RAT RUN GERALD SEYMOUR

by Gerald Seymour

  She could have bitten the tongue that had been far into his mouth. He winced. She thought she had wounded a man already hurt and down. Damage

  done. She did not apologize. What she knew of Malachy Kitchen had come in a terse one-page signal from Gaunt that was bald and without humanity. It would have been easier for her to sit as judge and jury on him if he had made a callow admission of guilt or had writhed behind a catalogue of mitigation. He had said: 'I don't know what happened - everybody else does, but not me.' She'd thought he spoke the truth.

  She had tapped into vulnerability and she felt ashamed of her laughter.

  Polly said quietly, 'You burned down the home of a supplier, but you were still short of satisfaction. What had happened to you, everything, conspired to goad you forward - as if, Malachy, you're on a treadmill.

  But they always go faster, don't they, treadmills? So, who is above the supplier?'

  'I had a name given me. Ricky Capel of Bevin Close, that's south-east London. He was the importer.'

  'Going there, that's climbing higher,' she said bleakly. 'Higher than most would have.'

  'Going there got me a kicking.'

  She saw, for the first time, a smile - rueful, uncertain

  - crack his cheeks, and she listened and believed she could comprehend the burden of shame that had driven him. She thought it past the time for laughter, and for goading him. He told the story of it with detachment, as if another man had been kicked in the face - and she could taste the stale scent of his mouth.

  'I really appreciate this, Mr Rahman/ Ricky Capel babbled. 'I gave my word to my grandfather, to old Percy, that I'd come here. He's never been himself, but it was important to him that I came. They were his friends - could have been him if they hadn't shipped him out the squadron and sent him to Egypt. I'm grateful you've taken the time.'

  There was a shrug and a wallet was produced.

  Money was passed to him, and Ricky ducked his head in thanks. He chose, from the flower-seller at the gates, two bunches of red roses, each with a half-dozen blooms. In the car he sat in the back seat and water ran from the roses' stems on to his trouser leg.

  He looked around him and saw the high mature trees of the cemetery and the banks of rhododendrons.

  Couldn't say when it had last happened to him, and it was not a mood he liked, but he felt moved by the great quiet of the place. He had not been to a cemetery since his grandmother, Winifred, had been buried, and it had pissed with rain and his best suit had never been right afterwards - and he hadn't cared about her death because the old woman had loathed him. He thought this place lovely. The Bear stopped the car. Ricky climbed out, but Rahman waved for him to leave the flowers on the seat - which confused him, but he followed Rahman.

  They walked to a wide space among the trees, where long grass made a cross, with a square, high-walled building at its heart. There were no markers here of individual graves, not like he'd seen on TV.

  Each of the grassed lengths, he reckoned, was at least a hundred yards long.

  'What's this, then?'

  Rahman said, sarcastic, 'It is what the friends of your grandfather did, Ricky. It is where German people are. They died from the bombs when the RAF

  made the firestorm. The air burned. Prisoners from a concentration camp dug the pits and there are more than forty thousand souls buried here. In one week, more than forty thousand.'

  'Well - Nazis, weren't they?'

  'I expect some, Ricky, were children.'

  He grinned. 'Well, going to be Nazis, weren't they?'

  He gazed around him. Couldn't really comprehend it, not forty thousand people killed, burned up, in one week.

  At the car, he was passed his roses and they walked across the aisle road and down a neat pathway. Then it was like he had seen on TV. He faced rows of white stones set in careful lines. Bloody beautiful, and clumps of flowers growing in little areas, no weeds, in front of each. He had never been to a place like it, and so quiet. He said what the names were, old Percy's friends, and he took one sector and Rahman another, and the driver a third part - and the stones were all so clean, like they'd been there since last week and not the best part of sixty years. It made him shiver, thinking of it - men in a plane and all that flak hitting it and the plane starting to dive, out of control, and not able to get out, and coming down from three and a half miles up. How long would that bloody take? Made him feel kind of weak. All of them, heroes, weren't they? Could he have hacked it? Yes . . . sure . . - certain

  . . . He was Ricky Capel. But, the shiver and the weakness had come on bad and he was swaying on his feet.

  The shout came. Rahman had found them, the only ones of the crew who had been intact enough for identification. Two stones side by side. A wireless-operator's grave and a bomb-aimer's grave, and they'd both been friends of his grandfather. He never did photographs and had never owned a camera: cameras and pictures, to Ricky, were the Crime Squad and the Criminal Intelligence Service. If he went, and it was rare, to a wedding, he'd spend half the reception making bloody certain he was not in a photograph, that no camera was aimed at him

  Would have been nice to have a picture to take back to old Percy, though. One of them had been twenty years old and one was nineteen, and there were pansies and daffodils in front of the two stones. He stood in front of them, pulled in his stomach and straightened his spine, and the rain fell on him -

  Rahman was on the phone, which didn't help the dignity of it. The uppers of his shoes were wet from the grass and his trousers clung to him. A full minute he stood there, and Rahman came off one call, then took another. Then, doing it for his grandfather, he laid the roses in front of each stone in remembrance of a wireless-operator and a bomb-aimer, dead in the first week of August 1943, stepped away and felt good for what he'd done.

  As they walked back to the car, Ricky said, 'I expect, Mr Rahman, you're proud to be Albanian, and I'm proud to be British. You'll love your country, Mr Rahman, as I love mine. Mad, isn't it? You come to a place like this and you're proud. Daft, isn't it, how a place like this gets to you? Don't mind saying it, I love my country . . .'

  No one, in twenty-six months, had come to seek her out.

  She lived in south-east central England in a town best known for its budget-cost airport and motor-manufacturing industry: Luton, with a population of 160,000. Her home was with her parents, who had come two decades before to Britain to escape the brutal ravages of political oppression in the Libyan city of Benghazi. That she had been born a healthy, vigorous baby had been by chance, her father had often told her. Her mother had been two months pregnant with her when the thugs of the regime's secret police had come to their home and beaten each of her parents in turn, on suspicion of handing out leaflets of protest at the godless rule of Gaddafi; blows from boots and batons had been used against her mother's belly. Her father, once a teacher of philosophy at the University of Benghazi, worked in Luton on a production line, manufacturing windscreen wipers for vans and lorries.

  Through childhood and her teenage years she had harboured hate for any who rejected the true faith of Islam. She had been chosen at a mosque in the town: her fervour had been recognized. A video had been shown, in a back room to a selected few, of what the imam called the declaration of a martyr widow. A Chechen woman, clothed in black and veiled, had worn the belt holding the explosives, the wiring and the trigger button, and had made a statement to the camera of her happiness at gaining the chance to strike against the Russian enemy who had

  murdered her young husband. She had spoken - not in a language understood in the mosque's back room

  - in a voice of calm, love and resolve. The film had continued with a distant street shot. A slight, small figure in black had approached a checkpoint of soldiers and when she reached them there had been the detonation, fire, smoke and chaos. At that moment, the woman in Luton had stood before the video ended, and cheered in exultation, in admiration at the blessing of martyrdom.

  Now she never watched s
uch videos and was never invited to the back room of the mosque. She worked in a creche with children too young for school, while their mothers stood in lines and manufactured PVC

  windows. She was good with the children and her employers praised her dedication - and she waited. A man would come, either to her home or to the creche, one day. He would say: 'And He sends down hail from mountains in the sky, and He strikes with it whomever He wills, and turns it from whomever He wills.' She would answer: 'The vivid flash of its lightning nearly blinds the sight,' His statement and hers were in the Book, 24:43. Five days a week she played with and amused small children, and at the end of each day she was thanked by mothers for her kindness and devotion.

  When he came, she would slip away from the

  creche and would do what was asked of her.

  'What we cannot accept, Freddie, is a further failure.'

  'Of course not.'

  The meeting between Frederick Gaunt and the

  assistant deputy director took a familiar choreography.

  He paced as he talked and the ADD, Gilbert, stayed awkwardly hunched at his desk.

  'Quite simply put, a new failure would be

  intolerable.'

  'Of course.'

  Rain laced on the window and the desk light failed to lift the gloom.

  'It just cannot be countenanced, Freddie.'

  'I'm on board. Bodies crammed in morgues,

  mutilated victims stacked on corridor trolleys waiting for doctors, the shock and trauma of blood on the pavements. Without reservation, I accept that a major atrocity in our cities is not acceptable. No argument.'

  He saw a splash of surprise on his superior's face, then annoyance that the obvious drift of the argument had not been interpreted.

  'No, no, Freddie - take that as read.' He leaned forward and jabbed his finger for emphasis at the moving target, Gaunt striding. 'I am talking - don't you follow me? - about the effect of a new failure on us. Difficult times we live in. It is as if we are under siege. The reputation of the Service is at stake. There are corners of Whitehall in which our efforts, first-class efforts, are derided. There are, Freddie, enemies at large and they wait for one more cock-up - forgive me - on the scale of Iraq. We are perpetually scrutinized. Surely, Freddie, you see that? If there were to be a new failure, it's we who would be the victims. I don't exaggerate, there would be another weeding out and we would face desperate times.'

  'Oh, yes.'

  There was a shrill laugh from the desk. 'You know, Freddie, for a moment I didn't think you understood the true seriousness of the danger to the integrity, dignity, of the Service. Forgive me. Have you all you need?'

  'Computer time at Menwith, too low on the priority list. Do I want a galley-load of young Turks bustling around me? No. Do I want Berlin in on the act? No. Do I want a full charabanc sent from London to sit on Polly Wilkins in whom I have complete faith? No.

  What I want is luck, buckets of it.'

  'That is hardly a satisfactory shopping list. Freddie, very frankly, are you up for this one?'

  Was he? Wasn't he? He wondered briefly whether selfishness and a personal pride in his ability caused him to reject the battalions of help on offer. Word of any section's success always eddied through the building, crossed the need-to-know fences erected for internal security, and the men and women responsible for secret triumphs achieved an heroic status, and rank envy - damned if he would pass up the chance, damned if he would share.

  Gaunt said airily, 'Never been more confident, Gilbert. It's falling nicely into place.'

  'But you promised me, with the Prague business, you talked of a rat run that you'd interrupt—'

  'Just a blip,' Gaunt said. He turned for the door, then paused. 'I anticipate we will finish this one in good shape.'

  In the corridor, he found that sweat dribbled on his skin. Deer were culled by rifle shots, foxes by poison and rats by gas, birds of prey by the teeth of post traps. He mopped his forehead with his breast-pocket handkerchief, and pondered it: how would they cull old warriors who had failed to protect the Service's reputation? Dump them on the street and let them walk away up the Albert Embankment with the

  carriage clock or decanter or a presentation box of tools, airbrush them out of history and sweep them to retirement? God, he needed luck, sacks of it.

  He led the way into the office block and down the corridor. Inside each room that he passed, which had the door open - Administration, Sales, Accounts - the staff snapped to their feet. He went through the swing doors and into the warehouse.

  Trailing Timo Rahman was the Bear. Far behind the Bear, ignored, was the mouseboy. His feet rapped across the concrete flooring as he went down the wide aisle between towers of cardboard-wrapped flat-packs. At the aisle's far end was the door to a store room, where mops, buckets and the chemicals for cleaning toilets were kept.

  He had wasted an hour at the Ohlsdorf cemetery, to humour the mouseboy, and more minutes than he had anticipated had been taken up in the search for names on stones. A little of his certainty was gone as he pushed open the store-room door - and the image of his wife danced before him, as it had all the time in the cemetery, and what she had done to him.

  The man sat on the plastic seat of a chair.

  He looked up.

  There was a calmness about him, a presence. Timo Rahman saw it, recognized it. The man put his hand on the table, on which lay a cleaned plate and half-full plastic water-bottle and pushed himself to his feet.

  The face of a man short of confidence would have cracked, Timo knew, with relief, but this one did not.

  The man bowed his head gravely - not in deference but in a gesture of courtesy to an equal. Timo introduced himself, murmured his name, but was not given a response. Instead, the man moved the half-pace forward and kissed his cheeks. Questions were asked softly, without preamble.

  When would he move on? Soon, one day or two.

  Was the transport in place? Arriving, about to start its journey.

  Was the transport secure? As secure as was possible.

  A lesson Timo Rahman had learned over many

  years was that conversation, idle and unnecessary, between men of stature was beneath dignity. He said that bedding would be provided, that the location provided safety and secrecy. Nothing more.

  He left the man, and the Bear closed the door. Then he saw the mouseboy's gaping eyes, and his sleeve was pulled.

  'Is that him?'

  No man snatched the sleeve of Timo Rahman's

  shirt. His life was myriad compartments, each sealed from the other, each carried in his mind. Behind him, the door had closed on a compartment and another replaced it. The new compartment was his wife, his home, an intruder, a lover . . . For a flashed moment there was a blurred line between the compartments.

  He squeezed hard on Ricky Capel's hand, held it in his tightening fist, removed it from his sleeve, then let it drop. He thought then that the mouseboy was too stupid to recognize that anger.

  'It is.'

  'We're bringing the boat over for that one man?'

  'He, that man.'

  'What is he? An Arab?'

  'He is the passenger on your boat.'

  'We're talking big money - he doesn't look big money.'

  'I am paid to move him, as you will be.'

  He started to walk away down the aisle of the warehouse, and ahead of him were the swing doors to the corridor and the offices of Administration, Sales and Accounts. Again the fingers, because the mouseboy was stupid, held him - at the wrist, where the gold-chain bracelet was.

  'What I'm asking, Mr Rahman, who is he?'

  'You need to know nothing of him, you have only to transport him.'

  'For you, Mr Rahman, I move a gang of girls, get them to Enver, or a lorry full of Chinese, Kurds, whatever . . . but one Arab, a boat coming for one man, that's different.'

  'You will do what you are paid to do.' Timo softened his voice, the better to hide his anger. 'It is not a difficulty.'<
br />
  'I'll tell you why it's different. He's a scumbag, not a businessman - not anything normal that I move for you. Why's he so important that we're not taking him through Dover or Harwich? Why's he not going into Heathrow or Manchester? Why's he got a bloody boat coming just for him? An Arab, dressed like a wreck, I know why he's important.'

  'It does not concern you, Ricky.'

  Like a fly that flew at his ear, the pitch was more shrill. 'A packet, no problem. A packet and you've no problem with me, money on the nail. Good dealing between us. This, Mr Rahman, is out of order. You saw those headstones this morning, I saw them, laid flowers for them. It's my country. An Arab, can't go through an airport or a ferryport, has to have a boat sent to bring him - you think I'm a right fool, Mr Rahman? That scumbag's a terrorist. I don't want to know, not about shifting a terrorist.'

  He pushed open the swing doors into the corridor.

  It was the skill of Timo Rahman, the core of his success as he believed it, that problems were anticipated and fall-back positions were in place. He swung his arm, like a friend, round the mouseboy's shoulders - could have kicked him, there, half to death - could have broken his neck with the heel of his hand.

  Said quietly, 'I ask nothing of you, Ricky, that you are not at ease with. I do not pressure you, but I listen to you. We are comrades, Ricky.'

  'As long as that's understood.'

  'Everything is understood.'

  They went out into the rain, and all the time Timo Rahman's arm was, like a friend's, round Ricky Capel's shoulders.

  He thought she had waited with patience for the story to run its course. Malachy ploughed on to its end. 'I didn't have petrol. Didn't have a weapon - didn't have a plan. I was just driven forward. I went right up to the house ...'

  The yawn split her face.

  .. and they were talking about a shipment. Drugs, I suppose.'

  She stifled it, but the yawn's last heave muffled her voice. 'I think I'm there . . . I'm sorry, Malachy, for what happened to you but it's not my corner to stand in.' 'Drugs movements, they don't interest you?'