Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  Routine was important to him, and had shaped his character.

  His acceptance of an ordered lifestyle had made him a near legend in his chosen military unit, the Intelligence Corps. He could, of course, innovate but routine made for safety. That was what he craved and why he had moved, with Dusty, to the French Atlantic coast, where the cliffs were, the wide open beaches and the killing grounds.

  He stubbed out the second cigarette, drank the last of the beer, folded the paper he had been reading and pushed it back across the bar.

  Some customers were in their best clothing, which they wore for Mass, others greasy from working under their cars. A few were sweaty and in tracksuits from football on the all-weather pitch. They nodded to him, touched his arm or shook his hand. They were nearly friends but not quite. The doorbell of the Dickens Bar would chime as he went out onto the street. He would take – as he did every Sunday – the narrow alley with steep steps that led from the street where his bar was to the one with his minibus and his home.

  He let himself into the house and went into the kitchen. Dusty was having lunch, beef in a sauce. Christine fussed behind him. Lisette was at the sink. They lived on a sparrow’s diet but cared devotedly for their long-time lodgers. All, in their way, were sad, but didn’t recognise it. The house was Lisette’s and Christine was her daughter. They had taken in the itinerant foreigners, and the arrangement suited them all.

  He took bottled water from the fridge, smiled briefly at them and ducked his head. Dusty wished him a good trip. Lisette would have done his laundry when he returned next Saturday, and Christine would have tidied his room unnecessarily – he always left it pristine.

  He was a gypsy, a traveller, as were they all.

  He was an old soldier who needed routine. Dusty had long ago lost his parents, had a sister marooned in an urbanisation on a Spanish costa, a nineteen-year-old son living near Dortmund and another a year younger working in a Limassol hotel. Lisette’s mother had been seventeen when a German officer billeted on the family farm – overlooking the Canadian beach – had taken her to the hay barn. The baby was born after the successful invasion and the death of the officer. Lisette’s mother was dubbed a collaborator and her head had been publicly shaved. In response Lisette, sparky, aggressive and never one to compromise, had seduced a German tourist, come to visit the graves, and bedded him on three consecutive evenings. She had produced Christine, silkily blonde. The past governed all who lived in that house. It was worse for Danny Curnow than for the others: he lived with demons that had forced him to break away from his work and move on before it crushed him. He’d allowed no one to see him weaken.

  He took his bag, packed with the little he would need for a week away, and carried it to the minibus.

  His routine, on a Sunday afternoon, would take him to Honfleur within a couple of hours. There he would stalk a woman who refused to be sad. He walked around the vehicle and examined the tyres; he knew that Dusty would already have checked the engine. He climbed in, turned the key in the ignition, pulled away and slipped down the hill towards the great edifice of the castle.

  It was the same for Danny Curnow that Sunday as every Sunday. In more than a dozen years nothing had altered for him. The disciplines of routine had made him a good soldier with a medal – long gone in a rubbish bin – and three mentioned-in-despatches commendations. He had shredded the certificates.

  He drove out of the town towards Honfleur.

  He lived a lie. Ralph Exton believed that if he ever lost its cover he would be dead. The likelihood was that his death would not be an easy release from suffering but would involve torture.

  Part of the lie, a minor segment, had been to step out of the Heathrow terminal and avoid the stand for the coach service to Reading. Instead he had walked shakily to the taxi queue and waited his turn. When the driver had pulled up level with him he had given his address in Berkshire, more specifically in the nearly-royal residential road on the remoter outskirts of Bucklebury. It had been a bit of the lie to take the taxi because the Five woman wasn’t picking up the tab and the Irish had not yet paid him. A whisky or three on the flight would have helped calm him, but he was sober and more than conscious of the debrief he would be put through. He would pay off the cab on his debit card, which would send his account further into the red but the fear still racked him. He might not have been able to hold a glass steady if he’d ordered a drink on the flight. He felt sick. Ralph Exton did not consider himself unnaturally brave. He wasn’t a hero, would have grimaced at the idea. It was just that the ‘little problems’ of his life seemed disproportionably large. He existed alongside them, as if they were a constant but manageable head cold. He took the cab to the service station on the motorway going west. They, the bastards, would have had a chauffeured car from the airport. They would have watched him forgo the bus and get into a taxi. At that point his mobile had trilled and the location was given him. He could not have met them at Aldergrove or Heathrow, and certainly not at his home. It was thought the Irish might opt either for a surveillance run at him coming off the flight or stake out his home. The chance of them tailing him was almost negligible but nothing had been easy in his life, neither during the high-flying times nor later. He had survived, though, and there would be another deal around the corner.

  There had been just coffee to drink.

  The taxi’s meter had been drumming in his mind, and his hip ached from when he had been in the closed van and they had driven him up the hillside. He had lain – too frightened to move – on the shovel’s handle.

  In the service station he’d sat across the table from them. The staff seemed to ignore that corner – the dirty plates and mugs had been left for them to gaze at. The man Ralph Exton knew as Hugo looked incapable of getting a tray to clear the debris, and the woman, Gaby, had brought the coffee and a muffin for him. The look on her face was thunderous, mostly for the hapless Hugo. Bugger it. Ralph had stood up and shouted at the nearest staff member in Polish, Romanian and then colloquial Russian. The guy had flushed, come over to their table and swept up the dirty crockery.

  Gaby sent him a rueful smile. What had he said? ‘Clear this table or you’re on the next flight out tonight.’

  They’d done the debrief.

  Normally when they talked, he was close to her, and she had a small recorder in her bag. Hugo would play the man in charge and push the direction of the questioning. Sometimes Ralph would see her lips curl in exasperation because Hugo had interrupted the line they were following. It was important for Hugo, as Ralph Exton saw it, to be the man in charge, and he had the smart accent to go with it – like most people did in Bucklebury.

  Not that day.

  Ralph Exton was good at languages, a superior practitioner at selling high and buying low, and was moderately expert in staying a few steps ahead of the VAT or Revenue people, but he didn’t claim expertise in mental health. He didn’t need to. Hugo had clearly flipped, or whatever the word was for a full-blown nervous collapse. What was his problem? He hadn’t been on his back in a dark van and lain on top of the spade that would dig a grave on the edge of a field in Tyrone. The man from Five hadn’t had to listen to a drill being brought up to speed. The man from Five, good school and university, the type that inhabited the village further down the road from where Ralph Exton lived, had not been up close and personal, squeaking for his life with the two men who’d thrown the questions. Hugo was slumped, head on his arms, snivelling and sniffing.

  She was all right, on good form, used his name when she spoke and sucked in what he told her, big stuff. Her expression was warm and he sensed admiration. It was confirmation of a trade. He knew now what was wanted, how much, and when delivery was required.

  For Ralph Exton it made only a small difference if the commodity was furniture from a fire sale, cigarettes coming into Spain from North Africa, glass seconds from a middle-European factory, or rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine-guns and military detonators. He was not big on moral dil
emmas but took seriously the figures on the statements sent him each month by his banks. Money was his priority. Once it had brought him good things and Felicity, or ‘Fliss’ as everyone knew her, especially the dentist, had had the best, as had his daughter, Victoria – ‘Toria Exton’ on the loudspeakers at gymkhanas. Fliss and Toria hadn’t realised that the good and moderate times were behind him or the bloody difficult times lay ahead. During the good times he had given a helping hand to a struggling Russian wannabe entrepreneur; during the moderate times he had facilitated the supply of duty-free fags to the Irish. Now, in bloody difficult times, any contract was manna from on high. Life was complex, frighteningly so. Ralph Exton was an agent. He was still breathing because he lived a lie – or several.

  His changing landscape was where the fear lay. Perhaps the Five people frightened him most, or the Russian friend from the old days, but the Irish – the men he had met that morning – were currently on the rostrum. He played the fears against each other, let them compete, and clung to a series of lies. The vehicle was at the gate. The amount on the meter was extortionate. The Irish wouldn’t pay it and Gaby from Five had shaken her head when he’d asked. He couldn’t afford it but in his line of business he had to exude confidence and demonstrate success. He couldn’t walk up the road from a bus stop.

  He still felt the fear and seemed to hear the whine of the drill. He punched in his PIN and was given his card back. The man drove away fast because he hadn’t rounded up a tip.

  His daughter was coming out of the house, a semi that was one of twelve, a successful speculation, and dated from 1937. It had three bedrooms and was called The Cottage when the others in the row had numbers. She might have been attractive, if she hadn’t been frowning. Her skirt was ridiculous and her eye makeup was carpet thick. If he’d asked her where she was going on a Sunday afternoon she would have said, ‘Out.’ She paused at the gate, a snapshot moment. The picture had come through the post six weeks earlier. It was in a brown-paper envelope, printed on cheap paper, and showed her in the same skirt, with the same amount of eye makeup and the same scowl. It was, of course, from the Irish – and there was no need to embellish the threat. They knew his home and his family. As did Five and the Russian.

  Ralph Exton lived the lie. So, in their ignorance, did his family.

  ‘Hi.’

  A grunt.

  ‘Where’s Mum? At home or . . . ?’

  A shrug.

  He thought it indicated that his wife, Fliss Exton, married to him for sixteen years, was likely to be with her dentist. She had many appointments with him and a Sunday afternoon was as appropriate as any other.

  ‘Have a nice time.’

  He went past his daughter and walked up the gravel path, reached the front door and fished for his key. He lived the lie. He remembered, as he often did, a monochrome photograph of a man with a long pole doing the tightrope walk over Niagara. Ralph Exton thought, as he always did, Hey, man, you know nothing. I do it for real, no safety harness, each and every day. Wish me luck.

  It would be good if there was some lunch for him in the fridge, but he wouldn’t hold his breath.

  He slammed the door, leaned against it and the shivering was back. He could barely stand. ‘Fuck me,’ he wheezed. ‘Just another day at the office. Fuck me.’

  Ralph Exton lived with the fear and the lie. Over his head he saw a cobweb that neither Fliss nor Toria had bothered to clear. A spider was lurking in the corner and a fly was wriggling, trapped. ‘Know how you feel. Life’s shit, isn’t it?’ He went into the kitchen in the hope that some instant coffee would kill the shivering.

  Malachy Riordan did haulage work, cattle and sheep. The route would take him that afternoon through Dungannon, and he was hired to get over towards the Moy where a dozen bullocks awaited collection; the farm was a second cousin’s. He had come down through Donaghmore and gone past the big stone Celtic cross, sculpted a thousand years before, and now he drove into the town through the modern housing estates.

  Normally he would have regarded himself as safe at the wheel of a tractor or the heavy lorry and as good as any when bringing a getaway car clear of an ambush site: speed, distance – catastrophe if he spun off a road and ended up in a ditch, half concussed. Today, though, he had been within less than an inch of taking the side panels off a post-office van, and had missed the temporary traffic lights that the council had put up for roadworks on the Pomeroy road – he had gone through on red, and two cars had had to back up to clear a way for him.

  The Englishman had confused him.

  The man had said, I’ve a family to keep. You pay me. Good enough? I need the money. Where Malachy Riordan came from, men talked about the Cause, loyalty and martyrs. Their blood, they said, was in the soil. They knew each corner of their territory and could recite the atrocities that had been done to their people at which crossroads and whether it had happened a decade or a century before. The man had said he would do the deal for a slice of their cash. He seemed to think that money explained his actions. He was a funny little man. ‘Funny’ because he had been told of the smell of burned flesh, had heard the noise of the drill, and should have been wetting his trousers or blabbering. He hadn’t pleaded for their trust, had seemed to suggest that Malachy and Brennie Murphy could take it or leave it: they could employ him as a source of weapons or walk away from him. A guy had gone to Lithuania four years before, had been stung and was banged up in a gaol in Vilnius. They needed the firepower.

  Without trust there was a canker among them.

  If the fight was to continue, they must have new weapons.

  He had a good knowledge of target surveillance, had known since childhood of the techniques used by police, military and intelligence for bugs and cameras, but he was troubled because he couldn’t judge that man. He knew his name, Ralph Exton, his home address, where his wife went most days and where his daughter went to school. He knew the man had organised cigarette shipments from southern Spain to Ireland and that their sale kept the Organisation financially afloat. If it was a sting, a cell door would close behind Malachy Riordan and he’d be off the mountain for ten or fifteen years, or he’d be shot and a weapon planted. Suspicion flooded him. Yet he couldn’t say where the man had tripped. Brennie thought him clean.

  He came up the hill that was Irish Street, skirted the town’s sloping square and was below the ruins of the castle of the patriot O’Neill. He took the turning that would lead him to the Ranfurly road and towards the Moy. He saw Mikey Devine. He was difficult to miss: he wore a high-visibility orange jacket and held a lollipop sign warning of a school children’s crossing point. He was smoking as he waited for them to come out of their afternoon classes. Mikey Devine was eleven years older than himself and had followed him like a dog. He was a good ‘dicker’ – message-carrier – and could play stupid well enough to linger outside a barracks and get the policemen’s private car numbers when they came off shift. He and his ma, widowed, still lived on the mountain. He had been a volunteer, had moved weapons, tracked targets, had been a pall-bearer for one of those commemorated in the village of Cappagh where the names were done in gold on the stone . . . He had gone the other way. Most had. They had bought into the ‘peace’, and the reward for turning a back on the armed struggle was to wear the uniform needed to see kids across a street. ‘Fuck you, Mikey Devine. You were bought cheap.’ Everyone knew Malachy Riordan’s stock lorry, as would Mikey Devine, but the bastard ducked his head and didn’t peer up at the cab. There was enough puddle water close to the gutter from the morning’s rain so Malachy edged the wheel over and let his near-side tyres splash through it as he accelerated, wetting the other man’s legs. It was a brief moment of satisfaction.

  The Sinn Féin people in the town paid small sums for a week of crap jobs and the money kept a sort of discipline among those who had copped out of the fight. Better weapons and better supplies of military explosive would draw back a few of the waverers and lessen the organisation’s reliance on brave but unt
rained kids: like Pearse and Kevin.

  He had been told by Brennie Murphy that he should take the Englishman on trust. That was why Malachy was driving badly. The Englishman claimed a Russian contact, a safe one.

  The young man, mid-twenties, had dealt in heroin for four years. He prospered. Now he employed half a dozen enforcers and four sales people; he had targeted for his commercial expansion a district on the west side of the Iset river dividing the city of Yekaterinburg, and south of ulitsa Kuibysheva. The young man believed this city in the Sverdlovsk oblast, the capital of the Urals, offered a major business opportunity. Near to the wide river he had met with competition from men who used two kiosks, which had been torched; the people operating from them had been beaten. The young man had drunk local ‘champagne’ that evening in a nightclub on ulitsa Vosmogo Marta and had thought himself king of all he surveyed. A couple of months had passed since then and the young man was ignorant of certain factors that would affect what remained of his life.

  The areas of ignorance stacked up. He did not know of a former captain in the old GRU named Timofey Simonov. He was unaware that, twenty-five years after leaving Military Intelligence, Timofey Simonov had made his first ventures in the new capitalism in Yekaterinburg, and provided a protective ‘roof’ for a network of kiosks. His limited contacts could not tell him that Timofey Simonov performed functions for several of the fringe élite, the siloviki, in Moscow and St Petersburg. The young man’s knowledge of geography was limited to the supply routes running north from Afghanistan and through the Tajikistan city of Dushanbe into Russia, not of European maps and specifically not of the town of Karlovy Vary set in the hills of the western Czech Republic. There was no possibility he could have been warned that he was showing grave ‘disrespect’, or of the dangers in causing offence to an individual living a quiet life 3,800 kilometres away. Neither did he know that two sacks of cement dust and half of an oil drum had been delivered that afternoon to a lock-up garage on the east side of the Iset river, close to the weir where young lovers liked to leave padlocks on the railings. Men had followed him and learned his movement patterns, but he hadn’t seen them. The young man’s ignorance was perhaps a blessing because his awakening from it would be violent and cruel. He had lunch and drove now, in an Italian sports car, around his kingdom, checking his profit margins.