Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  Nothing about Timofey Simonov was ostentatious. He was at the old inn on the square and it was warm enough to take an outside table.

  There was a pretence that the one-time brigadier bought the one-time captain’s lunch. The cash would come from Denisov’s wallet, with a tip that was acceptable yet not flamboyant, but it was drawn from a bank in Karlovy Vary that dealt with accounts held in the name of Timofey Simonov. It was a ritual, and when the meal was finished he would thank the older man, dead pan, for his hospitality.

  He had a glass of wine, and his ‘host’ had sparkling water. Timofey had asked, ‘You still oppose it?’

  ‘I see no need for it.’

  They had eaten pork and now cheese. ‘You remember how I was treated by the British officers? Like I was shit – like we were all shit.’

  ‘I remember. I remember also that it is not wise to shit in your own yard. Or to tease authorities whom we expect to leave us alone.’

  Coffee would be brought, and the view for Timofey was of the castle high above: formidable. He was comfortable, close to home, and he felt the power in his body. ‘It’s for a friend.’

  ‘At home, it isn’t advisable to mix friendship with risk – ever.’

  ‘He was a friend when we needed a friend.’ The waiter refreshed the cheese platter. He added, ‘I think it’s still raining in England.’

  The afternoon wore on. Water dripped on the marksman’s clothing and the dip where the tree’s roots had been was filled with stagnant water that did not drain. The lights were on in the house. No one, he was sure, would come out in that rain at dusk for a walk or a smoke or to gaze at the skies. He cursed. He folded the weapon, bagged it and crawled up the last part of the slope. He paused by the path, looked around and saw no walkers, no kids, no dogs. The rain pattered on him. He walked back to the car. He had survived the siege of Sarajevo but this place unnerved him. He would sleep in his car, had nowhere else. If he failed, he would not work again. He would be back in the morning, and would hope that the weather had changed.

  They walked to the car, his brigadier following him. He walked first and his protection was close behind, wearing a shoulder holster with a Makarov PM, semi-automatic.

  At the collapse of the regime, the man had been a psychological wreck. They had gone back together to Moscow. He had thought niches would open. The brigadier had a wife to support and small children – she was fat with thick ankles, but he was devoted to her. Initially good times had been within reach – but they had been too long in Milovice, too many months away from the power struggles. They were too distanced from the new wave of gangsters and the money men who profited from the state-utility rip-offs, and they did not comprehend the extreme violence required to rule a sector. The new cars were sold off at knock-down rates. The twin apartments in a smart suburb, the Frunzenskaya quarter close to the Gorky Park, were given up. The money had gone. Doors were slammed in his face and the brigadier’s. It had been Timofey Simonov’s idea that they should decamp to Amsterdam. The wife and children were left behind, crammed into her parents’ three-room apartment. They took a bus to Amsterdam and were beaten up because it seemed they were trying to muscle in on the cannabis trade. They were beaten again for looking at tarts by a pimp impatient with gawkers. They spent two nights on the streets and took a good kicking from a pair of police. The last coins in his pocket: enough for one beer to share. Then it would be in God’s hands as to what they did in the morning.

  The arrival of the Englishman, confident and warm. Maybe the little man had done a good deal. He offered them a drink each.

  They spoke a little English because they were GRU-trained and had taken language classes. What did the benefactor do? ‘A bit of this and a bit of that,’ with a smile and a shrug. ‘Sometimes not too much of this and not enough of that, but right now it’s good.’

  More drinks.

  Timofey Simonov had recognised something in the man. No posture, no play-act, no lies. He had whispered to Denisov, ‘He’s honest, I guarantee.’ Another drink was ordered. They explained their circumstances. They had no bed that night. They had no clean clothing and hadn’t found a tap where they could wash their underwear, socks and shirts.

  ‘What might you be able to do?’

  The told him about backing fuel tankers up to the base perimeter fence, the queue of Czechs with plastic containers, and the office furniture. He had said, ‘We can trade, but we need a start. We don’t know how to begin.’

  After the man had produced a wad of notes from his hip pocket and paid the bill for the drinks, he had bought sandwiches and pies from a stand. They had wolfed them and got into his hire car. It had been swerving across the road but the chance of not meeting an oncoming police vehicle had seemed minimal. They were drunk and had had to stop twice beside a dual carriageway to pee. The arrival at the airfield. An introduction. They were brought to a little work ghetto of Russians. Nods and understanding when they had given their ranks in the GRU. An opportunity.

  First thing, that night, they had showered, and every stitch of clothing they had possessed had gone into a washing-machine.

  All because of Ralph Exton. The start of a new life. Timofey Simonov was not one to forget. They reached the car. He would see Ralph Exton that night, his truest friend. He would hug him, his truest and best friend, who seemed to have fallen on hard times, needed help and was trying to push through a pitiful deal. It was for his friend.

  Ralph Exton felt good. He’d had a romp with a woman and thought he’d said the right things. His back ached but he felt fine. He posed the question in his mind, repeated it, tried to get the right tone – desperate or casual, matter-of-fact or at crisis point. He didn’t know how Timofey Simonov would react to it: theirs was an old relationship based on a helping hand of long ago, and times had changed. One thing was appropriate for a business deal, another for a favour.

  He could dream. That, at least, was free.

  He had an understanding with Gabrielle Davies that he required ‘space’. She shouldn’t have them trailing round after him. Different from when he had been on the mountain and the fog had closed in: there had been no close-quarters back-up. He didn’t think she would put a tail on him.

  Ralph Exton went out of his hotel. A coffee in the Costa on Wenceslas Square. Across to the big basement bookshop opposite and a browse before he left from the back exit. A walk past the building that was now the Ministry of Trade and Industry, but bore a plaque that denounced it as the former home of the Gestapo in the city. He passed a money-exchange booth, a Toni & Guy hairdressing salon and a Vodaphone outlet. There was a little park nearer to the railway station, with indestructible bunkers among the lawns and bushes. He sat there and waited.

  He had lied. Her question: what would he do for the rest of the day? His response: Not too sure. Sit by the phone and wait for the call. He would be picked up from where he sat. A small victory because the outline of his itinerary was with the man. Only an outline. He owed them nothing because she had opened her legs. He owed himself survival. Endlessly, he repeated the question in his mind. He was satisfied, and thought his precautions satisfactory.

  Unprofessional.

  Had Karol Pilar assessed his target’s performance it would have failed. He watched the man on the bench – he had taken a paperback book from a pocket and was reading.

  His target’s efforts to observe possible foot or vehicle surveillance had been poor. Pilar was thirty metres away, sitting on a graffiti-daubed wall. A hand rested on his shoulder. Karol Pilar did not take his eyes off his target. A set of car keys landed in his jacket pocket. ‘Where is it?’ he asked, in English.

  ‘Just in the slip road. Right behind you.’

  ‘He has a book and has checked his watch twice.’

  ‘He’s slippery as an eel. The girl bought the line he peddled – that he doesn’t know about his pick-up. He told me he was getting a ride down but not from where or when, which says he lies. You alright?’

  ‘Of course.
Be in the car.’

  The hand slid off his shoulder. He knew him as Vagabond and thought him hard. He didn’t know if his ‘soul’ had left him. His girlfriend, Jana, said the soul was important, that she couldn’t live with a man and love him if he had lost it. It was almost impossible to do his job and cling to it. That weekend they would go to her mother, with the cake she was making. Then he would, however briefly, have broken free. The cake was a symbol: he was not totally owned by the job but thought that Danny Curnow was.

  He watched. The afternoon faded and the crowds thickened as they surged towards the railway station. He thought he was risking much. If the mission, as described to him by Mr Bentinick, ended as planned, then the anger he would have aroused in the offices of Bartolomejska and in the Convikt, the Capone and the Sherlock would be hard to deflect. A man came close and stood near to the target, who got to his feet.

  Malachy Riordan gazed down at him. Frankie was behind him, and he’d made that little gesture with his fingers that told her to stay back.

  He was used to it. Men cringed when he spoke to them, if they knew him. They would avoid his eye and look to the side. At the bungalow on the mountain the gaze had been steady. The drill had moaned in his ear and the man had held his nerve. He had seemed to have the balls, guts, ‘face’ that Brennie Murphy responded to. And Malachy? He had thought Ralph Exton a chancer. But the man had shown no fear. Himself? He was unsettled.

  Malachy had the girl with him. A smart tart. Near to Shanmaghry, to the east, was the Dungannon to Pomeroy road, which crossed the Gortavoy Bridge, an old stone one. Under the bridge there was a clear river pool, where kids had caught trout. He would have liked to take the smart tart, in her city clothes and makeup, to the water there and have her scrub her face. His Bridie didn’t use makeup. The smart tart wore scent and gazed too often into his face. He trusted neither of them and needed both. He had no faith in the girl, or in the man who had insinuated himself into the Organisation and carried the commendation of men and women senior to himself . . . But they needed the weapons. Without them they were dead and lost. A big man in intelligence in London had made a public speech, and it was reported on the television because he had listed the priorities for protecting Britain: cyberattack at the top, and Al Qaeda in some shite desert next, then home-bred jihadists, animal-rights people – and finally the armed struggle in Ireland. To be so dismissed had fuelled his anger. Without increased firepower, nothing would change.

  She looked at him too often.

  He didn’t know the Malone road and had never been inside the campus of Queen’s University. There were girls in Coalisland, Cookstown and Dungannon, from the housing estates, who hung round the boys who might get invited in as volunteers: some could be used for ‘dicking’. Some might get pregnant and fetch a weapon in a pram under a swaddled baby. The girl seemed to think herself his equal. She would do the logistics of the journey and leave the weapons checks to him. He’d scrub her face and get the paint off it.

  Him on the bench . . . Something about him he couldn’t pin down. There was always a bullock in a field that couldn’t easily be put in the wagon for the trip to the abattoir. Something in the eyes of the beast would tell him which it was, but only when the wagon was backed up to the farm gate and it was late for its slot.

  He was told what would happen. The girl had come closer to him, as if she were a part of him.

  Danny Curnow sat in the car’s passenger seat. On the windscreen he could see a slip of official paper that the Czech had said would see off any traffic police complaining about illegitimate parking.

  It was Wednesday evening and he was at the heart of middle Europe, with a decent view of the man and the girl. An age had passed since Monday morning, just hours before, when he had lain in that scrape and watched the man with his family. Now he read him: ill-at-ease without the certainties of home.

  Dusty was by the bus. It seemed half a lifetime ago that he had driven to the parking area above the dunes and found her. He might have spoken out of turn, or not. Gloom trapped him, and he remembered the woman who had walked into the barracks at Keady, near the border, asked to see an intelligence officer and given her name. Desperate and his boy, Dusty, had scrambled to get down there and weave the web round her. Lovely woman, great-looking and with a sense of humour. Why her man had cheated on her was beyond them. ‘ “Hell hath no fury,” ’ Mr Bentinick had said.

  They were at Pegasus Bridge.

  The bridge was grey-painted, small and insignificant, yet each of the visitors, on every tour that stopped at Pegasus, knew of its significance in the battle for the beaches. The guide helped as best he could, but most of the men and women wanted to walk beside the river, in the shadow of the bridge, and imagine how it would have been when the gliders navigated their free-fall to the landing sites. They had come through horrendous bursting flak barrages, and stories are told of airborne officers cocking their revolvers, standing behind the pilots and demanding that they go through the spraying shrapnel and on to the targets. Some of the gliders, ugly beasts, were so expertly put down that British soldiers were on the ground and sprinting across the bridge before the defences had been alerted.

  The clients also loved to hear of Piper Millen leading Lord Lovat to the bridge, with commandos who had come ashore that dawn and legged it through farmland to relieve the paratroops. Lord Lovat had apologised for arriving a few minutes late. Within a hundred yards of the end of the bridge they would see a tank, German gun emplacements and a small field where two gliders had landed. Awful casualties in 6th Airborne: four thousand men killed, wounded and missing. The gliders were sixty-five feet long and eighty-five feet from wing tip to wing tip; many of the boys squashed into them would not have been out of their teens. The visitors would have seen one across the road and marvelled . . . Then they would have gone to the Pegasus café, drunk coffee and bought cheap souvenirs or postcards.

  The girl was gone, as was Malachy Riordan, whose father Danny Curnow had killed. The darkness had thickened. The road beyond the park was filled with crawling traffic. It was a background that reeked of ordinariness.

  Twice policemen had come and smacked a closed fist on the window. He had pointed to the authorisation and had been left alone. He had never believed any informant he had run. He had acted on what he was told. Sometimes lives had been saved; at other times they had been lost. But he never believed what they said to him. He could barely see the Czech detective, but sometimes a cigarette was lit and the man on the bench was a faint outline. When it happened, it would be fast – always was.

  Chapter 12

  He peered into a dappled sea of lights for one slowing with a winking indicator. The traffic was solid. Danny Curnow could no longer see the Czech, and it might have been twenty minutes since a cigarette had been lit. His view of the target was vague.

  There should have been four or five men and women on the ground, and two cars, engines ticking over. It was cheap-skate – usually was where he had worked. It was why, he assumed, he had been called back, an increment, outside the areas where health and safety and obligations of due care, all the modern shit, ruled. Dusty had a ‘Make Do and Mend’ mug in the kitchen at Caen, and had bought a mug for Danny that showed a ration book. He never used it.

  He sat in the car and his hand hovered close to the key in the ignition. He could only peer in the direction of the target – Ralph Exton, liar, twister, temporarily useful. He was in darkness.

  A basic law of handling agents: they lied to friends, families, colleagues in war – and to their handlers. Anything the agent said should be tested for provenance. But laws were backed by resources and provenance cost money.

  The last years in Ireland, with FRU’s budget shrinking, had been Make Do and Mend times – as they were now.

  A car indicated. He saw the Mercedes. He had seen one in Karlovy Vary. He cursed: he hadn’t memorised the number-plate, but it was written on the pad now inside his anorak. If he fumbled for it he would lose sight. He
should have had the number in his head or on the dash. The vehicle slowed and crossed a lane, a volley of horns protesting. The target, visible now, stepped forward, almost jaunty. Ralph Exton was on the kerb and the car was closing on him.

  The bloody engine coughed, failed to fire. Danny tried again, heard it catch. Old skills, if not practised, died. Dusty would have had it quiet and ready. He left to Danny the glamour work with the agent. Fumes spewed back. The Czech came towards him, fast, and twice peered back over his shoulder. He flung the driver’s door open and gestured to Danny to get out. Danny saw the interior light illuminated the seats of the Mercedes as Ralph Exton dropped into the passenger seat. He had a fast sighting of the man at the wheel – a brigadier, who was now a manservant and carried a legal firearm. The man had pepperpot hair, cut short and thick. The traffic was blocked.

  Danny Curnow was pushing himself up but his shoulder was grabbed. He was hauled out and stumbled. His hand caught the bonnet and then he was round the front of the vehicle, tugging the passenger door, the car already moving. He was half in, half out, his left foot trailing.

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘You’re not needed.’ From Karol Pilar.

  ‘I’m coming.’ Danny Curnow’s old stubbornness.

  ‘You have no authorisation.’