Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  Dusty was parked outside the bar. The guide was inside with the visitors. A break had been called. His phone bleeped: Picture sent to you for delivery tomorrow, dunes and coast, sort of peace-offering for Danny and an opening of negotiations. Hanne xxx

  He reflected. Others had been damaged, not just Desperate. Yorkie had sat in a room all night, no lights, cradling a Browning. No one had known till past dawn, but he’d gone that day to Aldergrove airport, the military wing. Gary had put in a request for a transfer to Germany and told the captain that if he didn’t get it he’d go AWOL. Phil had broken up a bar in central Armagh and been taken to the cells by the Red Caps. It had all seemed to wash over Dusty Miller, and he might have been the least stressed guy at Gough where they lived, worked, did the business with the informers, paid them, crossed them off the lists when they were left in a ditch and recruited more. Always plenty, never a shortage, and the money was crap. Dusty didn’t lose sleep, and he’d never heard that Captain Bentinick did. He wouldn’t leave. If Desperate headed off with the girl to those islands where they lived off dried cod, where winter froze your balls and in summer the sun never set – well, Dusty would hang on in Caen. There was Christine to keep him warm at night, and Lisette to cook: he would drive a minibus. It might be the only offer Danny Curnow would get. Be a shame to turn it down.

  It was a pretty little village and the group’s discipline was fracturing. He fancied many had had their fill of graveyards, battlefields and the casualty statistics of war. The place offered no sense of danger. He didn’t think the guide did it that well. Danny would have livened it up, but he wasn’t there.

  The guide would try to breathe the stench of war – burned bodies, brewed tanks – into them.

  The British had arrived, infantry and mostly armour. They were purloining wine, scrounging food, peeing and catching up on sleep. Five weeks after the invasion, they had moved just twenty miles closer to the village.

  The guide needed to play a big card if he was to regain control. He returned them to the previous evening, the German cemetery at La Cambe, and the grave of a young SS panzer officer.

  Michael Wittman already wore the Knight’s Cross ranking of the Iron Cross and had been credited with 138 tank kills. He was in a Tiger Mark 6, with two crewmen. He came in his Tiger over the horizon and up the only street, and fought a brigade for a quarter of an hour. When he reversed away – tank ammunition exhausted – he had destroyed fourteen British tanks, fifteen personnel carriers and two anti-tank guns. It was a defeat for the British on a grand scale. On his side, Wittman was known as the Black Baron. He was ordered back to Berlin, heaped with more decorations and posted as an instructor. He slipped away to rejoin his crew.

  Wittman was bagged by Joe Ekins, a gunner in a Firefly, who found him in the open, hit his Tiger at a half-mile range and lived to tell the tale, modestly, until his death at eighty-eight.

  The story of Wittman’s end always cheered the visitors to Villers-Bocage. They muttered among themselves, confused, and wondered how a man who had such a pivotal moment in military history, Ekins, could have led a normal life afterwards. They moved on and were promised no more cemeteries, no more defeats.

  ‘I think he told the truth,’ Gaby Davies said.

  ‘You tickled his privates. I put a rod across his back. Same answer.’ Danny Curnow’s head was down.

  ‘He doesn’t know. He’s been told it’s the Milovice complex, not where it is.’

  ‘I have to believe him. The consequences of a lie are clear in his mind.’

  They had moved: they were four doorways down the hill from where they had spent the night, and this building was in a worse state. The cat that had befriended him was hunting behind the door and twice they had heard rat squeals. Brutal sounds, but calming to Danny – something from Vagabond days: stalking, death, then on the move again. The sun was up but little of it reached the street. Some of its brightness hit the upper window of the hotel where a light still burned and the curtains were half drawn.

  ‘He’s a good man, but out of his depth.’

  ‘Heroes tend to be thin on the ground.’ He reflected. How many had he known who could have had that label pinned to their chest, gone to the Palace, then posed outside with the little thing dangling from a ribbon? None, really. Not those men. There had been some and he’d met them in car parks, at forestry picnic sites, by the shores of Lough Neagh and in corners of the library. All lived with the fear. It was partly greed that brought them to each meeting, the transfer of the envelope, and was partly love of the adrenalin surge that came from a double life. It was also bare-bollock bravery. Desperate had Dusty behind him with the H&K, watching his back like a hawk. The real hero lived with the fall of a shadow behind him, the slowing of a car coming towards him when he was blinded by the headlights, the knock at the door when he was changing a baby’s nappy: he got no medals but had won the war. The Joes had done it via infiltration. Danny Curnow had bought their treachery.

  ‘He isn’t a hero and wouldn’t want to be,’ Gaby said. ‘He’s being taken.’

  ‘They know where to go, Riordan and the girl, and we’ll follow.’

  ‘Because we need evidence that’ll stand up in court.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  He saw a face at that window, fleeting, and the curtain fluttered. He ducked his head again and played the vagabond in a doorway, but he pinched the material of Gaby Davies’s trousers, alerted her.

  Malachy Riordan looked up the street and down it. A woman pushed a buggy, a dog checked lamp-posts. Water was swilled on the pavement outside a café, up near the church at the top. Riordan waited his moment, checked again, then pushed open the window. It groaned with his effort and dirt flaked out from behind the woodwork. He opened it wide.

  Then he took a last look round the room. What little he had brought on the flight to Nürnberg was in the rucksack, dry and wet, and her handbag. What she had taken off, displaying herself for him, was in the plastic bag. He expected her to wake, raise an eyebrow, tease or taunt, but she didn’t. She had broken him. He moved the sheet a last time, raised it so that the bruising and the dark lines at her throat were better hidden. Then Malachy Riordan bent over the bed and kissed her forehead. His eyes raked across the room.

  At the window he checked up and checked down, then lifted the rucksack and pitched it out. He watched it land hard on the paving. He pulled the window shut.

  The key in his hand, he went out, closed the door, made sure that the Do Not Disturb sign had not fallen off the handle. He took the stairs two at a time. In the hall, he tossed the key to the man behind the desk. He was in the street.

  He snatched up the rucksack, and a young guy pulled a face at him – doing a runner – and raised his hand towards Malachy. A high-five was called for, and executed. He walked fast along the street, knew where he had to go. Never before had he felt guilt, but now it chased him. An invalided policeman lived in a converted house on an estate outside Dungannon with ramps at the front and back for his wheelchair. The injuries had come from a bomb planted by Malachy Riordan: no guilt. On the far side there was a rubbish bin, contents bulging from the top, and he danced through traffic, paused long enough to ram in the plastic bag with her clothing, push it down, far from sight, then broke into a run.

  ‘He’s fucking killed her,’ Gaby had said.

  The tram lines had been angry on Riordan’s face. He had gone past them, had been the width of the street from them, but the scratches had been clear. Danny had seen his eyes: bagged underneath, dull, haunted.

  ‘If he hasn’t killed her he’s left her in a bad state.’

  ‘Not your problem or mine.’

  They were on their feet and Danny Curnow might have been slow because she reached down, locked her hand round his wrist and tugged him upright. They had seen him dump the bag in the bin. What astonished Danny was the lack of care Malachy showed. He seemed not to use counter-surveillance procedures. The man’s head was down and the rucksack bounce
d on his shoulders. Twice, he crossed the road without warning. Horns sounded and tyres screamed. She had a catch in her voice, and might have run to get level with him.

  ‘Just her clothes, wet – what she was wearing in the rain – and a handbag. She’d have been an idiot, the girl – a trophy shag.’

  He thought they were in a tough area. The gentrification that came hand in hand with corruption and backhanders wasn’t in evidence. It was a good place for Malachy Riordan to have holed up. Where she was, a conference hotel, showed poor tradecraft. But he didn’t understand why the man pushed on and didn’t use the tactics he’d have been weaned on. She said, in his ear, that the district was Žižkov: there had been a battle in 1420, and a rebel general, Jan Žižka, had been fighting the Holy Roman Empire. He had been a military genius and the first in Europe to use mobile artillery – pulled around on carts. She said he was a national figure to these people and his statue was on the hill above. It faced them. The target would have been a hundred yards ahead sometimes, and more often a hundred and fifty. Still the surprise that he wasn’t using evasion tactics.

  ‘I think he had bite marks. And his lip was split.’

  ‘Could be.’

  She flared at him, ‘She’s probably dead, murdered after fighting for her life. Aren’t you angry?’

  Danny said, ‘She’s a dissident Republican on a mission to buy weapons that will kill security forces and civilians. If I’d needed to I would’ve shot her, dropped her with a double tap – hopefully head shots. I would have felt nothing. I do my job.’

  He grimaced. The tunnel was ahead. Its opening gaped. The target had not needed to practise the procedures. It was perfect for him. Far ahead, over Riordan’s shoulder, the passageway was brilliantly lit, reflecting off white tiles. He glanced at Gaby Davies. He hadn’t seen her stripped down to her knickers and a T-shirt and didn’t know how strong her muscles were, but he’d recognised a bloody-minded obstinacy in her. No discussion. He used his palm to whack her arse.

  He’d had to. He couldn’t have done it himself. She spun on him, nearly tripped and—

  He said, ‘I can’t. Get up there,’ he gestured, ‘over and then down. Do it while he’s in the tunnel where I can’t follow close. If I don’t follow him, I’ll lose him. Might not have another chance. Do it.’

  He pushed her, as one would a recalcitrant teenager. She went. He could see the target in the tunnel as she sprinted towards the zigzag path to the top. He dropped his pace. The tunnel seemed straight, for ever. A couple were coming towards him, seemed pygmy small. Malachy’s use of the tunnel won Danny Curnow’s respect. He saw her, among the trees, gaining on the high slopes, going well.

  There were men and women at Thames House who seemed to live in Lycra and to be off each lunchbreak for a run on Horseferry Road, Millbank and along the Embankment. They were obsessive: they talked diet and kit, and she knew of a woman who ran in each day from Wimbledon, around twelve klicks, and home, another twelve klicks. It seemed more important to her to achieve her distance norm than to crack a conspiracy of Islamists. Gaby did not run on the London streets, couldn’t afford gym time and never seemed to get round to the exercise bikes in the building.

  At the start, Gaby Davies had let rip and gone fast on the shale path that climbed the slope. The breathing problem had cut in. Prague might have been a thousand feet above sea level but was not Mexico City, Johannesburg or La Paz. Before she reached the top, where the great mound levelled out, her lungs were empty and her thighs ached. It crossed her mind that she could blow him away with a human-resources investigation into inappropriate behaviour and sexual harassment. She struggled on and she was there. She had eaten nothing all through those hours, and Ralph Exton hadn’t fed her, other than a few peanuts from his mini-bar. She crowned the crest, kept running and knew from the guidebook that this place was revered. There was a huge mausoleum where the grave of the Unknown Soldier was sited, a national monument. A massive statue of a warhorse and Jan Žižka guarded it. She could have been accused – with justification – of lacking respect. She ran past two children, terrifying them, and screwed up a picture set up by a couple with a timer camera on a tripod. It flashed as she hugged the lens.

  It was not only fear of failure but fear of failure with him alongside her. Humiliation.

  She crossed the marble paving of the plateau, her Himalayan peak, and went for the path heading down. She was conscious of time slipping away, and ran faster. The sun had climbed and the night’s rain had been pushed away. There were puffy clouds around her, and below lay the historic panorama of the city: the castle, the great churches, the squares where the statues of martyrs stood.

  She remembered how, in her mind, she had denigrated him. She’d thought of him as the lonely little man who eked out days without purpose, who was almost sad and who bullied Ralph Exton for the sake of inflicting pain. Who seemed to have lost sight of the mission to gather together the evidence that would put Malachy Riordan into gaol until his hair whitened and the armed struggle withered. He had told her to run.

  Who else could have said that to her?

  Not the director general, not Matthew Bentinick, and she would have told Hugo Woolmer to go shaft himself if he had suggested it. No one. She could no longer feel the place on her buttock that he had smacked. Strange thing was that she wanted to feel it. She careered down the slope, sometimes on the path and sometimes the short-cuts between the shrubs. She lost her footing once, tumbling, then rolling. A stranger thing: when she badmouthed Danny Curnow – the dinosaur and torturer – she had won no applause from Ralph Exton. She regained eyeball.

  The target was out of the tunnel and on a pavement. There were new office buildings around him and at the far end of the street a metro station – she saw the sign for it. She had made good time, achieved the given task. She expected no praise, and that certainty flushed out more of her anger. She came onto the street. Her hair would have been a mess, her clothing sweat-streaked, and there was dirt on her face, and her knees and elbows. And something else was even stranger: his head on her shoulder when he’d slept and she hadn’t turfed him off. She had eyeball and she followed the target. Danny Curnow had not caught up.

  He came out of the tunnel. It had been a great echoing journey for him. It would have been impossible to push close to Malachy Riordan. There was no cover and the fierce ceiling lights burned down. It was an excellent place for a man to go if he was concerned that a tail was on him. Danny Curnow had stayed back, and didn’t know whether Gaby Davies had scaled the hill, then come down it . . .

  It was as if the tunnel had spat him out. The street was straight and empty ahead of him.

  He went on down it. He couldn’t see the target, or Gaby Davies. His breath came faster. He couldn’t run. For a surveillance tail to break out of the ordinary pace of life and hurry was an abomination. A man or woman who ran drew attention. He didn’t know where either of them was, and the pistol seemed to bounce in his belt. He wondered if, by now, his usefulness was exhausted. It beat a message in his head: he had no role left. Hunger and exhaustion struck, as he shambled along a smarter street than there had been on the other side of the hill. He had barely slept and was chilled to the bone. He had no role. He was an agent handler, and the job of the agent was done. The agent was now a passenger. All of Danny Curnow’s skills were in the manipulation of informers, who betrayed their supposed friends. It had gone on, moved up the track, and he might have screwed up – big-time.

  It was the nightmare of any man in the tail business: a street that gave no eyeball. The metro station was off to the right. He veered towards it. It was laid down that the mobiles should be used only as last resort, that voice footprints should be minimal. So he was alone. He should have been at the Falaise Gap, on from Villers-Bocage, with the image of the cemeteries clear in his mind – where he belonged. He felt the tiredness in his legs, heard the rasp of his breath and came into the station hall.

  His legs lost traction.

 
He was tripped.

  His hands went out, reflex, in front of him. The flooring, still wet from the overnight rain, lurched up at him and the faces of commuters blurred past his eyes.

  Danny Curnow braced himself for the shock of the impact.

  A fist gripped the collar of his coat. He clenched his fist, was about to swing and hit—

  Her voice: ‘Took your bloody time.’

  He didn’t hit her. He could have flattened her windpipe if he had hit her. She heaved him upright. He swayed and she freed him. Her hand went from his collar to her ankle.

  ‘You’re a weight, nearly broke my leg. What kept you?’

  He saw the triumph in her face. He wrenched his collar forward. She handed him a ticket. He had nothing to say but heaved, blew, no longer knew why he was there – and didn’t think she did. She gestured with her head, and the arrows took them to the B line, going back towards the city’s centre.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘He just missed one. You were close to fucking up. How would you have handled that?’

  She led, he followed. She held back at the entrance to the platform. The target was at the far end, slumped on a bench. They heard the rumble of an approaching train. They let him board, then took the carriage behind. Danny Curnow did not know how to praise her so stayed silent. If they had lost their target then the mission would have failed. All for nothing.