Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  Ralph Exton stood a little behind him, but was visible from the corner of an eye. His friend was the ‘middle man’ and would take a cut from the deal. Exton should have greeted the Irish man and had not. Neither did he ask about the girl or joke at her absence. The light was failing. The Irishman gazed at Timofey’s uniform, seemed to say with his eyes that only a buffoon wore such clothing. The brigadier put money on the table. They left. The girl was not there and the man’s face had been scratched, bitten and punched. For precious minutes he had forgotten the news in the bar on the screen, and the refusal of officials at the embassy to take his call. They went out into the last of the sunlight.

  The brigadier took a call, then murmured in his ear where they would meet the driver who had brought the gear. Timofey knew all of the old camp ground: he was always emotional when he came here.

  The van had come. The headlights had flashed. They were loaded through the back door. Black-gloved hands shook theirs. They heard names: Alpha, Bravo and Charlie.

  There was a brief hug from Karol Pilar, arms around Danny Curnow, but he made no gesture towards Gaby Davies. The van lurched forward.

  Danny was told that the targets were at a café, by a garage, then had left. They drove fast at first, then slowed when the Mercedes was in sight ahead.

  She must still have had the nerves because she needed to talk. ‘Finishes tonight. We’ll see him into custody with the local crowd, then brief the embassy people on extradition to Belfast. We’ll do a run to the airport, get the witness statements and file the photography in the office during the afternoon and evening. Sunday is chill-out and do the washing. What’s your week looking like, Danny? Any plans for Monday morning?’

  He said he had a group coming in at the start of the new week. After an early lunch he would have them on the beach at Dunkirk, then do the cemetery. In the evening there would be a talk from the guide travelling with them. That was his Monday.

  ‘Is it always difficult when you come down off a big operation? Flat and low key?’

  He said he felt waves of exhaustion, and that Monday was too far into any future to think about now.

  ‘And you don’t even have to be here.’

  He didn’t argue or take offence. There was indeed no need for him to be squatting on the floor of a van driven by Czech police, their weapons alongside him, a pistol of theirs stuck into his belt. He had no more business there.

  ‘I would have coped,’ she emphasised. ‘I wouldn’t have needed the verbal equivalent of a rubber truncheon. You could have stayed at home, gone round the cemeteries and battlefields. Do you talk to them about heroes? The world’s left you behind, Danny. Well, Monday morning for me will be a whole new scene. I’ll be turning my back on this place and you. I might bring a picnic and sit in the gardens behind the office, then go in and find out what they’ve given me. People like Matt Bentinick feed off poor lost souls like you. They’re bloody leeches, and they’re comfortable because you’re so thankful to be asked that you’ll do as you’re told with no fuss. And you always want to come back. You were scarred, and managed to quit, but never lost the habit. You had to have a last fix. The fingers flicked and you came running. It won’t happen to me. I thought, at one stage, that I might get to like you. How wrong I was. Damn you, have you nothing to say?’

  They followed the Mercedes. He didn’t give her the satisfaction of a riposte. He turned away, tapped out his text in the near darkness of the van, then hit send. He had agreed with most of what she had said. She was quiet now. He was something of a passenger, ‘along for the ride’, and she had the authority of Thames House behind her. The warrant would be in her name. Karol Pilar had the muscle of three heavily armed specialists, and an agent no longer needed handling. He could have pulled out, for all his usefulness that morning, and might have been lucky with a flight to Paris, then a fast TGV out of Gare Saint-Lazare, four stops to Caen. He might have caught the closing of the Falaise Gap and had dinner at the restaurant across from the marina where all the tours went on their last night.

  ‘God, Danny, did I say that?’

  ‘You didn’t hear me argue.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I want to say—’

  ‘Someone said once, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” Don’t apologise.’

  Danny Curnow closed his eyes. The night gathered.

  He sniffed. Jocelyn expected it: it was George’s style. The man wanted to talk.

  ‘Coffee, George?’

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt . . .’

  ‘It’s the cappuccino capsule, yes?’

  He nodded, and slid into her cubicle. It was not a comfortable chair that he sank onto, but she seldom encouraged visitors and few troubled her. In the corridor she went to the machine, pressed the buttons and studied the noticeboard that had the usual clutter of Pilates sessions, salsa dancing, Farsi conversation evenings and the hockey team’s fixtures. She allowed few into her room but he had the right to be there, and she sympathised. She had been sorting the matter of the air strip and its location.

  She brought the mug back and settled at her desk.

  He had the right to know. If it failed he was ‘dead in the water’. He might linger briefly but then he would be out on his ear. If there was blood on foreign soil, traceable, it would be the equivalent for the dear man of having both legs amputated at the knee. Some in Thames House would be sorry to see him go, but more would regard him as dispensable. Their relationship was much dissected by juniors but without conclusions. It was likely, she thought, to be based on trust, but few in the building knew the meaning of the word, or gave a toss about it. It was mid-afternoon. She did a little grin – sparked some mischief – opened a drawer and withdrew a hip flask. It had been a present from her father who perennially regretted that she was not male and didn’t handle a Purdey well. She sloshed Scotch into his mug, then told him what was in place, what was planned, and explained the feed that linked the field position of the team to the Six station at the Prague embassy. If it succeeded, he would be toasted with fine wines, in a few remote corners of government, and praise would cascade over him. She told him what was left to be confirmed, and an approximation of a timetable, then let him talk.

  He said, ‘With their influence over the Czechs, Magyars, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenians and Austrians, you’ve done well. They’re under the thumb. We’re not going to have Red Army tanks rolling up the high street, but we’ll have bloody cold winters if the Gazprom taps on the pipelines are closed off. It has to be Germany.’

  She favoured a flying club near Chemnitz.

  ‘They’ll go ape-shit. Forgive the vulgarity. The old Soviets are back running the show. They don’t reckon the clock ever nudged forward. And we have their whistleblower’s assassin tucked into a cell, but that’s minor in comparison with what we can achieve tonight. They use our country as a lavatory, piss in our streets and think nothing of it. We’ll send a message, a discreet one, and they’ll be throwing their ghastly crockery across the banqueting halls and chipping the gold-leaf paint they love off the ceilings. It’ll let them know we’re still breathing.’

  If there was ‘blood on the ground’, he would be out, and the telegrams from the foreign ministry in Prague would be deluging Foreign and Commonwealth by morning. The politicians would be queuing in disorderly lines to claim his body parts, and the Americans would be chortling at the screw-up. He’d be gone, exorcised from the Service’s history. Much was at stake.

  She said, ‘There’s a fair bit riding, George, on the man we have in there – the freelance who was, and is, Vagabond. Experienced, but no spring chicken.’

  ‘If he’s good enough for Matthew Bentinick he’ll have to do. Matthew didn’t offer me coffee – said he was too busy. In a rather bloodythirsty mood but perky enough.’

  ‘We have to hope he has cause to be.’

  He shook his head, declined a top-up from her flask, grimaced and left. She would have bet he’d be back later and that the Spartan
single bed would be in use adjacent to his office that night. She had been there at the start and would be there at the end. There were always two bottles of a cheap French bubbly in her floor fridge, likely to be long past a drinkable date, but they lived in hope. An agent doing routine deals with Irish dissidents had been propositioned to broker a weapons deal. He had thrown up a name and bells had rung. The formidable persuasive powers of Matthew Bentinick – God knew he had reason to hate – had fashioned the mission with the care of a sculptor working with clay, and had dragged a man from obscurity. It would not only be George who took early retirement if it ended in disaster: Matthew Bentinick would follow him out through the door, and so would she. A life without Thames House, for Jocelyn, was not worth contemplating. They were all in Vagabond’s hands.

  Young Gaby Davies might go in an avalanche of recrimination, if there was blood on the ground. She didn’t even know the target at issue. Jocelyn knew, and her future would rise or plummet on that knowledge. She swigged from the flask and spluttered. Many remained in blissful ignorance.

  A meeting was in progress, one of those at which the following month’s diary was explored. The operations area at Palace Barracks’ Five compound seemed deserted. He’d been with a detective from the police service. The old stager, his boss, was in his corner, screen on, low light, nibbling a sandwich. It was the end of a bizarre week. It had started with him escorting a stranger on an expedition to a hedgerow and an exercise in nostalgia for past methods, and seemed to be ending in a confusion that he hesitated to understand. He did not particularly care to. He said, ‘I just heard—’

  A soft voice: ‘What?’

  ‘About the boys who died in the explosion on the mountain.’

  ‘The “own goal”. You heard what?’

  ‘A cop told me – from Serious Crime. He has a brother working from Dungannon. He told me that the command wire was cut.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘When the kids tried to fire it, the device was certain to malfunction.’

  ‘Nothing certain in this world.’

  ‘The threat to the target never existed.’

  ‘I’m wrong. The only certainties are death and taxes.’

  ‘May I correct you, boss?’

  ‘Feel free, Sebastian.’

  ‘Advance knowledge of a command cable laid, then cut. The only certainties are death, taxation and a tout on the mountain.’

  ‘Nothing is as it seems – be dull if it was.’

  Sebastian could have added more, but did not. He left the older man to finish his sandwich and went to his own desk. Life returned to the operations area as his colleagues spilled in from their briefing. He could have said he’d had word of the absence from the community of Malachy Riordan, kingpin of the high ground, whom he had seen last Monday from a ditch. Perhaps it was known at a different level from his own. He muttered, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ He assumed that, abroad, an arrest operation was in preparation, evidence gathered and a smoking gun for provenance. The man who had been in the ditch with him would be at the heart of it. He would be outside the loop and the broadsheet crossword would claim his attention. He was not new to the Province and the Palace complex yet had accepted that he knew little. Soon after the transfer of all Five personnel to the purpose-built fortress in the barracks, a wag had typed the truism: ‘Anyone who believes they know the answer to Northern Ireland’s problems is ill-informed.’ Another had typed: ‘Every time we find the answer to NI’s problems, they change the question.’ They’d both been on the wall for twenty-four hours, then were deemed ‘inappropriate’ and had been removed. He knew so little of the way the bloody place ticked. A secretary of state had demanded after a first visit: ‘For God’s sake get me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Maybe, but he knew too little to judge, except that death, the Revenue and touts were abroad on the mountain.

  She was coming from Dungannon and had the boy with her. Bridie Riordan would not have wished to take Oisin to the doctor’s surgery but had no option. It was hard at the best of times to find someone she trusted, or liked, who would take her child for an afternoon or early evening. A litany of excuses, but most involved the hackneyed ‘My Dermot/Sean/Fergus has the flu, and I’d not be wanting it given to your Oisin. Another time.’

  Headlights from an oncoming car picked them up. Attracta Donnelly was the widow of a proud patriot of the mountain, now resting in the village’s Republican plot. Siobhan Nugent was the widow of a tout who had been rightly executed for the betrayal of the community’s finest fighter. He was in the same cemetery as Jon Jo Donnelly, but Mossie Nugent’s grave was against a wall. Bridie Riordan saw the two women walking from the shop. She knew where they lived. They were walking towards the Nugent house, and the arm of Attracta Donnelly was in the elbow of Siobhan Nugent. She drove past them. They were in conversation, like old friends. She swerved and the boy squealed. She told him to shut up and he started to cry. She slapped his leg and braked.

  Brennie Murphy’s hand was shielding his eyes from her lights. He knew her car well, and came forward. How was she doing?

  She was fine, but no thanks to the Donnelly and Nugent women, close and confiding. She felt a great weariness. Was Brennie going to the funeral in the morning?

  ‘Have to be there, but not prominent.’

  She would go too.

  ‘I can’t not be there, but there’s hostility towards us – directed at Malachy. God knows they were grown boys and not coerced. Are you asking me whether this is over, missus? Not while there’s blood in our veins and breath in our lungs. We won’t bend the knee. We’re not for compromising our principles. Not Malachy, not you, missus, and not me. We go on.’

  Could there be touts again on the mountain? Had touts killed the boys?

  ‘If there are, I’ll find them. If there are, they’ll wish they’d never been born. I think not. Safe back to your home, and I think he’ll be back with us by another evening.’

  She wound up her window and drove home.

  Dusty had parked on the main road and allowed the group, with their guide, to go past an old farmhouse, where smoke billowed from a chimney, to what had been a charnel house. He enjoyed a cigarette, and a wide grin spread across his face, accentuating the gap between his front teeth. He laughed. He had his phone out and read the text for the fourth or fifth time. He did a little jig. He was in his fifty-ninth year and thought he might have achieved a bit of matchmaking. He started to tap in the reply. His fingers were big and could be clumsy on the small keys. It took him as long to compose the message as it did to smoke the cigarette. He read back his message: Dear Miss Hanne, With respect, not before time, and I promise I will give Danny Curnow a good kicking to make sure he gets to H’fleur to thank you in person for your kind gift. Sincerely, Dusty Miller.

  He’d miss him. He’d miss the taciturn quiet, the far-away look, the silences when his mood darkened. He deserved some happiness, did Desperate. They wouldn’t stay, of course not. Too much baggage on the Atlantic coast of Normandy for them. Maybe they’d go to those islands way up off Norway in the Arctic Circle. She’d fill canvases for idiots to buy and he could do odd jobs, lose the chill in his body and the memories. Fuck it all: no one now bothered to raise a glass to what they had done – sort of written out of history, weren’t they? He’d stay, but he’d miss him.

  Dusty sent it. Might be the last trip he did, now that the big anniversary was past and the folks were getting older. The world might move on – might.

  The river was almost the last stop in the tour. After the slaughter at Villers-Bocage, the tide seemed irreversible and the issue was the closing of the Gap. Falaise was a historic town with good churches, a fine medieval castle and a statue of William the Conqueror in front of the mairie. The Gap had been closed, which ensured a significant victory for Montgomery. It was a decent way to round off the trip.

  The guide would have talked about tensions between British and American commanders, the Americans
saying their allies went too slowly and without commitment, the British sneering about PYBs – Pushy Yankee Bitches. A visitor might have asked, ‘But weren’t they all allies?’

  One or two would have raised the vexed issue of collaboration, and the impromptu firing squads greeting those who chose the wrong horse to put a shirt on, or plain women having their heads shaved. The guide would have responded quietly that we as a people were indeed fortunate to escape occupation and the temptation to find love, or food, wherever it came from. They would have been through the village of St Lambert-sur-Dives and stood where Major David Currie, of the South Alberta Regiment, blocked the road, pushed aside the fleeing German remnants and won the Victoria Cross. Such a pleasant place and so desirable for a summer holiday cottage.

  They would have gone on along what the guide called the ‘Corridor of Death’. They were by a river. The guide sat on one side of the slow-flowing shallow water, where cattle came in the evening to drink, and they would have been opposite him on a farm track. He would have talked of the greatest German defeat since Stalingrad. Little of it made sense to the visitors, and they wondered now why they were there. Memories of the cemeteries were consigned to their cameras, and perhaps they had begun to talk of dinner – their final meal together.

  The guide would have attempted to interest them in the statistics of the closing of the Gap, twenty thousand prisoners taken and many thousands killed and wounded in the incessant air attacks at the choke point before the 1st Polish Armoured snapped it shut. It had been a killing zone.

  On the way back towards the hotel in Caen the minibus would have stopped beside a Tiger tank, freshly painted, on a concrete base. The visitors would have piled out and had their photographs taken by the gun barrel. It was the same model as Wittman used at Villers-Bocage, and the fittest would have scrambled up beside the turret and sat astride the 88mm gun. Time for glad rags and a last supper.