by Robert Ryan
‘Very good, sir. And will sir be joining us for dinner?’
‘I’m travelling rather light, to be honest, old chap. Bit short in the dinner jacket department.’
‘I’m sure the concierge will be able to assist, Wing Commander.’
‘In which case … yes. Why not?’
The meal was taken at a vast communal table scattered with rose petals and adorned with heavy, gleaming silverware. He was seated with a mixed bag of Europeans, with just one fellow countryman at the far end of the table, a Henry King who was something in the moving picture business. Despite the pair being comprehensively outnumbered, however, the conversation was conducted in mostly impeccable English, which was just as well because Harry’s French was rudimentary at best.
As he scanned the table he found his eyes flicking back to the woman who had introduced herself to the company as the Contessa Hellie von Lutz, who hailed from Alsace. He tried not to stare, but she had a rather delicious laugh and for a moment when she caught and brazenly held his gaze he felt himself start to redden, like a schoolboy caught peeking. He ran a finger round his dress collar, which felt half a size too small. He may have mastered the accent, but the penguin suits were still tricky for him.
As they moved on to dessert Hellie von Lutz insisted that the men all rotate, choreographing the changes with waves of her fan, and he found himself parted from the dull wife of the Michelin executive and directed next to the Contessa. She waited until the conversation sparked into life around them before she put her mouth close to his ear.
‘So, a spy?’
Harry almost spluttered. He turned to face her and he could smell sweet wine on her breath. This close he could see she was well into her thirties, with pale skin, deep brown eyes and a mouth framed by two faint crescent-shaped lines that deepened when she smiled.
‘What on earth gave you that idea?’
She shrugged. ‘You think you can keep secrets from Hellie?’
‘Clearly, the Assistant Manager can’t keep anything from you.’
‘Few men can, chéri.’
He wondered whether she was drunk, but those eyes were clear and sparkling.
‘So,’ she continued. ‘Who do you spy for? No, no, don’t tell me. Let me guess. The English is too obvious. You’re clearly not a Wing Commander of anything, are you? The Germans? Maybe. The French? No, the DTS would never trust a foreigner. The Americans? No, they aren’t even sure where France is. Or do you mostly spy for yourself ?’
Harry was uneasy. She was clearly teasing him, and for the first time in many weeks, he felt as if Harry Cole was showing through. He stiffened in his chair and pulled himself upright, putting a little Air Ministry frost into his words. ‘What makes you say that?’
She lowered her voice even further. ‘Because all spies spy for themselves, really. They don’t do it out of patriotism. They do it out of love.’
‘For their country,’ he said curtly.
‘No, for the love of the game. For the love of spying itself. The sheer excitement. Which is why you get double agents … spies who don’t care who their masters are, just as long as they can continue to play.’ She took a sip of wine. ‘That is my experience, anyway, Wing Commander.’
‘Have you known many spies, Contessa?’
‘Not so many that one more would do any harm.’ She threw her head back and laughed, causing some of the other guests to look over at them disapprovingly.
He excused himself and went to the lavatory, wondering if he had misread the signals. Signals? They were more like bloody distress flares. But he wasn’t comfortable with the conversation. She had sniffed something all right, but she wasn’t quite certain what the scent was yet. The sensible thing would be to break off. She was, though, he thought, as he buttoned himself up and adjusted his dress, a rather handsome woman.
When he returned to the dinner table the matter had been decided for him. Hellie was deep in conversation with a Dutch diamond merchant who had slid into his seat and was intermittently stroking her hand. She flashed Harry a what-could-I-do look of regret, but he suddenly felt relieved and tired. Certainly, he was too weary to start any sort of antler-locking with a wealthy and amorous Dutchman. He said his loud goodnights to the table and left before brandy.
It was six thirty the following morning when he realised the rapping wasn’t in his dream after all, but someone at the door. The manager, perhaps. He opened it to find the Contessa, resplendent, in a silk dressing gown, leaning in the doorway, a cigarette drooping lazily from her lips. She swept past him, letting the gown fold onto the floor, and stubbed out the cigarette, exhaling a cloud of smoke into the room.
‘Thank God. You never gave me your room number. I’ve tried three floors and been fucked five times on the way.’ She struck a Louise Brooks pose, totally naked and unabashed. ‘Well, I’m here now.’
Harry burst out laughing, unsure whether she was telling the truth, but unable to resist bringing her score up to the full half dozen.
There was swell on the Channel on his return crossing, making the ferry feel as if it was wallowing from one trough to another rather than making headway. He had the deck almost to himself as he watched the Dover cliffs grow larger with each peak, a tired smile on his face at the memory of the Contessa Hellie von Lutz and the thought of the thick wad of high denomination notes in his pocket.
Wing Commander Gilbert had done well again, adding three more hotels to the tally after the Atlantic. And he still had five cheques left. On the train from Dover he read a Daily Mirror, despite the fact that a Wing Commander would almost certainly have taken The Times or the Telegraph. It was time to give the man a rest anyway, he realised. His weariness was partly from the strain of having to keep in character for hours or days at a time. Still, there was a lot of cash in his pocket, enough for him to consider moving up West, breaking free from the low horizons of the East End, finally making something of himself, something that might even be legal. A share in a bar or a café, maybe a swank restaurant. He’d make an excellent host, he was sure.
The newspaper alarmed him with a recommendation that, in the wake of Mussolini’s invasion of Albania and the trouble brewing in Europe, conscription be re-introduced. Harry didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t want to see the inside of another barracks ever again, and certainly not when he was about to get a leg up in life.
He alighted at Charing Cross, wondering if he should wait for Dottie to come off shift from the hotel, but had decided to head back east when he became aware of the two men, one either side. He could smell a cologne on one of them, far too delicate for his big, square frame. They sandwiched Harry, pushing him towards the exit far quicker than he would have liked.
‘I say—’ he began, indignantly.
‘Be quiet,’ Mr Cologne barked as he snatched the overnight case from him.
Harry snapped his mouth shut and allowed himself to be frog-marched outside. A black saloon was waiting on the forecourt, blocking the taxis. Mr Cologne pointed a finger like a pistol barrel at the nearest cabbie, who was leaning on his horn, and the noise stopped abruptly. Harry clearly wasn’t the only one to recognise that you didn’t argue with Mr Cologne. Harry was forced in the back of the Morris between his two escorts and the driver pulled away.
Mr Cologne unfastened Harry’s bag and began to rifle through the contents, spilling his soiled shirts and underwear on the floor.
‘Look here,’ Harry tried again. The fist hit him hard, clicking his jaw sideways, almost out of its socket, snapping his head back and loosening his hat. He didn’t struggle when the trilby was removed and the canvas sack was dragged down over his face.
Sir Claude Dansey of the Z organisation heard the Morris saloon pull into the yard outside the warehouse. He buttoned up his jacket and strode across the dusty concrete and took his place at the rickety desk, lowering himself stiffly into position, careful not to stress his back. He was getting too old for all this, too old to be running a private intelligence service,
too old for enforcement duties.
The gloomy brick building had once been an abattoir, back when this part of south London was all fields and farms, but now, after service as a garage and a warehouse, it was an empty shell, the interior illuminated only by a pair of sooty skylights. These days it was used only as an anonymous venue for Dansey to have a few quiet words with those who crossed him.
Dansey blinked as the main door slid back to admit daylight along with the three silhouettes, then slammed shut again. His two operatives dragged the Gilbert fraudster into the centre of the room. Dansey was sitting mostly in shadow, aware that he presented a vaguely threatening presence in the half-light.
‘Take off the hood,’ he said.
The man grunted as the sacking was yanked off him. Dansey nodded and a hard punch to the kidneys was delivered. The man staggered forward and a kick behind the knee sent him to the floor. Dansey watched impassively as his two men alternated kicks, their victim rolling into a ball, grunting and yelping under the blows.
Dansey had no compunction about the beating. Potential threats had to be dealt with swiftly. The Z organisation was his own creation, a force doing the government’s job of gathering intelligence, a task the real MI6 was far too enfeebled to perform. Using well-off businessmen, bankers, engineers and even filmmakers—the producer Alexander Korda, the man the public knew only as the force behind The Private Life of Henry VIII and Things To Come, was one of his best sources of information—Dansey gathered material across Europe and reported directly to Winston Churchill, who used it to needle the spineless government of the day. This was on the understanding that, should circumstances change, then Z, and Dansey, would be welcomed into the official fold.
‘Stop,’ said Dansey after a few minutes. A wisp of vapour hung in the air from his breath.
The room was silent but for the laboured breathing of his men, sweating after their exertions, and a thin whine coming from the tangle of limbs at their feet.
‘Search him.’
The man was rolled over and money and papers were placed on the desk before Dansey.
‘Wing Commander Gilbert,’ he said with a sneer. Dansey flipped open the envelope containing the cash. ‘RAF pay seems to be getting better. And in francs. How very European.’
‘Look, I don’t know who you are …’ The voice sounded frightened, the words blurred as they came out through swollen lips.
‘No, you don’t know who we are. It is best you keep it that way. I don’t suppose it occurred to you, Wing Commander,’ Dansey said slowly, ‘that there might be genuine agents operating in northern France.’ He nodded and another kick was delivered, powerful enough to send the impostor sliding across the floor. ‘That a foreign spy could overhear your stupid fabrications and report back to, say, Berlin.’ Another blow. ‘Which would mean our men—the genuine article—are threatened with detection and exposure, compromising the security of this country.’ He paused to let this sink in. ‘OK, pull him up.’
As he was lifted to his feet, the conman shook his head to try to clear it, droplets of blood flicking off onto the floor.
‘You stupid, pathetic idiot,’ said Dansey. ‘No more. You understand? No more.’
‘Yes,’ the man managed to croak, spitting out part of his front tooth as he did so. ‘No more. You have my word.’
‘No, no, no,’ laughed Dansey. ‘You have my word. Next time, if there is even a hint of a next time, it’ll be a bullet behind the ear.’ He waved the post office book under Harry’s nose to indicate the business was over. ‘We’ll see the money gets back to the rightful owners. Get him out of here.’
Dansey waited until he heard the Morris drive off before he rose and left himself, pausing only to rub the sole of his shoe in the largest of the glistening pools of blood on the floor, scraping it back and forth until it merged with the dust and dirt.
Within minutes of getting home Harry’s body had started stiffening up and turning a particularly sickly shade of yellow. His back ached, his piss was like rose water and his vision was distorted and flickering at the periphery. He felt like Max Schmeling after Joe Louis had finished with him in the rematch. He managed to pour himself a scotch and down it before he made it to the bed.
Dottie found him a couple of hours later, lying rigidly at attention on the candlewick bedspread, whimpering like a dog with toothache, his forehead covered with a slick of sweat. She quickly boiled kettles and helped him into the tin bath she positioned in front of the gas fire, feeding the gas meter to keep a stream of hot water coming, tutting and hissing at his wounds, calling him poor love this, poor darling that.
As she sponged him down as gently as possible, dabbing at the crusts of blood, she finally asked: ‘You going to tell me who it was?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ he snapped irritably. ‘Three of them jumped me after I got off the train. Took all the money, Dots. All of it.’
‘Not the savings, though.’
‘They took the post office book, Dottie. It’ll all be gone.’
She pursed her lips in irritation at the news they were poor once more. ‘You could’ve reported it, I mean, a robbery like that in broad daylight.’
He raised an eyebrow, and even that hurt. ‘You know better, Dottie.’
‘You should’ve gone to a hospital at least. Look at you. I don’t know how you got home in that state.’
‘Neither do I, love. Do I look terrible?’
She scanned the puffy face with its closed left eye, split lips, chipped tooth and deep gash on the cheekbone, leant over and kissed him. ‘Pretty as a picture, Harry.’
‘Yeah, I can imagine what kind of picture.’
‘I’ll go and get us some crackling and chips, eh? Make us both feel better. All right?’
‘There’s a fiver over by the window.’ He pointed at the stack of phony notes secured under a West Ham footballer paperweight.
‘I turn up at Charlie’s with a brand-new fiver and they’ll know there’s something fishy apart from the rock. My treat, Harry. Just this once.’
Harry managed a smile, but inside acid was eating through the lining of his gut. The beating had hurt, but that would pass. It wasn’t his first—when he was sixteen he’d had his nose broken in Limehouse by a copper who had caught him climbing over the dock fence on his way to a little pilfering—and he couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t be his last.
The pain of having to start all over again, though, the horror of being sucked back into the mindless routines of Hoxton and the East End, of pubs and crackling and chips, and forged fivers, all that panning for fool’s gold, just when he was so close to breaking free, that was real agony.
The spieler where Harry started his money-washing campaign was in a spartan side room of The Lord Taverner, a pub just on the edge of the City, near Spitalfields market and the Hawksmoor church. Closed off from the public bar by a mangy green velvet curtain, this was where, by invitation only, those known to Reg, the publican, could spend the night playing three card brag, rummy, Watch The Ten or Napoleon. Harry was a familiar face to Reg from the days when they’d both ditched school and become bookie’s runners.
Harry’s strategy was to exchange his supply of forged fivers for the real thing by winning some hands, losing others, getting the money nicely mixed up, but one thing hadn’t gone according to plan. At The Lord Taverner that night he’d won every hand. He simply couldn’t stop. The money flowed towards him in great waves, piling up at his side, watched by a wide-eyed Dottie, who sat at the bar sipping gins, occasionally coming over to ruffle his hair.
Round the table with him were Jimmy, a sometimes doorman at Daddy Ho’s gambling and opium operation in Limehouse; Tony Smethurst, who was Harry’s cousin, and whose dad owned the café along the street, Fred Lombard, a pimp, and, sitting in on some hands, Reg Smalls himself.
For most of the night, Harry was pleased with his progress, although he dared not calculate his winnings before the session was over—the one-sided success put him under a
little more scrutiny than he would have liked.
Then, around four in the morning, the Maltese and his minder came in, sat down at the table, and soon the flow had reversed. Harry couldn’t get up and leave, not after pounding the boys all night, not if he wanted to be welcome at any gambling table in the East End again. He just had to suffer the fact that the newcomer had brought a freshly minted piece of luck with him.
The Maltese’s minder, who stood behind his employer, kept glancing over at Dottie in a way that irritated Harry, even more when she smiled back. It had been a mistake to bring her, he concluded, ruining his concentration like that; next time she could stay at home.
At almost seven in the morning, the last of his money crossed the table and Harry threw down his cards, his mouth dry and stale. He was suddenly aware of how bad the room smelt, of damp and roaches and rancid failure. Harry glanced around the table. Smoke-reddened eyes stared at him. He could expect no favours or sympathy. After all, someone had to be the first to crash out, and his fellow players were simply glad it wasn’t them. The scar on his left cheekbone, still vivid from where a ridge on the warehouse’s concrete floor had cut deep, began to throb.
Harry got to his feet, summoning as much dignity as he could, took out the last two notes from his wallet and threw them down. ‘Thank you,’ he managed to say. ‘Be seeing you soon, gents.’
It was then that the Maltese burst out laughing, a long rattle that settled into his throat until it became a deep rumble. Harry froze. The Maltese was examining the last two fivers Harry had put on the table. He tossed one of the big white, crisp notes across at him. ‘Is mine.’
Harry kept calm. ‘They all are now.’
‘No. Is one of mine. I made the fuckin’ thing.’ The man examined his pile of winnings closely, screwed another and another into a ball and tossed them at Harry’s head. ‘You come in here and play with gash money? My gash money?’
‘Harry …’ Reg began to tut.
‘Shame on you, Harry,’ added the self-righteous Tony.
