by Jan Needle
Bill touched his tongue with drink. He had had too much today, he was thirsty and the whisky did not help. But his brain was still unfuddled.
‘Deep cover, eh? It sounds like fucking madness. Just what’s going on? Why murder Rudolf bleeding Hess?’
Peter-Joe was sitting on the bed. He grinned. His brain was also clear.
‘Quite honestly,’ he said, ‘even I’m confused. Only Silversmith knows the ins and outs, as far as I can see. The Widowmaker.’
Wiley smelled the Bells. He had not heard Silversmith called that for years. In his days in Ireland, in the seventies, Silversmith had made a lot of widows. It was also irony, a reference to the Provies’ favourite rifle of the era, the Armalite. Silversmith had run assassination squads for the SAS, had helped dream up the 14th Intelligence Regiment, had tried to teach the politicians about reality.
‘The Widowmaker,’ he said, pointing through the window at the darkening Ribble. ‘The sea. “To leave the farm and the neat home acre, and go with the old grey widowmaker”. Did you know that’s what the Widowmaker was?’
‘Fuck off. I went to comprehensive. Wanker.’
‘Got poetry in jail though, did you? Or just ruptured piles? Why jail, did you hit someone? Why the sentence?’
‘I was arrested for having a faulty licence plate. Two cops walked up to my car as nice as pie, guns in holsters, smiles on faces, and found an Ingram on the seat beside me, a three-five-seven Magnum, and a pair of snazzy night-to-day binoculars. I told them I was a bird watcher with a down on nightbirds and they didn’t crack a smile. They called the FBI, the Secret Service, the Narcotics Bureau, Scotland Yard, Interpol, the CIA…’
The room grew quiet. They could hear a fruit machine thudding tokens on a floor below.
‘Ah,’ said Wiley, quietly. ‘The CIA.’
‘Ah,’ mimicked Peter-Joe. ‘The CI fucking A. The cousins. Believe me, mate, they did their very best.’ He snickered. ‘According to the newspapers, I was there for everything known to man. To bump off Ian Paisley, to waste some PIRA who’d brought the begging bowl out to a Noraid jamboree, to knock off some Mafia bastard who’d got his fingers in the pasta jar, they even got me linked with two of their own men who’d gone bad and were running guns to Libya. All bollocks, but it worked like always, my own dear mother wouldn’t have recognized me. I was six feet tall, blond, red-haired, a dwarf, had a beard, a wooden leg, you name it. The man of a million disguises. It kept me quite amused for days.’
‘What happened?’
‘I pleaded guilty on a promise of two years for illegal weaponry, the maximum was seven. I figured for a while I’d get quietly let out, but they wanted cover deep, deep, deep. I’m a master criminal. Bad apple. The worst o’t’ fooking bunch, as they say round this way. If the Hess thing does go wrong, it’s shatterproof. It will’ve been a cash job by a weirdo hitman. Me. There’s plenty of nuts who want to see Hess dead.’
‘But why, for fuck’s sake? I mean the man’s the walking dead already. Ninety three. How much longer do they think he’s fucking got? Why waste him now?’
Peter-Joe sucked down Scotch. He took a refill, while Wiley looked at him. Two years inside, he thought. What a funny way to earn a crust.
‘I was in the States to kill another old’un,’ said Peter-Joe laconically. ‘So she got saved when I got done, by luck or judgment no one ever told me. Another German. Catherine, an aristo, lived in the US for donkey’s years. Maybe someone else got whatever it was we were after from off her, later. I got two years.’
Rain began to spatter lightly on the window. They turned their heads towards it.
‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,’ Wiley said. ‘So how old was Catherine? A hundred?’
Peter-Joe laughed.
‘Dunno. She used to knock off a German flier though, apparently. A fighter ace, Adolf Galland or some such name, something to do with Hess. He went to America after the war and did exhibition stuff, a flying circus, and this Catherine had some diaries and stuff he gave her for safekeeping. According to Silversmith it was a long-term love affair, she fell for him when she was twelve. She was up a lamppost at a big parade for Hitler, and when she clocked Galland in the entourage, she had a sexual climax, she came. Up a fucking lamppost at the age of twelve! Not fair is it, why don’t I meet birds like that? Some bastards get all the luck.’
The two men stared at the faded pattern in the carpet, thinking different thoughts.
‘So she was in her sixties when you went to kill her,’ Wiley said. ‘Bloody hell, Peter-Joe.’
‘I didn’t though, did I! Anyway bollocks, Bill, you’ve done worse, and you will again, if you want your gold clock. You were on the Hilda Murrell job, weren’t you? That’s what I heard.’
‘I was not. And I heard that wasn’t us. I heard that that was genuine.’
‘A genuine mistake? There’s too many twats running round with Uzis in their hands, that’s for definite. Too many enthusiastic amateurs. That’s why we wanted you on this. Silversmith’s sick of being given pillocks who’ve had three weeks training and done nothing on the ground. Trigger-happy pillocks who shoot and shit themselves. We want men who’ve done their killing. We want men who know how to stick a cast barrel in a Browning and blow someone away and not get traced. Fucking hell, he never forgave Nairac for going in that pub in Crossmaglen and getting wasted, it caused us endless problems. You wouldn’t have used the same gun time after time, would you? Cowboys and fucking Indians, the useless twat. We want you on this job. You’re mature.’
‘I’m flattered,’ said Bill. He was not, nor did he sound like it. German fighter aces, schoolgirls getting off on lampposts, randy geriatrics. Maturity!
‘He’s ninety-three,’ he said. ‘That is obscene. What in the name of God do they think he’s done to get done in for? I mean … what?’
Peter-Joe gestured, emptily, and the door opened silently. Silversmith walked in. The Old Grey Widowmaker.
‘Jesus, Bill,’ he said, mildly. ‘You really have got it bad, haven’t you? When they said you’d lost your bottle, I told them they were crazy.’
‘What?’ said Bill Wiley. ‘Lost my bottle?’
‘I heard it, too,’ said Peter-Joe. ‘News travels in the goldfish bowl, old son.’
‘Stuff the pair of you,’ Bill said. ‘Fuck the lot of you. I’m talking basic humanity. Bottle, my arse. This stunt is fucking crazy. Are we Russians? Joe Fucking Stalin? What?’
‘Funny you should say that, Bill,’ said the Widowmaker. ‘The buzz is that the Russkis are the problem. The bastards want to let him out.’
‘See?’ said Peter-Joe. ‘Shit and fan. Cat among the fucking pigeons, big time.’
‘Is it true? It sounds like bollocks. Is it true?’
‘It’s the strongest theory,’ said Silversmith. ‘Although I don’t get told jack shit, in the way of it. The Reds figure he’ll tell things to show them in a good light if they get him out. Things our lot’ve covered up for bloody aeons. The French claim they’re indifferent, which is also not a good sign for us, the lying bastards. And the good ole Yankee boys are with us all the way. As they were on the Hess thing from the start.’
‘He’s ninety three,’ said Bill. ‘You’re mad, the lot of you. I won’t be a part of it. I fucking won’t.’
‘You will,’ said Silversmith. ‘I assure you that you will.’
He smiled.
‘You just need to bone up on the facts, son. Hess is a monster. Hess killed myriads of men. Hess is a Nazi. Let’s just have a quiet little talk.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Peter-Joe. ‘I’ll ring down for another little bottle.’
Six
Despite all the odds, Bill almost made it home in time for Johnnie’s birthday. Not for the party, but in time to kiss him on the day. He put his key in the front door lock at one minute to midnight, and it was one minute past when his son awoke. Bill was standing beside his bed in the pale darkness, watching the peaceful face, almost consume
d by love and sorrow, when the eyelids fluttered and the boy awoke. There was a streetlight not far away, and the curtains were thin. They looked at each other for some moments, smiling, then Bill sat on the bed and they took each other in their arms. For a while they did not speak.
It was the boy who was the cause of all his deepest problems. The boy was thin and small, and his hair smelled faintly sweaty, and Bill loved him. It was a love that had crept up on him over several years, and it was inexplicable. They did not spend much time together, because of how he worked, and they had no interests in common. Johnnie played computer games, sometimes with friends but often alone, and he fished alone, or walked the countryside. He was self-contained, self-sufficient, undemonstrative. When he saw his father, when they had time together, they did not talk a lot, or play. But they knew, they shared a secret, which they did not put into words. They had love.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get back,’ said Bill, finally. ‘I had to go to England. You know how it is.’
The hair against his nostrils moved, as Johnnie nodded.
‘I’d like to go to England. I’d like to go back to live there. Will we, Dad?’
Bill’s eyes were on the bedroom furniture, the posters, the computer table. A boy’s bedroom, on an Army housing unit in a foreign country. He was exhausted, overwhelmed with sorrow. Outside a car passed, the window lightened momentarily, the noise rose and faded.
‘Yes. We will. I’m sick of this place too, we all are. Your mother’s sick of Ireland, and my job, and the things I put you all through. She’s right.’
The hair moved, as if Johnnie were going to sit up and face him.
He changed his mind, kept his eyes buried.
‘I wouldn’t worry too much, Dad. I mean… Mum’ll be all right. She loves you, doesn’t she? She shouts, but…’
She doesn’t love me at all, thought Bill. We, neither of us, loves the other. I’ve given everything to fight the bastard terrorists, I’ve thrown away my time, my life, my family, and she doesn’t understand. Maybe she’s right. I can’t lose this boy. I can’t.
‘Of course she’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘I’m never in, that’s all, the job’s appalling, the hours they make me work. But it’ll get better soon. Soon we’ll go back to England. Maybe I’ll leave the Army.’
‘But you’ll still be a spy, won’t you? At school they say you’re not really in the Army, you’re in the secret services. Will you give that up, too?’
Now John did look at his face. He rolled sideways, pulling the Superman duvet with him. His eyes were deep and troubled, the skin around them smudged with dark. Bill had to force himself not to look away. The absurdity of it came to him. He laughed quietly.
‘I almost lied to you again. I almost said it was a load of rubbish, nonsense. The nonsense is, I’m not allowed to tell you things like that, you’re not meant to have the faintest inkling of what I do, I’m just in the Army. God, my Dad was an engineer and I didn’t really know what he did, not till after he was dead. He was a toolmaker. In fact, I don’t really know even now exactly what he did. He didn’t make hammers and things, not that sort of tool.’
He was changing the subject, while trying to be honest. He recognized the process without caring enough to try and stop it. This boy was eleven years old. He was too young.
‘Mum says you’ll never give it up,’ said Johnnie. ‘Mum says you’re incapable. She says you lie all the time, as well. She’s drinking wine, Dad. As well as the pills. She smuggles bottles into the car and drives them into the country and throws them into fields. I was in a field two weeks ago, I nearly shouted, I thought she’d seen me. She chucked a plastic bag down into the ditch, a plastic bin bag. When she’d gone I looked. It was full of bottles. I don’t want her to get sick, Dad. I don’t want her to have a breakdown. Wendy Kerrigan’s mum just had a breakdown. She’s in a…she’s in a hospital.’
John rolled forward, reburied his face in his father’s lap. Bill gazed bleakly at the bedroom wall. He thought of the boy as someone else’s, tried to picture it. How would it look from the outside, this life, if anybody knew? A smart semi on a reasonable estate. A variety of cars. A tired-looking wife, but not one whose problems had become exactly visible. A quiet, studious, well-behaved lad of eleven, older than his age. Not a bad picture. The reality was an unexploded bomb, or a bomb exploding in slow motion. And Johnnie called him a ‘spy’, a word that nobody, surely, used any more, a romantic word. A tired man but a young one, a killer for his country’s good, a man who lived with danger, in sheep’s clothing in a country full of wolves. Who had been asked that day to kill a man of ninety-three.
‘Look, it’s late. It’s nearly half past twelve, we’d better knock this off, and you need your sleep. I’m going to sort things out, John; I’m going to try. That’s a promise. I don’t always tell lies; you don’t believe that, do you? Trust me and I’ll make another promise. Anything I tell you will be true, OK, whatever anybody else says. First truth is this: I’m going to sort things out. Quickly. As quickly as I can. Believe it. I’ll only tell the truth.’
An odd smile passed over Johnnie’s features. He unburied his face, as if to show the look.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you get my present?’
Bill had an urge to lie, to make up some story about time, and pressure, and orders. He grimaced.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right. You were going to pick it up, from Belfast. You weren’t, were you? You hadn’t bought me anything.’
‘No. I’m sorry, love. It’s not that I don’t care.’
‘I know. You didn’t lie to me. That wasn’t difficult, was it?’
Wiley’s eyes widened.
‘You‘re taking the Mickey, you little sod! You cheeky little devil!’
They were laughing. After a few seconds, Johnnie said: ‘Will you be here tomorrow? Tomorrow night? Maybe we…’
He made a face. The answer was in his father’s eyes.
‘I’ll be leaving in the morning. Early. I’ll be away some days.’
‘So I won’t see you, then. It’s that early. Yeah.’
They touched each other’s hands.
Liz, in their broad double bed, was lying on her back, uncovered in the night’s warmth. She wore a light nightdress, which had ridden up to mid-thigh, and her mouth was slack and open, although she was not snoring. Bill watched her for a while, noting the signs of drugged sleep. Dispassionately, because he felt his love for John so keenly, he considered what he felt for her. Firstly – the one he never could get over – was the lack of the slightest spark of physical attraction. She lay there, a good-looking woman, well-made and slim, and she might as well have been a lump of meat. He could see one of her breasts, and the inside of her left thigh almost to the top, and he would not have wanted to if he had been alone with her on a desert island. Her hair was long and lustrous black, only slightly streaked with premature grey, and he remembered days of joy and passion when he had lost his face in it, had stroked it, washed and plaited it. Her white face, narrow, serious, now looked like an aunt’s face, an ageing cousin’s, without attraction. And when they made love, now, he ended feeling false and hollow.
Bill Wiley undressed rapidly, down to his shirt, and got into the far side of the bed, nearest the window. He moved gently, although movement would not waken her when she had taken Nitrazepam, and he lay on his back, not expecting sleep to come. He listened to the gentle wind outside.
His parting with Silversmith had been amicable, if nothing else. Which had taken some achieving, because Silversmith had a shortish fuse and Bill, his mouth parched with spirit, had known that he was close indeed to doing something final.
‘Bullshit aside,’ the quiet man had said at last, when they had settled with the newly-opened bottle. ‘Or even steaming testicles; Peter-Joe rates you as highly as he rates himself, and that, as you are well aware, is pretty high. You were his suggestion, and I endorsed it a hundre
d per cent. So what’s gone wrong?’
Wiley considered.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know, and that’s a part of it. Looking-glass fatigue, secrecy blues, call it what you like. I don’t know if I’m on my arse or my elbow, I don’t even know if I can convince myself. I am not a bloody murderer.’
Silversmith neither moved nor smiled.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘perhaps I understand. Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt. But this job is important. Massive. It’ll take us a few weeks, no more. And when it’s over I’ll get you leave, I promise you.’
Peter-Joe shifted to the bed.
‘He’ll get you out of Ireland, too,’ he said. ‘The deathzone of the damned. Two years in pokey in the States was better than another spell on Bogwogville.’
Silversmith’s grey eyes were on him. They were like lasers.
‘You’re tired of it, aren’t you, son?’ he said. ‘You’re tired of the way we knock them down and they spring up again. You’re sick of the way the newspapers stand up for them, and the TV hammers us, and every time someone evil gets eliminated, some twat in Parliament screams bloody murder. You’re exhausted. You feel betrayed, and isolated, and alone.’
Bill found that he was panting. Not long ago, this assessment would have been complete, deadly accurate. But it had changed, he had changed, everything was back to front. He was panicking, his fingers round his glass were strained, the knuckles hurting. He licked his lips, the insides of his swollen lips.
‘Peter-Joe said I’d lost my bottle.’ He cleared his throat, his voice had been a croak. ‘Maybe it’s true. I must say I know damn all about this Hess guy, just bits and bobs that I remember. Except his age. He’s too old, damn it. He’s far too old.’
‘He was Hitler’s deputy.’
‘But Jesus Christ,’ said Bill. He stopped. He licked his lips once more, tried to squeeze some moisture from the insides of his cheeks.
The rotund figure on the bed stirred uneasily. Silversmith moved to a seat. He walked without a limp, but stiffly. Wiley had seen his legs once. They were lumpy and wrinkled, criss-crossed with livid scars, horrifying.
