The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  CONTENTS

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Part Six

  Part Seven

  Part Eight

  Part Nine

  Part Ten

  Conclusion

  About the Author

  THE GREAT WASH

  by

  GERALD KERSH

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Dedication: For Freda Court

  Copyright © 1953 by Gerald Kersh

  First published in Great Britain by Heinemann, January 1953.

  First published in the U.S. by Ballantine Books in June 1953 under the title The Secret Masters.

  A condensed form of the novel appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1952 under the title The Mystery of the Third Compartment.

  First Valancourt Books edition 2015

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover design by Lorenzo Princi/lorenzoprinci.com

  Part One

  There was no escape. Some mysterious instinct must have warned him that I was coming, and guided him to the right doorway in which to lie in wait for me; so that just as I crossed Poppin’s Court in Fleet Street, he darted out of the doorway of the Red Lion and caught me by the arm. “Albert Kemp,” he said, “I want a word with you.”

  “Hello, Conker,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Where is George Oaks?” he asked.

  I knew where George Oaks was, because I was on my way to meet him, but I said: “Isn’t he in the Red Lion?”

  “No,” said the man we called Conker. “Nor in the Bell, the Cogers, the Punch, the Falstaff, the Irish House, nor the Cheshire Cheese.”

  “Have you tried the Clachan, or the Falcon, or the George?” I asked.

  “Well, try the Black Swan, or the Press Club,” I said, knowing that George Oaks was waiting for me in another part of the town; and gave him a ten-shilling note, which he snatched and squeezed small, and poked into a waistcoat pocket.

  Then he said: “I don’t want your dirty money, I want George Oaks,” and tugged from the unsavoury hinterland of his coat a copy of the last Sunday Special, folded back at a prominently displayed feature article on page two entitled GEORGE OAKS PROBES MYSTERY OF MISSING SCIENTISTS. Conker had annotated and underscored this article with pencils of various colours. I read “Unmitigated Bosh!” in blue, “What Drivel!” in green, and “Hypocritical Eyewash!” in red. In plain black he had added a big H to the author’s surname.

  “Hoax! Hoax!” he cried, pointing with a long, stained forefinger. “Where is he? You’re his friend—Damon and Pythias, David and Jonathan!—tell me where he is, and I’ll have it out with him! I’ll thrash it out with George Oaks if I have to handcuff myself to the office railings!”

  He would have done that, too. In 1916 he had handcuffed himself to the railings of No. 10 Downing Street in order that Mr. Lloyd George might be forced to do something about the adulteration of milk. On another occasion he had got into trouble for hurling into the King’s lap some incomprehensible petition, a hundred and twelve pages long, when His Majesty was driving to open Parliament. He was one of those combative but harmless madmen for which London, of all the cities in the world, is most remarkable. Indeed, we are proud of them—or rather, proud of our sublime capacity to ignore them. There is, for example, a retired Korean acrobat who, for the past thirty years, has been parading the streets of the city dressed in a gold bowler hat, yellow bolero, violet waistcoat, cretonne shirt, scarlet silk pants, and aluminium shoes, and carrying a silver-painted umbrella: no true Englishman has ever turned his head to look at him, for fear of embarrassing him.

  So it was with old Conker. He ranted and he roared; he rushed up and down Whitehall screaming; he dashed his hat to the pavement outside Buckingham Palace, and invited H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester (as the tallest member of the Royal Family) to come out and put up his dukes and have it out like a man. The police simply moved him on: he was a character.

  Everyone knew that eccentric, seedy old man whose desperate gasping voice was so like the last spluttering whisper of an exhausted soda-water siphon. A famous cartoonist had made a type of him—Roger the Reformer—the crossed eyes between the blown-up bladder of his glabrous forehead and the pricked bladder of his collapsed, toothless face were irresistible. We tolerated him in Fleet Street, because he had been a friend of old Austin Crabbe who, in his day, had been one of us, and one of the best of us, before he, in his turn, had achieved madness or had it thrust upon him.

  Generally, a half-crown sufficed—not to pacify Conker, but to drive him away. But now he was having what we called “one of his funny turns”, and nothing but bolts and bars could keep him from getting at George Oaks. “Oaks the hoax!” said Conker. “Oaks the sycophant, Oaks the lackey of the press barons, and the lick-spittle of the gutter press! Oaks the coward! I’ll turn your filthy Fleet Street inside out like a dirty sock, but I’ll find him, I’ll find him!”

  Now, my affection for George Oaks was something so deep that I could hear nothing said against him, even by the likes of Conker that are not accountable for what they say, so that at this I forgot to make the customary non-committal placatory grimace, and said: “Conker, George Oaks has been a good friend to you, if you had the sense to appreciate it. One of these days you’ll go too far. Get out of my way!” And I brushed him aside, and crossed the street, and got into a taxi.

  Then I began to laugh. Conker had slandered, individually and collectively, every member of the Royal Family since Queen Victoria, together with Their Majesties’ several Privy Councils; and this was a laughing matter. He had hurled abuse of the most scurrilous kind at every idol in living memory; and three generations had smiled at him, tapping their foreheads. Now he had called George Oaks by a few bad names; and I had lost my temper with him. Well, I said to myself, forgiving myself, I, too, am in an unhealthy state of nerves—for which very reason I have come up from the country for the pleasure of Oaks’s company . . . and resolved that next time I would give old Conker a pound. And so I came to our appointed meeting-place, the Hop Pole, near Bow Street.

  The Hop Pole, as a public-house, caters for a strange and fascinating variety of customers. It is one of the Covent Garden market pubs: that is to say, it is open from six until nine o’clock on week-day mornings for the refreshment of bona fide workers in the fruit, vegetable, and flower market. At that time of the day its electric lights are half blind under cataracts of smoke, and the bar is somehow bleary, querulous, and only half awake. At nine in the morning it retires for a wash and brush-up, a gargle, a spit and a polish; gets the smoke out of its eyes and the fur off its tongue; and opens again spruce and shiny, at eleven-thirty. Then visitors accompanied by lawyers’ clerks drop in to wait for friends who are detained at Bow Street Police Court round the corner. They are joined, eventually, by these friends, who always look considerably the worse for wear, and take their first drink in one feverish gulp. By this time the newspapermen have come in from the offices across the way, together with potato salesmen, importers of pineapples or peaches or hyacinth bulbs. Riveted rather than buttoned
into dark suits that might be cut out of sheet metal, detectives turn up for a short beer and a long look. The landlord, an ex-prizefighter who has a noticeable tendency to shake his head and shuffle his feet and tuck his chin into his shoulder whenever the cash register rings, keeps up a gallant appearance of running the place against fearful odds, under the eye of his wife who manages him, his father-in-law who handles him, and his brother who seconds him and, occasionally, slips him the wherewithal to moisten his lumpy lips. The Hop Pole is closed again from three until half-past five in the evening. From then until eleven trade is steady but quiet. A great peace has fallen over Covent Garden, the market men having gone home. The newspapermen linger for an hour or so, and then give place to Tom, Dick, and Harry.

  The saloon bar was almost empty when I came in. An itinerant fishmonger had just startled the landlord into a defensive crouch by uncovering a basket, saying: “ ’Ere, y’are, Bombardier. Lovely cock-lobsters, all alive-o.”

  The Bombardier mumbled: “Shut that brasted brasket, wi’ya? I ’ate the sight o’ bruddy wobsters—they lives on dead men’s bobbies.”

  “So does grass live orf dead men’s bodies,” said the fishmonger.

  “Srimps, yes. Wobsters, I bar. Shut that brasted brasket.”

  A little horsy-looking man put in: “Go on, Bombardier, ’ave a lobster. You eat ’am, doncher? My cousin ’ad a pig wot eta baby. Now then!”

  George Oaks was sitting at a table in the corner, in conversation with ex-Chief Inspector Billy Sparrow, sometime of the Big Five, the confidence-trick and forgery expert, who, having retired, was working for one of the great insurance companies. Sparrow was saying: “. . . . To my mind, written by three different hands, though, of course, chronic arthritis can to an extent change the character of a man’s handwriting.”

  I knew then that they were discussing for the hundredth time the question of the authenticity of Shakespeare’s signatures. George Oaks’s hard little hand snapped like a rat-trap at the detective’s sleeve, and held it fast, as he said: “Listen. You must know that in 1599 Edmund Spenser was buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. I daresay you remember, Sparrow, that among others who cast manuscript poems of adulation into Spenser’s grave was Mr. William Shakespeare, then aged thirty-five. Thus, in 1938—only the Foreign Situation drove it into a six-line par at the foot of column five—Edmund Spenser’s grave was officially opened, but nothing was found. So it was presumed that they had opened the wrong grave. Ah, but had they, eh? Eh, Sparrow?”

  George Oaks waved me to the third chair and although I had not yet spoken said: “Be quiet just a minute, Albert, old friend, will you? . . . But had they opened the wrong grave, Sparrow? That business was very much hushed-up. What if they had opened the right grave, and found nothing whatsoever? Isn’t it conceivable, Sparrow, that someone had got there first, and rifled it, manuscripts, coffin, bones of Edmund Spenser, and all? . . . Go on, laugh. If an eccentric Californian billionaire can spend millions to buy a rotting castle, and have it transported crumb by crumb, and re-erected five thousand miles away, why shouldn’t he—or another billionaire who wanted to go one better—have stolen and transported the remains of the author of The Faerie Queene? Or of Shakespeare himself, for that matter? I needn’t tell you, Sparrow, what you can do if you have the will to do it, the skill to pick your helpers, and money enough to pay ’em. Wasn’t da Vinci’s Mona Lisa pinched from the Louvre itself under the eyes of guards? Aren’t living men spirited away in broad daylight with the whole world looking on? Wasn’t——”

  Sparrow said: “—Tell it to Mr. Kemp, George; he writes mystery stories . . . George is off again, Mr. Kemp. Ever since they printed that article of his last Sunday, he’s got Missing Persons on the brain. There’s no keeping him off it. Half an hour ago a fellow comes in and says: ‘I wonder what’s become of Harry?’ You know, Honest Harry, the tic-tac man. And you should have heard old George! He’s got it on the brain, I tell you. He half talked me into believing that Honest Harry had been spirited away behind the Iron Curtain, and I know for a fact that he was nabbed in Bristol in connection with wrist-watches. We sit down to have a quiet talk about handwriting, and, believe it or not, he twists the subject round to missing bodies!”

  George Oaks, returning with drinks, said: “Eh, Albert, eh? To these stuffed owls nothing is ever missing—it is only mislaid, improperly filed.”

  “Oh, come off it, George,” said Sparrow. “A joke is a joke; don’t work it to death. I know you’re trying to get my goat, and you know my goat can’t be got. I came in here for a quiet drink of beer and a pleasant chat. Change the subject, can’t you?”

  George Oaks said to me: “How’s Sussex, Albert, old friend?”

  “Beautiful as ever,” I said, “only one gets lonely.”

  “I’ll come and keep you company, perhaps,” said Oaks.

  “I wish to God you would!”

  Sparrow said: “That’s better. Let’s talk about something nice for a change. Let George once lay hold of a subject, and he’ll worry it like a terrier. . . . Missing Persons! You know as well as I do, George, there’s a thousand things we know that we daren’t act upon for lack of sufficient evidence. I could name you half a dozen men walking the streets today whom I’d have in the dock like that——” he snapped his fingers, “—given a case that’d hold water. Knowing is not enough. If you could hang a man purely on the evidence of your common sense, justice would be dust and ashes. Knowledge, without evidence, is guesswork; any trained questioner can tear it to ribbons. Even given evidence to back what you know, you’ve still got to make your case watertight before it’ll stand up to the Law, right or wrong. Look at Galileo.”

  “You see, Albert,” said George Oaks. “I rib them, I needle them, I goad them into eloquence! This Sparrow, you remember, wanted to change the subject.”

  “So I did,” said Sparrow. “Only you don’t play fair. You lead off on a subject; you drop it and you come back to it; you let it go and catch it again, like a cat with a mouse——”

  “—I was a terrier just before; now I’m a cat,” said George Oaks. “Department of Mixed Similes, eh, Albert?”

  “I thought we’d agreed to change the subject,” said Sparrow.

  “Once and for all,” said George Oaks. “Enough is enough! . . . We were talking, Albert, about Missing Scientists in general, and Kurt Brevis in particular. It all came out of my article in the Special. The greatest nuclear physicist in the world disappears in America. ‘Iron Curtain’, says Sparrow. ‘Which Iron Curtain?’ I ask. ‘Why, how many Iron Curtains are there?’ asks Sparrow. ‘More than one, for all you know,’ I tell him—and so the fight starts.”

  Sparrow said: “George gets carried away. He starts on his facts all right, but his imagination runs away with him, and he gets into your line of work, Mr. Kemp: he sees a mystery story in everything——”

  “—As if there were not a mystery story in everything!” said George Oaks. “But no, I beg your pardon. In Scotland Yard, there are no mysteries: they are filed as ‘Incomplete’. Now, they have a beautiful filing section; they call it ‘Iron Curtain’. . . . All I was saying, my dear Albert, is simply this: that there are two Behinds to every Iron Curtain; Russia is behind our side of the Iron Curtain, and we are behind Russia’s side of that same Iron Curtain——”

  “—Don’t start him off again, Mr. Kemp,” said Sparrow.

  George Oaks said: “Be quiet, Sparrow . . . I was pointing out, Albert, that while key men have disappeared, as it were, from our side of this Curtain, so key men have similarly disappeared from the Russian side. Now, where have those men gone? One must assume—I speak, for Sparrow’s benefit, in terms of filing cabinets—one must assume that there must be some neglected or carefully camouflaged Third Compartment between Two Iron Curtains, and that in this Third Compartment some of the most formidable brains in the world are being filed a
way. By whom? For what purpose? . . . That’s all I want to know.”

  A shadow fell between us. The Bombardier was standing over us. He whispered: “George, cop a garo at the lofty geezer wi’ the wofferty ogle, gammin wi’ the rakli—should I put the block on?”

  This, translated from mongrel Romany and old thieves’ slang, means: Pray glance at the tall gentleman with a cast in his eye talking to the young lady—shall I ask him to leave?

  I copped a garo, and so did George Oaks. The lofty geezer with the wofferty ogle was old Conker, talking to the barmaid thirty feet away. I said: “Conker’s gunning for you——” but the warning came too late.

  Conker was at our table, and hissed into George Oaks’s face: “I am asking you civilly, for the last time, you cowardly guttersnipe—will you, you lick-spittle, will you, you hired assassin—will you tell the Truth?”

  “Get it over and done with, Conker,” said George Oaks.

  Conker dashed to the floor that colourfully annotated article, and jumped upon it. “Muck hound!” he said. “Who murdered Austin Crabbe?”

  “Not I. . . . Leave him alone, Bombardier. . . . Not I, Conker.”

  There must have been something about him, perhaps in his voice, that soothed poor Conker; for, as soon as he spoke, the frenzy went out of the old man, and he said: “Austin Crabbe didn’t do away with himself, Mr. Oaks—Lord Kadmeel killed him. He was my only friend, sir, and Lord Kadmeel murdered him. You tell them, Mr. Oaks—they won’t listen to me . . .” Then white rage took hold of him again, and he cried: “But they shall not silence me until I’ve choked the last lies in Kadmeel’s throat!”

  “Here is Chief Inspector Sparrow, who is anxious to talk to you about it,” said George Oaks.