by Len Deighton
I heard Fernie’s voice telling her to hurry in rapid Portuguese. Reassuring and direct. I realized why he had been so taciturn when I had seen him before. His Portuguese had a strong English accent. There were splashes and thumps, and then a third voice, rather higher than Fernie’s, which spoke least of the three. They seemed to be an age getting aboard, and then I heard the woman’s voice, this time from some way off. She was returning to the shore in the dinghy. There was a click as someone switched on the small light over the controls. If I held my face horizontal, with my ear pressed against the cold locker-lid, my left eye had a narrow range of vision that included the top half of the person at the controls.
I could see Fernie in profile – the egg-shaped head with its black domed moustache hanging over the mouth. Upon his head was the black trilby hat of the peasant. The anchor came up like a curtain and the motors beat a drum-roll as we began the last act at Albufeira. Fernie engaged the screws and I felt the water thrash under the hull. The light above his head threw his eye sockets in black piratical patches. His hands moved across the controls, articulate and smooth, his head watched the beams, the compass, the rev. counters. This was a Fernie I had never seen, Fernie at sea, Fernie the sailor. From the seat at the controls he couldn’t see the ship’s clock. Every few moments he would call to the boy with him, ‘What time is it?’ and the boy would tell him.
He moved the throttles as far forward as they could go and at 3,000 r.p.m. the hull began hammering against the water like a pneumatic drill. When he was satisfied with the course, Fernie told the boy to hold the wheel steady. I heard the clicks of a suitcase being unlocked. I pushed my ear harder against the lid of the locker and raised it two inches. The boy was staring into the dark, while Fernie crouched on the floor over a radio chassis into which he was pushing small valves. Then his footsteps clattered down the saloon staircase and he reappeared with a black cable from the 24-volt supply to which he connected the radio machinery. He shouted, ‘Port – keep the lubber line on 240.’ The boy he had brought aboard was Augusto, who had secured a lock of Fernie’s hair for me.
Augusto sat on the high stool like a child at a tea-party, holding the wheel tightly between his small grubby hands. Fernie spoke in Portuguese about ‘the strong American at the railway station’; it must have been a question, for Augusto said that ‘the strong American’ (which was what the local people called H.K.) had unloaded a crate of sardines at the station to be put on the morning train to Lisbon.
There was a click and Augusto was bathed in reflected light as Tomas moved the beam of the big searchlight out across the waves. Slivers of rain and water droplets snipped at Augusto’s halo as the boat slammed into the swell and the sound of shipped water rushed along the deck outside. The little radio had warmed up and emitted a high-pitched note like a badly adjusted TV set. Tomas reappeared; his hand was on the radio. He tuned it. ‘Make it 245,’ he shouted above the noise.
I felt the boat vibrate as it turned at high speed. So far, and then it straightened again.
Tomas’s hand came into my view and he moved the radio. The signal it was receiving became stronger. ‘250,’ he shouted, and in his excitement broke into a gabble of Portuguese as he demanded that Augusto should give it more throttle. Augusto said it was as far advanced as it could get, and he pushed at the big levers with his child’s hands in order to prove it. Suddenly from the radio came a sound like ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’ played at double speed on a flute. Tomas put the set down roughly and moved out of my sight. Augusto’s head was one moment illuminated by an intense light-beam and the next moment drawn in dark silhouette against the bright heaving water.
Tomas was sweeping the ocean, looking for something in the roaring foam. The something was a metal container.
The flute-like sounds of the high-speed Morse stopped and the steady whistle replaced it. There was a cracking sound, and for some minutes I puzzled over it. It was difficult to imagine an ex-R.N. officer slapping his own face in Latin excitement and anger. ‘Too late!’ he shouted to Augusto, ‘too late, too late, too late, it’s down again to the sea bed.’ He snatched the wheel from Augusto and spun it viciously. The boat slid sideways, uncontrolled, the propellers screaming to get a hold on the water as the deck heeled over towards the dark sea.
It was unfortunate that I chose that moment to emerge. I fell forward, sprawling across the deck with my knees still trapped in the locker. My face walloped against the starboard bunk, my arm twisted under me, and I heard my Smith & Wesson pistol slide forward and drop with a crash into the saloon. ‘Steady amidships,’ I heard Fernie call, and the deck came level.
‘Get on your feet,’ Fernie said, like something out of a Greyfriars school story. I wasn’t too keen to get on my feet if it meant I was to be knocked down. On the other hand, lying there could earn me a slam on the kisser too.
‘I don’t want to fight you, Fernie,’ I said.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ said Fernie. He didn’t say it like a killer but like a prefect about to administer a thrashing.
‘You are making a mistake, Fernie,’ I said. But it was no use; when a man has fitted into the system as badly as Fernie had done, he has stockpiled spite and sadness, rage and revenge, until violence has built up under the surface like boiling lava.
Augusto had the boat on an even keel; he throttled back slightly. Fernie faced me across the bridge. He advanced slowly, keeping an even balance. His eyes stared into mine, sizing me up and judging my probable actions. We were an arm’s length apart when his hands moved slowly and easily upward. He put his hands higher than his waist and I detected a very slight turn of the shoulders. It told me what I wanted to know. Punching fighters hold themselves in a boxing stance, one hand and one foot slightly advanced. Judo fighters stand flat. Fernie was a left-handed puncher.
A rivulet of sea-water meandered across the deck, caught the light and became a scimitar under Fernie’s feet. I opened my left hand and advanced it in a protective, flinching manner across my chest and towards his rocksteady advanced right fist.
I watched his eyes deciding that I was going to be a pushover. He decided to clip me with a short left jab. My body was wide open. My fingers closed upon his advanced cuff, as my left toe kicked his right ankle under him. Fernie grabbed at my extended left knee to spin me to the ground. It was the correct counter but he was slow, far too slow. Before I had pulled his sleeve more than an inch to the left he’d lost balance. A man off balance thinks of nothing but getting balanced again; aggression disappears. He began to fall. My left hand pulled and continued to pull as I turned to my left. Right hand high. My turn was complete, right armpit clamped upper arm, left hand threatened his ulnar and radius bones. I heard a sharp intake of breath against my ear, and saw Augusto’s face turn towards us, his eyes like Belisha beacons.
Even at that instant Fernie did not allow the pain to influence him. He kicked. The radio set slid across the deck slowly, and gently fell over the side. There was a flash as the cable from the batteries shorted and a thud as the radio swung against the hull. At a slower speed, perhaps the radio would still have been plugged on the end when we hauled the cable in.
He was a character, this Fernie. He fell away and sat on the floor rubbing the arm I had so nearly broken. He said, ‘You know I could just throw you overboard – and no one could ask any questions?’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but there is just the chance that I’ll wring your neck while you’re trying.’
The electric cable had wrapped around the port screw, Augusto said. I heaved Fernie below into the cabin and into a bunk – he was too old for this sort of caper, he was badly shook up. I told Augusto to head back to Albufeira, using only the starboard motor. It would be a slow journey and the wind was backing against the dawn sun. This floating Cadillac was no sort of boat to face bad weather in. I retrieved my pistol, put it away and went across to Tomas.
‘I’ve got a Portuguese passport,’ Tomas said.
‘When you are
in Tarrafal* you might wish you had some other sort of passport.’
‘I’ve served my time in prison; I don’t have to put up with the British Gestapo around my neck for the rest of my life.’
‘That doesn’t have to be too long,’ I said. ‘If you peddle narcotics across the world you must expect to attract a little attention. It’s captious to complain afterwards.’
‘Save your lies for when you write your report,’ said Tomas. ‘You aren’t interested in narcotics.’
‘No? What am I interested in, then?’
‘You’re interested in the “Weiss List”, the item I nearly tugged out of the ocean a few minutes ago.’
‘That’s exactly right,’ I told him, ‘I am.’
‘It’s lost,’ he said, ‘lost for all time. You can never get it.’
‘But you know what it consisted of?’ Tomas’s face went grey – he was frightened and he didn’t take fright easily.
‘Let me help you remember,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you one name that was on it.’ I named Smith. Tomas said nothing. ‘The man that you and your friend Ivor Butcher decided to blackmail,’ I prompted.
‘You know about Butcher,’ said Tomas. ‘Leave him out of it. He’s just a nice little fellow trying to help me. He’s not to blame.’
‘He’s not, eh?’ I said, but I didn’t disillusion him.
I sat down. I was as limp as a Dali watch.
Fernie tugged at his moustache, paused and then said, ‘I was the only survivor from the U-boat. I thought at first …’
‘Look, Fernie,’ I said, ‘I seldom interrupt people when they’re talking; especially when they are inventing complicated lies, because they are often far more interesting than the truth. However, for you I’ll make an exception; start telling the truth or I’ll sling you over the side.’
‘Very well,’ said Fernie affably, ‘where shall I start?’
‘You can forget all that fairy-story stuff about dead sailors washed up with sovereign dies and digging graves to prove it. Also forget any nonsense about your career in the U-boat. Unless you know what caused it to sink.’
‘No,’ said Fernie, ‘I don’t know that.’
‘Did your friend da Cunha deliberately open the valves before he rowed ashore with the “Weiss List”?’
‘No,’ said Fernie quietly, ‘he would never do anything like that. He is a man of great honour.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘you all are; you, Kondit and da Cunha. An honourable bunch of thugs. Look, Peterson’ – it was the first time I had used his English name – ‘you’re just trying to kick a step out of a moving staircase. Behind me is another agent, behind him another. I’m a soft touch compared with some of the yahoos that are going to descend on you in any part of the world you go. All they want back in Whitehall is a nice clean file with the word “Closed” written across the front so that they can put it in the cellar. Try to be a bit sensible and I’ll write a little note about what a help you have been. You never know when a little billet doux like that could be useful.’
‘What do you want to know?’ he said.
‘I don’t know what it is that’s missing until I hear it; if there are any bits you don’t want to tell me, miss them out.’
‘Very cunning,’ said Tomas, ‘the gaps tell you more than the story in between.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’m the Attorney-General travelling incognito with a Japanese tape-recorder under my toupee. Or it could just be that you are a little on the paranoiac side.’
Fernie sipped at the big glass of whisky I had given him.
He said, ‘Do you remember the Spanish Civil War? Do you remember the newsreels? Dead horses, wounded babies.’ He removed a fleck of tobacco from his lip. ‘Frightened, I was so frightened. People like you don’t understand. Do you?’ he said. He wanted a reply.
I said, ‘As long as you don’t say it’s my lack of imagination.’
He went on staring into space and smoking. ‘That was this same Spanish Civil War that H.K. said you were a hero of?’ I said.
Fernie Tomas nodded. For a moment I thought he was going to smile.
‘Yes, I was there. There are times you’re so frightened of something that you have to make it happen sooner. I was just someone who wanted to come to grips with my trauma. Everyone I knew who had volunteered had gone to fight for the government; so I went to fight for Franco just to be different. They posted me to an Italian unit. I was with General Queipo de Llano’s second division at the fall of Malaga. Kondit thought I was defending Malaga. He liked it that way so I never disillusioned him.’
‘You didn’t like it?’ I said.
‘Yes. I used to lie on the beach watching the cruisers Canarias, Almirante Cervera and Baleares come up to bombard Malaga. It was just like an exercise, a crash and a puff of smoke and then after a couple of hours they would clear off down the coast again for dinner. It was pretty. Nice clean boats. Nice impersonal fight. No view of what you are hitting. No one trying to hit you. It was a gentleman’s war. When we got into Malaga … well, you’ve seen a town after bombardment.’
‘Who hasn’t nowadays?’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Tomas. ‘I remember …’, but he didn’t go on. It was as though he were dragging it out of a crystal ball. ‘I remember,’ he said again, ‘the last time I saw my old lady. I got compassionate leave because our house was bombed. The old man died of his injuries and my mother was living in the kitchen with a tarpaulin rigged across the ceiling. She didn’t want to go to a rest centre because of “all the happy times she’d had there”.’
‘Happy times.’ He shook his head as he remembered. ‘It was a slum, and she’d worked herself half to death there. She kept saying that they’d taken the old man to a hospital in “a proper ambulance, not one of these A.R.P. things”, she said, “it was a proper ambulance”. Well, that’s what Malaga was like; dead, swollen horses and a smell of brick-dust and drains.’
I could see that in some curious way the destruction in Malaga and London had fused into one, and he wouldn’t be able to sort them out. I remembered how, when he was arrested, he had said that it was all the same war. I wondered about that.
‘When I came back I joined the British Fascist Movement. I met Mosley in person. He’s a much misunderstood man, that Mosley, dynamic and honest. All the really Machiavellian supporters of the B.U.F. had seen the war coming for years and they buried themselves deep in the Conservative Party. Half the boys that give you your orders from Whitehall and gave us all those rousing anti-Nazi speeches were kicking themselves rotten that they didn’t have a nice big armament factory in Germany. But we were simple-minded idealists. Later, the war, and more especially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had changed our minds. I stopped trying to understand it. I went into the Navy as a telegraphist and then got a commission …’
‘Was that difficult for you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Tomas, ‘anyone who bought a pipe, a pair of pyjamas and walked around with Penguin books about Paul Nash was singled out as officer material.’
‘No, I meant difficult on account of your having been so political.’
‘If they’d kept out the politicals in 1940 there wouldn’t have been enough recruits to man a dinghy. The only English people who knew the slightest thing about fighting a modern war were the people who had been in Spain.’
‘Yes, I suppose you are right,’ I said.
‘I went to Prince Arthur at Brighton and became a naval officer in four months. I loved it. You spend a long time with the same people inside a small ship. You get to know every nut and bolt of the ship and every nut and bolt of the crew. When the boat is sunk it’s worse than being divorced after a happy marriage. You lose your home, your personal gear, your friends are dead, wounded or posted. You have nothing left. After the second time in the drink I wandered around the London pubs for twelve days hoping to see a face I recognized. I decided that I couldn’t go through that again. I volunteered for the submarine service. If you ge
t sunk there you stay down. But before I ever got near a submarine I found myself in Scotland, messing around with frogman gear.’
Tomas asked for a cigarette. After lighting it he said, ‘You don’t want to hear about frogman training?’
‘Just tell me what you think is interesting.’
‘You are a funny sort of bastard.’
‘Touché,’ I said.
‘I had orders to report to the depot. Everything had gone wrong that Thursday; the bank manager was gunning me for a lousy £12 and the MG had plug-trouble on the Great North Road – you remember what motor spares were like during the war – and this fat swine in the garage where I stopped was fiddling some petrol for two blokes with Boston haircuts and a van full of tinned fruit. I hung around fuming, but he told me I should be grateful for one of his precious spark plugs. “I reckon it all goes to you blokes in the services nowadays,” he said, as though we were living on the fat of the land. “Yes,” I said to him, “it must be a tough war back home, listening to Itma and knitting socks,” and then these other two got nasty and after some words he said he didn’t want any money for the plug, so I left. I can remember every minute.
‘It was from that time that I began to feel afraid of the deep water. I was quite O.K. diving in daylight or near the surface, but I couldn’t bear working with the thought that under me there was just darker and darker depths of water until you were just swallowed up.’
Fernie Tomas shouted to Augusto to make sure he didn’t forget the engine temperature, and Augusto said he wouldn’t.
‘You don’t know what it’s like on a midget,’ said Tomas. It was a plain statement of fact. I didn’t. ‘Imagine that you’ve crossed the North Sea inside the bonnet of a motorcar, jammed against the engine. You dress yourself in underwater gear. Much more incredible and inefficient than modern equipment. You dress in a space much smaller than a telephone booth, and then clamber through the flooding chamber, which has a nasty habit of going wrong and leaving you jammed in a tight-fitting coffin. But you may be lucky; the hatch cover isn’t jammed or fouled so you can crawl out into the ocean. You walk along the top of the midget submarine – it’s not much wider than a plank and getting narrower and narrower as you move forward. The pointed bow upon which you are finally balancing is bumping with great metallic crashes against a vast anti-submarine net which stretches as far as you can see in every direction. The rungs of the net are nearly as big as a steering wheel and you hold on to one to steady yourself as you wield the cutting tool. All the time the skipper keeps the motor running so that the bow will continue to nudge the net, but the deck grinds and grates and perhaps a flow of fresh water throws the buoyancy out, or rain makes it even darker than before. Your metal boots slip off the tightrope you are on.’
