I asked: ‘How and why did you find me?’
‘How? — by following Chindale to the Mitre. Why? — because I have to operate separately from him. As an officer of the UN he can’t negotiate direct with the American armed forces. Equally, I can’t have dealings with him without attracting the attention of the Senate Committee on UnAmerican Activities.’
‘But he knows you?’
‘He knows the man with me — Seale Taggard.’
‘Oh ... the political journalist.’ — Taggard’s face had been familiar. Now I knew why. Following in the golden footsteps of no less a man than Ed Murrow, Taggard had taken on ultra-rightwing Washington. I must say that on first sight he’d hardly looked the part.
Duncan went on: ‘Once again the guys that hurl the Fourteenth Amendment around have consolidated. In some ways Taggard is even more up against it than Murrow was in his day.’
We stopped by the thick concrete buttresses at the end of the promenade by Waterloo Bridge. There was silence here except for the throb of night traffic. Floodlights playing cleverly on the chunky, stone-age architecture shimmered on the water below. Overhead flagpoles unseen rattled their cleats in the breeze.
Now we turned, looked down the long deserted promenade which only a few minutes ago had been packed with over excited humanity. It looked more desolate, despite the neat lamp posts and bright green lawn and modern, squared-off layout, than even the highway at Elstree on the night of the ambulances. ‘And you?’ I asked.
‘I’ve just succeeded in getting myself transferred to Group Three. It has an altogether separate identity from the regular forces.’
‘Why did NASA pull out?’
‘Because although NASA think that rockets are good clean fun they’re nothing like as trigger-happy as these fellas. Besides which they have worries about a man called Thorne.’
I wondered how much he knew about that. ‘In which sense?’
‘His political affiliations. You may know that Thorne’s original research was done on a perfectly peaceable basis with the Czechs, at Prague University.’
I nodded. ‘So NASA foresaw what might happen if the Russians marched?’
‘It was always on the cards,’ he said. ‘The Czechs kept their researches away from the Politburo but the Russians can help themselves — probably have, by now.’ He added: ‘NASA couldn’t handle the delicate political complications built into the situation. Washington felt that development must continue, though, So they created a new department which — for the sake of secrecy — they continued to call Group Three.’
‘Which is now out of hand.’
‘Sure. We think that due to complexities arising from a long chain of command and the extreme technicality of the subject, no one knows what the next tier down is doing. Washington finances strategic weapons on the assumption that the experts are telling them the truth. So you get a situation of blind trust. Now Group Three want to use their weapon before the Russians have time to catch up.’
‘The old, old story.’
‘Yes ...’ He looked at me squarely. ‘Six years old. Taggard knew the Schwartz woman. She died — as you know.’
‘How well did he know her?’
He replied evasively. ‘Well enough to give him a conscience.’
‘And now? — What s Taggard’s motive?’
‘Simply to provide the proof your contact Chindale needs, but without incriminating himself enough with the Pentagon to lose his inside grip on the situation.’
‘The same applies to you?’
‘More so. A serving officer is immediately exposed to a treason charge and the CIA have already opened a dossier on me. In their eyes collusion with the UN is tantamount to being communist. Crazy, but that’s the way they think.’
‘But you’ll collaborate with me?’
He gestured towards the hall. ‘I wasn’t expecting what happened tonight. But the rebellion of Stergen’s teenage contingent is a major threat to him. He must act. He can do so over the Czech issue. This development made up my mind for me.’
‘And how do I make contact?’
He said grimly: ‘By contacting me inside Group Three before it’s too late. We think Chindale has this in mind for you’
‘ — That’s right. He has.’
‘Well ... I’ll be there.’
I said: ‘If what you say is right, we have a positive deadline.’
He nodded. ‘A week today. If Stergen doesn’t pull wires and prevent that TV spectacular going out on the air, it means it doesn’t matter any more. If you follow me.’
‘You mean, by then —’
‘ — by then the weapon will be off the pad.’
‘Jesus!’
We walked back to the car in silence. There was still a traffic jam but the commotion had died down. Just before we got in, the Commander said: ‘The last time we discussed this with Chindale direct, he agreed with Seale Taggard that you knew something about this weapon.’
‘How?’
‘A yacht tied up at St Tropez.’
‘I remember almost nothing about that interview.’
‘Then you’d better start some thinking, Yenn. Because if you don’t we’re going to find out the hard way.’
Duncan and the journalist said nothing in front of Louise. There were a few politenesses; then the two men went off in the Chevvy.
By mutual, unspoken consent, Louise and I didn’t refer to what happened in the concert hall. Rather did we feel that we were sitting on a time bomb. What time we had left with each other was our own; for only on Chindale’s instructions could I take action. So I drove back to my flat and let the speed limit look after itself.
*
When we’d parked, for a time, outside my flat Louise said: ‘Did you know your eyes were a different colour?’
‘I hope they’re both saying the same thing,’ I said.
‘Yes, but the one on the left is saying it slightly louder.’
‘Then that’s the one to look at.’
That was the extent of the prose spoken in the car, and even that was breathless. All things included, this dialogue took twenty minutes. Considerably less was said in my flat for quite a while.
I could not be graphic about Louise as a bed partner. It’s not an occasion I remember in that way. It was all haze and impressions and coloured lights. Later — one week later — the obscene finger of fate was to write a truly hideous aftermath; but the one redeeming factor of living within a hair’s-breadth of tragedy is that you don’t see it coming, you only sense it. And sensing it, you are in love with life to the power of ten.
Louise and I were middle class and therefore awkward; too civilized to score an alpha-plus in jungle conduct, yet not civilized enough to admit fully to our inhibitions. Our love-making would have seemed, to an animal, bafflingly indirect — a study in forgiven ineptitudes. Yet to me Louise was the most exciting thing that ever happened.
Story-book lovers seem to me to involve a lot of adjectives — most of them hopeful. Sex to me is an imperfect act; or we wouldn’t go about in clothes and then suddenly confront each other naked. It’s the pile of adjectives on the floor which leave you solely with the verbs. How good are we at using them really? — On this occasion we were good enough to feel Love; and the requirements for that are not yet beyond human capacity.
We lay contented thereafter, and able to communicate in the uncomplex way that post-coital relaxation permits. I don’t know whether we were good in bed but we were as good as that.
I had to prepare a decoy tape overnight to last the honeymoon of the morrow. And if the playback of this dummy conversation sounded somewhat unconvincing to me when I checked it I’m afraid I nevertheless allowed it through.
A measure of my happiness at that time was that I couldn’t quite believe it mattered that much.
*
It was sunny and hot next day and this fitted my undemanding specification for a holiday ... for our modest aspirations — as dictated by the boxed-in
situation — were to be met by the two-shilling playground of Ruislip Lido. Louise, slim and not classically hour-glassed, was a clinch in a bikini ... a glossy sperskin whose designer evidently possessed an extraordinary grasp of the effect of a pair of highlights. ‘You’d better get in the water fast,’ I said.
‘Where’s your heartbeat now?’ she asked.
‘In a healthier state altogether than the one in the Black Box.’
She looked anxious. ‘And where’s that?’
‘That’s why we stopped at the Air Force Base,’ I explained smugly. ‘At the moment it’s in conference with the duty officer who told us the way.’
‘He’ll find it!’
‘He won’t! They should cut the grass more often. Letting an airfield get overgrown like that is an affront to the good name of spit-and-polish.’
‘You mean the good name of Bullshit.’
‘Get in the water and don’t each the innocent your rude words.’
*
We danced in the evening and gone was the provocative playgirl and in her place was born the sultry partner on a dizzy dance floor. Here she was the woman in the place of the girl. To dance with her was like an endlessly held breath. It was uncanny how Louise could produce the ideal answer to the trumped-up environment — for however trumped-up the environment was (and we both knew about the cheap deal under the dim-lighted tablecloths) she herself remained genuine. Departing only from truth to the extent of merging with whatever ingenious nightclub proprietors (or swimwear designers) could dream up, she remained intelligent despite it. If ever a woman’s body perfectly re-enacted the thoughts of her mind. Louise was the ultimate. Whatever conflicts she felt, she expressed in the way she danced.
That was exciting.
At home that night she was a cat on hot tiles, a feline devilette to be tamed. We played ‘Dragging Her Off to The Bedroom’ and ‘Bad Girl You’ve Had Too Much Champagne.’ Later we played ‘Eggs and Bacon’ traditionally, three in the morning — two eggs and three rashers each. We were ravenous. Soon there was only the mustard left on the plates; and we both knew and accepted that having taken twenty-four hours’ leave of our senses we must now reclaim them.
So it was sobering coffee and neurotic cigarettes at the kitchen table for us by then ...
Indelible is the picture in my mind — Louise sitting there in the white light of a fluorescent tube overhead; plates stacked dirtily over on the sink unit, unclean ashtray accumulating poison remnants in the centre of the plastic-topped table. Somewhere outside there was still a noisy party going on, or breaking up, or both. Two drivers were angry about something in the street; pop music thumped out of a cheap player with a dirty needle and a slipping stack of thin wafer discs. A window slammed open and the music gushed more shrilly, then a pane of glass broke and the arguing motorists suddenly gave up, driving away from an escape world which had failed to provide escape. A bad party was folding. Virgins would remain virgins without necessarily wishing to; hussies would find themselves disappointing and predictable to men already experienced enough to be disappointed and boys who didn’t know enough to discern pleasure from ritual.
I turned to Louise to make some caustic comment when it happened. She went as white as a death-sheet and slid to the floor. Thank God, I caught her head just in time.
Everything in my body trembling I tried to recall what you should do — it’s never what instinct tells you to do. She was terribly motionless on the floor. Warm blanket ... don’t move her head to one side, warm sweet tea when it’s safe. What in God s name was it? For a day and a night she had been someone without a care in the world and I’d almost forgotten that secret tingle of terror that had been with me earlier. The mystery at the hospital. Why? Her insistence against my questioning ... ‘Unless I tell you everything, you couldn’t possibly understand enough.’ — But was I right not to insist? Supposing I was condemning her to a worse illness by ignoring the symptoms she couldn’t conceal?
Ten minutes later she was okay. And had she met my suggestion of calling a doctor with indignation — or even fury, as people sometimes do when despite it all they really want you to act — I would probably have done so.
But she didn’t. She just smiled a little and said: ‘Darling? ... trust me? They know at the hospital.’
I said grimly ‘But do they know —’
‘ — what I’m getting up to, you mean? Yes. And it’s right.’
I didn’t understand. But I felt terror at that moment. It never left my side from then on.
EIGHT
All next day I was in a state of high tension. Louise went off in the morning. She didn’t say where but I knew it was the hospital. I wasn’t allowed even to refer to what had happened overnight. She was just very affectionate and very firm.
Luckily the business of planning kept me busy. Louise’s initial arrival at the wrong flat had given me an idea; and I made an arrangement with Chindale for him to leave messages there, up in the dilapidated bathroom. I would look in twice a day and pick them up.
The news all round was bad. Dubcek was still in Moscow and the Russian tanks were still in Prague. If this meant that officials from the USSR were in a position to case the university labs in the Czech capital and get hold of information relating to Thorne, this in turn would goad Group Three. Whispers of increased activity in Somerset had reached Chindale who told me in a message that I must be prepared to fly down to Somerset any moment.
The difficulty was Henry. The Little Man called daily at ten in the morning. This meant that if I left immediately after his visit I would have less than twenty-four hours to get back for the next one. The last thing I could afford to do was take Henry with me and leave a trail of radio messages all over Somerset.
I hit on the answer, but the plan would involve Louise. Since it was quite unthinkable to make the journey in the time available — with any hope of getting useful information — I must devise a decoy-system that would last me at least thirty-six hours. It was a hectic business setting all this up.
Simmonds — the pilot I’d already mentioned to Chindale — operated his tiny fleet of charter planes from Elstree Airfield. Though this was dangerously close to the factory I hadn’t, in fact, much choice ... even if I’d chosen another man. There aren’t many private airfields in the London area and Elstree is the most accessible. I drove out there to brief him.
I found him painting an aircraft in the hangar. He was a black African who hadn’t allowed the Powellites to give him a chip on his shoulder. This was largely because he was a wow with the girls. I remembered this from a security job I’d had, way back, when Kenya had still been a colony. He’d laid so many white women, out near Lake Naibasha, that the local branch of Mau-Mau had had an understanding to keep the trek route clear. The High Commissioner had got to know about it and tried to get information out of the recalcitrant wives who had made the visits. Not one of them talked. They were as unhelpful and silent on the subject as the flamingos that turned the lake pink.
Simmonds showed me into his workshop/office. He listened with his arms folded, nodding diagonally as he took each point. Though a Mgiriama — originally from Mombasa — he didn’t have the lethargic image. He was tense, metallic, exact. He asked ‘Where’s the landing field?’
‘On my father’s property — here.’ I showed him on the map.
‘Isn’t that too far from Bishops Bight?’
‘It isn’t safe to land too near the Bight.’ I explained the security aspect of the thing. ‘We pick up a boat and go along the coast. That way we can discover any sea-inlets that could serve as submarine channels.’
‘What about this “Little Man”? If we don’t get back in time —’
‘— we won’t get back in time. That’s where the melodrama comes in. The story is I’m in bed with a cold.’
But you can’t manufacture tape-conversations to last for ever!’
‘I’m not trying.’ I said. ‘I shall make a tape-loop — a continuous circle of ta
pe — that will just transmit my heartbeat. My horrible bronchial breathing will indicate why I’m much too ill to talk to anybody.’
‘Then the girl goes to the flat next morning in time for the Little Man. What’s she do?’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that has to do with the bathroom.’
By this I left him suitably mystified.
But as I drove away from the airfield I made an annoying discovery. A Chipmunk that was taxying in contained a flamboyant-looking pilot with a shock of blond hair. I knew, of course, that the Group Three people made something of a fetish of flying — and I can’t talk because I did a little myself. The factory was enticingly close to those interesting toy aeroplanes. But I hadn’t reckoned on Michael joining the clan. He hadn’t seen me and I drove away as fast as he was taxying the machine — which was much too fast for him to have proper control.
I wondered what on earth he was like when airborne.
Part of my plan was to make use of my father s cartographical knowledge of Somerset. He lived half-buried by maps and as a country lawyer his property deals, though piffling, covered a wide area. He had a modest holding himself though he always made it sound like Balmoral. It was this sort of bug in his personality that made it necessary for him to own incredibly noisy boats. If you couldn’t hear the Golden Hind from the Scillies when he put out from the Lizard he wouldn’t speak to anyone for days. Still, he wasn’t in the Scillies now, so for once he might be useful. I couldn’t phone or send a wire — I hadn’t risked a letter, either — but he was too boring ever to move from his miserable office (except to fart across the bay in his blasted launch or whatever they call it) so I knew I’d find him there, misunderstood, miserable and mischievous. Gossip Extraordinary for a sizeable hunk of Somerset, he kept his business going on the litigation resulting from his own filthy mind. In case anyone is still in doubt. I didn’t like him.
Dad was a Powellite — a fact that left a marvellous opportunity for goading him. Appearing out of the sky with a black man was an irresistible thought — especially as the only occasion I had used Dad’s field before had resulted in a buckled landing wheel and two hours’ use of his rusting tractor. On this occasion it had not helped his ego much when I discovered the locals called him ‘Mr Paradise Lost’ and told him so.
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