‘I can’t possibly tell you on the phone!’
Okay, so he needs me. Let’s jigger him up a bit more. Quietly, I said: ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘The press, you fool!’ He look a hold on himself. ‘We can’t risk line-tapping. Just take my word for it and get here. Go to the harbour. You want the western side. You’ll find several quite large craft moored and we’re about eight along from the hard. You can’t miss it: it’s bright yellow, just painted. ‘You’ll see the lights are on. And for Pete’s sake, keep quiet.’
By the time I hung up I felt shaken. Vince must have been in one hell of a flap if he didn’t realize the lights would scarcely be relevant by the time I could get there.
*
St Tropez ... starting to fade but still the mecca of the Bardot cult and well equipped with toys. Bikinis neatly worn and the sun properly stage-managed; boats scrubbed and painted in the sexy little harbour; crowded restaurants and beachside cafés hard-packed and smelling of Ambre-Solaire. Torsos archbowed succulently and tiny bras showing white edges margined off from deep brown scalded skin; mobile rumps sea-wet and glossed in tense geometric ripeness — cash on delivery; busts articulate in the happytalk, as gawking men towel off and sublimate that which they revel in reserving for sundown. The carousel in runaway delight; throwing off the sexual dropouts by centrifugal force yet drawing in by gravity the grim anonymity of backstreet abortionists and heartbreak telegrams from neglected wives.
I penetrated the fuzzy-focused argy-bargy of skinlife and searched for the lean, stage-cad figure of Vince Halliard. Soon he was there; moustache surmounting the fixed smile that never touched the brittle uranium eyes. The smile spoke: ‘Hallo old boy!’
I said: ‘So cheerful?’
‘For God’s sake! The press are holding every front page from here to Hollywood.’ The pseudo-smile gritted against his teeth and the uranium fissioned the eyes. ‘Why in hell did you take so long?’
‘The planes are full and you’re lucky I have friends in aviation or I wouldn’t be here at all.’
Vince strained for a rutted smile and steered me under the canopy of one of those bars on the sea front. ‘No need to get angry, old boy. What will you drink?’
‘Perriet.’
He ordered that for me and a double scotch for himself. ‘Now, before I tell you what I have to tell you, let me assure you of one thing: We are in hot, merciless France and I have someone’s family reputation to consider. Everything must be sacrificed to that.’
‘Well, go on. Who’s in the boat?’
The waiter brought the drinks and Vince sluiced half of his down like a man. ‘Jemma Schwartz is dead.’
Jemma Schwartz! How could he even know I’d met her? Surely, she couldn’t have told him? ‘How?’
‘Suicide.’ He drank some more, his face tautening over the top of the glass, his sunken eyes — so impressive when they were meant to be — now small and afraid in their little sockets.
‘Have you informed the police?’
As he answered I could see nothing except that barnacled face trying to be young. Dark hair loose over the sweating brow; strong jaw jutting as if grafted on to give the illusion of strength. Knuckly hands, big ones, clamped starkly tight; ice-misted glass in one and a shortened cheroot in the other. ‘Leave that,’ he mouthed, ‘to me.’
‘I don’t think you heard me very well. I said, have you told the police?’
‘And bring the whole pack to the yacht? — What about Jemma’s family? What difference does it make to her now, if we leave it till tonight?’
‘Don’t you mean the scandal would kill the merger?’
He reacted sharply. ‘Jemma’s death? — Why should it touch the merger?’
I said: ‘Perhaps you’d better tell me exactly why you dragged me down here.’ I suddenly felt sick and revolted. ‘I can hardly alter what’s happened.’
Vince nodded, as if to himself, then stubbed out the cheroot. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’d better come over to the boat.’
It was unreal. We picked and weaved our way through hordes of pretty-birds and their beach-loafer mates adorned in minimal trunks. Tiny radios blared, laughter in the French language, rapid torrents of German earnestness and grating snatches of Pont Street ... all nothing to do with us, as now we clacked along planks that linked up rows of boats with high towers for fishing. My suit prickled in the heat while bathers, their spines dividing baked backs stooping over a cleat or a girl or an outboard motor, envigoured themselves in ultra-violet and emanated salt good health.
Vince, in shorts that were too large, led off left towards the yellow yacht and here all was quiet. Boats bobbed their timbers intimately against each other, brushing their dangling fenders. One couple law motionless in sun glasses on a deck littered with symbols of luxury ... tall glasses empty save for melting ice, Lilo on which rested a fat best-seller, reflex camera, skin-dive flippers ... an alien hamper from Fortnum’s.
We got aboard Vince’s boat and this one was slackly maintained. The companionway led down direct into the galley. Here, stale cans and unwashed mugs signalled shipboard squalor. Yet there was the unmistakable tang of a craft which actually put to sea. Instead of a floating caravan here was a seaworthy craft who wasn’t afraid of her natural element. Recent oil oozed from the engine hatch aft. A grubby chart, weighted down on a locker top by navigational paraphernalia, testified to experienced sailsmanship. The smells were there ... creosote and kerosene and new rope ... and a faint bite of disinfectant used for the head.
The non-real Technicolor/Panavision of the exterior, with its stark sky and florid swimwear and unnatural tan of flesh, gave place here to quiet death in chalky monochrome through in the cabin. Here, on one of three bunks, was a pathetic, untidy bundle covered loosely by a blanket. A single oil-lamp burned dirtily in the nick of a porthole whose curtains were closed. A man waited for us, sitting in a corner. He looked disproportionately large. His reading-matter was Time Magazine. He got up now, looked at me non-committally, thumbed me through to a further cabin aft of this one. Vince started to follow, then there was an exchange of monosyllables. Vince nodded and went back. We were to be treated to coffee.
This cabin was near the stern and the head was immediately behind us. The rounded slant of the timbers hemmed us in. There was greased chain on the floor which clinked as the man crouched opposite me. He looked down at his hands as if deciding on a line of talk. Then he offered me a Chesterfield from a crunched pack. We lit up and he identified himself. ‘Steve Andomin, CIA.’ He rolled his eyes up at me, as if he couldn’t be bothered to move the heavy head. Brows crinkled wisely to make up for it, as he addressed me in a grumbling voice which reverberated in the confined space. ‘Halliard tells me you saw the Schwartz woman. Tell me about that.’
I held my fire until I knew what this was all about. I was in a world I understood: Security. And in those days I showed more obedience to military interrogation. This was an era before flower power, before stalemate in Vietnam, before people in my kind of a job ever seriously thought for themselves. ‘I didn’t say so,’ I said.
‘I guess he must have known from your manner. Anyway, we knew. We had you followed.’
‘Why?’
He emitted a short, unhumorous choke of a laugh. ‘Why?’ He didn’t say why. ‘What kind of story did the Schwartz woman tell you?’
The boat rocked on a riplet and you could hear the swill of bilge. ‘She had worries.’ I said, ‘about this merger. And I felt they were worth considering.’
‘Yeah? Schwartz was a very sick woman. Embittered, frightened, a drunk.’
I got heated. ‘She told me —’
‘— it doesn’t particularly matter what she told you.’ He managed to interrupt without raising his voice or cutting in sharply.
‘It matters to me.’
He shrugged. ‘We all get sorry for people. I’ve been worked over by Schwartz myself.’ He gazed at me without much expression. ‘Very effective.’ He got
a crumpled bit of buff paper from his pocket, handed it to me with a Biro. ‘Sign it, please. I’m authorized to hand it to you. British Home Office.’
It was an extract from the Official Secrets Act. I paused. It seemed to me that my signature on this would bring about an automatic silence.
He saw me hesitate, said boredly: ‘I can’t tell you a thing unless you do. Are you afraid of knowledge, Mr Yenn?’
I signed and asked him: ‘Who was the pretty-boy for?’
With an underlying menace Andomin replied softly: ‘I’m afraid that is not covered by the Act.’ He took the form from me and crinkled it back into his pocket. ‘What is important to the Western world is that the research project Schwartz tried to block gets off the ground. It’s in the rules that whatever the Russians get, in terms of weapons of war, we must get first.’
— The miserable arms race ... I was to be hooked on to that. His account made ironical listening when you thought how differently the naive Philip Thorne had interpreted the same set of facts. ‘Why did you get me down here? — Because I might go on following up on Jemma Schwartz? And did she kill herself because her feelings were too damn inconvenient to the military?’ He said without a sign of emotion: ‘The answer to your first question is, yes.’
‘You mean you hoped to silence me?’
‘I hoped to give you some of the facts. If you’d read about this in the press’
‘ — Oh. I get it!’ I said. ‘What about my second question?’
‘You know already. That body in there is all that remains of a woman who really died before she was born. It was inevitable, just a question of when.’
‘How glib can you get?’
‘It’s you who are glib, Mr Yenn.’ He chucked his cigarette into a damp patch and it hissed out. ‘Let me tell you: In 1954 Schwartz tried it first. Why? Same reason as last night. She was a hopeless neurotic. Her excuse? Years before she’d met some guy who gratuitously made her pregnant. I think it was on a train. You know?’ He nodded wisely. ‘She probably told you. She usually does. In ’54 she saw the guy had married. She folded in a small heap at La Guardia and held up a TWA Constellation bound for Chicago for an hour while they fed her out of the exit. In ’57 she did the same thing, only this time it was a TV studio ... Always conspicuous, always for maximum dramatic effect. That time the show made headlines. This time it will not. There are the facts you should have checked, before you came under the Schwartz spell. Right?’
Maybe. But the spell I was under right now was a lot less excusable. As I listened to the explanation of events Andomin offered in the next few minutes I was only too anxious to hear something that would back up and justify his kind of job, because it was also my kind of job. We were big men moving among momentous events. How could the dead body of an unfortunate neurotic heiress alter that?
So when the grinning Vince Halliard strode in there with the steaming coffee — one of the boys, in on the deal, privileged to know — I remained under the spell and allowed a pressure-group of two to twist my mind against my genuine convictions. ‘Where have you got to in the briefing?’ he boomed to the CIA man. ‘Are we on NCMBS?
And how could I have failed to assess Andomin’s seething glance of warning, a command to shut up, which he then aimed so urgently at Vince? It’s significance eluded me because I wanted it to. Yet in retrospect Andomin must have welcomed reference to this cryptic label about as much as a personal gift of a nuclear sub to Red China.
Still Vince blundered on. Seeing my baffled expression he persisted jovially: ‘Nerve-Controlled Ballistic Missiles!’ The grin spread beneath the hearty, healthy moustache. Then he stood over me and handed across the mug of coffee. ‘Thinkbombs, old boy!’
*
The radar dishes on the airfield were still casting wedges of sunlight across the tall grass of the perimeter, thence illuminating the scatter of flower heads amputated from their stems by the children.
I climbed into the Land-Rover, recalling the snapping of the snare which had gripped me tight for years. The great wise head of the lethargic CIA man, peering calmly across the boat as he rustled the form I had signed. His voice reverberating in the closed space of the aft cabin as wash from a power boat rocked it ... his voice reverberating through time and putting the big freeze on any subsequent actions of mine: ‘As a loyal Englishman,’ he had said, ‘I know we can rely on your discretion.’ The eyes had rolled up at me. ‘You have no choice.’ — Stergen, then, had got the final signature for authorized lunacy from me. And — just to make sure — my influence had been reduced to nothing by a campaign of slander thereafter.
Mechanically, I started the engine and drove slowly away from the spot where memory had returned, marvelling at the human mechanism that had permitted me ever to forget. But of course such amnesia had been the only device with which I could conceal from myself my utter insignificance.
TEN
It was dark and moist with heavy woodland scent when I shoved the Land-Rover in a copse and made my way on foot to the cliff edge. We were due for a moon a few minutes after midnight, but now my luminous watch thrust its digits weirdly at me and indicated that it was seven minutes before my scheduled rendezvous with Simmonds. By now he should be beached in the bay below.
To my right, the nuclear power station glittered like a tin monument to the atom. Two identical buildings showed their guts to the world through huge expanses of sheet glass like an X-ray. A large intestine of plump piping coiled itself down from top to bottom in each, tortuously bulbing around giant blocks of gear, then reappearing, much thickened from an encounter with other tubes. A halo of reflected boundary lights described an inverted arc-umbrella over the top, encasing light within light.
But here on the cliff a brief downpour at sundown had squeezed mud from under the scrubby grass and rainwater dripped from the swollen wooden fence I had climbed. The hoots of patient owls echoed from the unseen masts of big trees and sounded vaguely unnerving. It was difficult to associate the eerie nightcall with those friendly, agreeable birds which, though not particularly wise, are intrinsically tame and affectionate. As I slithered down a steep path towards the bare beach the owl-sounds were editorial comment on isolation.
Tyrant’s Bay smelled of fish. The stored life in countless shells waited for the quiet tide to wash them over salt. Seaweed laced among pebbles gave off a clinical odour as it breathed. And I’d caught the place unawares; here was the alien incubator for organisms that were lost and forgotten in the rat-race of evolutionary bustle; not even the gulls were there to bridge the astronomical gap in time which separated Man from his inscrutable forebears in the washpan of the sea.
Underfoot, flat sand gave place to shingle and soon I could see the dim glow of a cigarette which broke against the shimmering coastal marshlight that was Wales. There was a pencil of rocks protruding towards the moored craft. I felt and picked my way along it, till the boards of the deck were under me. Simmonds crouched near the cabin entrance. It seemed strange that I had so recently been recalling another encounter aboard a tied-up craft. Time had wrapped around itself and produced a logic of its own.
There was, however, little about the structure of Golden Hind that was logical. It had ugly lines and the weight of the engine — mounted high too near the stern — kept the thing in permanent imbalance. There was too much bow out of the water and the deckboards reflected the awkwardness of hull shape by warping uncomfortably as if they’d been put in upside down. Good boats, even when anchored, feel serene; this one felt as though it would pop its nails from a permanent sense of nautical anxiety.
We headed out to sea and for a long time nothing was said. Simmonds had the chart out and I could see he knew what he was doing so I didn’t interfere. I had my own thoughts; and I kept seeing Louise slipping to the floor that night, her face so utterly without life. There was a tremble in me; and though I hadn’t admitted it to myself at the time I now faced the fact that at the time I’d thought she was dying.
It see
med so wrong that she was alone with her secret now ... up there in London, threatened by something within and which I wasn’t allowed to share. I was tormented by the thought that my own lust was hiding behind an excuse of silence. Had I really tried to get her to tell me what was wrong? Didn’t it suit me too well not to know? Might I not be harming her by loving her physically when she was so evidently in the grip of some cyclic illness? ... However convinced she was of the rights and wrongs of it from her point of view, was I?
As I searched the darkness ahead for some sign of clandestine shipping I dimly became aware of one thing: that the closer I got to Louise, the harder it was to reason. When it came to thinking out, calmly and coherently, the true significance of the deadly riddle she had offered in the deserted house, my brain was no use to me. I desperately hoped this wasn’t because I just didn’t want to know.
— So now I was restless, unable to think clearly about the immediate practicalities ahead and unable to affect Louise’s fate and future until the morning after the morrow. Perhaps the unseemly gait of the boat was telling me via my stomach that this was no way to solve a maritime problem. We were in a flat calm and the top-heavy craft perambulated over it rather than through it as if scared by the thought of water. I went down into the cabin in search of my cigarettes and took note suddenly of the fact that the thing was making hardly any noise. In view of my father’s acoustical requirements — they took precedence over such mundane details as seaworthiness — this was confusing. I called up to Simmonds. ‘She’s running quiet. What’s wrong?’
His frame, silhouetted against sharp clear stars, lunged in an attempt to check one of the more psychopathic lurches of a mock-turtle rudder. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘It has something to do with my fitting a silencer during the afternoon.’
‘We’ll have to whip it off before we return this road-roller or Dad will throw a tantrum.’
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