Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  A grey shape loomed for a second on his right. He was in the ditch with the world tumbling over him and the sound of a great crash in his ears. His consciousness, although momentarily reduced to a mere flicker, registered the knowledge that the crash represented some objective happening in the outer world, and that no impact upon either a human body or a single motor bicycle could account for it. A second later he was sitting on grass, as if at a picnic, and staring past the buckled front wheel of the two-stroke at the Lagonda across the road. Only the Lagonda’s back was visible. Its bonnet had gone through a substantial stone wall. Routh found himself laughing weakly. Squire had once more made an ass of himself. And this time, with any luck, to the actual destruction of himself and his companion.

  Fear like a cold finger touched Routh between the shoulder blades and ran down his back. He had heard a sound – it might have been a curse or a groan – from across the road. A second later first one human head and then another rose up behind the folded hood of the Lagonda. Squire and his accomplice were staring at him.

  They weren’t dead yet. But no more was he. Routh moved his limbs cautiously. He was bruised and shaken, and there was a cut across the back of his left hand – nothing more. And his pursuers, even if equally unscathed, had certainly derived no advantage from the crash. The odds were considerably closer than they had been a few seconds before.

  Routh looked up and down the road. It was still quite empty. But it was a substantial high road, all the same, and it could only be a few minutes – perhaps no more than seconds – before something came along.

  But meanwhile Squire was making to climb painfully over the side of his wrecked car. Routh thought he had better get to his feet. But this took him longer than he expected. When at length he was standing on the road Squire and the bearded man were standing on it too. They were supporting each other like a couple of drunks. But they looked quite formidable, all the same.

  Routh moved off. The effort to get on his feet had taken all his energy. He seemed to have none left to think with. But neither did his enemies. Routh shambled off down the road, and they shambled after him. Painfully his sense of the need to plan returned to him. They couldn’t very well kidnap him here and now. The wrecking of their car had dished that. And until they knew that he hadn’t cached Formula Ten somewhere on the route of his flight they couldn’t bring out guns and shoot him. Or not to kill…

  Something had happened to the sounds behind him. There was only one man running. He turned his head. Squire was down on one knee in the road. Routh thought joyfully that he had collapsed. Then he saw that Squire’s left arm was up oddly before his face, and that there was something resting on it. A spurt of dust flew up beside Routh’s feet. There was a sharp report. Squire had tried to wing him. They’d do that, fake him up as part of their car accident, and then manage somehow to smuggle him away – perhaps in a relief car of their own.

  And still A417 was wickedly empty. Squire was running again, but presently he would take another shot. The ditch on Routh’s left had vanished, and in its place was a grass verge and a low stone wall. Beyond were trees. Routh stumbled to the wall and threw himself over; he blundered his way forward, staggering from tree to tree like a ball on a bagatelle board. A bullet won’t wind its way round a lot of bloody trees. He went on and on. There was silence all round him.

  He stopped, not believing it. No pounding feet. His eyes were drawn down to his own feet, which ached beneath him. They rested on a thick carpet of pine needles. The enemy might be quite close, after all; they might be moving up on him in perfect silence, Nor was the cover so very good. This sort of tree was in too much of a hurry to reach the sun. It scrambled upwards with indecent speed, leaving nothing but a spare, businesslike trunk behind it. Routh stood for a moment at bay, radiating futile malevolence upon the straight, still presences around him. He hated the wood. It wasn’t natural – a place that was nothing but trees and silence. People shouldn’t make such places. He longed for the street, for four walls and a roof, for a tough crowd that would see fair play.

  Squire and the bearded man were close to him. The silence, as if retorting upon his dislike of it, allowed itself to be shattered by their voices. The sound seemed to be all around him. Wherever he moved it was in front of him as well as behind. If he turned half-left or half-right it was the same. Perhaps it was a trick of the place; perhaps among trees sound always behaved like that. Or perhaps – he thought in sudden horror – he was dying. Perhaps he was going to die of sheer long-drawn-out nervous tension. Perhaps this confusion of voices was simply the decay of the senses before death. He floundered on.

  The trees thinned and vanished. In front of him stretched a low stone wall. Surely he had seen it before? What lay behind the wall, however, could not be the high road, because he was looking directly at the roof and windows of a small, single-storeyed house. It was far from being a substantial refuge; nevertheless Routh saw in it his last hope.

  But the wall was unexpectedly hard to surmount. His last vestiges of physical strength were leaving him. When he did get to the wall he could do little more than claw at it blindly. One moment it seemed an insuperable barrier; at the next he was lying along the top of it, his head swimming. The drop was steeper on the other side. He glimpsed a hard surface beneath him, and in front of him a pale wall, a blank window of the little house. And then he fell. He was aware of pain, of voices, of two obscurely familiar forms bending over him. Hands were laid on his body, and at their touch he fainted.

  When he recovered consciousness it was to find himself lying on the floor of a small bare room. He was certain that very little time had elapsed, and he wondered how his enemies had conjured up this prison out of vacancy. His limbs were free; he flexed them cautiously and then, rolling over on his stomach, managed to raise himself to his hands and knees.

  The place was tiny and smelt of fresh plasterwork; it had a single casement window, unbarred. Sudden hope leapt up in Routh. This was simply the tiny house in which he had hoped to find refuge, and it was not his enemies who were responsible for his being in it now. It was not they who had laid hands on him. He had been carried in here by a friendly, not a hostile power. But in that case his pursuers must still be close by. He got unsteadily to his feet. Why had his rescuers simply dumped him here? He must find them. He must explain the danger. Routh’s eye, proposing to search the bleak little room for a door, fell once more upon the window. Squire and the bearded man were framed in it.

  Without consciousness of the movement, he tumbled again to his hands and knees. And so he remained – looking up and out at his enemies, like a cornered dog. Squire’s hand was on the window, and it was plain that he could force it in an instant. He was trapped. Only a miracle could save him now.

  Routh prayed. He prayed for the miracle that would take him from these implacable men. And as he did so the faces of Squire and the bearded man moved queerly and unnaturally across the window – glided smoothly and laterally away. They were replaced by a telegraph post. And that glided away too. There was a tremor under Routh’s body. The little house was moving. It was because he had been on his knees, he thought. Darling, darling Mummy –

  This time he was unconscious for much longer.

  6

  Somebody was bending over him. It was the lad to whom he had given the handkerchief to wipe the coffee from his face and mop his hair. Behind him was his companion, the hairy man who had begun the talking about the pools. ‘I wouldn’t ’ave thought it of ’im,’ the hairy man was saying. ‘Law-abiding little beggar, ’e looks to me.’

  ‘They might ’ave been crooks or they might ’ave been cops. But whichever they was, we didn’t ’arf get ’im away from them nicely.’ The lad laughed cheerfully; then, looking down at Routh, saw that his eyes were open. ‘That’s right, mate. Sit up and take a bit of notice. We must get you out before they check us in. No passengers allowed in these bleeding travelling Ritzes.’

  Routh sat up. The hairy man stepped forward
, fished the remains of a cigarette from behind his ear, and thrust it companionably in Routh’s mouth. ‘’Ere,’ he said, ‘no ’arm in a puff of tobacco in the Louis Cans lounge.’

  The Louis Cans lounge was the same bare little room in which Routh had lost consciousness. There was the window through which Squire and his confederate had peered at him. Routh got to his feet and staggered to it. He looked out on a landscape of trodden mud, dotted for as far as he could see with prefabricated houses. They were the kind that arrive in three ready-made sections which simply bolt together. He had seen these sections on the road often enough. And of course he was in one now.

  The miracle was explained. Routh felt a momentary resentment against providence for not having, as he had supposed, suspended the natural order of things in his favour. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  The hairy man held out a match. ‘We’d pulled up to fill in the log, mate, when you came tumbling over the wall like a sack. So we nipped out and took a look over, and there was your commercial gent coming after you with a gun, and a nasty-looking beggar with a beard beside him. So we bundled you into Buckingham Palace here, and carried you off under their bleeding noses.’

  ‘How do I get away from this?’

  ‘Straight down the Mall, mate.’ The lad advanced to the window and pointed. ‘There’s a bus service at the other end.’

  The hairy man had opened a door through which one could drop to the ground. Routh looked at the two men awkwardly. They looked back at him, benevolent and elaborately incurious. All words of thanks had for him connotations of insincerity, dislike, dishonest design. He could speak none of them. ‘Hope you win that treble chance,’ he mumbled. The lad gave him a hand down.

  7

  Workmen were tinkering at a score of prefabs on either side of him. There were acres of these, laid out in unbroken parallel lines. If you were in an aeroplane, and got your height a bit wrong, it would look like one of those awfully military cemeteries. Routh shivered. It would be horrible to live in such a place. It would be like annihilation. You would come to think that you were just like other people. There could be nothing worse than that.

  At the same time he envied the workmen their anonymity. He realized that he looked queer among them, a hurrying figure with nothing to do with the place. As far as his eye could see, there were only these workmen, all geared into this antlike, squalidly impressive communal effort, and himself, a piece of loose grit in it – something lawless and on its own, slipping through the cogs to an irregular and problematical fate.

  There was now a metalled road under his feet. And solitude around him. He stopped, alarmed. The workmen had vanished, because in this part of the new estate their work was done. He could hear their clatter behind him. And far ahead he could see different signs of life: patches of grass and flowers, a scattering of television aerials, washing fluttering on a line. Ahead of him people had already moved in. But round about him there was an intermediate stage in the growth of this mass building: rows of these little houses, blank, empty and unquickened. He felt, just because they were so empty, that anything might come out of them. He might turn his head for a moment and there, standing in each little doorway, might be one of his own hidden fears. It was another tableau that would build itself into his evil dreams of the long tunnel.

  The empty road in front of him was a regular chequer of sunlight and shadow. Each house cast its identical black cube of shade; and monotonously, just past this, was a shorter finger of shade from the sort of glorified dog kennel provided as an outhouse. He was near the end of the uninhabited block or belt – he could even see what looked like a main road ahead – when he found himself at a dead halt, quivering like a horse that has pulled up in its stride. For a second he was at a loss to account for his own action. And then he saw. Thirty yards ahead of him, the regular pattern of shade was broken. Between two of the cubes, instead of the expected blunt finger, lay an irregular mass of shadow, as if of something crouched low with an uplifted arm. He dragged himself forward, his breath shortening with every step. He read taut muscles, poised limbs into the enigmatical shape. He managed one more stride. Close beside one of the outhouses was the twisted trunk of an ancient apple tree. Its boughs had been lopped, but through some failure of energy it had not been grubbed out. A few shoots were springing from it. There was reason for it to cast a shadow instinct with life. It was the only thing left alive in all this wilderness.

  Routh ran. He almost stumbled over a sticky-mouthed child on a tricycle – an intrepid explorer from the inhabited country ahead. There were voices – kids screaming, women gossiping, a baker’s boy shouting at a horse – and gusts of music from the Light Programme. A few men, already at home from work or out of it, were pottering about their prefabs, obliterating what small patches of earth they had under useless little concrete paths and bird baths. Routh spared them a glance of contempt as he ran. They took no interest in him whatever. Probably they thought he was running for a bus.

  And so he was. For straight in front of him was a red double-decker, comfortingly urban in suggestion, waiting at its terminus – its side scrawled with a slogan exhorting the prefab population to National Saving. Routh put his last strength into leaping on the platform, and as he did so the bus moved off.

  The upper deck was empty. As he swayed forward and slumped down he realized how done up he was. He realized too that he was still wearing the leggings he used on the Douglas. They made him look conspicuous now he was dismounted, and he hastily tugged them off and bundled them up as he heard the conductress climbing the stair.

  ‘Fare, please.’

  He fumbled in a breast pocket and brought out a ten shilling note. ‘As far as you go.’

  ‘Hey?’ The girl seemed to doubt if she heard correctly. ‘What d’you say?’

  ‘I said “As far as you go.” I can’t say farther than that, can I?’ Routh did his best to import an elaborate facetiousness into his tone.

  ‘That will be one and ten. But you can have the Mental Hospital for a shilling.’ The girl gave him a ticket, a handful of change, and a long stare. As soon as she had gone away he looked at the ticket. But it had only numbers on it, and told him nothing. He began to keep a lookout for a signpost, a milestone, the indicator of a bus coming the other way. The bus might be bound for Witney, somewhere like that. It stopped in a hamlet and a number of people got on. Routh peered down at them anxiously as they mounted. It was three old women and a girl. At least it looked like that. He must suspect anyone, however unlikely, who took as much as a glance at him. It would be the same in a teashop or in the places one went for shelter: a cinema or a public library. He might feel the sudden prick of a needle. Excuse me, my friend has fainted. But luckily I have my car outside.

  But perhaps that was only in stories. Perhaps they couldn’t really get you with a drug like that. The bus stopped once more and its upper deck was invaded by a tumbling and shouting crowd of airmen. Most of them seemed no more than lads; they flung themselves on the seats, tossed each other cigarettes, called across the bus to particular cronies from whom they had been separated in the crush, craned their necks to study the conductress when she came up for fares. Here, Routh thought, was the best bodyguard he had found yet.

  At last he glimpsed a roadsign and saw that they were running into Abingdon. The name conveyed almost nothing to him. He was sure it wasn’t on any main line to London. Not that it mattered, if he had really broken the trail behind him at last.

  They were in a market place, and there was a lot of coming and going downstairs. He got large, vague comfort from the solid mass of laughing and shouting boys behind him. There were only two seats vacant up here: the one beside himself and the corresponding one across the gangway. The bus began to move, and then jerked to a stop again. There was some sort of flurry below. He peered out and saw, foreshortened with a queer effect of comedy, the hurrying figures of two nuns. They skirted the bus, one of them flourishing an incongruously secular-looking umbrella at t
he driver. Then they clambered on. The bus twisted its way out of Abingdon. Routh dropped into a doze.

  When he woke up one of the nuns was sitting beside him, and the second had taken the other spare seat just over the gangway. Queer how they had to go about in couples. As if anyone would think of making passes at an old creature like that. Not that this one was necessarily old, since it was impossible to see her face. Pricked by idle and drowsy curiosity, Routh leant forward to take a peep. But still he couldn’t see anything. The nun had an enormous white starched hood. She must feel as if she lived at the end of a tunnel. Routh wondered why such things had been invented. As blinkers, more or less, he supposed. See no evil unless it came at you head-on. That sort of thing.

  He thought he might catch a glimpse of the other nun instead. When she turned to speak to her companion it ought to be possible at least to catch sight of her nose. But she showed no disposition to do this. Both of them sat perfectly still. Perhaps they were asleep. Or perhaps just staring straight ahead of them. Or again, they might be praying. But when they prayed didn’t they go fumbling and clicking at a string of beads? Routh’s eyes went to the hands of the nun sitting beside him. They were idle in her lap. Suddenly, and just as he was taking this in, she slid both hands beneath the black folds of her gown.

  The bus was already airless and fuggy. Routh yawned. He remembered vaguely that giving way to sleepiness was a luxury in which, for some reason, he must not at present indulge himself. He yawned again – and jerked fully awake with a start that almost dislocated his jaw. He had experienced, against the screen of his closed eyes, a vivid image on the idle hands of the nun before she had slipped them out of sight. They were large and hairy hands. They were not a woman’s hands at all.