Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  The car braked. The lights were steady, then switched off. Darkness plunged around him.

  A door groaned open, then slammed, and he heard the squelch of a footfall on the sodden ground as someone came to the door of his home. His finger was on the guard of the trigger. The dog had gone quiet but he could feel its bulk against his leg and hear the wheeze of its breathing. He sensed it was coiled, ready to spring, if the door should be forced. He had known that one night, under cover of darkness, they would come. The curse afflicting him had demanded they would come because of what he had done.

  The door was rapped. Not hard, not with aggression. He felt a lessening of the fear that had been with him since a man had seemed to search for a grave, then sat against a tree and watched his home. The knock was repeated. He stayed quiet, and the dog hissed in defiance but did not bark.

  Then the voice he knew: ‘Tadeuz … Are you there, Tadeuz?’

  He didn’t answer but lowered the gun’s barrels until they pointed at the floor.

  He thought the voice sounded nervous. ‘Tadeuz … I think you’re inside. It’s me, Tadeuz, Father Jerzy. Please, Tadeuz, answer if you’re there.’

  Outside, beyond the door, the priest would have heard the dog growl. He went to the table, broke the shotgun and placed it, angled and ugly, on the old newspapers there.

  ‘I think you’re there, Tadeuz. Let me in.’

  Tadeuz Komiski unbolted and unlocked the door, then murmured into the ear of his dog, which slunk, belly low, to the place beside the stove. He opened the door. He saw only the silhouetted outline of the priest’s shoulders and head. A match was struck, held up by the priest, and in his other hand a plastic bag hung heavily with the weight of its contents.

  ‘Are you not well, Tadeuz? Why no light? Are you ill?’

  He scurried back. He put a paper strip into the stove, and moved it sharply until it found embers and caught, then used it to light the oil lamp. Now he saw the priest look around and grimace in horror, shock, disgust. His nose twitched and his lip curled.

  ‘This is no way to live, Tadeuz, with this smell, in the dark. It’s wrong to live like this, and not necessary.’

  Father Jerzy peered at the sink. In it were the dishes that Tadeuz had not washed, and he had not eaten for the whole of that day or the previous one.

  ‘Do you have any food in your house, Tadeuz?’

  He shook his head, and felt that the lamplight caught his shame.

  ‘Can you make coffee, Tadeuz?’

  He gestured with his hands, helpless, that he had none.

  The priest wiped the seat of a chair and sat on it. He reached across the table, pushed the shotgun carefully aside, so that its barrel was aimed at the window, then laid the plastic bag by the stock. He had a cheerful face, weathered, and his cheeks shone with scrubbed cleanliness. He took a small paper bag from his coat pocket and lifted out two biscuits, then held out his hand flat with the biscuits on the palm. The dog came to him and wolfed them, then laid its head on his lap.

  ‘You didn’t come, Tadeuz. You didn’t bring us the wood you usually bring. To be frank, we have little wood at the church house, and next Sunday we’ll have used the last in the boiler. There’s an old saying, Tadeuz: “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain.” I say that in jest because you’re not a mountain and I’m most certainly not Mahomet. I thought you were not well, that you hadn’t the strength to cut, haul and split wood, so I came to find out.’

  He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, but hung his head. The priest’s hand fondled the dog’s neck.

  ‘I had Magda ask in the shop. I didn’t think you would have gone there and not brought us the wood. Magda confirmed that you hadn’t been in. That’s why I believed you were ill, and that you’d have no food. Magda did this for you.’

  The plastic bag was opened. A pie was shown to him, and gravy had run down its tinfoil tray. To show his gratitude, Tadeuz Komiski dropped his head.

  ‘But you’re not ill, not in body … Tadeuz, I expected to find you had suffered an injury or an accident, or had pneumonia. I look at you, the darkness you keep and the weapon close to you, and what confronts me is a great sadness about you. Tadeuz, I’m a priest and you have no obligation to answer me, but have you done wrong? Why are you hiding from the world?’

  He gazed with longing at the pie made for him by Magda, housekeeper to Father Jerzy, and saw the strong hands gentle at the dog’s neck. Another biscuit was placed in the slobbering mouth.

  ‘Have you committed some crime? Hurt somebody or taken something from someone? Confession cleanses. Is there something you wish to tell me?’

  He felt his chin slacken, and his lips were dry. His tongue whipped over them, and an owl called from the trees beyond the door. He did not answer.

  ‘I made enquiries before setting out to come here, and I requested the same of Magda. People in the village, Tadeuz, think you’re strange. They believe you to be different, but none has told me or Magda that you’d do anything deceitful or violent, yet the gun is readied and you’re frightened. I ask myself: why does an old man who lives in the house where he was born need to arm himself and be protected by a dog? Tadeuz, I’m young, only seven years out of the seminary at Krakow, and I know little of men’s minds. What I do know is that confession purges guilt. You show the signs of guilt.’

  Tadeuz felt tears well in his eyes and put his hand across his face.

  The priest said quietly, ‘I ask, why does an individual who is not a criminal fear guilt? I believe, Tadeuz, that you were born in this house – the house where you now cower with a dog and a lethal weapon for company – in 1937. I think of you as a man who has done no criminal wrong, but you were a child and you were here. As a child your home was among these trees, in this forest, close to that place. In my last year as a student at the seminary, a rabbi came to visit us from Germany. It was a very special visit and we listened to him with close attention. He spoke of the Holocaust, and the next day he was to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, an hour by train from Krakow. He said, and I have never forgotten it, that survivors had told him, “For Jews, the Germans were evil but the Christian Poles were worse.” Was it when you were a child? You don’t have to answer me – but the only palliative for guilt is confession. All I can say, Tadeuz, is that if ever the chance is given you – it is unlikely – to right a wrong, then seize it. Please, and soon, bring me more wood. They were difficult days.’

  The priest, Father Jerzy, left.

  The two of them, Tadeuz Komiski and his dog, ate the meat pie, shared it in equal parts. It rang in his ears, to right a wrong. He took the last crumbs of the pie and picked off the table what had fallen, then let the dog lick the tinfoil plate clean.

  He was jolted, alert and aware. Carrick gaped but Reuven Weissberg had not seen them.

  They walked on the wall’s platform and below them, to their right, was the moat that had, in history, surrounded the Stare Miasto. To their left, below the platform, was a street of impatient pedestrians, surging to be gone now that their shops, cafés and workplaces had closed for the evening. The couple were like a stone on a beach and the incoming tide flowed round them. It was as if they were lovers. His arms round her shoulders, and hers round his waist. He couldn’t see the face of the young man, buried in her hair, but she looked up as if in exaltation of the moment, and saw Carrick, as he saw her, Katie.

  And he was gone, moving on, the moment lost.

  It was like a wound, his girl from the bed in the narrowboat in the arms of another man. He trailed after Reuven Weissberg, and felt the sting of imagined betrayal.

  ‘To Control. Have an eyeball. On the wall, going west. C One, out.’

  Katie Jennings broke clear of Luke Davies, but he took her hand as they started to walk. She realized that was the right thing to do, because she didn’t know how closely they were observed. She’d done it before, hugged a man, held him, and felt nothing for him. It was a part of a surveillance ro
utine, and she knew it from the days when she had been the token girl in SCD10. He held her hand tightly and she allowed him to entwine his fingers in hers.

  A cigarette was lit, a hand masked a face.

  ‘To C One. That was good, thank you for doing guiding. Suggest you return to Control and leave D One and me for the rest. Well done. A One, out.’

  Smoke filtered in the evening air from a cigarette.

  It defeated Yashkin. He could see no reason why his friend should sweat.

  He did not have the heater on in the Polonez, but he reached across Molenkov and wound down the passenger window.

  It was not just sweat, there was pain in his face, and apprehension.

  The one-time security officer would have been the first to admit that the one-time political officer had turned in a bravura performance at the Customs point. Yes, there had been sweat then on Molenkov’s face and hands, but insufficient to be noticed – not like the wetness that dripped from him now. It had been an exercise in command, authority and control: out of the car, ignoring the question of whether there were items for declaration, steering the official to the front bumper and away from the tail door behind which it was hidden under the tarpaulin. Molenkov had assumed the role of interrogator. Did the officer believe the tyres of the Polonez, front near side and front open side, would get them to Minsk? They would, but new tyres were needed. Did the officer have the knowledge to check the oil in the engine? The bonnet had been lifted, it had been done, and Yashkin had marvelled at the skill shown, and the oil amount was satisfactory.

  The questions had kept coming: take the M20 or the M1 for Minsk, or take the Bobrujsk route? Did the officer have relatives who had served in the armed forces? Was the forecast for rain and …?

  Yashkin had sat in the car and heard the rattle of the medals on Molenkov’s chest, the murmur of their voices, and had seen the passports returned, the shaking of hands, heard the expression of thanks for courtesy and the wishes for a safe journey. Molenkov and the officer had parted as bosom friends, and then they had driven away. They had stopped at the first café kiosk beyond, and out of sight, of the Customs point, and used the toilets that were spotlessly clean, and would not have been so in Sarov, to change back into their civilian clothes. The medals had gone into the bags, and they had bought a fresh loaf of bread, cheese, a small jar of pickle and they had eaten. He had thought it the reaction to the tension of the Customs point that had caused Molenkov to gobble his food and stuff hunks of the cheese, anointed with pickle, into his mouth.

  His friend’s hands came up and seemed to grasp his chest. The sweating was more acute. Molenkov groaned. Yashkin drove on.

  The groan was a sigh, almost a sob, and the mouth contorted. The fingers held tighter to his shirt. A croak. ‘Yashkin …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m ill, seriously.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I have a heart attack.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Should you stop?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No, go on to Gomel. It’s agony … There’ll be a hospital in Gomel.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not.’

  ‘Yashkin, my chest. The pain … will kill me.’

  He drove on, neither faster nor slower, and was looking for the turning to Dobrus where he would leave the M13.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Yashkin … it’s a heart attack. In a few minutes I’ll be dead – do something, please, my friend, anything, something …’

  Yashkin pulled on to the hard shoulder. He said briskly, ‘Get out.’

  Molenkov staggered out of the car. Yashkin didn’t follow him. Molenkov was doubled up and tottering.

  Yashkin leaned across the passenger seat, spoke through the open door. ‘First, Molenkov, unfasten your belt. Go on, do it … That’s better, good. Now undo the top buttons of your trousers. That’s right. No one who drives past will care if they see you with your trousers at your knees. You should use both hands to massage your stomach hard – get on with it. Now fart. Get the gas out. Breathe deep. Take it down. Do you still have a heart-attack, Molenkov?’

  He heard the escape of the wind, and smelled it – like poison gas out of a sewer. The colour was seeping back into his friend’s face. Yashkin said, ‘You’d eaten too much too fast. Then you sat. Your belt was too tight and constricted the passage of the food. The pain was from the build of acid inside your oesophagus. Can we move on now?’

  Shamefaced, Molenkov sat in the car and pulled the door shut. Yashkin eased away from the hard shoulder and nudged into place among the lorries and trucks.

  Molenkov asked him, ‘How did you know it wasn’t a heart attack?’

  ‘Your hands were in the wrong place.’

  ‘My hands were over my heart.’

  ‘No – the heart is higher and to the side. Your hands were not on your heart. You were suffering, Molenkov, from gastric indigestion made acute by eating bread and cheese like a pig swallows acorns.’

  More wind filled the car, and Molenkov’s belt hung loose. Then he belched. ‘I feel better but I thought I was dead.’

  ‘Look for the turning, please.’

  ‘What would you have done if it had been a heart-attack? We have a schedule.’ Molenkov pointed. ‘There, the sign for Dobrus and Vetka.’

  Yashkin knew what he would have done, and was glad to have the excuse not to answer the question.

  The young man wanted a fight. Well, he would have it. Lawson thought Luke Davies was a young colt out in a field, pawing the grass with a hoof.

  They were all at the minibus except Adrian and Dennis. Deadeye was Control and had the street map on his knee in the back; Lawson liked Deadeye, respecting the man’s quiet. He only spoke when necessary. Bugsy had said again that they needed to get a harness beacon on their man; agreed and no further discussion required. Lawson respected Bugsy too. Shrinks had been near the cathedral when the agent and the target had gone by, a full two hundred metres away, and would have had a view of them for no more than fifteen seconds but with the magnification of pocket binoculars; probably had had nothing to add that had not already been said. And Charlie, the girl, had done well when she’d been called forward, and most likely hadn’t needed Davies with her but he’d horned in. Lawson thought her adequate, not a passenger. Luke Davies was the one who would confront him, and maybe it was time for a clearing of the air.

  He’d get it over with. Lawson stepped out of the minibus, and knew Davies would follow him. He walked a few paces towards the walls of the Royal Palace – quite well restored – and heard another door shoved open, then slammed.

  ‘Have you a minute, Mr Lawson?’

  ‘Always have time for anything of importance.’

  Davies came round in front of him, blocked his walk and his view of the palace, home once of King Stanislaw August, and he was near to the fine statue of a rampant King Sigismund III. He had been here with Clipper Reade.

  ‘I want, Mr Lawson, to lodge my protest at the way this business is being conducted.’

  ‘Do you now? How fascinating.’

  He and Clipper Reade, the tractor spare-parts salesman, had been in this square on a July evening thirty-something years before, lost in a great crowd that gazed up at the clock face in the Sigismund tower.

  The complaint exploded out at him: ‘I saw him: he walked right by me. He looked pathetic. He’s crushed and bowed. God knows what level, should he survive this, of post-traumatic stress he’ll be subject to. He’s down there on the floor.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  The clock in the Sigismund tower had been stopped at the exact moment that the first bomb from a Luftwaffe Stuka, in response to the uprising of 1944, had hit the tower and wrecked the clock’s workings. The crowd had gathered to hear it start to click again, and see the hands move … He’d been in a good mood that evening, as Clipper Reade had, because they had come from a clandestine meeting, the initial contact, with an engineer of the central telephone exchange who had taken
the Queen’s shilling and the President’s silver dollar, and had accepted recruitment.

  ‘You’ve hung him out to dry. What you’ve done to that man is shameful, disgraceful. I suppose you wouldn’t recognize that. Some sort of sacrificial lamb and you playing God with his welfare, his life. You just don’t care, do you?’

  ‘I’ve come to expect the dull and mediocre from you, Davies, and expectations are seldom unfulfilled.’

  ‘And the way this business is being conducted is just so unprofessional. We’re barging around, bumbling and stumbling, without local co-operation. I suppose, in your warped world, the Polish intelligence community are unreconstructed Communists, the same people as in the blissful Good Old Days. I know that when I’ve been in Lithuania, our station chief has said—’

  ‘You were irksome when you started. Now you are merely tedious.’

  ‘You don’t care, do you? You’re devoid of decency and humanity.’

  In his mind, Lawson had been back in ‘84, after Clipper Reade had left Europe, and he’d done a tour of the palace, had seen King Stanislaw August’s apartments, and the Canaletto Room, and the chapel that held the urn where the heart of Kosciuszko, the leader of an eighteenth-century revolt, was laid. And seen the Study Room where Napoleon, on his way to Moscow, had slept, and the Ballroom where the nation’s finest ladies were on display for him that he might more quickly choose a mistress.

  Davies’s voice spat. His features were contorted. ‘You won’t survive this. Believe me, you will not. I’ll make it my business to see that you’re hauled before an ethics committee, trampled on and shown the door. Not only are you old-fashioned, a dinosaur, you’re also, Mr Lawson, an individual of quite extraordinary self-regard. You play God with people and think it acceptable. You don’t care.’