The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “Because you’re a nosy, posh tart who’s never satisfied.”

  “This posh tart could rat this cockney oik out to her dad.”

  “But she won’t.”

  Up on one elbow now, all semblance that it was just sticky-time word-fun evaporating as she met him eye to eye.

  “Seriously, Wilderness. You slipped back into the field. I took my eye off your balls and you slipped back into the field. That’s not what I wanted. Ever. We have two daughters. We have no money problems. We should be happy as a pair of nesting squirrels, cocooned in fur, surrounded by hazelnuts . . . happy in the hollow tree of marriage, sensuous and satisfied in the sunlit meadow known as the rest of our fucking lives.”

  Wilderness said nothing. Admired her turn of phrase, but said nothing.

  §138

  Wilderness met Alleyn at the main gate of Wormwood Scrubs with a black Civil Service Humber Snipe driven by Nerk from Special Branch, who also doubled as guard. Combining the two jobs seemed to put him out of sorts as though one task or the other were beneath him. Wilderness tried to speak to him as little as possible. He hated the Branch. There seemed to be only two qualifications for joining—size of feet and lack of imagination.

  Alleyn emerged, a brown paper parcel bound up with white string tucked under his arm. A moth-eaten suit clinging to his body.

  Neither spoke until the gates clanged shut.

  “You don’t know how good that sounds, Joe.”

  “Believe me, Bernard, I do. What’s that awful smell?”

  “Mothballs, I believe. Rather ineffective mothballs.”

  In the back of the Humber, Wilderness wound down a window.

  Alleyn said, “I do have a better suit.”

  “You do?”

  “At my tailors. Foulkes and Fransham in Savile Row. They’ve been holding it for me since 1959.”

  “Won’t that stink too?”

  “Good Lord no. No mothballs. It’ll be in one of their camphor-lined rooms.”

  Wilderness spoke to Nerk.

  “Take us through the West End, would you. Savile Row.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Surprised at what?”

  “That you have a Savile Row tailor and that they didn’t shut your account when you got nicked.”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t, would they? I mean to say . . . as long as the bills are paid . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Bernard. Guy Burgess’s tailor only closed his account when the bugger died. I have every confidence they’ll ship anything you want to Moscow.”

  “I was hoping it might be ready now. I mean . . . they’ve had six years.”

  §139

  “I am told I have lost weight.”

  “Once again, I’m not surprised.”

  “No . . . I mean they’d like an hour or so to take in the waist.”

  “Then we’ll grab a coffee somewhere.”

  “No . . . I’m needed here.”

  “OK. Then I’ll grab a coffee and Nerk from Special Branch can stay on the door.”

  “I won’t run, you know.”

  “Bernard, you have nowhere to run to.”

  “But if you’re going out, perhaps one last favour . . . there’s a book I’d like . . . if you’re going anywhere near Hatchards.”

  “That’s not a favour, that’s a cheek.”

  “Just something I read in the prison library. A memory I’d like to keep. A souvenir of England, I suppose.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What’s the book?”

  “Oh . . . Betjeman’s autobiography, Summoned by Bells.”

  “That’s how you want to remember England? An England neither you nor I have ever known.”

  “Indulge me, Joe. And don’t worry about the money. I have an account there too.”

  In Hatchards Wilderness picked out half a dozen Penguin and Pan paperbacks, not quite at random—Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, John le Carré—charged them to Alleyn’s account and had them mailed to Masefield. Feeling wicked he signed the card, “Happy days. Your old pal, Leonid.”

  Then he sat in a caff in Swallow Street. Summoned by Bells was a quick read. By the time he got back to Foulkes and Fransham he’d read most of it. This wasn’t an England he’d want as his “souvenir.” For all the beauty recalled, for all the musical measure of his blank verse it seemed to Wilderness that it was an England, a childhood, that Betjeman had hated, a portrait of a nation rooted in cruelty—not the savage cruelty to be found in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky . . . a very English petty cruelty. It was Betjeman’s “Damn You England,” a title John Osborne had given to an open letter in the Tribune a few years back. Burne-Jones had all but boiled over in anger when Judy had read it out to him over breakfast.

  But Alleyn beamed with delight as Wilderness handed him the book, folded back the dust jacket and traced out the bells stamped in the boards with his fingertips.

  “You don’t know what this means to me,” he said.

  “You’re quite right,” Wilderness replied. “I don’t.”

  §140

  The suit fitted beautifully. Alleyn looked svelte. Looked younger. Smiling at his own reflection in the full-length mirror.

  Wilderness had bespoke suits. But he’d never been able to afford ­Savile Row. He had his made by Jakobson and Hummel in the Mile End Road—cheaper than Savile Row. Better than Savile Row.

  “A million dollars. That’s the cliché isn’t it?”

  “Eh?”

  “I feel like a million dollars.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Bernard. When I get my hands on my first million I’ll let you know.”

  Special Branch Nerk ground out his cigarette on the York paving and made a passable attempt at standing up straight.

  Wilderness sat in the back of the car with Alleyn once more, leaned over the seat and told Nerk, “The Belsize Park house.”

  Alleyn looked puzzled, turned his head as Wilderness sank back in his seat.

  “Not Heathrow, then?”

  “Sorry, Bernard. Not just yet.”

  Only when the Humber climbed up Haverstock Hill did the words “Belsize” and “Park” seem to register fully with Alleyn.

  “Oh,” he said. “Just another prison.”

  “No. A better prison. No goons. Your own lavatory. A morning ­paper. Decent food.”

  Standing on the pavement Alleyn said, “You know MI5 held me here in ’59?”

  “No. Does it matter? We just borrowed it from Five. They won’t be troubling you.”

  “Then why not simply leave me in the Scrubs?”

  “Because I choose not to. You can go back to the Scrubs if you wish. I’m not looking for gratitude.”

  “It wasn’t a complaint, Joe. I was just curious.”

  It was the same room. Redecorated in the interim, a tasteful, mute magnolia, and the boarded-up windows unboarded, if still locked, southern sunlight pouring in. More light than he’d seen in years, as though saved up and released in a torrent. Just for him.

  “You choose?”

  “I’m not going to debate this with you, Bernard. You’ll be here until I can get you to Berlin.”

  “How long?”

  “A couple of weeks. No more, I would hope, but certainly no less. There are things I have to do.”

  “Such as.”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Then perhaps a last favour.”

  “Betjeman was your last favour.”

  “But I shall have read the book by nightfall.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “We passed a library on the hill, perhaps you would be so kind as to enrol me.”

  Alone. Wilderness gone. Nerk bumbling with a tea
pot in the kitchen below. Alleyn sat on the bed and watched the sunlight play across the toes of his shiny black beetle-crushers.

  It was just another prison. It was a prison with a double bed. A bedside radio-cum-teasmaid. It was just another prison. And it felt so oddly like coming home.

  He kicked off his shoes, swung his legs up on to the bed. His ­bedroom—their bedroom—in Cholmondeley Road had faced south, southeast. One of the delights, perhaps the greatest delight, of a Saturday summer morning was to draw back the curtains and watch the sunbeams dancing in Kate’s hair while she slept. A Titian red that age seemed not to dim. He’d stare as long as he wished, or as long as he could, until the next greatest delight, his two daughters, burst in to wake her.

  Now he slept.

  Alone.

  Dreamt.

  Not of Moscow.

  But of Highgate.

  Of Titian hair and sunbeams.

  From the kitchen a waft of PG tips penetrated his reverie.

  But failed to wake him.

  §141

  Alice Pettifer called Wilderness.

  “Are you ever showing up for work?”

  “As you said, Alice, I don’t have an office, so I am working at the kitchen table. I have Joan and Molly in high chairs, so I believe we have enough for a quorum and in the event of an international crisis Molly can push the nuclear button.”

  “Ha bloody ha. Joe, I am looking at a chit for five hundred quid from Saint Edwin. He wants to buy a 1960 Mercedes truck out of petty cash!”

  “Give him the money, Alice.”

  “I can’t do that unless Burne-Jones signs off on it.”

  “He won’t thank you for telling him, you know that. He’s not interested in process or strategy; he’s interested in results. The last thing he wants is a field agent bringing him queries about petty cash. Just stick it in front of him and let him sign it. He won’t even bother to read it.”

  “Will I ever see the five hundred pounds again?”

  “If all goes well, Ed can sell the truck when the job’s done.”

  “Is this really necessary?”

  “Do we really want Masefield back? If it were up to me . . .”

  “OK, OK.”

  §142

  Swift Eddie called Wilderness.

  “Got the truck.”

  “Good man.”

  “I have a bit of a problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “Didier Pascaud insists on talking to you in person.”

  “I’ll give him a call.”

  “No. I mean in person. Face-to-face.”

  “Then I’ll get on a ferry later today. Pay, pack, and follow.”

  “Eh?”

  “Sir Richard Burton, our man in Damascus in God knows when. Left that message for his wife, the redoubtable Isabel, when he was recalled to London.”

  “What does that make me? The redoubtable Eddie?”

  §143

  Rue Perrée, Paris

  Wilderness met Didier Pascaud in a bar in the Third Arrondissement.

  “I assume that you want anything you say off the record?”

  “And so do you. Joe . . . I have done some strange things for you over the years . . .”

  “And I like to think I have been able to return the favour from time to time.”

  “But this is the strangest.”

  “I’m listening, Didier.”

  “Eddie assures me all this is legal.”

  “It is. I would not ask you to present yourself in your official capacity if it weren’t.”

  “But . . .”

  “But?”

  “I don’t know how to phrase this precisely in any language. There is honour at stake.”

  Wilderness just about had a handle on honour. The English version. The French version was close to unfathomable. It ran so deep, so deep.

  “The scars of war are still visible in my country. The English may trumpet Dunkirk and D-Day as great victories . . .”

  “Actually, Didier, Dunkirk was a great defeat.”

  “Bear with me . . . but they do not have to contend with pervasive notions like occupation and collaboration. To the English, war crimes happened on another continent—this one. We do not fight the Germans any longer, but we are still fighting ourselves.”

  “OK. I’m with you now. The wine . . . Dukas . . . Wölk . . . Treblinka.”

  “Yes. All of those things. And there’s something about the fact that it all revolves around wine—my country’s greatest asset . . . the soul of France is in her wine—that makes it all so . . . so questionable.”

  “Questionable? So what’s the question?”

  “Eddie clammed up on me when I asked about this Nazi, this man Wölk.”

  “He’s being discreet. Possibly too discreet. What do you want to know?”

  “That there is a possibility of some kind of justice in all this. That in giving the Russians ten thousand bottles of claret to get your man Masefield back we are not compounding an ancient crime of the occupation but bringing it to some sort of resolution.”

  “Dukas is dead. We can’t do a damn thing for him. And he has no family.”

  “Wölk.”

  “Wölk got justice.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “No trial, no public remorse?”

  “And no beating chests, no hair pulled out, no wailing women, no Greek chorus. He’s dead, Didier. I insisted on that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Yuri Myshkin pulled the trigger personally.”

  A pause. Didier cradling his untouched glass of claret. Warming on the palm of his hand.

  “Then, let’s drink to that. One less Nazi in the world. And let’s drink to Yuri . . . an old friend, an old bastard I had not thought of in almost twenty years.”

  A drink, another drink, and a third.

  Then Wilderness said, “I’m expected in Bordeaux the day after tomorrow. I’ve briefed them, but there are bound to be questions.”

  “Don’t worry,” Didier replied. “I’ll be there.”

  §144

  Paris to Bordeaux was an arduous drive.

  Six hundred kilometres.

  A truck with a top speed of sixty miles per hour and roads with a top speed of less.

  They took it in turns.

  Half an hour out of Bordeaux, Wilderness was at the wheel.

  “You know,” Eddie said, seemingly apropos of nothing. “I’m surprised there was no room to bargain.”

  “Not quite with you there, Ed.”

  “I mean . . . no deal to be done. OK, we get Masefield, but Yuri gets everything he wants. He gets Alleyn and we give him ten thousand bottles of wine.”

  In for a penny . . .

  “Not give. He’s paying us a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  “Current market value of the wine is just under a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I know. I checked with Christie’s. An average of £5 7s 6d a bottle. That’s roughly fifteen dollars. More than a tenfold increase on the 1934 price. Yuri will pay us the market price plus twenty per cent. Call it a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. That’s eighty-five thousand each.”

  “Stop the truck!”

  “Eh?”

  “Pull over. Pull over right now!”

  Wilderness braked and swung the truck into a lay-by with a screech and a spurt of gravel.

  Eddie leapt a little fat bloke’s leap to the ground, plumping down.

  Wilderness had little choice but to follow.

  “You wait till we’re ten miles from Bordeaux to tell me it’s all a fuckin’ scam? And then you let rip with your statistics, to dazzle me. Your missis was right. It’s in the things you don’t say . . . it’s in the fuckin’ spac
es between what you do say . . . It’s a scam!”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “Is this why Burne-Jones isn’t supposed to know?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Ed.”

  “Does Didier know?”

  “No. Didier would not understand. It’s not a scam. But Didier would not understand. He’s a policeman.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this back in England?”

  “Because you might not have set foot outside England. Ed, it’s not a scam. The beauty of it is it’s all legit. Wölk was the legal owner. He made the certificate over to me.”

  “Only because you had Yuri put a gun to his head.”

  “You think he’d have signed any other way?”

  “Put a gun to his head and pulled the bloody trigger!”

  “Telling me that won’t make me care, Ed. I told you. He had it coming. Rough justice, but justice all the same.”

  “Vengeance, more like.”

  “Vengeance and justice are not always the same thing, but they can be . . . sometimes.”

  “And the French bloke? Henri whatsisname. Where’s the justice for him?”

  “There is none. No more than there was in 1947. He was murdered. We just took out his killer. I cannot pretend that is justice for Henri-Pierre. Justice might have been coming home to find his sons alive and his cache intact. We can’t give him that. No heirs. No living relatives. We’ve known that for nearly twenty years. But that’s no reason to give his wine to the French government or to our government. Where’s the justice in that? They’re just taxmen. Little grey men in suits. And without the wine we can’t give justice to our little grey man—Geoffrey Masefield. That there’s profit in it is a pleasing coincidence. Ed, it’s seventy-five grand. Seventy-five grand that belongs to no one. If it’s a scam, it is the sweetest scam ever. No one gets hurt, no one gets robbed. And we walk away with eighty-five grand each. Are you really going to turn that down?”

  If Ed could have squirmed like a schoolboy caught scrumping he would have. His face, so plump, so amiable, was twisted into something Wilderness took for grief—grief at the death of his conscience.

  “I can’t bloody afford to,” he said softly. “You really are the Satan I should put behind me, aren’t you? Unlike you I spent the entire war in the army—not shinning up drainpipes and nicking women’s jewellery. Then a tour of duty in Intelligence in Berlin, from there to the Birmingham Police. I’d still be there; I’d still be a bloody constable in hobnail boots if Troy hadn’t rescued me. I’d never have made sergeant. And other ranks’ pay is bugger all.”