The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “And now you’re paid on par with a Chief Inspector. And that’s not down to Troy. That was me. Ed, when will we ever get our hands on a pot like this again?”

  “Dunno. Every time we got close to it in the old days it seemed to slip though our fingers.”

  “Not this time.”

  “What’s different? It’s you, me, and Yuri . . . again!”

  “What’s different? No Frank. That’s what’s different. Ed, do what Yuri does. Look upon it as your pension.”

  “Pension?”

  “That’s what he’s calling it. He said, ‘you can’t eat medals.’”

  “We haven’t got any fuckin’ medals! If medals were grub we’d still be starving.

  “Joe, I’ve had nearly twenty years of living within the law. Nine of them as a Scotland Yard copper. Since 1956 the dodgiest thing I’ve done is place the odd bet with a kerbside bookie. Now . . . it feels too much like the old days. We’re Schiebers again. You say we’re operating within the law, we have diplomatic passports and the biggest diplomatic bag in history . . . so why do I feel like a Schieber?”

  “Get back in the truck and drive, Ed. You need to take your mind off things.”

  §145

  Lawton Frères Wine Merchants,

  Quai de Bacalan, Bordeaux

  Alexandre Lawton was, at first sight, nothing like his grandfather, Auguste. Thirty at most, as tall as Wilderness, with thick black hair combed back from his forehead and deep blue eyes. But his voice was the same, a voice that Wilderness could never imagine raised in anger—and his clothes were as elegant and as expensive. Just one of his cuff links would cost Wilderness a month’s pay.

  Pascaud made the introductions and he and Wilderness held up their identity cards. Wilderness handed him the certificate of ownership and the deed of transfer.

  Alexandre barely glanced at their ID. Instead he read the documents, and spread them out on his desk—the same desk Wilderness had sat at before in 1947. He placed the original deed of transfer bearing Henri-Pierre Dukas’s signature next them—like three cards dealt from the shoe in a baccarat game.

  Unlike his grandfather he chose to speak in French.

  “This appears to be all in order. But you will understand if I say I am baffled. You will understand if I say I am disturbed. The war is back. There are ghosts in the room. The war was my childhood. And to a child growing up in the war the war was total; it was everything. And just when I thought I might have escaped it . . . abroad in the sixties, an unimaginable decade . . . a new France . . . a new Europe . . . a new man when I look in the mirror rather than a frightened child . . . you gentlemen unearth it on my own doorstep. Burrow like rabbits into the depths of our caves. I say again, there are ghosts in the room. And one of them is Henri-Pierre Dukas. A man I scarcely knew. A man who vanished into nuit et brouillard when I was seven.”

  Wilderness thought he understood the musing, and he couldn’t hear a question. Hadn’t Nell said something almost the same twenty years ago? That Berlin was a city of ghosts? He wasn’t sure Pascaud had understood, but they’d agreed—he would stick to statements of fact, and if the arrangement did not proceed to a simple, quick compliance . . . Wilderness would do the talking.

  “I can’t pretend that this does anything for Monsieur Dukas or his family. Monsieur Dukas was a victim of the war. You should look upon Geoffrey Masefield as a victim of another war. A hapless victim who got caught in the crossfire, in a country he should never have set foot in, doing a job he was poorly equipped to do. We can save Masefield. It would be nice to be able to tell you that we’re all doing this for France but we’re not. We’re not even doing it for the West or the Allies or NATO. We’re doing it for one man. And if we don’t he’ll become a living ghost. The Lubyanka is full of ghosts.”

  Alexandre wasn’t looking at Wilderness as he spoke. He was twirling the certificate of ownership around on the leather top of his desk like a slow Catherine wheel.

  He stopped. Looked from Pascaud to Wilderness.

  “Had you said ‘pour la patrie,’ Mr. Holderness, there might have been a grain of poetry in it. ‘For NATO’ would have had none—none whatsoever. For the man? Well . . . I hope he’s worth it. Let us lay this ghost to rest.”

  So saying, he placed both hands on the desk, spread his fingers and gently slid all three documents towards Wilderness.

  “Shall we say nine thirty tomorrow morning? I am ready.”

  §146

  At 7:30 a waiter in the Hotel Arouet showed Wilderness and Eddie to their table.

  A large man was already seated, messily eating a large breakfast and scattering croissant crumbs across the tablecloth with the self-confidence of one who considers himself beyond reproach.

  “Sit down, boys, the coffee’s getting cold.”

  “Oh bloody Norah,” said Eddie.

  “Good morning to you too, shortstuff.”

  Wilderness said nothing.

  “Whassamatter, kid? Cat gotcha tongue?”

  Wilderness slid into the banquette.

  “What are you doing here, Frank?”

  “What am I doing here? Jeez but that is rich. Do you honestly think you guys could pull a stunt like this and me not get to hear about it?”

  Eddie turned his back and started to walk away.

  Wilderness said, “Ed! Half a mo. Just take a seat.”

  Eddie froze.

  “Ed. Please. Just sit down.”

  Eddie pulled out the spare chair and sat—silent in red rage. Frank was stabbing the air with his fork now, globs of scrambled egg launching into space.

  “Did you think you could call the Sûreté and me not get to hear about it? Do you think you can strike a bargain with Yuri Myshkin and me not get to hear about it? Do you think you can set up a hundred-seventy-­thousand-dollar scam and not fucking include me? You pair of cocksuckers!”

  The briefest hiatus—as though Frank had finally arrived at the insult he had intended all along. His punch line. He shovelled in more eggs, striving to combine his own indulgence with a gaze of unflagging reprimand for Wilderness.

  Eddie reached out. Put his thumb under the saucer of Frank’s café au lait and flipped it into his lap.

  Frank spat egg.

  “Jeezus H. Christ!”

  “You want to walk back into Joe’s life, that’s his problem, but I’ll be fucked if you’re walking back into mine after eighteen Frank-free years.”

  And he was gone.

  “What the fuck . . . the little momzer damn near scalded my balls!”

  Wilderness beckoned to a hovering waiter.

  “Deux cafés au lait, s’il vous plait.”

  Tossed Frank a napkin.

  “You asked for that. Now, mop up and tell me what you want.”

  “Jeez, jeez, jeez . . . who would ever have thought that worm would turn.”

  “Less of the worm. Are you done? Are you dry?”

  “No, you dumb fuck. I’m soggy.”

  “Just be grateful it wasn’t me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  Another pause for discretion as the waiter set coffee in front of them. When he asked if Frank needed any help, Frank thrust the sodden napkin at him and waved him away.

  “What do I want? I want the old deal. Full partnership. Fifty-five grand. Not a penny more, not a—”

  “OK. We both know where that cliché leads. What makes you think I’d give you so much as a nickel?”

  “Because I can think of a couple of ways I could really fuck this up for you if you don’t.”

  Wilderness could think of half a dozen ways Frank could fuck this up.

  “All right. But you’ll have to earn it.”

  §147

  Frank was still belching up his breakf
ast when Eddie backed the truck up to the Lawton Frères warehouse.

  It didn’t surprise him in the least not to see Alexandre—he’d said his piece. Instead two men in brown warehouse coats, one clutching a clipboard with a receipt for Wilderness to sign: “Her Britannic Majesty’s Representative”—he’d never be able to see himself as such. And a third at the wheel of a forklift—one hundred and twenty-five cases to a pallet.

  “Frank. Up top.”

  “What?”

  “Get up inside and stack. There are nine hundred cases and they’re not going to stack themselves.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “In Berlin you never lifted a thing. You never got your hands dirty. You want a full partnership? You get your hands dirty. So stack or fuck up the deal in whatever way your twisted imagination can come up with. There are no passengers on this trip.”

  “I don’t fucking believe this.”

  “Believe!”

  “OK. OK. I can muck in with the rest of the guys. Just fuckin’ watch me.”

  He slipped off his jacket, tossed it at Eddie, who let it fall to the ground. Then he got a knee above the tailgate . . . and then he got stuck.

  “Would it be beyond the two of you to give a guy a shove here?”

  Wilderness thrust at Frank’s backside and sent him flying into the truck head first, to roll on his back.

  “Sheeit!”

  “You ready up there, Frank?

  Wilderness could not see Frank’s face. From inside the truck his voice sounded both angry and plaintive.

  “You gonna make me eat shit, Joe? Is that it?”

  “If at all possible, Frank, at every turn.”

  §148

  “OK, Joe. You’ve had your fun. You’ve twisted Frank’s balls. He’s so keen to get a cut right now you could roll him in dog shit and he’d come up smiling. But it’s not going to last, is it? Frank hefting wine, Frank hefting anything is a one-off novelty. Any minute now he’ll revert to being the Frank we all know and hate.”

  “I’ve other uses for him.”

  “Like what?”

  “We’re in a truck, a fully laden truck. He’s in a Citroën DS. He can move much faster than we can. He can be at the Helmstedt border crossing hours ahead of us.”

  “So?”

  “Do you know how many vehicles use that crossing every day? Do you have any idea how many levels of inspection there are?”

  “I’m just a simple copper, Joe. Or I was till two weeks ago, and right now I wish I was again. No, of course I don’t bloody know!”

  “Four thousand eight hundred vehicles a day go down the autobahn. In order to do that, they have to pass West German Customs, West German Police, the Frontier Defence Force, the British Army and the British Frontier Service. That’s just our side. On the DDR side—”

  “OK. OK. I get it. What’s Frank’s part in all that?”

  “To have them all prepared, briefed by a smooth-talking CIA con artist may save a lot of explanations. I don’t want to get stuck in a queue while our own side argues the toss about our diplomatic immunity. Look at it this way. He’s an unscrupulous bastard, but right now he’s our unscrupulous bastard. An unscrupulous bastard with CIA credentials. Cuts a hell of a lot more mustard with the Germans than we do.”

  “And when he’s smoothed the way for us, charmed the German sparrows off the German trees . . . can I kill him?”

  “Only if you have a complete character bypass.”

  Eddie sighed, one last burst of defiance surfacing.

  “Can I go home, now?”

  “Knock it off, Ed.”

  “No Frank, you said. It was music to my ears. Yet here he is. How did he find out?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  §149

  It was twelve hours to Wiesbaden.

  Eddie was close to silent the whole way, taking the driving over from Wilderness at two-hour intervals with scarcely a comment.

  Wilderness began to wish he’d specified “a truck with a radio.”

  On long bus rides when he was a boy his grandfather had played a time-wasting game with him, usually rendered pointless by the old man’s inability to spell—“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with . . . ”

  He could not think of a pastime less appropriate to the occasion. And if he made a joke of it, penny-to-a-quid Eddie would not find it funny. He began to wonder whether the sole result of the venture so far had not been the death of Eddie’s sense of humour. That and the loss of twenty-five thousand dollars each to the deeply undeserving cause that was Frank Spoleto.

  §150

  Hotel Dannoritzer, Wiesbaden

  Frank did not appear at dinner.

  Wilderness walked around the car park. There were three Citroën DSs, none of them Frank’s. If he’d had enough and buggered off Wilderness wasn’t going to look for him and he wasn’t going to care.

  But he was there at breakfast—just like the day before, sat at the table ahead of them, at least one course and a messy tablecloth ahead of them.

  “Ed—you get clumsy with the coffee, so help me I will knock your bloody block off.”

  Frank loved English slang. Occasionally he got it right.

  Eddie blew him a raspberry.

  Wilderness said, “Where were you?”

  “I had business. You two clowns are not the only irons I have in the pot.”

  “By all means. Mix your metaphors.”

  “What?”

  “So you’re working another scam. I don’t care. Just get to Helmstedt before we do.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be there. Gimme an hour before you set off. I have to nip into Bonn.”

  “Nip?”

  “Sure. As in ‘nippy.’ It’s not much more than an hour from here. I have a couple of things to take care of and then I’ll scoot on over to Helmstedt and I’ll be all yours.”

  “Company things or Madison Avenue things?”

  Frank grinned, munched on his toast, and grinned.

  “What makes you think they’re not the same thing?”

  When he’d knocked back another cup of coffee and left, Eddie said, “Nip . . . scoot . . . ?”

  “What’s your point, Ed?”

  “It’s the vocabulary of the nursery. They’re words designed to convey innocence, to fool us into thinking he’s not chock-a-block with dodgy schemes and ulterior motives.”

  “I don’t care. He can be robbing the Federal Bank, assassinating Adenauer. If he shows up at Helmstedt he shows up and that’s all there is to it.

  “And if he double-crosses us this time, you won’t have to worry about shooting him. I’ll shoot him myself.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  §151

  Helmstedt was beginning to sprawl as Checkpoint Charlie had sprawled, but in a different way.

  Everything on the British side looked as temporary as it had in the ­forties—a deliberate avoidance of steel and concrete, of anything that might suggest that this crossing—Grenzübergang Helmstedt–­Marienborn—and the division of Germany might be permanent. Hence a string of wooden huts offering the illusion that the most heavily guarded frontier in the world was no more substantial than a World War II RAF base abandoned to the grass and weeds of the home counties.

  The merest glance across the border gave the lie to that: minefields, tank traps, concrete posts, barbed wire, the denaturised Death Strip, watchtowers to watch—and watchtowers to watch the watchers.

  Eddie slowed the truck at the first sign.

  Allied Checkpoint

  Alpha

  Poste de Contrôle Allié

  “I’ve got one question. Where is he?”

  “Count your blessings and swing left, Ed. Swing left. Military and dipl
omatic lane. Or we’ll be stuck in a German visitors’ queue for hours.”

  As they drove past a motionless line of Volkswagens, BMWs—every make the Bundesrepublik had to offer—a British Land Rover was speeding towards them. It swung sideways across them. Leaving rubber stripes across the tarmac.

  A man in what looked like Royal Navy uniform leapt out. Naval uniform, but not quite—something odd about it. An officer of the British Frontier Service, rank indeterminate.

  He took in the UK number plate and appeared to be reading whatever was written on the front of the truck. Wilderness had no idea what that might be. He hadn’t even noticed. And if he’d noticed he hadn’t remembered. It was just an anonymous second-hand truck.

  He opened the door and leapt down.

  “Are you blind? Military and diplomatic only. Not bloody plumbers!”

  The officer pointed to the script above the windscreen.

  Nev. Fountain & Sons

  Plumbers’ Merchants

  Guildford, Surrey

  Oh shit.

  “We’re not plumbers.”

  “I don’t care if you’re Thomas Crapper himself. Get back in line.”

  “We’re . . .”

  Wilderness handed him his identity card and the four pages of government guff covering the diplomatic bag.

  The officer shifted away slightly, read it with his back to Wilderness and, still turning pages, said, “Oh God. I hate it when you bastards turn up.”

  A Citroën DS roared past the truck and screeched to a halt next to the Land Rover.

  “Then here’s a bigger bastard for you.”

  Frank stepped out of the car. All suit and smiles.

  “Hi there. Good to meet you.”

  Good manners led the officer into a trap. Once gripped in a handshake, Frank would not let him go and steered him gently away from the truck into the pretence of shared confidences. He flashed his ID so quickly it was back in his pocket before the man could even react.

  “We’d greatly appreciate your cooperation here. Joint operation and we’d like to expedite. You understand? Expedite.”