Riptide

by Lawton, John

  ‘You’re sure it was them?’

  ‘The scar on the blond puzzles me. It is a likeness this sketch, no more – it has not caught the man.’

  Stilton twisted his neck to look up at Cal. The first acknowledgement he’d made of his presence since they crossed the room.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said to Fish Wally. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes – it’s him.’

  ‘And the older one?’

  ‘Definitely him.’

  ‘Good – now, did you get the young one a room?’

  ‘Of course. I took him to my cousin.’

  ‘Your cousin?’

  ‘My cousin. Why else did you think I came to London? Did you think I washed up on these shores like Gulliver in Brobdingnag? Stilton, I told you last year I had family. I have a cousin Casimir – been here since 1932. A naturalised Englishman. He lets rooms. I send him people from time to time. Mostly I send him Poles. But we would consider any refugee.’

  ‘I’m not addled, Wally – I remember you had a cousin. I tried to find him three or four days back. I don’t recall that he let rooms.’

  ‘In those days he didn’t. He had one room on Fulham High Street. Things changed after the fall of France. You know that as well as I. We have lived in a new world ever since. The blond man said he was Czech. Sounded Czech to me. So we arranged to meet outside the London Palladium just after closing time. I took him round to Cash Wally.’

  ‘Cash Wally?’

  ‘Casimir – Casimir Wallfiçz. Hence, since yours is a tongue that must mangle what it cannot spell, “Cash Wally”. A man aptly named. A greedy man in every respect. A mean man. I live on the handouts he gives me and the work I can pick up.’

  Fish Wally held up his mangled hands.

  ‘You will appreciate, Walter, that is not much.’

  ‘And where does Cash Wally have this house of exiles?’

  ‘23b Marshall Street – the one in Soho. As you would say, spitting distance from the Palladium. I even know the room number. He is in four – the second-floor front.’

  Stilton quickly scribbled down the address.

  ‘And you Wally, where are you living now?’

  ‘I have a new room in Drury Lane.’

  ‘From Drury Lane you could shelter in the tube at Holborn or Covent Garden or the Aldwych. Why on earth would you want to come down here? If your cousin pays you a wage and you’ve a room of your own, why here, why down here with the drunks and the tramps?’

  Fish Wally looked off into the crypt – stared a moment at the ranting monologuist, then fixed his gaze on Stilton and sighed. It seemed to Cal that through his precise, cultured English he was talking to Stilton as though he were an exasperating child to whom he must state the obvious once too often.

  ‘I like it here. It reminds me of the last time I saw Poland. Before the Germans came we were workers. Teachers, engineers, policemen even. After the Germans came we were fighters. Then we lost. We became runners. Some of us ran all the way to Hungary, some of us ran all the way to the sea. I stayed with my unit. Thirty of us, retreating north, we tramped five hundred miles on foot, dodging Germans every step of the way. Those who fed and housed us the Germans shot – so we took no food or shelter. We lived off the land. And when the winter froze the soil, we starved. We sank to the bottom of Poland. And most of us died there, and some of us went mad. I saw half a dozen comrades turn mad as hatters. My last sight of my brother Stanislaus was him standing in a Polish forest ranting at the trees like that witless idiot over there. We became raggedymen, all of us raggedymen. We looked, we sounded, we smelt no different from this lot. We were the dregs of Poland, the last scum of a scorched earth. ‘And I alone am escaped to tell thee.’ To tell thee, Stilton, to tell the Squadron Leader. You took me in. England took me in. And I sank to the bottom of England. And so you find me here, as deep as I can go. And now it is England’s turn. Soon England will fall before the Panzers. Tell me, Stilton, how deep can you go? Try it – learn. I am here to replenish my sense of reality. I have lived too easy this last year or more. I have a pillow for my head and coins to jingle in my pocket – but I can go deep, straight to the bottom. One day soon we will all know this madness. How deep can you go, Walter?’

  Outside Cal said, ‘What was that about?’

  ‘My fault, lad. I shouldn’t have asked. Not as if I haven’t heard it before. It’s pretty much what he said day after day when we had him out at Burnham-on-Crouch last year. It’s . . . it’s Wally’s vision, I suppose. He’s cast himself as the wandering Jew. At least the Catholic version of it.’

  ‘Or Ishmael. “And I alone am escaped to tell thee.” That’s Moby Dick. I know, I skipped to the last page when I realised I was never goingtoget throughitall.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Stilton, a bit dismissively. ‘I’d just assumed he was quoting the Bible. No point in skipping to the end o’ that, is there? We all know how it ends.’

  § 40

  Marshall Street was as close to the heart of things as could be. Regent Street was only a few yards west, Oxford Street a few yards north. Stilton drove in silence. There was a new tenacity to the man – just when Cal thought they’d both been flagging, the prospect of getting close to the quarry had invigorated him. He wished he felt the same. He thought of the prospect of meeting Wolf again with a mixture of sadness and fear. He voiced none of it. Better by far to let silence prevail. Anxieties could only alarm Stilton – as would questions, and there was one question he was biting back. If he’d been the one to talk to Fish Wally, he’d’ve asked why total strangers came to him for help, and how they knew where to find him. Could be Fish Wally might not know the answer, but that did not invalidate the question. It nagged. It burst the logic of pursuit they had set up for themselves. Walter, after all, had been emphatic. Wally was clean. And if they really were only minutes away from catching up with Stahl, what did it matter?

  23b Marshall Street was a ramshackle house, but at least it still stood. Cal estimated it to be about as old as his country. They were probably laying these bricks as Jefferson pondered life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Three items currently in short supply.

  The door looked rotten, as though one good kick from Stilton would send it flying from its hinges. It wasn’t locked. Stilton pushed gently at it – a miasma of steam and frying fat filled the air.

  ‘Reckon we caught Cash Wally at his trough,’ Stilton whispered, and walked softly towards the back of the house with Cal treading on his heels. The trail of steam led them straight to the kitchen. It was a filthy parody of Edna Stilton’s kitchen. A big room, a centre table, strewn with dishes waiting to be washed. A patina of grease on every surface, into which months of dust had settled, giving solid, inanimate household objects an illusion of life – they had fur, so they might breathe or move also. In the fireplace stood a three-legged gas stove, propped up at its fourth corner by a pile of bricks. And on the hob a pan of potatoes boiled furiously, while three sausages nestled deep and crisp in a cooling pan of lard.

  ‘Good God,’ Stilton said softly. ‘How can he live like this?’

  ‘And where is he?’ Cal added. ‘It’s like we’ve pulled up alongside the Marie Celeste.’

  Stilton beckoned to Cal, they stepped into the stairwell.

  ‘Is our man likely to be hostile?’ he whispered.

  ‘Walter – I’ve no idea. He’s on our side. If that makes any sense.’

  ‘Thenweplayit byear.’

  Cal rather thought that this was what they’d been doing for a week already. He followed Walter up the stairs, step for step, pausing as he paused at every crack and creak to listen for any response. The house was deathly silent, much as Cal resisted the adverb.

  Stilton stood on the far side of the door. He rapped on it. There was no answer. There was no sound of any kind. He rapped again. Then he turned the doorknob and pushed. The door swung in onto an empty room, banging back against the wall. Cal put his head round the door jamb. Stilton leaned
in from the other side.

  ‘Bugger,’ Stilton said.

  They stepped into the room. In complete contrast to the kitchen this room had been cleaned and dusted. The bed stripped. Every surface wiped. You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass to know there’d be no fingerprints. Stahl had left no tracks. Not a scrap of paper, a burnt match or a bus ticket. It looked to Cal like a thorough, professional job. This man meant to vanish.

  All the same, Stilton peeked under the bed, opened the closet, pulled out the drawers in the dresser and uttered the conclusion Cal had reached minutes before.

  ‘He’s flown the coop. Not so much as a toothbrush or a pair of socks.’

  ‘Always one step ahead of us,’ said Cal.

  They heard the slam of a door downstairs. They looked at each other. Stilton all but tiptoed to the landing. The sound of someone banging about in the kitchen drifted up the staircase.

  Stilton put a finger to his lips and set off down the stairs. At the next landing Cal grabbed him by the arm and whispered, ‘Let me do it.’

  ‘It’s not Stahl – that would be too good to be true,’ Stilton whispered back.

  ‘No matter. We’re a team, aren’t we? My turn.’

  Stilton yielded silently and let Cal pass. Down to the ground floor on feet of glass. A gentle twist of the door handle, and a sudden thrust. A spidery, thin man in a tatty sweater, all elbows and knuckles, his hair standing up as though galvanised, was seated at the table in front of a plate piled high with mashed potato, the mash peppered with sausages – and a brand new bottle of the ubiquitous British brown sauce clutched in his hand ready to gloop.

  ‘Casimir Wallfiçz?’ Cal said breezily.

  The man stared at him, his hand still poised over the base of the bottle ready to give it the baby-bottom slap that would send the sauce gushing over his feast.

  ‘Wod?’

  ‘You are Casimir Wallfiçz, the proprietor of this establishment?’

  ‘Proprietor?’ Cash Wally said, a much more heavily accented voice than his cousin’s. ‘Proprietor be buggered. Is my house, I own it lock, stock and sausage. Now who you and what you want? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  ‘Calvin Cormack, US Intelligence. My colleague, Chief Inspector Stilton. You don’t mind if we join you?’

  Cal snatched the plate from him. Slammed himself down in a chair and said, ‘The guy in number four. He checked out. When?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  Cash Wally reached for the plate. Cal held it away from him at arm’s length, like a schoolyard bully teasing a child.

  ‘You know, Casimir, I think you know damn well, because you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who lets his lodgers do moonlight flits. Besides, you’ve two pound notes and a ten-shilling note stuck behind the clock on the mantelpiece, so somebody’s just paid their bill.’

  Cash Wally tried to look stubborn. He succeeded only in looking hungry. Cal picked up a sausage and bit into it. From the look on his face, Cal might just as well have bitten into Wally. It was agony, the tortured passion of the eating man.

  Cal wolfed the sausage. Cash Wally moaned out loud. His head shook from side to side, his eyes rolled. As Cal finished the second, Cash Wally beat the table with his hands and screamed.

  ‘No. No. Nooooooo!!!!’

  Cal took up the third sausage, worked it around in the neck of the sauce bottle, worked up a good head of gloop, and pointed at him with it. He dared not look at Stilton – so much as a smile from Stilton and he knew he’d corpse.

  ‘Wally. You’ve one sausage left. Now, you see this man here? This is Walter Stilton. One of the finest trenchermen in Scotland Yard. And he skipped lunch today. He’s a particularly hungry policeman. This is your last wienie. If you don’t tell me everything and right now, I’ll toss this wienie in the air and you’ll see the Chief Inspector catch it in his teeth like Pavlov’s dog. Then I’ll turn him loose on your mash. Very partial to a plate of mash, is the Chief Inspector. Now – the Czech guy. The guy who said he was Czech. When did he go and where did he go?’

  Cash Wally put his arms on the table, his head resting lightly on them. It seemed to Cal that he was stifling sobs.

  ‘He left about four o’clock this afternoon. I don’t know where he gone. He gave me extra ten bobs just to say he never been here. He said at the beginning he would not be here more than ten days. Believe me – I do not know where he gone.’

  Stilton spoke from the far end of the table, the brusque informality of the Metropolitan Police, the dull inevitability of procedure observed. ‘And did you tell the local nick you had an alien here?’

  Cash Wally raised his head, red of face, bleary of eye, ‘Aliens? We’re all aliens. What one more mattered more or less?’

  Cal didn’t doubt the sentiment – the pain which shot through his words, and the continental contempt for the very notion ‘alien’. He felt for Cash Wally – just a little – he also felt certain he’d got pretty much the truth out of the man.

  He looked at Stilton, wondering if he felt remotely what he was feeling himself. ‘Well, do you want this man’s wienie?’

  ‘No,’ said Stilton. ‘Let him have his banger. I think we’ve got all we’re going to get.’

  ‘SodoI.’

  Cal stuck the sausage back in the mountain of mash and shoved the plate towards Cash Wally.

  ‘Eat up, Mr Wallfiçz. Nothing’s going to happen to you. But you’ll do as the Chief Inspector asks, won’t you? You’ll report every new foreigner to the police. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ sobbed Cash Wally. ‘Foreigners. Police. Police. Foreigners. Right.’

  They sat in the car. Stilton seemed to be waiting for something. If only, Cal thought, for his own anger to subside. He’d looked grim from the minute they left Cash Wally’s kitchen.

  At last he said, ‘Y’know, I didn’t think you had it in you. But I have to say . . . well done.’

  ‘You don’t think that maybe it was a little cruel?’

  ‘No I don’t. In fact he’s lucky I didn’t wring his neck. We check the local station reports every morning. If he ran a straight house and listed his foreigners we might have picked up Stahl days ago. As things stand we’re back to square bloody one. I think I’ll send the uniforms round in the morning just to see he gets the message. No – you played the bugger just about right. I couldn’t have done it better meself. Mind, I’ve never thought of myself as a trencherman before.’

  He was smiling as he said it. The anger had passed. They were on level ground again.

  ‘So? What do we do now?’

  ‘What do we do now? We go back to Stepney and pray my missis has stuck summat tasty in the oven. You’ve had two bangers. I’ve had nowt.’

  § 41

  There was a note on the kitchen table. Cal felt Stilton must have seen it a few thousand times in the course of a thirty-year marriage – ‘Your dinner’s in the oven.’

  Stilton took a tea cloth, opened the lower oven and pulled out a dish half full of something indeterminate and crisp.

  ‘Dunno what it is,’ he said. ‘But it smells a treat.’

  ‘It’s fish pie, Dad.’

  Reenie Stilton appeared in the doorway, and eased her pregnant bulk onto a kitchen chair.

  ‘My Maurice got a twenty-four-hour pass, so him and some of his mates went fishing out past Southend somewhere. Came back with two lovely whole cod.’

  ‘Past Southend? That’s a restricted area.’

  ‘Leave it out, Dad. Who do you think Maurice is going to spy on? Old fellers diggin’ lugworm? You just be grateful you got some supper. Rest of us ate hours ago.’

  Stilton dished up. The greens were boiled to death and dried out, but Cal could have eaten seconds and thirds of the pie. It was fresh and spicy and it hit the spot. Stilton ate with a practised fork action that improved his elbow speed and upped his rate of consumption. He was scraping the dish before Cal was halfway across his plate. And he’d never thought of himself as a trenche
rman.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ Stilton said as Reenie plodded across the floor to stick the kettle on.

  ‘Went round to old George Bonham to give him a bit o’ cooked cod. Reckons he don’t eat proper any more. Then she was going on to Aunt Dolly. Her Dennis is constipated again, and you know they always ask for Mum like she was the family witch-doctor. She’ll dose the little sod.’

  ‘You know, Walter,’ Cal said, ‘the house certainly seems empty.’

  ‘Kev and Trev are back at sea. They sailed a day or two back, I should think. Rose and Tom have got their own home to go to, though most of the time you’d never know it.’

  ‘Tel’s gone down the Troxy,’ Reenie chipped in, leaving Cal to wonder what a troxy was.

  ‘And Vera’s gone with Mum.’

  Over the hiss of the kettle Cal thought he heard a motorbike engine putter down to nothing. The missing name from the list. He heard the door slam. A slight pause in the steps along the hallway as she hung up her helmet – then a rush of feet dancing down the stairs – and the kitchen door burst open. Kitty’s hair bounced the way it always did, springy on her blue collar. Her eyes flashed, the way they always did. If she was surprised to see him sitting there, she didn’t show it.

  ‘Late again,’ said Reenie. ‘I don’t think there’s any left.’

  ‘Wot?’

  ‘You shoulda got here on time. You’re on reg’lar shifts. You don’t work daft hours like dad. I reckon Captain Cormack’s had yours.’

  Kitty looked from Cal to her father to the empty dish and back again.

  ‘Wot? You greedy so and sos. You ain’t left me a mouthful!’

  ‘Manners,’ said Stilton, as Cal knew he would. ‘Captain Cormack’s a guest in this house.’

  ‘I know,’ Kitty sneered. ‘Mum thinks the sun shines out of his –’

  ‘Kitty!!!’

  Kitty turned her back on her father and wheedled her sister.

  ‘Reen, be a love and take a look in the larder. A bit o’ bread and cheese. Anything.’