Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  She had known him from school. She was taller than him then, and taller than him now. They were thrown together at school because the Smyth and the Capel breadwinners were away. Seemed natural for them to be close because their fathers were. In Brixton, the fathers shared a cell. In Wandsworth, the fathers were on the same landing. In Pentonville, the fathers had been in adjacent cells. Her father was a snatch man, his a driver. While the fathers tramped the exercise yard, together, the children were in a school playground.

  Lying in the darkness, Joanne felt her cheek and her teeth. Nothing broken but there would be a bruise, big and rich, in the morning.

  The first boy she had kissed had been Ricky Capel, tongues in mouths and him with smoother face skin than hers. The first boy she had had sex with had been Ricky Capel, her showing him what to do in her bed when their mothers were gone visiting. They had left school together, not a qualification between them, the only ones in their year who were not encouraged by the teachers to make something of themselves. She hadn't gone out with him when he'd been on the streets for thieving, but he'd talked about it with her and she'd told him where he was wrong and where he was right, and he'd listened. Natural that they'd be married. They were inseparable. Soulmates. His mother and her mother would have liked a church and a white dress. They'd done a register office, and then a reception down at the British Legion. 'I don't want nothing flash,' Ricky had said. 'I don't want nothing that draws attention. Just the Smyths and the Capels and the cousins.' The alliance her father had hankered after had not happened. Ricky had said her family were crap, couldn't keep their mouths shut, were losers. She had moved into Bevin Close, next door to his mum and dad and his grandfather. She was distanced now from her own clan, did not confide in them – would not tell them that he had hit her face.

  No tears, only the anger. She heard him pace below.

  She would not go down the stairs and tell him that the loss of a bloody necklace mattered not a damn to her, and she knew he would not come after her.

  She had been told by Sharon about the cat, had been told by Mikey about the arrest and the kicking of the detectives. Nothing surprised her now. She was a woman of intuition and intelligence. Might spend her days under the eye of her mother-in-law, keeping a house clean, cooking meals and not complaining if they were wasted because Ricky was not back when he'd said he would be, looking after her child, but she knew the weakness of her husband. Her own father had explained it years back: 'He'll go away, hazard of the job. He'll be put inside. Nobody stays out, not for ever. You got to put up with it, girl, like your mum did, like his. Actually, it'll be the making of him. A man who's not done bird isn't rounded off. Terrible pressure there is on any man the longer he stays out.

  Once you've done it, realized you can handle it – well, then it's a cake walk.' She had watched the swell of his irritation, like that pressure built, because he had not been inside… They didn't talk about life any more.

  He didn't bounce ideas at her, tell her what he was thinking, planning. They had nothing.

  His grandfather liked to come next door, old Percy did. Old Percy was the only one in the Capel family that Joanne now had time for. Made her laugh. Used to tell his stories and she'd end up fit to bust with her sides in pain from the laughter: how he'd screwed up, how he'd cocked up. But two years back, old Percy had told a different story. No weeping, no sentiment, but told with a cold rancour that didn't sit easily on a grandfather's shoulders. Winnie had died in '93, and she'd gone to the funeral – not married yet to Ricky but regarded as family A bloody awful day, cold and wet, and a hell of a turn-out for her.

  Two years back, on the anniversary, old Percy had called by. He'd have been driven that morning by Mikey to the cemetery and would have laid some flowers and had a quiet moment… Mikey had brought him back and old Percy must have made some excuse and come to see her. First he had talked about the girls who had fled abroad. Perhaps she'd encouraged him to talk, reckoned it was a therapy for him. No smiles that day, no laughter, only the story that had chilled her. He had done big bird, had done a war, and could tell a story. She had not known that a story could be so heavy with bitterness brought from a grave. 'You're the best thing that ever happened to him, love, not that he has the brain to know it. Don't know how you live with him. My Winnie couldn't stand the sight of him, reckoned the girls were right to get out – but she missed them. You heard about the cat? Yes? We were all frightened of him, what he might do… My Winnie was in hospital and sinking.

  Ricky and I went to see her. Ricky was all smarms, all comforting. You could see it in her face, she loathed him. He went out to the car park for a fag – or maybe to do a deal on his mobile. She hadn't much strength left. She said to me, "We should have drowned him at birth. That's what we should have done, Percy, drowned the little bugger. Drowned…" Last thing she ever said. She turned away, she coughed, she was gone… All that hate in her when she moved on – not right, is it? To hate when you're dying. You watch him, love.' Told the story once, and she'd shut it away, had tried to obliterate i t… But Ricky had hit her.

  He could yell, he could scream, but it wouldn't be her hand that reached out to save him. Lying alone in the darkness, in the quiet of Bevin Close, she wondered what, who, could drown him.

  'You all right, Polly?'

  'Fine, I'm OK, just fine.' She did not look up. She was bent over her desk and light cascaded down in a cone from the lamp and fell on the cheap little notepad with the wire coil binding it.

  'The photographs have gone, and your prelim report. Well received. So it bloody well ought to have been. Can't the rest wait till the morning? If not, can I get you a sandwich, some coffee?'

  The girls in the office, long gone home, had told her often enough that she allowed Justin Braithwaite, station chief (Prague), to load work on her as if she were a pack-mule. Because she did not confide, entertain them with the soap-opera of her life, they knew so little. After being dumped by email from Buenos Aires, work kept Polly Wilkins sane… She realized her rudeness.

  'Sorry. I'm grateful you called by Nothing, thanks. I want to go on hitting it.'

  'Just checking. Freddie's at the other end of the line, sleeping in. You can handle it?'

  'I can handle it.' A yawn creased her face and she giggled. 'I'll pack in when it's done.'

  'Goodnight, Polly.'

  He was gone, closing her door softly behind him.

  She glanced at her watch, and grimaced. Hadn't realized it was deep in the small hours, that the embassy had emptied and the city slept. She heard him move away through the outer office and there was the bang of the grille gate closing on the rooms used by what Consular, Trade and Political called the 'dirty raincoat crowd'. At first, responding to the email, she had joined everything. Within a week she had signed up to art-appreciation courses, walking weekends and clay-court tennis lessons. Within two weeks, nursing a bruised brain, blisters and elbow ache, she had gone into Justin Braithwaite's office, spilled out the story of her broken relationship, had brushed away his offered sympathy and pleaded for work. Work was salvation.

  What she respected most about her station chief, he had not offered a homily on the effect of tiredness on the quality of performance; nor would he take personal credit for what she had achieved inside the smashed, ineptly searched cafe. How many in

  London, among those who had savaged the desk, would not have claimed a medal and citation for what she had found? Precious bloody few. It was an old work technique. After dumping the passports with the blown-up photographs on Justin Braithwaite's desk, and after writing up her report for encoding and dispatch and leaving it with him, she had gone on a search of every cupboard, drawer and storage box in their offices and in the secure section of the basement they used. She had been among old cobwebs, spiders' territory, and had finally retrieved the graphite powder.

  The notebook, of course, should have gone in a pouch to London. A courier should have been sent pell-mell from Heathrow to collect it, bag it, chain
it to his wrist, and fly it back for the boffins to handle.

  Not Polly Wilkins's way.

  Freddie Gaunt would back her and Justin

  Braithwaite had not overruled her.

  If she had not been hurt the way she had, belted, bounced off the walls like she was a rag doll, she would not have had that streak: bloody-minded awkwardness, her signature. She yawned again and felt the ache in her shoulders. A maxim of the Service was

  'Find, fix, strike, exploit'. She thought, if she could stay awake, she would have the means to exploit.

  The technique, using graphite powder – fine and black – was what they taught at the Fort down on the south coast. Recruits on the induction course, computer literate, grinned and patronized the instructor when he lectured on the use of graphite powder and told stories of how it had been used by old men, long retired, from the Service or the Soviet enemy or the east Germans. She had a double page of the Prague Post spread across her desk. On it was the first blank page of the notebook, where top sheets had been torn out. Difficult for her, in exhaustion, to keep her hands steady, but she lifted the sachet of powder and tilted its neck, then let the grains cascade down. God, what a bloody mess.

  She lifted the open notebook, hands shaking, shook it and let the powder run on the page, up, down and across. Then she spilled the mess on to the newspaper.

  She saw the writing, could make out the faint outline of the digits.

  She copied what she read in a wavering hand.

  A man had died that another might be given time to flee. A man was tortured and stayed silent that another's flight might be hidden. She saw them both: charred skull, bruised and bloodied features. She had respect for them… She would undo them, make the death and pain wasted. That was her work, done better because of respect.

  Polly studied the numbers, then her mind glazed and the sheet of newspaper careered up at her, and the powder was in her nose, eyes and mouth. She slept at the desk and the graphite – a weapon of the long-past war – smeared her cheeks.

  A hand shook his shoulder.

  Gaunt woke, startled. His arm was thrown out from the blanket and scalding tea slopped on to his chest.

  His eyes opened.

  Over him, trying to steady the mug, was Gloria.

  'Apologies if I frightened you, Mr Gaunt.'

  'God… what time is it?'

  'Two minutes after six o'clock, Mr Gaunt.'

  She was always so precise, what made her so valued.

  He reached up, took the tea from her and gulped.

  Now that he was awake, she switched on the light.

  Its brightness bathed him. He had slept only in his singlet and pants. She gazed at him with rather frank interest. He couldn't see why. He was skeletally thin, his facial features were drawn tight over his bones and his legs and arms were like fencing posts, but his shoulders were strong. Perhaps her interest in his white body, on which the sun was never permitted to shine, came from the absence of a man in her life. He would not have cared to list in priority the three features of her existence. Gloria, as he knew it, had her job, her self-appointed role of caring for Frederick Gaunt, and a spaniel, with the name C hung on a disc from its collar. Gaunt might come first or last, and did not ask. The tea cleansed his mind.

  He shivered. New regulations demanded money be saved – of course it should be: without money saved there would not be the resources to pay for bloody pamphlets on glossy paper, The goddam Secret Intelligence Service in 2010 – the central heating came on at seven, no longer at five. He held his spindly arms across his chest, not for modesty but for warmth.

  'What's in?'

  'Wilco's signal and her passports. Nothing after that.' Then the stern schoolma'am reminder:

  'Everybody has to sleep, Mr Gaunt – not just you.'

  He drank the last of the tea, then waved the mug towards his desk. 'I think I'd like those pictures up so as we get under the blighter's skin.'

  Off the bed. He padded to the door, retrieved his suit trousers from the hanger and slipped into them.

  From his desk cupboard he took clean socks, an ironed and folded shirt, a towel and his washbag.

  Gloria, the blessed woman, always made sure he had a change of clothes. He collapsed the bed, the blanket inside it, and took it to the little annexe off the office.

  Then he was off, his waistcoat, jacket and tie on his arm, shoes in his hand, to wash, shave and ready himself for the day with a cooked breakfast in the canteen far below.

  He saw the river traffic from the window and behind the capital city's waterway were the great buildings of prestige and government – any of them could be a target if the co-ordinator came this way.

  From the door Gaunt glanced back. She had already Sellotaped the blown-up picture – A3 size – from the Argentina passport to the wall and was tearing off strips to fasten up the photograph lifted from the Canada passport. Strictly forbidden to cover office walls with posters and images – interfered with the master plan of the contract interior designer. The faces, one bearded and one clean-shaven with heavy-framed spectacles, stared back at him, seeming to threaten him. Again, Gaunt shivered, but not with cold.

  He traipsed off down the corridor to the solace of the shower and war drums sounded in his ears.

  The light came slowly under heavy cloud, and he waited.

  The man did not go to the Florenc coach station for long-distance travel, or the principal rail terminus, the Mazarykovo Nadrazi, where the international trains left from. He was at a stop for a local bus that would take him only as far as the edge of Prague. His intention was to move away from the city in short, stuttered steps, not to use the coach station or any of the rail termini that he assumed would be watched.

  He had slept rough in the Mala Strana parkland, had not dared since his flight to find a bed in a hostel.

  Most of each day he had sat in the shadowed pews of St Thomas Church or St Nicholas Church or the Church of Our Lady Below the Chain, but for part of each of those days he had tramped the streets to learn.

  The flight had taken him up through the hatch above the apartment's kitchen, and for a moment there he had reached down and grasped the hand of Iyad, their fists locking together. He had seen into the eyes of the bodyguard and had known that time would be bought for him – an hour, half a day, a day and a night. He would not waste the time. He had crawled, slowly, over the common wall between the buildings, scraping himself into the small space between masonry and roof tiles, and gone at snail's pace over the rafters and had heard TVs, radios and voices below him… and over another building's wall, and across more rafters.

  The last had been the hardest. There he had had to scratch out the mortar, centuries old, that held the wall's stones, remove them silently, pray to his God that he did not make a disturbance. He had lifted a hatch, had found himself above a staircase, had dropped down, replaced the hatch, gone down the steps and out into the night air. A policeman had shouted at him: language not understood, gestures clear. The alley was evacuated. Residents should be gone. Why was he so late? His God had walked with him. A woman came behind him and held a pet, a lapdog, in her arms, and the policeman was distracted. The man thought she had slipped back in to retrieve her dog. He had drifted into the darkness.

  An artisan, with his work bag on his shoulder, and his head protected against the rain by a cap, broke open a chocolate bar, ate two squares and gave one to the man. They smiled at each other. They were the only two persons waiting for the first suburban bus.

  He had gone to the cafe near the coach station. He had seen the vans parked, had stood among the watching crowd and heard the smashing destruction of the search. He had seen the cafe owner led away, cowed and handcuffed. The crowds stayed to witness the show, but the man had sidled away. He had been alone in a strange city with only a tourist street map, a passport and the name of the contact he must reach.

  He had thought the vigilance, once the apartment had been stormed and once Iyad's defence was ended
, would be greatest in the first hours. He did not know if they had his face or the identity of the passport against his chest.

  The chocolate made his stomach growl with hunger, but the bus came in the early thin light and the man travelled on through empty streets, past concrete tower blocks and by old factories, resumed his journey to the north and the coast.

  When the torments came worst, when he could not sleep, Oskar Netzer would give up the fight. He sat on the sandbank, the first beat of the low sun on his back, and watched the strand across the channel between Baltrum and the greater island of Norderney.

  For the dawning of those days when he was persecuted by memories, he dressed in the gloom of his house, kicked his feet into his boots, and searched for salvation. The torments that afflicted him had killed her, his Gertrud, as surely as if he had bent over her while she slept and smothered her with a pillow.

  She was dead, buried in the cemetery at Ostdorf, because of him, as if by his hand.

  The water in the channel rippled and dazzled and sunbeams danced on the waves. On the strand beyond, uncovered and wide because the tide was out, lay an old wreck whose hull was rusty dark and had sunk into the windblown sand. Near it were the seals, bulls and cows, who had not yet produced pups. After his love of the eider ducks, Oskar revered most the seals, Phoca vitulina, great gentle creatures.

  The island still slept and the visitors had not yet come, and watching the seals at dawn gave him slight respite from the agonies of the past. The words written on the sheet of paper by his uncle, Rolf, stayed with him, as clear as they had been on the day he had heard them read in the lawyer's office – and the pain he had run from, had not escaped.

  The Deposition of Rolf Hegner – the story of my guilt for which I expect to burn in hell. Those who have given me undeserved love should know the truth of me.

  In 1941 joined the Schutzstaffel. Because of the problem of fallen arches in my feet I was not sent to a combat unit, but was posted to the concentration camp at Neuengamme. I worked there as a driver. I took prisoners, many of them foreign resistance fighters from France, Holland and Scandinavia, to work on building projects outside the camp and to dig from the clay pits for the lining of canals. After the firestorm raids of the British and Americans on Hamburg, I drove prisoners to the city for clearance and for the excavation of the mass graves for citizens at Ohlsdorf cemetery.