Artillery of Lies

by Derek Robinson

  “Oh dear,” Luis said. The canary was back in the birdcage and he had canary-shit over both his hands. All the optimism drained out of him and despair galloped in to fill the space.

  “We need to know,” Canaris said.

  With every fresh hand-hold, fresh soot fell on her arms and head and, sometimes, hit her in the face and mouth. She spat it out. The stuff felt disgusting—powdery yet greasy—but it didn’t taste too bad. After all, what was it? No different from burned toast. At least her eyes were safe. It was odd that she kept them tightly closed behind the blindfold. Enhanced the sense of feel, perhaps.

  The first five or six feet were easy. Her fingers found new places to grip, her feet moved and clamped, moved and clamped. Then the chimney narrowed again. She hung by her arms and tried to reach new places to press her feet against, and she banged her right knee on the stonework. She scrabbled about and managed to secure her right toes in front and her left heel behind, but she was gasping for breath and her arms felt like old string. She rested them and wondered what her Californian boyfriend would have done now.

  In fact there was no alternative. Her toes were beginning to stiffen and her heel was slippery with soot. “Move, Julie!” she said. “Shift your butt.” The words echoed gloomily. She put her fingers to work, and climbed.

  The chimney continued to narrow. She was bumping her elbows and shoulders and her backside, and her knees were losing skin. Should have bandaged them. Too late now. The hand-holds were getting worse: smaller and tighter and further apart. What if the damn chimney poked up high in the sky? What if it came to a point? She searched with her toes, twitched her hips, gained a few more inches and both her shoulders rubbed against stone. This felt like the end of the road. It also felt like sweet fresh air: something pleasant was blowing in her face. She released one hand and groped. Her hand went through a hole. She clung to the edge of it and used the other hand to drag off her blindfold. The moon glared at her.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that she was looking at it through a six-inch-square gap in some sort of elaborate chimneypot.

  After she’d got some strength back she hit the chimneypot as hard as she could with her fist, and hurt her fist. That chimneypot was built to withstand hurricane winds. Weary American ladies could pound it day and night and it wouldn’t budge.

  It was easier to climb down without the blindfold; easier, that is, until the chimney really widened and the sole of one foot, slick with soot, lost its grip. The sudden strain was too much for her overworked fingers and she fell six feet on to the chair and its stack of drawers. Pain blazed in a dozen parts of her body. She lay in the wreckage, looking up through her tears at the glimmer of moonlight high above.

  “Need to know,” Luis said quietly. “Need to know, need to know.” He did a bit more earlobe-tugging.

  “Garlic is dead,” the first voice said. “Secrecy isn’t going to protect him. Or her. Is it?”

  “I’m not so sure. Appearances can be deceptive.” Luis had no idea what he meant by that.

  “The appearance of death? Or the appearance of Garlic?”

  “I think he means the appearance of loyalty,” Christian said. “That is certainly deceptive.”

  The moon had risen; Luis could make out the soft outlines of the figures on the terrace. “What I mean is,” he said, “people are not always what they seem. Brigadier Christian, for instance, turns out to be Commodore Meyer. Or is it the other way round?” He spread his arms, the picture of innocent bewilderment. “Whom should I trust?”

  “Trust me,” said the first voice. “And stop waffling.”

  “You want the truth about Garlic”

  “Without delay.”

  “But which one? That’s the difficulty.”

  “You mean there is a second Garlic? We killed one and you met the other last week? Fine. Tell us about the other. All about the other.”

  “No, no, no.” Luis shook his head, like a piano teacher whose pupil keeps missing the B flat. “There isn’t another Garlic. There are six other Garlics. You shot the seventh.”

  Utter silence.

  “One for every day of the week,” Luis said. “Except Sundays, thanks to you.”

  This no longer had anything to do with the great big war. It wasn’t even part of the contest between the Double-Cross System and the Abwehr. Now it was just Mrs. Julie Conroy versus The Room. She hated its blank, silent stupidity more than the people who had shut her inside, and she was going to get out if she had to chew a hole through the wall.

  The skylight looked easier.

  She dragged the bed to the middle of the room and stood the chest of drawers on top of it. The chest was less than steady: the mattress did not make a solid base. There were two chairs. She stood one of them on the chest. Its legs reached to the very edge; there was nothing to spare. If it slid an inch it would fall.

  That left the second chair. Fix the second chair on the first and it just might add enough height for her to stand on top and reach the skylight. Unfortunately their design made this impossible: the legs splayed out too much, they contained too many struts and braces in awkward places. “Come on, you little bastard, help me,” Julie urged as she stood on the bed and struggled. The little bastard refused to help and the whole heap of furniture wobbled. “Sweet suffering Christ!” she said, and gave up and got down before it all collapsed. Then, in a fit of fury and frustration, she seized the bed and tipped it, and spilled her gimcrack creation all over the floor with a gratifying crash.

  Nobody came to investigate. Nobody cared.

  The mattress had fallen off the bed.

  The bed had a wooden frame that held together a strong wire mesh with the help of a lot of little springs around the edge. Its legs were very stubby and attached exactly at the corners.

  Julie sat on the floor and picked bits of soot off her arms and legs while she thought. Her hair was full of the stuff; it was in her ears, up her nose … She was wearing her slip, which was torn and filthy; bits of her body must be cut or bruised because they made her wince when she accidentally touched them. It was all irrelevant. Only escape mattered. The bed must be six feet long. Six feet: that was more than half the height she needed.

  She shoved the wreckage to one side and stood the bed on its end. Its little legs held it perfectly vertical.

  By now she was getting to be an old hand at this escaping racket. She looked at the bed and worked out in her blackened, battered head that if she climbed up one side—the side with no legs—her weight would pull it over. But if she went up the side with the legs sticking out she might get to the top.

  The wire mesh did her toes no favors but as long as she kept going the pain never caught up. She got to the top and sat shakily on the wooden frame. It was a hell of a view. When her feet had forgiven her, she brought them to the top and, slowly and carefully, she stood. Her head was level with the bottom of the skylight. She could see out. It was a fine, moonlit night. She could see the sky and the stars and the steel clasp on the outside of the skylight and the padlock through the clasp.

  She went back down, got a shoe, climbed up with it in her teeth, and attacked the glass with the heel. After a couple of minutes her arm was exhausted and the glass had lost a very small chip. It was too bad to be true. The moon had risen in the sky. She looked hard at the place she had chipped and the moonlight showed her a fine filament of wires crisscrossing the glass. No way out here. She was so weary that on her way down she lost her balance and fell, but she landed on the mattress, so it scarcely hurt at all.

  “Seven sub-agents,” Christian said, his voice stretched with disbelief. “All called Garlic”

  “Well, you didn’t really think I got all that intelligence out of one person, did you?” Luis said. “Good gracious, no. Garlic One was my first sub-agent in Glasgow, and jolly good she was too, but when she had to sit her medical exams she introduced me to Garlic Two.”

  “And what does Garlic Two do?”

  “Works for
the railways. Manager. Arranges troop trains. Key man.”

  “Garlic Three?”

  “Tugboat captain. I recruited him. Daughter got made pregnant by an American soldier. Very bitter.”

  “Garlic Four?”

  “Pest control officer, gets him into all sorts of offices. Five is a woman typist for the Army, Six is a crook. Steals documents. God knows which Garlic your gangster has shot. I only hope it’s not Garlic Five, she’s just got promotion, works for a lieutenant-general now, if you’ve shot her he’ll be heartbroken, they were starting to be really close friends if you know what I mean—”

  “We killed Garlic One,” the first voice said. “We killed the Venezuelan medical student.”

  Luis yawned, and rubbed his eyes. “Do it more often,” he said. “She looks very well on it. I told you she’d moved to Cambridge, didn’t I? Works for Churchill’s heart specialist now. Clever woman. Should go far. No, I bet you shot Garlic Five, and she’s irreplaceable.”

  “You’re lying,” Christian said. “Give me one reason why our agent might have shot Garlic Five instead of Garlic One.”

  “Garlic Five moved into Garlic One’s flat when Garlic One went to Cambridge,” Luis said. “And now there’s blood all over the carpet. Sloppy. Very sloppy.” Watch it! he warned himself. You’re getting so you couldn’t tell the truth if you tried.

  Forget the chimney. Forget the skylight. The room had no windows, no ventilation grills, no secret trapdoors under the carpet. It was a stone box with a door, and the door was solid mahogany with heavy brass fittings. Julie Conroy had hit it with the chair and she had bust the chair. Forget the door.

  She lay on the mattress, staring at the light fitting and hunting for the solution that must exist; otherwise she was beaten. Not the chimney; not the skylight. It must be the door, which was locked from the outside and couldn’t be broken down from the inside. Given those facts, escape was obviously impossible.

  So get out and find some new facts, she told herself.

  Well, there was the mirror. Smash that and you’ve got a cutting edge. Anything you can think of that’s worth cutting? No.

  So.

  The bed had lots of metal bits—springs, wire mesh. Rip a bit off, straighten it, pick the lock. She rolled on to her side and looked at the lock. Massive. Poke a wire in there and the lock would eat it for breakfast and belch in your face.

  Wash-basin?

  Turn on the taps, flood the room, sooner or later someone would see water pouring out under the door and do something.

  Like what?

  Like open the door and reproach her with a straight left to the chops.

  Which were already cut. Her lower lip felt as big as a banana.

  Light fitting?

  There was electricity waiting up there. An invaluable aid to modern living, so the power companies said. No lightbulb should be without it. Julie stared at the lightbulb until its glare was imprinted on the backs of her eyeballs.

  She looked at the door and saw it through a kaleidoscope of red and purple and green. She looked back at the light. How far? Twelve, thirteen feet?

  The springs that attached the wire mesh to the frame of the bed would not come off. She damaged a couple of fingernails wrestling with them before she quit and bashed the frame with the chest of drawers instead. This took all her strength, hoisting the chest and then bringing it crashing down so that an edge hit the frame midway between its legs. After three blows it cracked. The effort left her slightly giddy. She sat on the floor, sucking in deep lungfuls of air until she felt strong enough to stand up and try again. She managed one more attack with the chest; then her arms refused. She put her shoes on and jumped on the bedframe repeatedly until it snapped.

  That took the tension off the springs, and off the wire mesh. She undipped all the springs down two sides. The wires zigzagged, interlocking to make a wide diamond pattern. It took five finger-bruising minutes to extract three bed-lengths of wire: fifteen or sixteen feet in all. She hooked them together and wrapped one end round the brass door knob. She took the other end, stood on the chest, and wound it around the flex above the lightbulb, leaving a foot of wire to spare.

  She got dressed, thinking hard about all the high-school physics she had forgotten. She took a thin strip of bedsheet, soaked it in water, put it in her pocket, dried her hands. She turned off the light. The moonlight let her see enough to get back on the chest and, with her handkerchief, remove the lightbulb. She made a hook out of the end of the wire and shoved it deep inside the socket. Then she stuffed the wet bit of bedsheet all around it and rammed the cloth home. Water dribbled down her thumb.

  She eased herself to the floor. She put the plug in the wash-basin and turned the taps full on. She found the surviving chair and carried it to the light switch, taking care to avoid the loop of wire. She stood on the chair. After a while, water began to lap over the wash-basin and spread across the floor. She put her finger on the switch.

  “All right,” said the first voice, “let’s put Garlic aside for the moment.”

  “I thought you’d already done that,” Luis remarked.

  “You arrived in Santander alone. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not for long. One of your colleagues is here.”

  “No. I mean, not as far as I know.”

  “I assure you it’s true. I hoped you would have an explanation.”

  Luis was silent. Anything he said might be dangerous. He scratched his nose; that was safe. This interrogation was turning into an ordeal; he was beginning to feel mentally bruised.

  “I’m surprised you don’t want to know the name of this visitor,” the first voice said.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t told me.”

  “Mrs. Conroy,” Christian said.

  “Good God Almighty.” Luis didn’t need to fake his astonishment. “What on earth does she want here?”

  “You.”

  Luis put his head in his hands. Dismay struck hard. He felt like a juggler struggling with three oranges who suddenly finds a flaming torch added to his act.

  “She is very anxious to meet you,” Christian said. “Why is that?”

  Oh Christ, Luis thought, something must have gone horribly wrong, something really crucial … He raised his head but kept his fingers cupped over the bottom half of his face. “It’s an infatuation,” he said, making his voice as flat as a plank. “The silly woman thinks she’s in love with me, I can’t get rid of her. Everywhere I go she follows. She’s rich, she’s infatuated and she won’t listen. It’s like a disease.”

  “She’s also an American.”

  “But she suspects nothing. I keep her at arm’s length. Further, if possible.”

  “Tell us more,” the first voice said. “Tell us everything.”

  *

  The water found the gap under the door remarkably quickly. Julie Conroy couldn’t see it going through but she could hear it seethe and bubble at the corners. The sound was very different from the steady splatter of the overflowing basin. Moonlight shimmered on the thin flood rippling across the middle of the room. The water had no way out except under the door, and soon it was more than the narrow gap could take. The seething and the bubbling were drowned.

  After that a surprisingly long time passed and nobody outside noticed anything. Julie worried, and then remembered: the room she was in was at the end of a bigger room, the one with a refectory table. So the water would have to escape from that room too, before it did her any good.

  Someone cried out. Julie took a deep breath, and flexed her fingers. A distant door banged, light drew a thin white line around her door, footsteps came splashing toward her, someone pounded on the door so violently that she flinched. He shouted, furiously, in German. Her mouth was bone-dry; she swallowed, uncomfortably. A key rattled, the door opened and the instant she saw the hand on the doorknob she pressed the switch. A bang like a small handgun seemed to shake the air. The door swung open in a rush of spray, dragging
with it a man bent like a bow, eyes gaping, fist welded to the brass knob, mouth screaming. By then Julie was out and running.

  Luis Cabrillo spoke for the best part of ten minutes about the sufferings of unrequited love as experienced by the loved one. He spoke with a mounting eloquence and, in the end, a passion that surprised him. “There is no escape,” he said. “One’s life becomes dominated by the woman. The harder you kick her the more she adores you.” He had second thoughts about “adores” but it was too late, he had said it. “It’s more like hero-worship than love,” he said. “Ten seconds in my presence is enough to excite her for a week. That’s what drives her to follow me everywhere. It’s a disease, an addiction, and I’m the victim too.” They heard all this in silence. “She has no scruples,” he said bleakly. I don’t know how many times she’s bribed her way into my hotel bedroom. I’m her obsession.” He took them on a pilgrimage of the hotels of Great Britain where Mrs. Conroy had pursued him, cornered him, offered him eternal devotion combined with immediate erotic gratifications of such variety and intensity that he would have had no strength left to serve the Abwehr … Luis took them from the Savoy in London to the Waverley in Edinburgh, the Rougemont in Exeter, the University Arms in Cambridge, and a dozen others before ending up back in London at the Dorchester. He had never seen them but he knew them well: they figured on the expenses charged by his network when they traveled on Abwehr business. “I can’t go to the police,” he said at the end. “For obvious reasons.”

  There was no response from the gloom of the terrace but he sensed that his remarks had gone down rather well. He slumped on his stool and tried to remember what it was like to enjoy erotic exhaustion in the arms of Julie Conroy. It had never slowed down his Eldorado work, he knew that. Quite the reverse. He missed that. He missed her. He wished very much that she would chase him everywhere, or even somewhere. Anywhere. Thus his mind was wandering unhappily through no man’s land when she flung open the door and staggered in, soot-blackened, wild-eyed, bloody-faced, her clothes ruined. “Holy shit,” Luis said. “Not you again.”