Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Of course.”

  “Just a milk-run of a delivery. Nothing too strenuous.”

  “Right.” I remembered the last time someone had described a job to me as a milk-run.

  MY BODYGUARD/CHAPERONE WAS a surprise. When I arrived at Central Station the next day I found the Farmboy waiting on the platform, a little overnight holdall beside his feet. We looked at each other and he smiled and nodded hello, and he never said a single word to me the whole time we were away.

  We went in through Ernshire this time. Again there was a succession of trains from Władysław, and the next afternoon we were leaving the station in Stanhurst, having, so far as I understood these things, somehow and without even noticing having crossed what the English called The Channel. We took a carriage outside the station and drove out into the countryside a short distance, then we dismounted, I paid the driver, and we climbed a stile and set out across a field.

  On the other side of the field was a line of trees. The Farmboy seemed to know the way. We walked through the trees, and a few minutes later the air smelled acrid and was full of noise and we stepped out into West London.

  I DIDN’T REALLY have a plan. The Directorate only allowed trusted officers to cross the border, and the Farmboy was there as much to keep an eye on me as to protect me. I didn’t want to do anything that might make them decide not to send me to Europe again.

  On the other hand, I had been out of touch for over five years. Baines and Bevan had planned this to be an open-ended operation, but I should at least try to leave a sign that I was still alive and functioning. To this end, I had sewn into my jacket a picture-postcard of the village green at Eveshalt, addressed to Baines’s home.

  I also had, in my travelling bag, a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied up with rough twine. It was heavy, but when I shook it nothing moved inside. It felt suspiciously like a brick, in which case this whole thing was a test and the postcard should stay exactly where it was, digging into my armpit through the lining of my jacket. There was no way to tell if anyone else was watching me.

  We took a bus into central London, and then another bus north to a place called Crouch End, not very far from Highgate. There was a chaotic little restaurant on the High Street, just by the Clock Tower. We went in and ordered coffees, sat with my bag sitting open on the floor beside the table. When we had finished, we left again. My bag was considerably lighter. I had never seen the package go, and I never found out what it was.

  Outside on the pavement, I said to the Farmboy, “Burger King?”

  The Farmboy smiled.

  WE ATE AT the same Holborn outlet that Lionel had taken us to all those years ago. The place had been redecorated but the food was the same. I was aware that the majority of Europeans looked down their noses at fast food, for either culinary or ideological reasons, but after five years of steak and kidney puddings and roast beef and boiled vegetables it tasted wonderful. The Farmboy evidently felt the same way; he ate two burgers and two large portions of fries and looked perfectly happy when he had finished.

  Afterward, we used the Underground. I still found it alarming and confusing, but the Farmboy seemed entirely at home in the maze of tunnels and rushing trains and crowds.

  We went down to Piccadilly, to a shop called Fortnum & Mason, where Michael wanted me to collect a parcel, already paid for and left for the name of Richards. Mr Richards’s parcel turned out to be a wicker picnic hamper the size of a small suitcase. I peeked inside and saw jars of pâtés and jams and something called caviar, tins of tea and coffee, biscuits in expensive-looking packets, and two bottles of champagne. In this spirit, I bought myself a packet of aniseed balls – you could get them in the Community, but they weren’t the same – and we caught the Piccadilly Line out to Heathrow and then a local bus to the border. No one saw us arrive, no one saw us leave. We had been in Europe for six hours and the postcard was still in my jacket.

  7

  WE SETTLED INTO a routine. Every week or so, Rafe came into the shop with a list of books he wanted and to see whether I had been able to find the ones from last week’s list. Usually, I had. Christine still looked at him with distrust, but he was paying well for his purchases and, from the number of well-dressed folk who started to drift into the shop, he was recommending us to his friends too.

  They were not the only new customers to start drifting in, and I found these people of interest. Academics, mostly. Tweedy and inoffensive, browsing the shelves, occasionally asking after some volume or other but mostly chatting in groups of two or three in quiet corners of the shop. After a few weeks, I got to know them by sight, and was on nodding terms with most of them and speaking terms with a couple. A casual observer wouldn’t have noticed, but I was there all the time, and after a while it seemed to me that their visits coincided with Rafe’s. It occurred to me that, if I were of a suspicious nature, it would look rather as if they were watching him. For his part, Rafe seemed to relegate them to the status of regular customers, just part of the furniture, if he noticed them at all.

  This was all very interesting and it was impossible to know right now how it was going to impact on the real reason for my presence in the bookshop. I’d mentioned Rafe to Michael, just in passing during one of our regular informal debriefs, but I certainly wasn’t about to let on why he interested me. The fact that he seemed to interest the academics as well was a complication I couldn’t assess yet.

  One evening, a month or so after the academics started to visit the shop, I was just tidying up for the day when one of them came over and said hello, a neat, sprightly old man with a goatee beard. We’d spoken a couple of times before, mostly about the weather.

  He said, “I noticed Professor Delahunty comes here rather a lot.”

  “One of our regulars,” I said cheerfully. “Likes his books, does the Professor.”

  “I’m George, by the way. George Quinn.”

  “Tommy Potter.” We shook hands.

  “I’ve got a favour to ask you, Tommy,” George said. “And please, you’re well within your rights to tell me to bugger off.”

  “Of course. How can I help you?”

  “Could I just have a look at the list of the books you’ve sold Professor Delahunty? Just for a moment?”

  I thought about it, on two levels. I thought about it as Tommy Potter, bookseller, and I thought about it as Tommy Potter, intelligence officer, and came to different decisions on each.

  I said, “I don’t know. It’s sort of irregular, George. We take care of our customers; they like people not to know their business.”

  George noted that this was not an outright refusal and said, “I won’t tell anyone else. And I’ll make it worth your while.”

  I thought about it again, but this time I only thought about it as an intelligence officer, watching one of his operations unfold like an unlikely flower.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “How does twenty sound?”

  “How does forty?”

  George smiled, and I smiled, and he gave me two twenty-crown notes and I got out the ledger and showed him Rafe’s page and he looked at it for a couple of minutes, then thanked me and left.

  AFTER THAT, GEORGE came over for a chat more and more often. Usually it was just harmless conversation about a book he was looking for – he was interested in Nineteenth Century Southern poets – but now and again, always in the evenings when nobody else was about, he wandered over to the desk and asked if he could have a quick look at the ledger. These requests were always accompanied by the production of two crisp twenties, which had been established as the price of client confidentiality at the shop.

  Eventually, these transactions grew into little exchanges of personal information. George asked about my politics, and I told him, truthfully, that I had none. He wanted to know how I felt about the Presiding Authority. He didn’t ask any of these questions straight out, but that was the information he was looking for. As I gave each correct answer, the questions became more strai
ghtforward, until one evening he asked if I’d like to join him and his colleagues at a nearby pub.

  So I wound up at the Dragon’s Head with George and four of his friends. The beer was excellent, the ham sandwiches less so. As well as George there were two stout quiet men who reminded me a lot of the Farmboy, in demeanour if not in looks, and a slight, willowy young woman named Patricia who had brown hair and startling violet eyes and who worked with George at the University.

  “Have you ever wondered what it’s like in Europe?” Patricia asked me when we were all settled and friends together.

  “Of course,” I said. “Hasn’t everyone?” Unlike my people, the people of the Community were aware of their origins. They knew Europe was just a footstep away across the border, but by tradition they were not allowed to visit. There was a general distrust of the European neighbour, an assumption that there was nothing there worth having anything to do with. Generations of Presiding Authorities and Directorates had bred the urge to leave out of the people of the Community.

  Patricia lowered her voice. “We were there two years ago,” she said. “George and I.”

  I felt my heart thud in my chest. I had an enormous pity for these people, with their trusting nature and their appalling security; if Michael hadn’t wanted the entire group rounded up wholesale, Patricia and George would have been in one of the camps out to the East right now.

  “Field trip,” she went on. “We were buying books.” She gave me a little ironic smile. “Keats, Wordsworth, Tom Paulin, Sylvia Plath, Ginsberg.”

  “‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed’,” said George.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. They sent us with a guide. He blindfolded us before he took us across the border, so we don’t know where it was.”

  “We want to go back,” Patricia said.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I said.

  George sat back and took a drink of his beer and looked at me. Then he said, “Professor Delahunty knows how to cross the border.”

  “Some people think he’s European,” Patricia put in. “They’ve come over before, and stayed. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “It’d be the first time any of them married into a Founding Family and wound up with a research post,” George grumped.

  “I didn’t realise they’d come here,” I said.

  “It’s been happening for centuries,” George said. “They come here, but we can’t go there.”

  “But the border’s guarded...”

  “The border is everywhere,” Patricia said. “It’s not just a line on a map, it’s discrete places, points of contact between us and them, pathways, railway lines, rivers. Nobody knows how many there are.”

  Officially, the Directorate knew how many there were, but off the books even they admitted that they couldn’t be certain they knew of all of them. I said, “So where does Professor Delahunty come into this?”

  “Well, you see,” said George, “it’s a little bit delicate for us to approach him,” which I thought was one of the larger understatements I had ever heard. George clearly thought I was a bit stupid, but I was way ahead of him. The bastards wanted to use me as a cut-out, a safety valve between them and Rafe. If anything went wrong, I would be the one who got blamed.

  “I’m dying,” said Patricia.

  I blinked at her.

  “It’s a cancer,” she told me. “Not aggressive, but I’ve only got a couple of years, at best. Nobody here can treat it.”

  “And you think they can in Europe?”

  “Their medical science is years ahead of ours,” George said.

  It was obvious they had never had any experience of the National Health Service. They must have thought you could just walk into a hospital in Europe and be treated for anything, without identification or social security credentials or money. It was lucky I couldn’t ask how they expected to get Patricia a National Insurance number and a GP, because their answer would probably have boggled my mind. I’d been treated free of charge in Nottingham, but that was because I had been an accident victim. A course of cancer treatment was something entirely different.

  “So you want me to ask Professor Delahunty to take you across the border, right?” I asked, playing the part of a not-very-bright shopkeeper.

  “Not in so many words, no,” George said. “And not straight out like that. You have to approach it sort of edgeways.”

  “We’ll take you with us,” Patricia said.

  “I don’t want to go,” I told her.

  “Oh, come on,” George scoffed.

  “I’ve heard terrible stories about it,” I said. “Wars, crime. I don’t want anything to do with all that.”

  “We’ll pay you for your time, then,” George said, and I decided I didn’t like him at all. I didn’t like people who thought they could buy other people; I’d seen enough of them in my time here.

  I thought about it, and named a price that was high enough to rock George back in his seat.

  “Now hang on,” he protested quietly, and I saw the two silent men start to tense up. George made a discreet sign with his hand, and they relaxed again. He said to me, “That’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s a lot of risk I’m taking, if the Professor decides to take my questions the wrong way,” I said, cementing my image as a venal tradesman. “And what’s to stop me going straight to the Constabulary when I leave here?”

  Patricia reached out and put a long, slender, pale hand gently on my arm. “You won’t do that, though. Will you?”

  “No, miss,” I told her. “No, probably not. But it is a big risk.

  She squeezed my arm gently. “Then you’ll try? For me?”

  I looked into her eyes. She had beautiful eyes, and I saw fear there, and hope, and a terrible loneliness, and I said, “Yes, miss. I’ll try.”

  “SHE’S NO MORE got cancer than I have,” Michael snorted. “Bloody woman.”

  “They seem sincere, that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Oh, of course they’re sincere. That’s why we’ve been watching them.” He looked around the park. “Ah, perhaps we should just let them go, eh?”

  “Can we do that?”

  “It would make everyone’s life more simple.”

  “It would certainly make my life more simple.” The situation was not without its amusing side. The Security Service had sent me to spy on the Community. In turn, the Community had sent me to spy on its citizens. And in their turn, the citizens were asking me to spy on a European. All I needed now was for Rafe to ask me to spy on the Security Service and my life would be complete. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Delahunty has connections. Not just through his wife, either. He did a lot of research work for us when he first came here; he’s well-regarded by the Committee, they won’t be pleased about him being mixed up in this, however tangentially.”

  “He’s not under suspicion, though. The dissidents just want me to ask for his help.”

  “He’ll report you the moment you ask him,” Michael said. “You’ll be arrested and we’ll have to arrest the others. Damn.” He grimaced. “We haven’t identified them all yet; the ones we don’t get will just scatter.” Michael was a keen gardener; he knew the importance of not only getting rid of weeds but their root systems as well.

  “So tell him. Make him aware of the operation. You don’t have to tell him who I am, just say someone’s probably going to approach him about crossing the border and everything’s fine and you have it all under control.”

  Michael presented a fair facsimile of an agony of indecision before shaking his head; he’d already decided what to do, of course. “No,” he said. “The less people know about this, the better. I’d rather take our chances.”

  I said, “You don’t think some of the Committee are involved in this, do you?”

  “The Committee have access to the maps,” he said. “Half of them have been to Europe at some point or ot
her. If they were mixed up in it, George and poor sick Patricia wouldn’t be approaching Delahunty.” He looked at me. “Ask him. It’s a step towards establishing your bona fides with the dissidents; if the wheels do come off, we’ll just arrest the ones we know about and see if anyone else makes a run for it. Bloody operation’s been running long enough as it is. What are you thinking about?”

  I was mentally making a list of the number of ways in which this whole thing could go wrong. It was a long list.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’ll be glad when this is all over.”

  “Me too, old man,” he said. “Me too.”

  7

  THE WHOLE THING had started with a walk-in, someone approaching the Directorate out of the blue with information about a dissident group centred around some of the Arts Faculty staff at the University. The Directorate had already made its own inquiries and identified a number of persons of interest and had been keeping them under surveillance for some months before Michael called me in for a chat.

  “There’s some evidence that they’re going to start using a bookshop on Poe Street as a rendezvous,” he told me. “You know about selling books, don’t you.”

  “I’m hardly an expert,” I protested.

  He waved it away. “You’re a quick learner. All you have to do is be there, anyway. Get close to them, see what they’re planning. I’ve had a word with the editor of the Intelligencer and let him know you’re taking a bit of a sabbatical.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Don’t be insubordinate, there’s a good chap.”

  I contrived to look grumpy.

  “It’ll all be over in a couple of weeks, anyway,” he said.

  But it wasn’t over in a couple of weeks. Either Michael’s intelligence was incorrect, or the dissidents had decided not to use the bookshop immediately, but I waited months for them to turn up.