‘It’s mined. The path is mined the whole way. Their territory begins at the foot of the hill.’ Leclerc turned to Leiser. ‘You start from here.’ He pointed with his shooting stick. ‘You proceed to the brow of the hill and lie up till take-off time. We’ll have you here early so that your eyes grow used to the light. I think we should go now. We mustn’t attract attention, you know.’
As they drove back to the farmhouse the rain came bursting against the windscreen, thundering on the roof of the car. Avery, sitting next to Leiser, was sunk in his own thoughts. He realized with what he took to be utter detachment that, whilst his own mission had unfolded as comedy, Leiser was to play the same part as tragedy; that he was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but at his own destruction.
‘Incidentally,’ he said suddenly, addressing himself to Leiser, ‘hadn’t you better do something about your hair? I don’t imagine they have much in the way of lotions over there. A thing like that could be insecure.’
‘He needn’t cut it,’ Haldane observed. ‘The Germans go in for long hair. Just wash it, that’s all that’s needed. Get the oil out. A nice point, John, I congratulate you.’
17
The rain had stopped. The night came slowly, struggling with the wind. They sat at the table in the farmhouse, waiting; Leiser was in his bedroom. Johnson made tea and attended to his equipment. No one talked. The pretending was over. Not even Leclerc, master of the public-school catchword, bothered any more. He seemed to resent being made to wait, that was all, at the tardy wedding of an unloved friend. They had relapsed into a state of somnolent fear, like men in a submarine, while the lamp over their heads rocked gently. Now and then Johnson would be sent to the door to look for the moon, and each time he announced that there was none.
‘The met reports were pretty good,’ Leclerc observed, and drifted away to the attic to watch Johnson check his equipment.
Avery, alone with Haldane, said quickly, ‘He says the Ministry’s ruled against the gun. He’s not to take it.’
‘And what bloody fool told him to consult the Ministry in the first place?’ Haldane demanded, beside himself with anger. Then: ‘You’ll have to tell him. It depends on you.’
‘Tell Leclerc?’
‘No, you idiot; Leiser.’
They had some food and afterwards Avery and Haldane took Leiser to his bedroom.
‘We must dress you up,’ they said.
They made him strip, taking from him piece by piece his warm, expensive clothes: jacket and trousers of matching grey, cream silk shirt, black shoes without toecaps, socks of dark blue nylon. As he loosened the knot of his tartan tie his fingers discovered the gold pin with the horse’s head. He unclipped it carefully and held it out to Haldane.
‘What about this?’
Haldane had provided envelopes for valuables. Into one of these he slipped the tie-pin, sealed it, wrote on the back, tossed it on the bed.
‘You washed your hair?’
‘Yes.’
‘We had difficulty in obtaining East German soap. I’m afraid you’ll have to try and get some when you’re over there. I understand it’s in short supply.’
‘All right.’
He sat on the bed naked except for his watch, crouched forward, his broad arms folded across his hairless thighs, his white skin mottled from the cold. Haldane opened a trunk and extracted a bundle of clothes and half a dozen pairs of shoes.
As Leiser put on each unfamiliar thing, the cheap, baggy trousers of coarse serge, broad at the foot and gathered at the waist, the grey, threadbare jacket with arched pleats, the shoes, brown with a bright unhealthy finish, he seemed to shrink before their eyes, returning to some former estate which they had only guessed at. His brown hair, free from oil, was streaked with grey and fell undisciplined upon his head. He glanced shyly at them, as if he had revealed a secret; a peasant in the company of his masters.
‘How do I look?’
‘Fine,’ Avery said. ‘You look marvellous, Fred.’
‘What about a tie?’
‘A tie would spoil it.’
He tried the shoes one after another, pulling them with difficulty over the coarse woollen socks.
‘They’re Polish,’ Haldane said, giving him a second pair. ‘The Poles export them to East Germany. You’d better take these as well – you don’t know how much walking you’ll have to do.’
Haldane fetched from his own bedroom a heavy cashbox and unlocked it.
First he took a wallet, a shabby brown one with a centre compartment of Cellophane which held Leiser’s identity card, fingered and stamped it; it lay open behind its flat frame, so that the photograph of Leiser looked outwards, a little prison picture. Beside it was an authority to travel and a written offer of employment from the State Co-operative for ship-building in Rostock. Haldane emptied one pocket of the wallet and then replaced the contents paper for paper, describing each in turn.
‘Food registration card – driving licence … Party card. How long have you been a Party member?’
‘Since ’forty-nine.’
He put in a photograph of a woman and three or four grimy letters, some still in their envelopes.
‘Love letters,’ he explained shortly.
Next came a Union card and a cutting from a Magdeburg newspaper about production figures at a local engineering works; a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate before the war, a tattered testimonial from a former employer.
‘That’s the wallet, then,’ Haldane said. ‘Except for the money. The rest of your equipment is in the rucksack. Provisions and that kind of thing.’
He handed Leiser a bundle of banknotes from the box. Leiser stood in the compliant attitude of a man being searched, his arms raised a little from his sides and his feet slightly apart. He would accept whatever Haldane gave him, put it carefully away, then resume the same position. He signed a receipt for the money. Haldane glanced at the signature and put the paper in a black briefcase which he had put separately on a side table.
Next came the odds and ends which Hartbeck would plausibly have about him: a bunch of keys on a chain – the key to the suitcase was among them – a comb, a khaki handkerchief stained with oil and a couple of ounces of substitute coffee in a twist of newspaper; a screwdriver, a length of fine wire and fragments of metal ends newly turned – the meaningless rubble of a working man’s pockets.
‘I’m afraid you can’t take that watch,’ Haldane said.
Leiser unbuckled the gold armband and dropped the watch into Haldane’s open palm. They gave him a steel one of Eastern manufacture and set it with great precision by Avery’s bedside clock.
Haldane stood back. ‘That will do. Now remain there and go through your pockets. Make sure things are where you would naturally keep them. Don’t touch anything else in the room, do you understand?’
‘I know the form,’ said Leiser, glancing at his gold watch on the table. He accepted the knife and hooked the black scabbard into the waistband of his trousers.
‘What about my gun?’
Haldane guided the steel clip of the briefcase into its housing and it snapped like the latch of a door.
‘You don’t take one,’ Avery said.
‘No gun?’
‘It’s not on, Fred. They reckon it’s too dangerous.’
‘Who for?’
‘It could lead to a dangerous situation. Politically, I mean. Sending an armed man into East Germany. They’re afraid of an incident.’
‘Afraid.’
For a long time he stared at Avery, his eyes searching the young, unfurrowed face for something that was not there. He turned to Haldane.
‘Is that true?’
Haldane nodded.
Suddenly he thrust out his empty hands in front of him, cupped in a terrible gesture of poverty, the fingers crooked and pressed together as if to catch the last water, his shoulders trembling in the cheap jacket, his face drawn, half in supplicati
on, half in panic.
‘The gun, John! You can’t send a man without a gun! For mercy’s sake, let me have the gun!’
‘Sorry, Fred.’
His hands still extended, he swung round to Haldane. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’
Leclerc had heard the noise and came to the doorway. Haldane’s face was arid as rock; Leiser could have beaten his empty fists upon it for all the charity it held. His voice fell to a whisper. ‘What are you doing? God Christ, what are you trying to do?’ To both of them he cried in revelation, ‘You hate me, don’t you! What have I done to you? John, what have I done? We were pals, weren’t we?’
Leclerc’s voice, when at last he spoke, sounded very pure, as if he were deliberately emphasising the gulf between them.
‘What’s the trouble?’
‘He’s worried about the gun,’ Haldane explained.
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. It’s out of our hands. You know how we feel about it, Fred. Surely you know that. It’s an order, that’s all. Have you forgotten how it used to be?’ He added stiffly, a man of duty and decision, ‘I can’t question my orders: what do you want me to say?’
Leiser shook his head. His hands fell to his sides. The discipline had gone out of his body.
‘Never mind.’ He was looking at Avery.
‘A knife’s better in some ways, Fred,’ Leclerc added consolingly, ‘quieter.’
‘Yes.’
Haldane picked up Leiser’s spare clothes. ‘I must put these into the rucksack,’ he said, and with a sideways glance at Avery, walked quickly from the room, taking Leclerc with him. Leiser and Avery looked at one another in silence. Avery was embarrassed to see him so ugly. At last Leiser spoke.
‘It was us three. The Captain, you and me. It was all right, then. Don’t worry about the others, John. They don’t matter.’
‘That’s right, Fred.’
Leiser smiled. ‘It was the best ever, that week, John. It’s funny, isn’t it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it’s the men that matter; just the men.’
‘You’re one of us, Fred. You always were; all the time your card was there, you were one of us. We don’t forget.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘It’s two pinned together. One for then, one for now. It’s in the index … live agents, we call it. Yours is the first name. You’re the best man we’ve got.’ He could imagine it now; the index was something they had built together. He could believe in it, like love.
‘You said it was alphabetical order,’ Leiser said sharply. ‘You said it was a special index for the best.’
‘Big cases go to the front.’
‘And men all over the world?’
‘Everywhere.’
Leiser frowned as if it were a private matter, a decision to be privately taken. He stared slowly round the bare room, then at the cuffs on his coarse jacket, then at Avery, interminably at Avery, until, taking him by the wrist, but lightly, more to touch than to lead, he said under his breath, ‘Give us something. Give me something to take. From you. Anything.’
Avery felt in his pockets, pulling out a handkerchief, some loose change and a twist of thin cardboard, which he opened. It was the photograph of Taylor’s little girl.
‘Is that your kid?’ Leiser looked over the other’s shoulder at the small, bespectacled face; his hand closed on Avery’s. ‘I’d like that.’ Avery nodded. Leiser put it in his wallet, then picked up his watch from the bed. It was gold with a black dial for the phases of the moon. ‘You have it,’ he said. ‘Keep it. I’ve been trying to remember,’ he continued, ‘at home. There was this school. A big courtyard like a barracks with nothing but windows and drainpipes. We used to bang a ball round after lunch. Then a gate, and a path to the church, and the river on the other side …’ He was laying out the town with his hands, placing bricks. ‘We went on Sunday, through the side door, the kids last, see?’ A smile of success. ‘That church was facing north,’ he declared, ‘not east at all.’ Suddenly he asked: ‘How long; how long have you been in, John?’
‘In the outfit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Four years.’
‘How old were you then?’
‘Twenty-eight. It’s the youngest they take you.’
‘You told me you were thirty-four.’
‘They’re waiting for us,’ Avery said.
In the hall they had the rucksack and the suitcase, green canvas with leather corners. He tried the rucksack on, adjusting the straps until it sat high on his back, like a German schoolboy’s satchel. He lifted the suitcase and felt the weight of the two things together.
‘Not too bad,’ he muttered.
‘It’s the minimum,’ Leclerc said. They had begun to whisper, though no one could hear. One by one they got into the car.
A hurried handshake and he walked away towards the hill. There were no fine words; not even from Leclerc. It was as if they had all taken leave of Leiser long ago. The last they saw of him was the rucksack gently bobbing as he disappeared into the darkness. There had always been a rhythm about the way he walked.
18
Leiser lay in the bracken on the spur of the hill, stared at the luminous dial of his watch. Ten minutes to wait. The key chain was swinging from his belt. He put the keys back in his pocket, and as he drew his hand away he felt the links slip between his thumb and finger like the beads of a rosary. For a moment he let them linger there; there was comfort in their touch; they were where his childhood was. St Christopher and all his angels, please preserve us from road accidents.
Ahead of him the ground descended sharply, then evened out. He had seen it; he knew. But now, as he looked down, he could make out nothing in the darkness below him. Suppose it were marshland down there? There had been rain; the water had drained into the valley. He saw himself struggling through mud to his waist, carrying the suitcase above his head, the bullets splashing round him.
He tried to discern the tower on the opposite hill, but if it was there it was lost against the blackness of the trees.
Seven minutes. Don’t worry about the noise, they said, the wind will carry it south. They’ll hear nothing in a wind like this. Run beside the path, on the south side, that means to the right, keep on the new trail through the bracken, it’s narrow but clear. If you meet anyone, use your knife, but for the love of Heaven don’t go near the path.
His rucksack was heavy. Too heavy. So was the case. He’d quarrelled about it with Jack. He didn’t care for Jack. ‘Better be on the safe side, Fred,’ Jack had explained. ‘These little sets are sensitive as virgins: all right for fifty miles, dead as mutton on sixty. Better to have the margin, Fred, then we know where we are. They’re experts, real experts where this one comes from.’
One minute to go. They’d set his watch by Avery’s clock.
He was frightened. Suddenly he couldn’t keep his mind from it any more. Perhaps he was too old, too tired, perhaps he’d done enough. Perhaps the training had worn him out. He felt his heart pounding in his chest. His body wouldn’t stand any more; he hadn’t the strength. He lay there, talking to Haldane: Christ, Captain, can’t you see I’m past it? The old body’s cracking up. That’s what he’d tell them; he would stay there when the minute hand came up, he would stay there too heavy to move. ‘It’s my heart, it’s packed in,’ he’d tell them. ‘I’ve had a heart attack, skipper, didn’t tell you about my dickie heart, did I? It just came over me as I lay here in the bracken.’
He stood up. Let the dog see the rabbit.
Run down the hill, they’d said; in this wind they won’t hear a thing; run down the hill, because that’s where they may spot you, they’ll be looking at that hillside hoping for a silhouette. Run fast through the moving bracken, keep low and you’ll be safe. When you reach level ground, lie up and get your breath back, then begin the crawl.
He was running like a madman. He tripped and the rucksack brought him down, he felt his knee against his chin and the pain as
he bit his tongue, then he was up again and the suitcase swung him round. He half fell into the path and waited for the flash of a bursting mine. He was running down the slope, the ground gave way beneath his heels, the suitcase rattling like an old car. Why wouldn’t they let him take the gun? The pain rose in his chest like fire, spreading under the bone, burning the lungs: he counted each step, he could feel the thump of each footfall and the slowing drag of the case and rucksack. Avery had lied. Lied all the way. Better watch that cough, Captain; better see a doctor, it’s like barbed wire in your guts. The ground levelled out; he fell again and lay still, panting like an animal, feeling nothing but fear and the sweat that drenched his woollen shirt.
He pressed his face to the ground. Arching his body, he slid his hand beneath his belly and tightened the belt of his rucksack.
He began crawling up the hill, dragging himself forward with his elbows and his hands, pushing the suitcase in front of him, conscious all the time of the hump on his back rising above the undergrowth. The water was seeping through his clothes; soon it ran freely over his thighs and knees. The stink of leaf mould filled his nostrils; twigs tugged at his hair. It was as if all nature conspired to hold him back. He looked up the slope and caught sight of the observation tower against the line of black trees on the horizon. There was no light on the tower.
He lay still. It was too far: he could never crawl so far. It was quarter to three by his watch. The relief guard would be coming from the north. He unbuckled his rucksack, stood up, holding it under his arm like a child. Taking the suitcase in his other hand he began walking cautiously up the rise, keeping the trodden path to his left, his eyes fixed upon the skeleton outline of the tower. Suddenly it rose before him like the dark bones of a monster.
The Looking Glass War Page 21
