In the morning Cal woke early. He lay in bed, Kitty asleep, one arm stretched across his chest, red head buried in the sheets, and wondered again about the famous English reserve. After the third bout, when he had begun to think her inexhaustible, he had put the question to her.
‘What happened to the famous English reserve?’
And Kitty had answered, ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
But then, he had learnt in less than a week that that was pretty much their answer to everything.
The telephone next to the bed rang. Cal slid from under Kitty’s arm and picked it up.
‘Captain Cormack? Chief Inspector Stilton in the foyer for you, sir.’
Cal looked at Kitty. Looked at his watch. Good God, it was only seven thirty. Did the man never sleep?
‘I’ll be down in ten minutes,’ he said.
‘Kitty, Kitty.’
He shook her.
‘Kitty, wake up. For Christ’s sake, wake up.’
She opened her eyes, the lids fluttering blearily.
‘Wossatime?’
‘It’s seven thirty.’
‘Zatall? I’m not on till noon.’
She pulled a pillow over her head. Cal snatched it away.
‘Your father’s on now!’
‘Wot?’
‘He’s in the lobby right now.’
She sat upright, hands flat on the mattress, breasts swaying.
‘He’s never coming up?’
‘No – but I’ve got to go down.’
‘Fine – bung out the “do not disturb” and I’ll get some kip.’
She took back her pillow, pulled up the sheets and ignored him.
Cal took the lift down to the lobby, showered, shaved and dressed in less than seven minutes, rubbing at his chin and knowing he looked about as shaved as a singed pig. He wondered about the Stilton sense of ‘manners’ – a word so potent both Stilton and his wife had used it as a one-word reprimand last night – the cockney equivalent of ‘good form’? What was good form when greeting a man whose daughter you’d just spent a long night fucking? What if sex inscribed itself on your forehead like the mark of Cain? From the open lift doors he could see Stilton at one of the tables, a large map spread out in front of him. On either side of the Atlantic, the moment had only one clearly good form – deceit. Lie and hope nothing showed.
Stilton was eating – toast and jam – a cup of tea stuck on top of the map. A young woman sitting opposite him – glasses, hair up, a pleasing smile and intense eyes.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ Stilton said. ‘We ordered breakfast on your room number.’
‘That’s fine. I hardly ever eat breakfast.’
‘Nor me,’ said the woman.
‘I was forgetting meself. Captain Cormack, Miss Payne. Our sketch artist.’
‘Sketch artist?’
‘We don’t have a photo of our man. We can’t go around London expecting to find him on a description, now can we?’
Cal sat down in the third chair. A waitress asked him if he wanted anything and he asked for black coffee. He brushed away the mark of Cain and waited for Stilton to explain.
‘It’s dead easy,’ he began. ‘You tell Miss Payne what Stahl looks like and she’ll draw him.’
Instinctively, Cal looked around. He’d never get used to this – this public airing of things and names he’d learnt to see as secrets. Perhaps it wasn’t just Stilton, perhaps it was the British? The habitual cry of ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ was a necessity – most of them seemed to forget so readily. Perhaps it was all of them? Miss Payne hadn’t batted an eyelid, just sipped at her tea.
‘How long will this take?’
Miss Payne answered, ‘About two hours.’
Stilton set down his cup, wiped his lips on the back of his hand, stuffed the crumpled map into his macintosh pocket and got up.
‘I’ll drop by about eleven.’
That was more like three hours.
‘You mean you’re going without me?’
‘Got my Czech bloke to find, haven’t I?’
Cal followed him to the door. Caught up with him in a few strides and buttonholed him.
‘Walter. I didn’t come all this way to sit by while you chase –’
He couldn’t say it. It went against all his training to utter Stahl’s name out loud.
‘Walter, we have to do this together.’
‘Aye, lad. And we will. We’ll get stuck in. We will. Straight after lunch. We’ll get right on it. But we do need that sketch.’
He clapped Cal on one shoulder with the flat of his hand – an avuncular brush-off.
‘Wot larx, eh?’
Wot larx? What was the man talking about?
He went back to the table. A silver pot of coffee had been set out for him. Miss Payne had her sketch pad propped against the table. A row of sharp pencils. A vicious looking penknife. A huge, putty-coloured india rubber eraser. She smiled at him. A silent ‘ready-when-you-are’. Cal sighed a silent sigh. Poured himself a coffee. Miss Payne was following the movements of his hands, like a cat at a tennis match.
‘Is anything wrong?’ Cal asked.
‘I don’t suppose your coffee would run to two, would it? I’m not really a tea sort of person.’
‘Of course,’ he said, and she slopped her tea into a handy aspidistra and stuck out her cup.
‘Walter’s a tea man. Could drink it all day, I’ve no doubt. But I do so miss a good cup of coffee. And that really does look like a good cup of coffee.’
She sipped and sighed. A look of real pleasure on her face.
‘Why didn’t you just order coffee?’
‘Reserved,’ she said, looking at him across the top of her cup.
‘Reserved for whom?’
‘For Americans.’
‘For Americans?’
‘Coffee isn’t actually on the ration. After all, most English people don’t care for it, anyway. And generally one can have as much as one wants. But just lately it sort of comes and goes. A bit of a bean famine. Especially since Jerry flattened the coffee stores in Old Compton Street on Sunday morning. One hears rumours – there’s coffee to be had in Barnsley or Bakewell or Banff, the sort of places one wouldn’t go to more than once in a lifetime if at all. Quite why is baffling – I mean, why Barnsley? Why not Highgate or Chelsea? When it last got short, about three weeks ago, your embassy took to supplying coffee beans to those hotels that billet embassy staff. A bit goes to the Savoy, but most of it comes here. Officers only, of course. Those of us that can’t swallow the taste of dandelion and roast barley – what the Ministry of Food laughingly calls ersatz coffee – are terribly envious of life here. I have a girlfriend who’s hung around here since the end of April trying out every accent from Mae West to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind. Never works. I almost got arrested. I tried to do Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again - forgot she was German, you see. When I called her “dollink” the waitress called the police.’
‘But you are the police.’
‘Strictly for the duration, dollink. No Season after all, and one must do one’s bit.’
Cal sipped guiltily at his own cup, then set it down and pushed the pot across the table to her.
‘Help yourself,’ he said.
‘Thanks awfully. You’re a brick. Now shall we make a start?’
‘How, exactly?’
‘Just describe the chap to me, that’s all.’
Cal tried to think of words that would convey Wolfgang Stahl to the ears and hands of a woman who’d never seen him and never, until now, had to imagine him. What Stahl looked like had never mattered to him. What Stahl was had been the axis of his work for two years.
‘Stuck?’ Miss Payne asked.
‘A little,’ Cal said.
‘Why not. . . why not think of your chap as a type? Tell me what type you’d sort of put him into.’
‘Sort of?’
‘You know . . . roughly.’
‘He’s an Aryan.’
‘Ah, one of those, eh? Odd when you think about it. I mean. How did they arrive at blue-eyed blonds as a racial type? Hitler’s short and dark and looks like Charlie Chaplin. Goebbels is short and ugly and looks like a rat. And as for Goering – well is that what Billy Bunter grew up to be?’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind. I’m rambling. Aryan it is. Look, why don’t you sit where Stinker sat, so you can see what I draw. We’ll get on a lot better that way.’
Cal moved around the table. Pulled the chair closer to look over her right shoulder as she worked, caught the waft of her perfume, watched her hands fly across the paper as he talked.
Two hours later Miss Payne had worked her way through twenty or more pages, and a version of Stahl had appeared on the pad. She’d had to draw the scar above the left eybrow half a dozen times before Cal saw Stahl come to life. She’d taken a coloured pencil and added a dash of blue to the eyes, and then, when Cal had said ‘Too bright’, rubbed a little charcoal in with the tip of her pinky finger. It was Stahl. Not a hard face, but a face that had rendered itself hard. Not a face so much as mask, he thought.
Miss Payne was holding the sketch at arm’s length and squinting at it framed against the bank of elevators when Cal saw the doors open and Kitty emerge, looking clean and fresh and vital – the opposite of the blanket bed-beast he’d left a few hours ago. She waved – a cheery smile – a hammy wink of the eye. Good God, what was she thinking of? Then he caught sight of Miss Payne, waving back and smiling.
‘Old Stinker’s daughter,’ she said. ‘Quite a character. Rules weren’t made for our Kitty. Now, is this the bloke or isn’t it? I may not be Picasso – but then, if I was, I suppose no one would ever recognise him with his nose under his armpit. Any chance of another pot of coffee?’