Jago glanced up from the ground at Nicky. He wasn’t wearing the uniform of an officer with the King’s commission in the Royal Navy; instead he looked more like the volunteer he’d been in Spain. He was in voluminous trousers and up top he was sporting a grubby white roll-necked jumper that looked like it had belonged to a submariner.
‘What’s going on, Nicky? Is it a joke?’
‘Wish it were, old man; let’s wait for Austen.’
Jago looked at the girl called Lavender. Her lips were as red as sin, while her hair was free and fair. She flicked it; Jago, raised amongst girls, knew this was a sign of vanity. ‘You should cover it up,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You should cover up your hair on ops, it reflects the light. It gave you away in the cathedral.’
Nicky spoke, ‘Lavender doesn’t need any advice; she’s done tours on the other side.’
Operations on the other side of the channel. Something Jago had never managed. He shut up and condemned again his delusion that he was the stuff of agents. Half a dozen half-arsed courses in living off the land and eating rat had not removed his inappropriateness.
The man called Austen arrived. ‘Got him then,’ he said.
Twisting his head up, Jago realised he knew this man too, but not as Austen. It was the leech he’d hit with the dustbin lid. ‘What is this? What’s he doing here? Is it blackmail?’
‘I should coco,’ said Austen.
Lavender seemed to take offence at Jago’s words and snapped at him. ‘Stand up Captain Craze – you look like a drunk lying there.’
Jago stood. ‘Are you one of them, Nicky? A collaborator? Or do you play on MI6’s team; a secret agent under the cover of a Royal Navy gentleman?’
‘All in good time. Did you stow away the ladder, Austen?’
‘All shipshape, skipper.’
‘Alright Lavender,’ said Nicky, tossing her some keys, ‘fetch the Daimler, will you? It’s at the front of this God-shed.’
He turned to Jago as Lavender beetled off. ‘Austen and I motored down together, Lavender came on the train with you.’
‘I didn’t see her.’
‘You weren’t meant to.’
Another confirmation of his amateur status. ‘Where are you taking me?’
Jago saw the attempt at reassurance in Nicky’s smile. ‘Nowhere exotic, just back to the Smoke. I’m afraid you’re going to waste your return ticket.’
The levity failed to amuse Jago. ‘What’s this about?’
For the first time in this bizarre incident, Nicky seemed to be serious.
‘Someone wants a quiet word with you. It’s important you listen.’
‘Then your approach might have been a little less dramatic.’
Nicky smiling again, a lazy grin. ‘We tried, old man; turns out you can get rather violent. Ask Austen.’
‘Too right.’ Austen’s face floated into view, the nose and cheekbone still purple with bruises.
Jago looked at the young man in the baggy, double-breasted suit. ‘Do you normally try to start a conversation by offering your body in a gent’s toilet?’
The bonhomie left Austen and something hurt and harder took its place behind his eyes. ‘That’s how you see me, don’t you? Some bit of shit on the fiddle, not a someone. Not a someone who might have thoughts and ideas just as clever as you. You might have more shrapnel to clink in your pocket and folding stuff in your wallet but that don’t make you a better man than me, Captain Craze. It takes two to make an immoral congress, two. Or does your willy let itself out and go cottaging on its own? Maybe I’m as moral as you, Captain. Maybe I’ve got principles too.’
‘Maybe Austen has more principles than you, Jago,’ said Nicky.
Austen poked Jago with a finger. ‘You look at me and all you see is a tuppenny-ha’penny bum-boy, and so when you see me again you reckon I’ve got to be on the cadge. But maybe I’m involved in great works, a great struggle, but you don’t give me a chance to explain, you hit me with a dustbin lid. A bloody dustbin lid.’
They stood there, not speaking, as the sound of a car drew closer. Nicky broke their stand-off. ‘Here she is, good girl.’
Lavender wound down the window and leaned out. ‘All aboard.’
Nicky took command. ‘In the back, Jago. Austen up front, please.’
Nicky climbed in beside Jago. ‘Off we go, Lavender.’
They drove off into the night, and Jago felt the panic of the prisoner who, in an instant, has lost his freedom and is now controlled by others whose motives are hidden from him.
The silent drive seemed to last forever. The night was overcast and the blackout made the world blind. There was no reassurance of road signs, just endless blank choices that Lavender seemed able to make. His father had once told Jago why he never painted nightscapes: The night is a different dimension;I paint light and life. His father had been right for once, Jago thought: in daylight the drive would have been through one of the softest landscapes in Britain, but in the dark it had become a world of sinister shapes and grotesque silhouettes, of tree tunnels that seemed to slide past the car as if the Daimler was stationary and the shadow world on the move somewhere.
London, when it finally came, was a graveyard; tombstone-type buildings shuffled together in disapproving streets that stared at the passing travellers like the wounded left behind by a retreating army. The bombed, blind buildings with cataract eyes; smashed windows misty from the night sky behind. They were missing roofs, missing walls, missing people. Jago caught glimpses of another time – the garish wallpapers now muted and fading into something blurry and softer, washed by the rain. The missing pipework, still remembered by dark lines that crossed the exposed interior walls like lines on a blueprint. Jago felt his fate and reputation shared a similarity with the bombed buildings; destroyed, exposed. Exposed, destroyed.
The drive affected them all in the same way, as if the smell of brick dust cemented their minds into the same thought.
‘Think this is bad, you should see the East End,’ said Lavender.
‘At least we’re hitting the bastards back. We shouldn’t stop till Hun-land’s as flat as a pancake.’ Austen turned to speak into Jago’s face as if to challenge him to disagree. ‘Every sodding church, hospital and orphanage; let’s drive what’s left of them out into the wilderness to live in ditches, like animals.’
Jago met Austen’s look. ‘I’m surprised you’re not in uniform.’
‘Piss off, Captain Craze. You know nothing about me.’
‘Leave him alone, Jago; you’re on dodgy ground,’ said Nicky. ‘And he’s right, isn’t he? He subscribes to the same set of beliefs you do, doesn’t he? He voices it, puts it into words, the actions you advocate in regard to Germany – every home and hospital; that’s what unconditional surrender is going to mean isn’t it, the rape of the people and the eradication of their way of life? Or are you still an appeaser?’
Jago gave them the answer he gave himself. ‘I know that after this monstrousness there shouldn’t, mustn’t, ever be another war like it.’
Nicky laughed. ‘How convenient. Regarding the future, every man takes an idealistic view, but it’s the here and now that requires practical answers.’
Jago had another attempt to explain his shifting beliefs. ‘I thought what happened at Munich, when Chamberlain brought back that paper – well I thought it was wonderful. I thought he’d been brave and noble to reach out and seek a reasonable solution to our differences. With another personality to deal with, it would have been the correct action, the action of a great statesman – with Adolf Hitler, it turned out to be a mistake. I still think it was worth attempting; to try to talk.’
‘So did we.’
And something in the way Nicky said we made Jago realise he was talking about more than his three captors in the car.
‘Park by the bottom of the Heath, Lavender. I’ll deliver the captain by foot.’
Lavender parked the car and then leaned over the seat to speak to Jago. ‘I just wanted to say, Captain Craze…’ Jago was sure she was going to say something innocuous such as Driving you has been a pleasure, but she didn’t. ‘I just wanted to say, Captain Craze, that the way you treated Austen was really horrible, and that makes you rather nasty in my book.’
The car was abandoned and Lavender and Austen set off south with gas-bags swinging. Nicky and Jago headed into Belsize.
‘Lead on, old man.’
Blacked-out North London loomed about them.
‘I don’t know where to go.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you if you take a wrong turn.’
Jago didn’t know this part of London well, and the situation in which Nicky had become a stranger made the walk weirder and the night seem darker than it was.
They went barely a quarter of a mile before Jago’s captor pointed down an alley that ran through a parade of shops. ‘He’s waiting for you at the other end.’
‘Who?’ said Jago.
Nicky shrugged. ‘We don’t know his real name. We call him the Don.’
‘Spanish?’
‘Academic. And, Jago, he’ll be armed, so no silly buggers.’
Jago paused and looked into Nicky’s brilliant blue eyes. ‘I’ll go and see him – you leave me no choice – but you do understand Commander Godwin, that after this there can’t be any communication between us. No friendship, Nicky.’
Jago walked off down the alley, stepping around coke-bins and dustbins, past doors that led to flats above shops, where families grouped around their wirelesses. He walked on, trying to ignore the lump in his throat that seemed the size of a cricket ball. It was over. No more Nicky. No more liaisons at the club, just loneliness after work in the house where he wasn’t welcome.
At the other end of the alley, in the slit of the buildings, the silhouette of a man appeared almost theatrically. The shadow raised an arm and Jago saw it wasn’t a greeting but that the man was displaying an automatic; not as British as a revolver, thought Jago – more sinister. As Jago reached the man, the automatic was pocketed but the threat was clear.
The man was silent but smiled. In late middle age, portly, dressed in a houndstooth check suit and Madder paisley tie, he wasn’t London, Jago thought. He smelled of Oxbridge. Some insane don who would kill Jago and giggle into his sherry at the memory. Someone ultra-bright, but not quite human. The Don.
‘Across the road and turn left,’ he said.
They walked on into Belsize until they arrived at a low block of modernist flats that Jago recognised as the Isokon Building. He was herded inside and up the stairs into an apartment that resembled the exterior; cold, aware of itself and not wanting company. The Don in his country squire clothing was at odds with it, but then it was the sort of room that might have made Salvador Dalí feel a little conservative.
The man took himself to a Butaque armchair and indicated its twin for Jago. When they were settled, the Don finally spoke. ‘So here you are, Captain Craze.’
‘Yes, here I am.’
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘An explanation?’
As the Don considered Jago’s request, he played his stomach with his fingers as if it were a piano. The silent tune finished, he finally spoke. ‘Of course, a reasonable request. Let me assure you, although I’m armed that’s for my defence in case you go mad; I’m not one for fisticuffs. As for you – well you can go whenever you please, but I would be grateful if you would give me a little of your time and all your attention. Now, an explanation…’
‘Who are you?’
The Don sighed. ‘If I told you my name it would be a lie. I have many names. Would you like one? I can offer you a choice. And if later you want to sneak to the beak, I am so very happy to tell you this ghastly furniture showroom is not my home.’
Jago sat silently. The Don continued, ‘As to why you’re here, think about it. Who brought you and more importantly how many of them were there?’
‘Three.’
‘Ah, I can see the penny has dropped.’
‘A cell,’ said Jago.
‘A cell as you say, and who operates in cells?’
‘Communists.’ Jago was annoyed and felt like an undergraduate again, some new boy being patronised by a don into answering a series of simple questions.
The Don smiled. ‘If only we could teach the cell system to the French Resistance, with their insistence on a centralised command and everyone knowing everyone – so French and so deadly. Such a gift to the fascists.’
‘So why do you want to see me? I’m no one.’
The Don tried to snuggle down into the vicious armchair. ‘We’ve been interested in you since you trained at Beaulieu with the SOE. Oh yes, we know all about the Finishing School, the permanent training staff: Ralph Vibert in charge of codes and ciphers, Killer Green in charge of housebreaking and safe-blowing, Nobby Clark in charge of living off the land and field craft, and Kim Philby in charge of black propaganda. We know about the house system; you were in Drokes House and Captain Carr was your housemaster – so wonderfully public school. We know everything about you. We’ve read your military service record, we’ve been told about your peculiar childhood, the world knows about your degenerate father. Then there’s your sham marriage and – of course – your homosexuality. Have I missed anything?’
Jago stood up. ‘So what’s new? We all know the Communist Party is a vulgar little organisation, full of seedy people who feed their self-importance by uncovering sordid secrets.’
‘Sit down, Captain; I’m not trying to blackmail you. I’m just trying to say we know everything and we still want to work with you. Would the British government say the same?’
They held each other’s eyes like gangsters at the Brighton races. Jago sat back down and the Don leaned forward.
‘I’m here to tell you, Captain Craze, that we admire you. We are all in awe of your analytical skills. Your report on the undesirability of assassinating Adolf Hitler, of reaching an armistice with the German generals, has reached the highest levels of Soviet government. The highest.’
‘Did Nicky give you a copy?’
The Don smiled and stayed silent.
‘Why did you kidnap me?’
The false joviality vanished, the face became hard, the eyes cold. ‘The Soviet Union cannot be abandoned by the West. I cannot stress how strongly this is felt in Moscow. No one will gain from a premature armistice.’
‘Well the Jews might.’
The Don found his humour again and sniggered. ‘The Yids? The Kremlin wants their persecution to continue. Consider the resources the Nazis waste rounding up the Jews, transporting them on trains that could be taking soldiers and tanks to the Eastern Front. Think about the trained SS personnel guarding them and murdering them, men of crack legions wasting their training cooking Jews. The Final Solution, as they call it, is a considerable drain on the fascists’ dwindling resources; long may it continue. As Stalin himself said, Better the Yids get it than the Soviet Union. So don’t talk to me about the money lenders.’
Jago realised he had moved from listening to the far-right wing to the extreme left and that he couldn’t tell them apart. ‘You have almost convinced me that it might be worth going for peace now.’
The Don roared at him. ‘Rot! You know that’s sentimental twaddle; for the West a premature peace now means a bigger war tomorrow. If you’re a Jew-lover – well it’s tough, but it doesn’t alter the fact that what the German generals are offering is a mirage, a false image of water in the desert. They’re not offering peace, it’s not in the nature of these Prussians; war is their blood. What they want is a breathing space to deal with their enemies piecemeal; first Russia and later the West. And believe me, in the German Empire there’ll be no place for the Jews, with or without the Nazis. But I’m talking to the converted, aren’t I? You wrote the bible.’
Jago accepted the compliment uncomfortably. ‘And I’m to do what with it?’
‘Get it read and acted upon.’
‘I believe I’m about to become yesterday’s man; I’m to be transferred to a mobile bath unit or something. That’s if I’m not murdered. The opposition believe I have the grand strategic plan for the Fatherland to deal with little England.’
‘What?’
Jago explained and the Don pondered and sighed. ‘Yes, almost certainly purloined and sent by a comrade. Some silly little over-conscientious sod of a clerk who believes in the cause, sings the Red Flag, but has neglected to officially join the Party. If he had, he might have known to give the plan to his contact and not launch it into the ether aimed at Captain Craze, a report writer. And you haven’t received it?’
‘No.’
‘Bugger. Where’s it got to?’
‘No idea, and it probably won’t find me now I’m to be shunted into the long grass.’
The Don shook his head. ‘Possibly, possibly not, we’ll see. I think we see more in you than you see in yourself, and we’re not sentimental when it comes to judging men. We followed your progress through the Finishing School at Beaulieu; we even thought of tapping you on the shoulder, till you disgraced yourself. Plus, there was your political naivete; far from setting you against the Establishment, your Bohemian father and your own deviant sexuality have paradoxically made you more desperate to belong to it. We lost interest in you, but thanks to your report, we could be persuaded to change our minds.’
Jago discovered he was tempted. He’d been an outcast, uncherished for so long that even an offer from the Communist Party, that murdered almost as many as the Nazi Party, flattered him. But it wouldn’t do. ‘No thanks.’
The Don snorted. Jago was pleased to note it was with displeasure. ‘Shortly you will find yourself in a position to serve both our ends. Don’t let us down, Captain Craze. You have to save Hitler.’
‘And if I fail?’
The man smiled but left his eyes out in the cold. ‘We will blow the cover off your little secret. As you know, it’s a criminal offence to be a queer in this country. The world you want to move in, be accepted by – the Establishment – will not welcome a membership enquiry from one of – how do they put it, one of the pansy fraternity?’