Horse Under Water (18 page)

‘He’s in deep with the local church, and last week there was a gang of business tycoons down from Madrid. Whatever he intends to do for Portugal it certainly won’t include moving the average wage up from four dollars a week.’ H.K. raised his head and said, ‘You’re not kidding me about letting me scram, are you? Because if I’m shooting my mouth off for nothing …’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you can talk your way out as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Boat and all?’ asked H.K.

‘Boat and all,’ I said.

‘I bet that da Cunha’s V.N.V. is a local branch office of the Young Europe machine. You know what I’m talking about?’

‘Talk on,’ I said.

‘It’s a network of Fascists throughout Europe, Rabat to Narvik. The O.A.S. in France, the Belgian M.A.C. As far as these boys are concerned the present régime here in Portugal is Socialist.’

‘What can you offer as proof?’

‘Not a thing, pal. I wish I had something, it’s been my big dream to iron him out.’

‘Looks like you’re too late now,’ I said.

‘The Fascists will tumble; historically it’s all part of the class struggle.’

‘Class struggle,’ I said, ‘that’s hilarious, coming from you. You are the spokesman for the Hopheads and General Narcotic Dealers’ Union?’

‘Yeah, the dope outfit – I’m the chief dope,’ said H.K.H.K.’s eyes held mine. I decided to try a bluff. ‘The English visitor,’ I coaxed gently, ‘don’t forget the English visitor, Harry.’

‘Pal of Fernie’s,’ H.K. said. ‘Nice little guy, great sense of fun.’

‘His name?’

‘Ivor Butcher,’ said H.K., ‘great sense of fun.’

‘
Great
sense of fun,’ I said. Now it was shuffling its way together. Ivor Butcher knew Fernie. A messenger? A courier? Did Smith tell Fernie what to do or was it the other way round? In either case: why?

I looked around at the darkened factory: the oily machinery, the great piles of tins.

‘Harry,’ I said, ‘I want Fernie Tomas here; get him here and you can go.’

H.K. sucked his cheeks in and snorted a laugh down his nose. ‘You can get him as easily as I can,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to rub my face in the dirt.’ He walked across to the sink and washed his hands with the strange flecked Portuguese soap that looks like Roquefort cheese, dried them, put on his wrist-watch and turned to face us. ‘You did the hero bit already, pal. Now I’m walking out of here, hardware or no hardware.’

‘You think so,’ I said, but I did nothing as he walked across to the chair and picked up his cashmere cardigan, and nothing as he walked down between the machines towards the door. He looked back once to see how I was reacting. I put my gun into my jacket pocket and he looked reassured. It was then that a flash roared across the tension and echoed through the piles of empty tins like a
piranha
in a goldfish bowl. Charly had fished a pistol out of her handbag and let fly at H.K. I saw him spin around and fall forward against the pressing machine. I reached out to take the gun from her. The gun crashed again and the heat bent the hairs on the back of my hand. The bullet nicked the machinery with a clang and whined off into the darkness. My hand closed over the barrel to drag it from her, but it was hot enough to burn me and I dropped it with a crash. I flung my arm around Charly and held her captive.

From behind the machinery H.K.’s voice asked, ‘Where did that loony dame get a gun?’

I looked at the old Italian Victoria 7.65 automatic on the floor. ‘Out of a Christmas cracker by the look of it,’ I said. ‘Now beat it, fade, before I change my mind.’

Charly beat her fists against my button-down madras and yelled, ‘Don’t let him go – he killed your friend!’ over and over again. She stopped to draw breath. ‘You just aren’t human,’ she said quietly. I held her tightly while H.K. limped away with a big red hand clamped across his forearm.

I sat Charly down. Finally she blew her nose into my handkerchief and told me that she worked for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Washington, and that I had just messed everything up. It was her damaged esprit de corps she was crying about as she sat in Harry Kondit’s dream house.

‘Then you knew that the smell of vinegar was acetic acid and would be coming from the processing of morphine. Why didn’t you tell me the real story?’

She blew her nose again. ‘Because a good operator lets other law-enforcement agencies spearhead his actions,’ she quoted between sniffs.

At that precise moment we heard H.K. start the engine. ‘He’s taking
our
car,’ said Charly, ‘we’re going to be left here.’ She began to giggle.

It was a little over three kilometres to Albufeira. We skirted the huge plantation of fig trees and smelt the olive crop ready for the press. Charly took her shoes off after one kilometre and stopped sniffing after two. For the fiftieth time she said, ‘You’ve let him get away. I must phone the police.’

‘Look,’ I finally said, ‘I don’t know what they teach you in the Treasury Department,
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but if you think your prestige there depends on putting the iron
bangles across H.K. you are quite nutty. Let him go spread panic among his pals. If he goes to the end of the world you can be there in a day or phone there in an hour. This is a strictly cerebral business and just because I wave an old war-souvenir pistol around to impress you, it doesn’t mean you have to go off your trolley. You might hurt him.’

This last remark stung Charly into a fury and she said I was just as bad as H.K. As for hurting H.K., if it hadn’t been for me getting in the way she would have killed him and a good thing too.

You can’t help envying these narcotics sleuths. The governments of the world are all so keen to prove themselves blameless that, far from asking awkward questions about firearms, they will steady up your gun elbow while you’re firing. I couldn’t afford luxuries like remembering that H.K.’s desire to remove the evidence had certainly killed Joe MacIntosh.

My position wasn’t quite so pretty. I couldn’t have Charly phoning up the police and attracting attention to our enterprise. At least not before I contacted Singleton, folded up the equipment and faded out. I began to be aware of a silence and realized that Charly had asked me a question. ‘Umm,’ I said, as though I was considering it carefully.

‘It’s so confusing, isn’t it?’ Charly said.

‘Confusing,’ I replied, ‘of course it’s confusing. You involve yourself in industrial espionage and then you complain about it being confusing.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Charly. ‘I’m not involved with industrial espionage.’

‘Aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Narcotics is a multi-million-dollar industry. Half of that industry is devoted to making money, the other half to making you confused.’ There was a silence. ‘In one way or another,’ I added.

‘Just exactly what does that last crack mean?’

‘It means authority can be confused in many ways, by bribes, codes, camouflage, false informers or even by pressures so powerful that the law can be changed to suit the lawbreaker. But the most confusing thing of all is old-fashioned lying by old liars: like H.K.’

‘Why, was a lot of what he said untrue?’ She stopped in the centre of the road and pulled her shoes on again.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but like all first-class lies it had a firm foundation of truth, like margarine with twelve and a half per cent butter.’

‘What did he say that was true?’ asked Charly.

‘Well, suppose you get those smart boys at the Treasury Department to work it out for you. I’ll just say he didn’t leave us in any doubt about the way our investigations should continue. Providing that we want it tailored one hundred per cent to the convenience of Harry Kondit.’

‘Yes,’ said Charly obediently, and she hugged my arm. I wish I had listened to my last remark more closely.

It was damn nice of H.K. to leave the car outside Number 12 Praca Miguel Bombarda. Charly said that it looked as though we had collected a parking fine. Which was Charly’s idea of a joke; the white envelope under the wiper was a note from H.K.:

Singleton was not expected back from Lisbon for another twenty-four hours. Anything to be done had to be done alone. I went into Joe’s old room and prised up a floorboard with one of the kitchen knives.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Charly. I told her to buzz off and fix some strong tea. I was feeling very tired what with one thing and another.

From under the floorboard I got the small radio transmitter with which Joe had contacted London. I set it to transmit, raised the antenna and set the cipher numbers on the Kurier.
^*
I cranked the handle at twenty-three minutes past the hour (as our arrangement with R.N. Gibraltar demanded) and then put the apparatus away.

Charly brought tea. I told her I had sent a signal to London and she was now free to take any action she wished in respect of the narcotics processing. I also cautioned her that under the Official Secrets Act any mention of the operation in which we had been engaged at Albufeira was actionable, and that if there was any reason to suspect her of indiscretion in this respect her employment by the Federal Narcotics Bureau in the U.S.A. made her
liable for trial as an agent of a foreign power. I thanked her for the tea and gave her a reassuring and not too brotherly kiss.

‘You must row me out to H.K.’s boat,’ I said. I was dog-tired.

Charly brought the dinghy alongside the forty-foot cabin cruiser with skill befitting an admiral’s daughter. I scrambled on to the teak-laid deck in my stockinged feet – I couldn’t risk leaving wet footmarks across it. Charly spun the dinghy round and rowed back to the cove. I watched the cliff-top and willed Fernie Tomas not to appear until she was over the headland by the steep high path. Then I walked across the bridge and got into the big stowage locker under one of the extra bunks. It was a bit coffin-like, but I jammed a pencil under the lid, which gave me air, although not enough to dispel the smell of tar and mothballs. I waited.

Something struck the side of the boat with a thud. It wasn’t very Royal Navy and I began to wonder whether it was Fernie Tomas. Perhaps H.K. had lured me into a trap. I flushed with sudden fear at the thought of this locker really becoming a coffin.

A woman’s voice – Fernie’s wife – gabbled in Portuguese, the dinghy was drifting away. Hold the rope. Couldn’t he help her. Take the suitcase. There is water in the bottom of the boat. An oar has slipped into the water. The conversation went the way it does when women are in boats.

I heard Fernie’s voice telling her to hurry in rapid Portuguese. Reassuring and direct. I realized why he had been so taciturn when I had seen him before. His Portuguese had a strong English accent. There were splashes and thumps, and then a third voice, rather higher than Fernie’s, which spoke least of the three. They seemed to be an age getting aboard, and then I heard the woman’s voice, this time from some way off. She was returning to the shore in the dinghy. There was a click as someone switched on the small light over the controls. If I held my face horizontal, with my ear pressed against the cold locker-lid, my left eye had a narrow range of vision that included the top half of the person at the controls.

I could see Fernie in profile – the egg-shaped head with its black domed moustache hanging over the mouth. Upon his head was the black trilby hat of the peasant. The anchor came up like a curtain and the motors beat a drum-roll as we began the last act at Albufeira. Fernie engaged the screws and I felt the water thrash under the hull. The light above his head threw his eye sockets in black piratical patches. His hands moved across the controls, articulate and smooth, his head watched the beams, the compass, the rev. counters. This was a Fernie I had never seen, Fernie at sea, Fernie the sailor. From the seat at the controls he couldn’t see the ship’s clock. Every few moments he would call to the boy with him, ‘What time is it?’ and the boy would tell him.

He moved the throttles as far forward as they could go and at 3,000 r.p.m. the hull began hammering against the water like a pneumatic drill. When he was satisfied with the course, Fernie told the boy to hold the wheel steady. I heard the clicks of a suitcase being unlocked. I pushed my ear harder against the lid of the locker and raised it two inches. The boy was staring into the dark, while Fernie crouched on the floor over a radio chassis into which he was pushing small valves. Then his footsteps clattered down the saloon staircase and he reappeared with a black cable from the 24-volt supply to which he connected the radio machinery. He shouted, ‘Port – keep the lubber line on 240.’ The boy he had brought aboard was Augusto, who had secured a lock of Fernie’s hair for me.

Augusto sat on the high stool like a child at a tea-party, holding the wheel tightly between his small grubby hands. Fernie spoke in Portuguese about ‘the strong American at the railway station’; it must have been a question, for Augusto said that ‘the strong American’ (which was what the local people called H.K.) had unloaded a crate of sardines at the station to be put on the morning train to Lisbon.

There was a click and Augusto was bathed in reflected light as Tomas moved the beam of the big searchlight out across the waves. Slivers of rain and water droplets snipped at Augusto’s halo as the boat slammed into the swell and the sound of
shipped water rushed along the deck outside. The little radio had warmed up and emitted a high-pitched note like a badly adjusted TV set. Tomas reappeared; his hand was on the radio. He tuned it. ‘Make it 245,’ he shouted above the noise.

I felt the boat vibrate as it turned at high speed. So far, and then it straightened again.

Tomas’s hand came into my view and he moved the radio. The signal it was receiving became stronger. ‘250,’ he shouted, and in his excitement broke into a gabble of Portuguese as he demanded that Augusto should give it more throttle. Augusto said it was as far advanced as it could get, and he pushed at the big levers with his child’s hands in order to prove it. Suddenly from the radio came a sound like ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’ played at double speed on a flute. Tomas put the set down roughly and moved out of my sight. Augusto’s head was one moment illuminated by an intense light-beam and the next moment drawn in dark silhouette against the bright heaving water.

Tomas was sweeping the ocean, looking for something in the roaring foam. The something was a metal container.

The flute-like sounds of the high-speed Morse stopped and the steady whistle replaced it. There was a cracking sound, and for some minutes I puzzled over it. It was difficult to imagine an ex-R.N. officer slapping his own face in Latin excitement and anger. ‘Too late!’ he shouted to Augusto, ‘too late, too late, too late, it’s down again to the sea
bed.’ He snatched the wheel from Augusto and spun it viciously. The boat slid sideways, uncontrolled, the propellers screaming to get a hold on the water as the deck heeled over towards the dark sea.

It was unfortunate that I chose that moment to emerge. I fell forward, sprawling across the deck with my knees still trapped in the locker. My face walloped against the starboard bunk, my arm twisted under me, and I heard my Smith & Wesson pistol slide forward and drop with a crash into the saloon. ‘Steady amidships,’ I heard Fernie call, and the deck came level.

‘Get on your feet,’ Fernie said, like something out of a Greyfriars school story. I wasn’t too keen to get on my feet if it meant I was to be knocked down. On the other hand, lying there could earn me a slam on the kisser too.

‘I don’t want to fight you, Fernie,’ I said.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ said Fernie. He didn’t say it like a killer but like a prefect about to administer a thrashing.

‘You are making a mistake, Fernie,’ I said. But it was no use; when a man has fitted into the system as badly as Fernie had done, he has stockpiled spite and sadness, rage and revenge, until violence has built up under the surface like boiling lava.

Augusto had the boat on an even keel; he throttled back slightly. Fernie faced me across the bridge. He advanced slowly, keeping an even bal
ance. His eyes stared into mine, sizing me up and judging my probable actions. We were an arm’s length apart when his hands moved slowly and easily upward. He put his hands higher than his waist and I detected a very slight turn of the shoulders. It told me what I wanted to know. Punching fighters hold themselves in a boxing stance, one hand and one foot slightly advanced. Judo fighters stand flat. Fernie was a left-handed puncher.

A rivulet of sea-water meandered across the deck, caught the light and became a scimitar under Fernie’s feet. I opened my left hand and advanced it in a protective, flinching manner across my chest and towards his rocksteady advanced right fist.

I watched his eyes deciding that I was going to be a pushover. He decided to clip me with a short left jab. My body was wide open. My fingers closed upon his advanced cuff, as my left toe kicked his right ankle under him. Fernie grabbed at my extended left knee to spin me to the ground. It was the correct counter but he was slow, far too slow. Before I had pulled his sleeve more than an inch to the left he’d lost balance. A man off balance thinks of nothing but getting balanced again; aggression disappears. He began to fall. My left hand pulled and continued to pull as I turned to my left. Right hand high. My turn was complete, right armpit clamped upper arm, left hand threatened his ulnar and radius bones. I heard a sharp intake of breath against my ear, and saw Augusto’s face turn towards us, his eyes like Belisha beacons.

Even at that instant Fernie did not allow the pain to influence him. He kicked. The radio set slid across the deck slowly, and gently fell over the side. There was a flash as the cable from the batteries shorted and a thud as the radio swung against the hull. At a slower speed, perhaps the radio would still have been plugged on the end when we hauled the cable in.

He was a character, this Fernie. He fell away and sat on the floor rubbing the arm I had so nearly broken. He said, ‘You know I could just throw you overboard – and no one could ask any questions?’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but there is just the chance that I’ll wring your neck while you’re trying.’

The electric cable had wrapped around the port screw, Augusto said. I heaved Fernie below into the cabin and into a bunk – he was too old for this sort of caper, he was badly shook up. I told Augusto to head back to Albufeira, using only the starboard motor. It would be a slow journey and the wind was backing against the dawn sun. This floating Cadillac was no sort of boat to face bad weather in. I retrieved my pistol, put it away and went across to Tomas.

‘I’ve got a Portuguese passport,’ Tomas said.

‘When you are in Tarrafal
^*
you might wish you had some other sort of passport.’

‘I’ve served my time in prison; I don’t have to put up with the British Gestapo around my neck for the rest of my life.’

‘That doesn’t have to be too long,’ I said. ‘If you peddle narcotics across the world you must expect to attract a little attention. It’s captious to complain afterwards.’

‘Save your lies for when you write your report,’ said Tomas. ‘You aren’t interested in narcotics.’

‘No? What am I interested in, then?’

‘You’re interested in the “Weiss List”, the item I nearly tugged out of the ocean a few minutes ago.’

‘That’s exactly right,’ I told him, ‘I am.’

‘It’s lost,’ he said, ‘lost for all time. You can never get it.’

‘But you know what it consisted of?’ Tomas’s face went grey – he was frightened and he didn’t take fright easily.

‘Let me help you remember,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you one name that was on it.’ I named Smith. Tomas said nothing. ‘The man that you and your friend Ivor Butcher decided to blackmail,’ I prompted.

‘You know about Butcher,’ said Tomas. ‘Leave him out of it. He’s just a nice little fellow trying to help me. He’s not to blame.’

‘He’s not, eh?’ I said, but I didn’t disillusion him.

I sat down. I was as limp as a Dali watch.

Fernie tugged at his moustache, paused and then said, ‘I was the only survivor from the U-boat. I thought at first …’

‘Look, Fernie,’ I said, ‘I seldom interrupt people when they’re talking; especially when they are inventing complicated lies, because they are often far more interesting than the truth. However, for you I’ll make an exception; start telling the truth or I’ll sling you over the side.’

‘Very well,’ said Fernie affably, ‘where shall I start?’

‘You can forget all that fairy-story stuff about dead sailors washed up with sovereign dies and digging graves to prove it. Also forget any nonsense about your career in the U-boat. Unless you know what caused it to sink.’

‘No,’ said Fernie, ‘I don’t know that.’

‘Did your friend da Cunha deliberately open the valves before he rowed ashore with the “Weiss List”?’

‘No,’ said Fernie quietly, ‘he would never do anything like that. He is a man of great honour.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘you all are; you, Kondit and da Cunha. An honourable bunch of thugs. Look, Peterson’ – it was the first time I had used his English name – ‘you’re just trying to kick a step out of a moving staircase. Behind me is another agent, behind him another. I’m a soft touch compared with some of the yahoos that are going to descend on you in any part of the world you go. All they want back in Whitehall is a nice clean file with the word “Closed” written across the front so that they can put it in the cellar. Try to be a bit sensible and I’ll write a little note about what a
help you have been. You never know when a little billet doux like that could be useful.’