The German Numbers Woman (32 page)

‘Opium? Did they say that?' Anything more specific, and Howard would be lying.

‘As far as I heard.' Keep it indefinite. ‘Tons of it. More than you could get from all the Flanders poppies put together, it seemed.' The fact that Richard kept him on this topic, as he had known he would, told Howard more than he had been certain of before the meeting. ‘I suppose if I was a right thinking law abiding citizen I might put a word in somebody's ear about it.'

‘And why didn't you? Don't you, I should say?' It's because he's still not sure, or he's lying. He's in the airy realms of yarn telling. But if he isn't, and his intention is hinted to Waistcoat, there'll be a contract killing on his head before he can find the Belisha beacons to cross the road.

Howard felt hot ash on his wrist, a bit of cigarette paper attached, but let it burn out – Richard noticed – without flinching. ‘It's because that isn't all. I could be waiting for something more to develop.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like what? Something so big it gives me palpitations.' He regretted more than at any other time that he couldn't see Richard's face on coming out with: ‘The Azores.'

‘I'd better get the bill.' Richard knew that if he couldn't stand the heat he had better get out of the kitchen. The blind man was playing cup and ball, and scoring every time, the only good being that he didn't see the jolt of his hand when he said
Azores
– though he recovered sufficiently to say: ‘We were made to recite a poem at school about the Azores. Didn't it go something like: “At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay” – I forget the rest. I hated it.'

‘Tennyson,' Howard said.

‘Yeh, the old bastard. But what about the Azores?' he went on, calmly now.

‘Oh, yes, well, there's going to be the biggest pick-up of the lot from there. Isn't that enough?' He stopped, feeling a fly on his hand and waiting to swat it. It flew away, as if disturbed by the tension in his veins. ‘Very big, all lined up.'

‘You heard that?'

‘In no uncertain terms.'

No more fucking about, he decided. ‘When?'

‘In September, late, towards the end. But even they don't know the exact date. Not yet. I'll find out. I'm glued to the radio every night.'

‘They're still talking?'

‘Why shouldn't they be?'

‘I don't know.'

‘They're in love, you see. Indiscreet, perhaps, but not too much so. It's just that someone like me can put the bits and pieces together, and come up with the right answer.'

Richard had to play the only card possible, though with little hope of winning. He lit another cigarette, in spite of a sore spot in his chest, sent the smoke drifting over Howard's empty plate. ‘Supposing I were a detective putting all the pieces together. I have to assume so, to be part of the game.'

‘It's certainly absorbing us,' Howard grinned.

‘Well, it's such a good story. The end of it all for me would be that, finally, I wouldn't believe there was any reality to it. Absolute garbage. I'd like it for the story – who wouldn't? – but not for the truth.'

‘Why is that?'

‘I wouldn't believe two people chatting on the radio would be so careless, and give away a scheme that might put them and a few others away for twenty years.'

Howard moved spoon and fork around on his plate. ‘You could be right.'

‘I'm sure I am – would be, I mean.'

But why so sure, on any terms? Truth was often, as he had heard, stranger than fiction, and instinct a sure guide to sort out both, the final lock on what was what. He was tiring of the cat-and-mouse zig-zags, ‘And yet.'

‘Yet what?'

‘My deductions are spot on. A few holes left, but not many. When they're filled in I shall know what to do.'

All was lost for a moment, with knobs on, forcing Richard to say: ‘Will you promise you won't do anything until you've talked it over with me?'

It was hard at times when you were blind not to think that others couldn't see either, so Howard's smile was more than ruthlessly put down, Richard only catching a figment of pain on his lips. He knew now all he needed to know. ‘If you'd like me to, out of friendship, yes. I'll keep it to myself.'

A laugh was necessary, to cover the fact that he felt a mere child. ‘Not that. Why should it be? I only ask because maybe the final story will be more finished if we put both our heads together. It's such a good one. I like talking about it, that's all.'

‘All right. I'll keep to that,' regarding Richard's request as an attempt to save face.

Which promise was the best Richard knew he would get out of such a subtle antagonist, at least until he had spoken to the others. ‘Before going back, let's drive down to Dungeness.'

‘I'd like that.' He knocked a chair over while standing up, which Richard righted in an instant. ‘We can watch the fish swimming in the warm water from the power station. Laura told me about them when we were there before.'

TWENTY

On the way to town Richard thought he would listen, for entertainment, to the latest morse letter from Howard. Each note's absolute regularity could almost have been made on a machine, but after the initial greetings, and enquiries after health, he realised that the forthcoming text would be special and create no laughter. There was something eerie about the self-assured patter of his sending.

He spun the tape back several times to check that he had heard correctly. Can I credit it? he asked himself, and a solid no was the response. The aura of a bad dream was hardly calculated to calm his mind. Certainly a fantasy on Howard's part, though he couldn't deny that it was one which cemented their relationship even further.

He had been thinking, Howard said – he certainly had – but what he proposed, what he in fact demanded in a way not much short of blackmail, must have been in his mind far earlier than the time of their lunch together. That Howard had a unique mind compared to his own he had never doubted, though whether it was because of his affliction – so called: he was beginning to wonder – or because he would have been that way as a perfectly sighted man, he didn't know. All he was sure of was that the association might land Howard in such a quantity of drek that it would bury him even above his unseeing head.

As far as Howard went, and Howard was more than acute enough to know it, he had nothing to lose or, being as blind as a bat, assumed he hadn't, but Richard, as far as he himself was concerned, had everything to lose, which could also be said for the rest of the crew. Howard must obviously realise as much, but didn't bring the factor into his calculations. Had he been normal, and sent a handwritten letter, there would have been something to hang him by, but the dear and imperious morse, which only the two of them in the local circle could read, enclosed them in secrecy and implicated Richard also, which Howard well knew, in his peculiar and illuminated ruthlessness.

Richard didn't know what to do, yet there was only one thing he could do. The sentences came clear and pat, no more dissimulation or hiding what Howard wanted. And what he did want was preposterous. It was unbelievable. ‘I seem to have the whole key to your expedition in my hands, even down to the details.' He was lying, but that wasn't significant anymore, though a blind man lying could be alarming enough to set the klaxon shrieking.

Howard would know that Richard would know that he was lying, which was all part of the net he was casting. ‘It is up to me whether or not to blow the gaff on you and the rest. I could do it at any hour I chose, whether you go on the trip or not. Nothing would be easier. As you know, however, telling what I know to the police would put me on the wrong side of the law for listening, an anomalous position with regard to my conscience, but I expect they would forgive me for that.'

What a mealy-mouthed old bastard! though Richard admired his subtlety and dexterity, especially when he went on: ‘Informing a third party would in any case allow me to get used to being against the law, so having contemplated such a course I can feel no qualms by going even further, even the whole hog, you might say. In my life a little chaos, and even danger (though I don't anticipate that) can do no harm. Rather, it has an attraction which I find hard to steer away from.

‘What I propose then, want, demand if you like, is that you somehow or other take me with you to the Azores, on any pretext – I don't care which you have to choose – but get me on that boat. If you want absolute secrecy from me as to why you are going then I can guarantee it hand on heart. After all, what can a blind man be witness to? That I go with you is the only condition for my silence, and from then on I will take my secret to the grave, as melodramatic as that may sound. I'm all set for it, nothing will stop me, and you have no other way out except to make sure I go with you.'

Oh, yes there was a way out, but it was one which Howard's imagination seemed not to have thought of, unless he just wasn't saying. He lacked one of his five senses already, but could be deprived of the others, could lose even the use of his legs, or his hands or, worst of all, his ears, which could cut him off from life and mischief altogether. Maybe he knew this, well aware of the odds but, as before, thought he had nothing to lose, and because of one paltry affliction was prepared to gamble his empty life away.

In the tape he went on to indicate – and Richard even in his mind saw the rather large but delicate fingers manipulating the key with a certainty that he would get what he wanted – that since he poured all his thoughts on the matter into such a message his obsession would have to be satisfied. He ended by saying that on the kind of trip he envisaged – a little sugar on the pill – he could act as second radio man and tune into any station whose information might be vital for making the trip safer for all on board. He thought of everything, this final snippet at least giving Richard a line to suggest if Waistcoat's reaction turned out to be rougher than he hoped.

Richard regretted getting to know him, yet if he hadn't he would not have won his confidence, and found put what he listened to. Also, it would be a godsend for the others to be aware of a break in their security. A man with the use of his eyes may have thought little of the chatter going on between two women, but the one in a million chance of a blind man hearing it had let him put clues together and figure the whole thing out. Richard had been on hand to know, luckily, but he hardly saw himself being thanked for the priceless information that had been hammered into his brainbox.

Going into the flat on Harley Street, he couldn't imagine the redecorations had been done specially for the penultimate countdown briefings, though Waistcoat may have had such an object in mind, since he would be coming on the boat with them. He never thought he had much aesthetic taste (having left it to Amanda, who had) but puke yellow in the recesses, offal white for the ceiling, and snot green for the rest, obviously seemed more than all right to Waistcoat, who stood by the mantelpiece beneath the fake ‘Last Supper' with a finger in each lower pocket. Such bizarre choices didn't much matter to Richard, whose stance was bolstered by a little private knowledge about the forthcoming expedition, something they would learn soon enough.

Waistcoat was as close to an affable mood as he could get, as he poured white wine, even though he thought it much too good for them, since they wouldn't know mouthwash from the best Bordeaux, or a vintage from recently established vineyards in the north of England.

Richard glanced around the room as if seeing everyone for the first time, a villainous lot of proficient seamen whose faces he hoped belied their true character. On the other hand it was often difficult to decide whether the face showed its true self, or whether the true self was hidden by the face. All he knew was that the right behaviour was guaranteed in a crisis. He had sailed with them before, had no qualms, and supposed it was likewise, their glances so quick as he came in that no optical instrument could measure them.

Killisick's large head and small body made him look frail, but Richard knew him as a strong little man, in that he had once slung a vat of boiling stew over someone who, he found out, had taken his false teeth – resting in a mug on the bread bin – and wouldn't say where they were hidden. Bald and fair skinned, always with a smile while working at his stove, he was known as so ingenious a cook that if need be he could produce a cordon bleu blow-out in a force nine gale from a couple of seagulls and a bucket of kelp.

Richard was so engrossed in weighing up his shipmates' qualities that for some moments he wasn't aware of Waistcoat talking, though didn't suppose he had missed anything important.

‘It's a long time since we had such a big job on, and I've called the six of you together just to make sure you know it, and how vital it's going to be. We're taking a big boat, which signifies you'll be in the lap of luxury. But I'll need all the hands I can get, so I'll be on board from start to finish. You'll have to watch yourselves, that's all I can say. We don't want any fuck-ups this time.'

Waistcoat's choice of language made it easy to know what ran through his mind – a cross as he was between a panther and a south London slum kid. A certain tension among the members of such an organisation – if you could call it that – was healthy enough, and Richard had no difficulty plugging into it, knowing that in any emergency they would fuse into an acceptable unity rather than the other way round – except that introducing the matter of Howard's demands right now might have a spectacular effect, Waistcoat's temper always fragile when any grains of sand fell into the meticulousness of his Swiss watch arrangements.

‘There've never been any fuck-ups,' Scuddilaw said. ‘That's not what we're here for. Never have been.' Richard had seen him do the most backbreaking work for longer than anyone else, without complaining. He had a squat compact body, thick ginger hair low on his brow, and grey glinting eyes that gave nothing away. All they knew about him was that he exercised several hours a day to make himself look more and more as if he had nothing inside but concrete. ‘We all know well enough what to do once we're at sea.'