Then We Take Berlin (13 page)

“I’ve no use for him, Holderness. You were the only one who met the IQ requirements.”

“I’m not talking about that. What I mean is I want him out of the RAF. Away from those tosspots who’ll drive him to suicide before his ten weeks are up. Get him discharged. Medically unfit.”

“But he was passed fit or he wouldn’t be in the bloody RAF.”

“Then un-pass him.”

“He’s got two years to serve, just like everyone else.”

“You can do it.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Never said it was. But if it were impossible you’d have said impossible.”

“Two years, Holderness.”

“Fine. If the king can’t spare ’em, I’ll serve his two bleedin’ years, You can sign me up till 1949.”

“You’re not joking?”

“Just get him out and back in civvies before those fuckers kill him.”

“Was he charged after the piss incident?”

“No. They blamed me for everything.”

“Jankers?”

“All they could pile on I’d imagine, but no formal charges.”

“Alright, you have a deal. And you tell no one. Mr. Birch will be back in Civvy Street by the end of the week.”

“Thank you sir. You are a gentleman . . . and I am a scholar.”

The grin was too much for Burne-Jones.

“Don’t push it, Holderness. And don’t let altruism ruin you. Or you’ll be no bloody use to me.”

Burne-Jones got back in his MG. Wilderness went in search of a dictionary and looked up “altruism.” It was not something he thought would trouble him much.

§32

It was tempting to be a schoolboy and slip laxative into the cocoa of the two infantry corporals or to let down the tyres of their ubiquitous Cambridge bikes, but it went against the grain of everything he had learnt from his grandfather, chiefly that vengeance could and should be tempered with profit.

It was easy enough to find out where they boarded, and almost as easy to slip in when no one was home and rob them of everything worth stealing. Two burglaries in a single wet afternoon while both corporals were stuck in remedial German grammar would point the finger squarely at him, so he chose the digs of the bigger, nastier of the two and netted seven pounds seven and sixpence in cash, a pair of gold cuff links, a silver cigarette case and several back issues of
Men Only
. It felt odd, like practising an instrument after months of neglect—a strange tingling in the fingertips as though they itched not for the easy pickings of petty theft, but for a safe.

On his next trip to London he sold the gold and silver to Abner’s fence and on his return took Clark out for an off-the-ration meal at one of the city’s better restaurants. Much to the bafflement of the waiters they conducted their entire conversation in two languages. Clark would speak in German, and Wilderness was obliged to respond to whatever he said in Russian. And vice versa.

“Мне кажется, что если мы не были в форме, они уже позвонили бы Полиции.” Wilderness said.

“
Verdammt richtig.
” Clark replied.

Wilderness switched to English over the coffee, not yet feeling he could string out every vital thought at its proper speed in any foreign language.

“I’ve never eaten in a restaurant before.”

“I can tell,” said Clark.

“Not counting chippies of course.”

“I have. When I was a War Office driver, the back pay used to pile up by dribs and drabs and about once a month a few of us would go up West and have a bit of a blowout. It’s what got me interested in languages, reading menus in French.”

“Like what?”

“
Filet mignon
.”

“What does that mean?”

“Steak, posh steak.”

“
Et pommes dauphinoises
.”

“You got me there, Eddie.”

“Spuds in milk.”

“Sounds awful.”

“It’s not.”

“Y’know. One day, I’m going to go into one of those posh restaurants and eat my way through the menu.”

“Literally?”

“Nah . . . but have anything, absolutely anything I want.”

Clark paused, drew breath.

“You’ve never really lived have you, Joe?”

“I’m eighteen and a half, Eddie. How much living do you want me to have done?”

“I’m only twenty-three meself. What I mean is England isn’t one world, it’s several. Let’s not kid ourselves that because we’re on first-name terms with a couple of navy sub-lieutenants and the colonel’s not above using our first names when it suits him, that us and them live in the same world. We don’t. Going up West was a wartime treat. It would have been unpatriotic for any restaurant to have been snotty with us, but the war’s over. English snottiness will be back in spades. And we’ll be down the chippie.”

“I say, waiter, cod and chips twice with an extra helping of mushy peas and a saveloy. Pip pip!”

Clark giggled.

“How do you do that? You sound just like Burne-Jones.”

“Ain’t difficult Eddie, and if all it takes to pass for a toff is sounding like one and looking like one . . . well . . . their world is ours for the taking isn’t it? A bit of ventriloquism and a decent tailor and it’s ours.”

“I’m not sure I want it.”

“I do. I want the bleedin’ lot. I wants what’s mine, and if some other tosser’s got it I want what’s his too.”

“For a chit of a kid, you certainly scare me sometimes, Joe.”

§33

Wilderness had no idea why or how a serving officer might come to pawn his uniform, but at the back of a dusty, cobwebbed window in a pawn shop in the Mile End Road there hung the jacket and trousers of what his fag cards (buttons grouped in fives, ludicrously embossed with leeks) told him was a second lieutenant in the Welsh Guards.

Wilderness asked.

“Yeah, I remember him. Three sheets to the fuckin’ wind ’e was. One day in, I reckon it was January 1943. Said he’d come on leave without evening dress and could he swap his uniform for a full DJ and dickie until Monday morning. Well, I got five bob off him up front, ’cos if he never come back I was stuck with the bleedin’ thing wasn’t I? And he never did. Not seen him again from that day to this. Either he was so pissed he forgot where the shop was, and if he weren’t pissed and lost, what was he doin’ in the bleedin’ Mile End Road in the first place? . . . or he copped it. Either way I got stuck with his uniform.”

“Two quid,” said Wilderness.

“Three,” said the pawnbroker. “This ain’t tat. This is the proper clobber. Gieves and Hawkes. Savile Row tailors they are.”

“Two pound ten.”

“Done, but yer robbin’ me blind, son.”

Looking in Merle’s full-length mirror on the front of her wardrobe he thought, “Not bad. Bit shorter than me, a bit fuller.”

Merle said, “Nobody looks at your feet. The length don’t matter. Tighten your belt and the tum’ll be OK. What people look at is your face. If you’re going to pull off the stunt I think you’re going to then what you need is a proper haircut—and I don’t mean the ninepenny barber down the road. I mean a proper job. Half a dollar up West.”

In an alley off Jermyn Street, he strangled his vowels, got a haircut for half a crown—a ludicrous sum of money, but the trick, he knew, was to suppress all sense of the ludicrous—and took himself for tea at the Café Royal.

Café Royal was nothing more to him than a name. He’d never been there. He had no idea if royalty might be there. One of his childhood heroes was forever eating there, but A. J. Raffles was fictional. He’d no idea what would be on the menu, but assumed that at four o’clock they would probably be serving tea and cake. All he had to do was catch his dropped aitches before they hit the carpet.

It was a caff. Just a caff. A caff glorified by waiters dressed like penguins, by a lick of paint and a clean cloth on every table, but a caff.

He was shown to a table with a degree of obsequiousness unknown in the Mile End Road—and over Assam and Battenberg pretended to read the
Daily Express
while looking at and listening to everything around him.

It reminded him of going out on jobs with Abner. He was peeking into other rooms and other lives. It was the same feeling he got creeping around in some rich woman’s bedroom. Every sight, every scent was fascinating. The real difference was not in his visibility—he was surely almost as invisible at four in the afternoon under electric chandeliers as he had been in the crepuscular light by which Abner worked. The real difference was he had not snuck in through a window or shinned down a soil stack, he had walked in through the revolving door. It wasn’t his world, it might never be his world, but it was just a game, a game of manners and illusions and deceptions, and at that a game he could play. Raffles got away with everything. He could be as fake as Raffles, and get away with everything.

§34

Eddie Clark did not agree.

“You stupid bugger. Masquerading as an officer. It’s a court-martial offence!”

“So?”

“Supposing you’d been rumbled?”

“I wasn’t. I remembered to tip the waiter. I got a cab to King’s Cross. Tipped the cabbie. Once I was on the train I nipped in the bog and changed back into my RAF togs. Nobody rumbled me. In fact I’ve found only one thing not to like about being a toff.”

“And what might that be?”

“All this tipping lark. Never had to do that before. But then I’ve never had tea at the Café Royal or ridden in a cab before.”

“And your point is?”

“My point? My point . . . my point is it’s our world Eddie, not theirs.”

§35

The first car they stole was a 1937 Crossley 26/90. A plain four-door model with no exotic, athletic ornament on the radiator cap—as though Crossley Motors had anticipated the austerity to come.

“We don’t want to attract too much attention, now do we?”

“Joe—I don’t want to attract any attention. I’m not past a bit of coupon fiddling, but I’ve never nicked anything in my life.”

“We aren’t stealing it, Eddie.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“’Cos if there’s no one about when we’ve finished, I’ll put it back where we found it. And if you have any of those hooky petrol coupons about your person we’ll even put a gallon in the tank for him. Now I’m going to head out in the direction of Trumpington, you just tell me when I do something wrong.”

Eddie told him not to crunch the gears, to ease his foot off the clutch not just let go of it, to make more use of the mirrors.

“You’re not half bad for a beginner,” he said. “Get some miles in and you’ll pass.”

The coast being clear, Wilderness parked the car back where he had found it. As they walked away, he taught Eddie a thing or two.

“Never look over your shoulder. It’s a dead giveaway.”

“Whatever you say. But . . .”

“Yeah? What?”

“Are we going to go on nicking cars?”

“Don’t see why not. Nobody loses. Bloke who owns the Crossley made half a gallon of petrol and still has all his coupons.”

“Then, next time, would you nick something a bit smaller.”

Two days later, they had arranged to meet by Jesus Green. Clark stood watching as Wilderness roared up in a 1938 MG.

“This small enough?”

“But . . . but . . . that’s Burne-Jones’s car.”

All the way to Newmarket, Eddie said nothing.

On the way back he said, “You’re still not using your mirrors and you stay in third too long.”

Then he said, “Do you do things like this just because you can?”

“Not quite with you there, Eddie.”

“I mean—what are you trying to prove? You could have nicked any car. You didn’t have to nick Burne-Jones’s.”

He insisted on getting out at Parker’s Piece, well short of the city centre, well short of Queens.

“Y’know Joe . . . I think I’ll get shot if I stick with you.”

§36

About a week later, Burne-Jones called Wilderness to a meeting in rooms at Queens.

“You’re doing very well. In fact too well.”

“How do make that out?”

“You’re ahead of the class. I am told that the pace at which you learn is forcing the tutors to speed up and that isn’t working out for the rest of them. Hence I’ve arranged more private tuition for you. Native Russian speaker. Probably the best tutor in the business. Think of it as your finishing school. It’ll mean you going up to London twice a week, but I doubt that’ll be a hardship for you. Tuesdays and Fridays from now on.”

Burne-Jones fished around in his pockets, found a battered, dog-eared calling card and handed it to Wilderness.

Wilderness looked at it.

Countess Rada Lyubova

99 Douro Mansions

Cornwall Gardens