Artillery of Lies (29 page)

“Well, then.”

“So why not admit it? Why try to hide it from me? I mean, what have you got to lose, for God's sake?” She sighed, and relaxed, and leaned back against him so that he had to lean against her. “You can be such a phony,” she said.

“Well, that's what I am, isn't it? A professional cheat.”

“Do you have to cheat me? Sometimes I think there's something wrong with me, some deficiency, it's the reason he can't trust me, so he's never honest with me. But it isn't me, is it? It's you. And I get sick of always having to be the interpreter. You can cheat and chisel the rest of the world, that's your business—”

“Yes it is.”

“—but if you can't be honest with me then the hell with you,
I'm not going to waste my time figuring out what's going on between your ears.”

They sat staring at the walls, looking like a couple of bookends with no books. Luis thought:
I really must do something about that Petrified Bog idea, it's been hanging about far too long.
“Why can't we be like we were?” he asked.

“Because we're not like we were anymore!” She got up so suddenly that he toppled over. “Forget
then.
This is
now.
What are you going to do about it?” She went over, came back, and kissed him on the forehead. “Creep,” she said, and went out.

Next morning the sun shone. They walked in the park, walked all the way up Piccadilly, and did the tourist trail: Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Houses of Parliament. The streets were awash with uniforms, the sky bubbled with barrage balloons, there were always aircraft high above the balloons speeding on some urgent mission. London had been badly knocked about, but the unexpected gaps and the fire-gutted shells of buildings were collecting fringes of grass and odd tufts of purple buddleia, which gave them a sort of raffish charm. Luis was delighted with the place. He was still full of fizz, and he let Julie—who knew London—guide him while he chattered cheerfully about nothing special. He was very taken with the appearance of American army officers in pink trousers and maroon tunics. “Poor devils,” he said. “Can't they afford a top and bottom to match? It's a scandal. We're not going to invade Europe looking like a chorus line from
The Gay Hussar,
are we?”

“Not us,” she said. “We're going to eat. Now.”

After lunch they walked back to Trafalgar Square. “I want a picture of you feeding the pigeons,” Luis said. He took a bread roll from his pocket. “Stole it while the waiter wasn't looking,” he said.

“We haven't got a camera.”

“Isn't there always a photographer hanging around?” He looked, and failed to find one. “Go ahead anyway. I'll just have to remember you.”

He tried to give her the bread roll but she would not take it. “That's not such a smart idea, Luis. You know, wasting food in wartime. There's probably some regulation.”

“You mean they'll arrest us? I can't see a British bobby. Can you?”

She turned and walked away. “I don't care. Pigeons give me the heebie-jeebies. I don't like them. In fact I hate them.”

Luis followed her, tossing the bread roll from hand to hand. A few
pigeons followed him. “You hate
pigeons?”
he said. “That's ridiculous. How can anyone hate pigeons?”

“Because they terrify me. They're stupid and they stink and they're all feathers and they panic and fly up in your face. I really loathe the little bastards.”

Luis took her arm. “That's crazy,” he said. They're just pigeons. How can they hurt you? Look.' He stamped his foot. The nearest birds took off in a rush of wings. Julie broke free and ran.

Luis had plenty of time to work out where he went wrong. She ran a long way. By the time he found her she was sitting on the steps of the National Gallery. “My fault entirely,” he said.

She looked at him as if he were a pigeon. “That was a really shitty thing to do,” she said. “Don't you ever think of anyone but yourself?”

He sat beside her and watched the crowds go by. Part of him was sorry and ashamed; another, rebellious part was saying:
What a fuss over a few scruffy pigeons. I was only trying to help. If she didn't want me to help, she shouldn't have
… He couldn't finish the sentence.

“Now I know you can't stand pigeons,” he said.

“Don't sound so goddam smug. Everybody has something. Even you.”

Cracked glass,
Luis thought. He couldn't bring himself to touch a piece of glass that was cracked, a windowpane, for instance, in case it shattered and cut him. He hated to see it. Just thinking of it made him shiver. He shook his head to chase the awful thought away.

“OK,” she said flatly, “so don't tell me.”

“I didn't mean that.”

“So what did you mean?” It was supposed to be a simple request for information. Somehow it came out coated with sandpaper. She knew from the way he hunched his shoulders and ducked his head that he wasn't going to answer.

They walked up St. Martin's Lane, for no particular reason, not saying much, looking in second-hand book shops, each silently juggling with blame and fault, guilt and regret. The sunshine had exhausted itself already; the sky was gray and odd freckles of rain appeared unexpectedly on the flagstones. They took cover beneath the canvas awning of a shop. Each knew that neither wanted to go back to the apartment; not like this. The owner of the shop came out and closed the awning.

“So what's the point?” Julie asked him.

“Keeps the sun off the books,” he said. “You wouldn't want to buy a bleached book, would you?”

“I might,” she said. “What's it about?” He went back inside.

Luis pointed. Across the road was a theater. The play was called
So Much For Love;
the
Telegraph
said it was beguiling, enchanting, delightful, and there was a matinée. They bought tickets and saw it. The
Telegraph
must have seen a different play but at least it killed the afternoon, and it made them hungry. As they ate they talked about the one subject they both knew was quite safe: their childhoods. Then they were standing in the street again. It was night; the blackout was total except for the soft glow from heavily shielded headlights. Buses rumbled past and the passengers were lost in shadow. Luis felt suddenly helpless. He had no idea how to get home—which way to go, where the Tube stations were, how to get a taxi when you couldn't tell a taxi from an army truck. “What now?” he said brightly.

“I want to see
Casablanca,”
she said.

“I thought you'd seen it.”

“That's why I want to see it again.”

“Is it on?”

“
Casablanca
is always on, somewhere.”

She bought an evening paper and checked the listings. She took him by Tube to a part of London he had never heard of, Notting Hill Gate, and they saw half a western, a gung-ho newsreel, and
Casablanca.

They took a bus back to Knightsbridge. Luis was still caught up in the film; he had never seen it before; it left him both limp and elated. He wanted to share his feelings but Julie was so silent that he decided to wait until they got home. Then he said: “That was a good idea of yours.”

“Glad you liked it. I used to like it.” She was looking in a mirror, taking off her earrings. “Now it does nothing for me anymore.”

He went to the kitchen and got a bottle of beer from the fridge. “Want some?” She shook her head. “I can't see what more you could ask for,” he said. “Good story, good acting. Terrific song.”

“Sure.” She was moving about the room, straightening the blackout curtains. “It's box-office, no two ways about it. I guess I've got tired of watching people run away all the time.
Casablanca's
full of running away, isn't it? It's set in Casablanca, for a start. Ever been there? I spent my honeymoon in Casablanca. The Atlantic City of North Africa. I know the cinema's about escapism, but
what a place for a war movie.” There was a touch of sandpaper in her voice again and she could see he didn't like it. Too bad.

“It's not a war movie, it's a love movie,” he said.

“Yeah, I heard the lyrics. ‘Woman loves man and man must have his mate,' on account of it rhymes with ‘fate.' D'you believe that?”

“It worked for Bogart and Bergman.”

“No, it didn't. He lost her, then she found him and what do you know? He lost her again. Which makes me think he didn't really want her in the first place.”

Luis drank more beer, and belched like a baby. “I have a nasty feeling this is getting painfully close to home,” he said.

“Then run away from it. You're good at that. You don't love me, Luis. You don't love anyone except Eldorado and he doesn't exist, so you're safe there.”

Luis swigged his beer. He was bored with it. “Does that mean we're finished?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

Luis had had enough. It was late, he was tired, he had a great desire to escape, to fly to Casablanca, to spend the rest of his life in a corner of Rick's Bar. “I'll tell you in the morning,” he said.

But in the morning he told her nothing, and in the afternoon she talked to Freddy Garcia and moved into a flat on another floor. Luis knew it was happening but he didn't see her go. He was shut in his room, writing.

The corridor was crowded, but Domenik saw Christian coming and pitched his voice to reach him. “What's a hundred yards long and lived on cabbage?” he asked.

“Don't know. What?”

“A German meat-queue,” Domenik said as they passed. Christian winced. He wished Domenik wouldn't do that to him. Even if it was true.

*

Laszlo saw three street-fights in his first half-hour in Glasgow. It was dusk, and he was somewhere between the docks and the red-light district, with plenty of drunks lurching out of plenty of bars, but even so he was impressed. The tenements were tall, gaunt and smoke-blackened, and the air tasted of sulfur; people shouted and swore; the trams lurched like drunks and screeched like whores. Laszlo had spent the last two-and-a-half days trundling along quiet country lanes and the raucous vigor of Glasgow nearly overwhelmed him. Here was a big, bleak, hard, ugly port-city with money in its pocket and fire in its belly, working flat-out twenty-four hours a day to handle all the trade the war kept sending it. Laszlo inwardly rejoiced.

A couple of miles outside Lime Street he had made the engine-driver stop the locomotive on a bridge over a main road. He had taken the man's money and his identification papers, and told him to shut up or he'd shoot him. The driver had thrown lumps of coal at Laszlo as he scrambled down the embankment, and missed. It was raining hard; nobody looked up at a lonely locomotive. Laszlo took a bus. He kept taking buses until he got into the country. He slept in a barn, and took more buses next day, and the day after, always heading north, feeling sure that the police and the army would be watching for him at railway stations and long-distance coach depots and gambling on their inability to check out every scruffy little country bus. It was a long journey. Thirty miles at a stretch was good going. He sat and waited in many little towns and villages, all the way up through Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland, over the border into Dumfries and Lanark. He was asleep when the last bus carried him into Glasgow. The driver came back and shook him awake, saying something cheerfully guttural and totally incomprehensible, and Laszlo got out. Language was a problem he had not expected. He could get by in English but up here they talked a strange, swooping dialect, marked by harsh use of the back of the throat, which explained (he thought) why they spat so much. He understood occasional words, such as “bus” or “street,” but the rest could just as well have been Cherokee or Polish. Here was another obstacle to be overcome.

But first he needed money.

The bars were full of money. Laszlo found a big bar, bought a drink—they understood “beer”—and eased through the din of customers to a place by the door where he could rest his back and
blend with the stained pub wallpaper. Laszlo was not so squalid as to be refused service in a Glasgow bar but he was fairly dirty (washing in horse-troughs only diluted the dirt), he hadn't shaved for three days, his clothes were stained and his body was rank; he knew that, because he could smell it. So could others. Nobody had sat beside him on the buses for long. Well, he didn't care if he was unattractive but he couldn't risk being noticeably repugnant.

It took him the worst part of an hour but eventually he saw the man he was looking for: a merchant seaman, about Laszlo's age and build, perhaps a Lascar, probably fresh off his boat and glad to be alive after another Atlantic convoy. What mattered was that he was alone. He took his drink for a stroll about the bar, didn't find what he wanted and left. Laszlo followed.

He had no clear-cut plan; he didn't like plans, they went wrong, it was better to let his gun arrange things. When he saw the Lascar pause at a street corner he ran and caught up with him. “Do you know what this is?” he said. There was just enough light in the sky for the Lascar to see the pistol. “I do,” he said and Laszlo was amused by his familiarity. He put the gun in his coat pocket but still held it. The man was quite still. They waited until some people had strolled by.

“Vamos,”
Laszlo said. They walked down a sidestreet, Laszlo beside him, their shoulders touching. On a foolish impulse Laszlo put his arm around him and kissed his neck, just above the collar. No response. Using his other hand, still in his coat pocket, Laszlo reached across and rubbed the gun-muzzle against the man's ribs. “You're mine now,” he said. Again, no response. He raised his arm, knocked off the man's hat and leaning close, nuzzled his ear, even biting lightly on the lobe. Absolutely no reaction: the fellow just kept pace with him, not looking, not speaking; so that Laszlo felt childish and angry, and released him.