Artillery of Lies (30 page)

I don't care,
he said to himself furiously,
I can do what I like. I can kill him if I want to. I don't care.

The street petered out into a waste of bombed sites. Laszlo used the gunpoint to steer the Lascar through piles of rubble. “Now stop,” he said. “Give me your money and your papers.” He got the man's wallet. “Now go,” he said, and tripped him as he turned away. The man sprawled. Laszlo bent and whacked his head with the pistol-butt. “Stay silent,” he said. “Tell no one, or I shall find you and kill you.”

Fifty yards away, Laszlo stopped and wondered whether he shouldn't go back and finish him off. He took out the silencer and
softly blew down it. The hard, cool, metallic taste was far better than that seaman's soft, disgusting ear.

No. Better not. A murder would provoke the police far more than an everyday backstreet robbery. He put it away.

Thirty-two pounds in the wallet, and the identity papers of A. J. Lakram. Laszlo signed the name with ease and familiarity when he registered at a doss-house that masqueraded as a hotel, and got a good night's sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a hard day.

“You can't give Eisenhower the pox, Luis,” Freddy Garcia said. “Honestly you can't. I mean, there are limits.”

“General Patton, then.” Luis was lying on his bed, reading a boys' comic weekly called
The Rover.
“Poxy Patton.”

Freddy grunted, and turned the pages of the draft report. “Is it absolutely essential to drown an entire American infantry division?” he asked. “Not a single survivor?”

“Troopship hits an ammunition boat at full speed. Krakatoa! What else d'you expect?”

“I don't expect the convoy commander to commit suicide. It's not the British way, old chap.”

“He was American. Didn't I say so? Admiral Orson O. Sixshooter the Third. Couldn't take the disgrace so he tried to cut his throat but he missed because he was pissed, so he beat his brains out with an old cucumber instead.” Luis gave Freddy a blank stare. “Write it in the margin, there's a good chap.”

“Old cucumbers go soggy, I believe,” Freddy said.

“Not as soggy as American brains. Look,” Luis said, “I've given you all your boring troop movements and training exercises and aircraft production schedules, so what are you complaining about?”

“I'm not complaining. I'm just wondering how cholera got into the American embassy.”

“The
Abwehr
will love it.” Luis went back to
The Rover.

Freddy re-read the draft, and sighed. “Let's discuss it tomorrow,” he said. Luis nodded, deep in his story. Freddy paused at the door. I know it's none of my business, but I do feel sorry,' he said. “For you both.”

“I told her to go,” Luis said. “I've got to have peace and quiet or I can't work. You know what women are like.”

*

Washed, shaven and brushed, Laszlo Martini went out into the great city of Glasgow and found his way to the university medical school in less than an hour, and it was empty. Summer vacation, a porter told him. “They've a' ganged hame,” he explained.

“Hame?” Laszlo said. “Where is Hame?”

“Hame is where it's aye bin, ye daft bugger. Hame is where ye hang yer hat.”

“I see.” Laszlo nodded. “And is Hame easy to find?”

“Dinny pull ma chain, Jimmy,” the porter warned him. “Ah done twenny-two year in the Black Watch.” His door slammed.

Laszlo bought a cup of tea at a small café around the corner. “Not many medical students to be seen,” he remarked.

“Ah'm nay greetin',” the man who served him said. “Next?”

Laszlo took his cup and went away and thought. So far there were two words he was confident of:
vacation
and
Hame,
although
Hame
meant nothing to him. He remembered his training in Madrid and decided to try a new tack. When a girl came round collecting used cups he smiled and said, “The medical students—when will they be back?”

She stared. “Dinny ken,” she said.

“I see. All of them?”

“Dinny ken.”

“Many thanks.” He gave her sixpence and left. At least he had got a straight answer, even if he didn't fully understand it. “Dinnyken” sounded vaguely familiar, he'd heard it in the bar last night, he was almost sure of that. Maybe it was a local name for a religious feast-day, like Christmas or Easter. That made sense. Vacation ends at Dinnyken. Laszlo felt a bristling of annoyance: the
Abwehr
should have briefed him on these things, instead of fussing over ounces and farthings. But he quashed the feeling and shaped his face to look pleasant as he stopped a passer-by. “Excuse me,” he said. “When exactly is Dinnyken?”

The dirty blue overalls were patched, the left leg limped, and the eyes had just finished a long, weary shift. “Go bile yer heed,” he said blackly.

Next Laszlo stopped two women and asked the same question. They looked at each other. “We're baith Presbyterian,” one told him. They hurried on.

He made one more attempt, and chose a tall, elderly man in sweater and corduroy trousers who—although Laszlo couldn't have known it—was both an Englishman and a lecturer in philosophy at the university. “When is Dinnyken?” Laszlo asked him.

“I often ask myself that very question,” he said. “Also, where is time? And how is life? Good-day to you.” He raised his hat and went on his way.

For Laszlo all this was infuriating. He knew he must be only a mile or two from his target, yet he kept stumbling over these tripwires of ignorance and idiocy. He sat on a wall and forced himself to think. One fact was clear: anything involving the working classes was a waste of time. They spoke a kind of gibberish and even for peasantry they seemed very dense. Someone in the university must know where he could find Garlic if only he could get past these clods. Why hadn't Madrid prepared him for this sort of emergency? Gradually he sank into apathy. The people of Glasgow wandered about in front of him and he found them a sorry sight. They all dressed so sombrely, in blacks and grays and dark blues. God knew, the place itself was grim enough, nothing but blackened granite, every house pimpled with a dozen chimneypots all smudging and staining the sky. No wonder the children looked stunted, with heads close-cropped like pygmy convicts and short trousers that covered their knees as if they were made of sacks, and often no shoes or boots. The whole place was like a slum. How could a good spy operate in a slum? It was an insult. Laszlo's head turned as he watched a typical product of the slums go by, kicking a dented tin can, until he saw a policeman standing watching him, and a bag of ice dropped into his guts and froze everything hard.

That was when his
Abwehr
training saved him.
Looked bored,
they had said again and again.
Don't whistle, don't grin, don't scratch your private parts, you're not a trained actor and you won't look innocent, you'll look peculiar. Do nothing. And do it slowly.
So Laszlo forgot the boy and counted up to a hundred.
The bastard cop probably reckons I'm some sort of pervert,
he thought when he got into the twenties. At forty his heart was thudding as if someone was attacking it with mallets. At sixty he could see his left hand shaking. He gave up counting, slid off the wall, dusted the seat of his pants to give his left hand a job, and astounded himself by walking toward the policeman.
No eye-contact. Never look him in the face. You're not interested, you're bored.
But the man was still watching Laszlo, he could sense it, and very soon Laszlo
knew he had to do something, anything, or he would trip over his own feet. He took out his small change and sorted the coins as he walked. Why? What if the cop said
Where are you going?
Going to make a phone call, obviously.

He sauntered past the policeman and saw, of all things, a telephone booth just twenty yards ahead. So he went into it. There was even a phone book, looking as if it had been chewed by rats.

Laszlo telephoned the school of medicine. He knew how to do that: Dr. Hartmann had coached them in British telephones. You inserted two pennies, waited for the tone to change, dialed the number and when someone answered, you pressed the button marked A.

Nobody answered. The line was engaged.

And just as bloody well,
Laszlo told himself,
because you haven't worked out what you're going to say, have you?
Still listening to the continuous buzz he said into the telephone. “Excuse me, I am a visiting Spaniard and I am desperate for garlic, could you possibly recommend a reliable agent somewhere in Glasgow? Give me his address and—”

Knuckles rapped on the door. It was the policeman. Laszlo felt his knees buckle under the burden of fright, as if he had come down in a lift that stopped too suddenly.

He tugged at the door. It was jammed tight. The policeman slowly shook his head, a gesture full of reproach, and pulled the door. It opened
outward.
Everyone knew that. Bad mistake.

“Dinna waste yer breath,” the policeman said. “They canna hear ye.”

“Ah.” The telephone was slippery in Laszlo's sweaty hand. “I was only … um …”

“Ye didny press button A. I seen ye havin' a good blether on the phone, but ye hadny pressed button A.” The policeman's forefinger punched button B and Laszlo's twopence clattered into the return box. He took the coins out and rubbed them between his meaty fingers. “What's your game, then, Jimmy?” he asked. “Black magic, is it?”

“I am trying to call my bank,” Laszlo said. (If you must lie, Richard Fischer had stressed, keep it simple.) “To borrow some money. The number was busy, so I practiced what I was going to say.” Laszlo replaced the phone. “Banks make me nervous,” he said. This was true. Laszlo had never been inside a bank in his life.

The policeman had let his eyelids droop until they were almost closed. “Practice, is it?” he said. “Tell us what you were gonny say.”

“I was going to say …”
Keep it simple.
“I was going to say
that I need more money because the police take what little I have.”

Neither of them smiled. The policeman seemed to find Laszlo's left ear slightly interesting. Then he got tired of looking at it. He gave him his twopence. “Rich again,” he said, and walked away.

This time Laszlo went in the opposite direction. His next stop should have been a public lavatory but it was too far away by about ten feet and he threw up his breakfast in the gutter. “Some party, eh?” said a passer-by, with a genial laugh. Laszlo hated him. Losing your breakfast was no joke when you were engaged in work of national importance.

An hour later he tried again. This time he got through to the medical school, and he actually spoke to the bursar. It was the wrong time of day. The bursar wanted his dinner. He didn't want to get involved in a telephone discussion with some twerp at the Venezuelan consulate when they telephoned about a student who might be the next-of-kin of someone who'd just died in Venezuela but the cable hadn't given his name, so the consulate wondered if … No, no. The bursar's instincts told him to stay well clear of stuff as complex as that, it always got worse. Unfortunately (he said) his secretary was on holiday, and in any case it sounded more like the sort of thing they'd know about in the Student Registration office, extension 4242, sorry he couldn't help, ask for Mrs. Ogilvy, she knows everything, goodbye.

Long before Laszlo hung up, he knew that the next-of-kin story was no good. Too long-winded, too complicated, too peculiar. He must keep it simple. What he needed was some utterly straightforward reason why the university should give him Garlic's name and address. Something ordinary and boring.

He walked about Glasgow for an hour, stood in a queue and bought some fish and chips wrapped in newspaper and ate them as he walked some more. In the end he was looking at a bunch of young soldiers, wondering just how young they were, and the idea came to him as easily as picking a flower. It pleased him so much that he went straight to a phone and called extension 4242.

To Laszlo's tin ear, Mrs. Ogilvy sounded like Docherty in drag, but at least she was understandable and she was willing to help the Venezuelan consul.

“It's about these new forms, Mrs. Ogilvy,” Laszlo said. “The Ministry of Labor has sent us Form 8000B, ‘Exemption of Foreign Students from Military Service.' I believe the university has one Venezuelan student? In your school of medicine? Is that right?”

Mrs. Ogilvy went to get the files. She kept special files on overseas students; it was easier; the Home Office was forever fussing and fretting itself about them …

“Yes. Here we are,” she said. Laszlo's head jerked with joy. “No South American undergraduates, but that's hardly surprising, is it? Not in wartime. Not many graduates, either. Our school of medicine has just the one. Is your pencil ready? It's Dr. Cabezas. Initials R. M. Dr. R. M. Cabezas.”

“Excellent.” Only one hurdle to jump. “If you have an address …”

“La Paz, Bolivia. I can't pronounce the street, but I'll spell it out for you and you can—”

“Not Bolivia. Venezuela.”

That stopped her short. “It says Bolivia here,” she said. “Sometimes they move and they don't tell us, but Dr. Cabezas has been at the university for some years, so I don't see how …”

“What I mean is I asked you for names of Venezuelan students.” The telephone started sounding urgent pips. Laszlo stuffed more pennies in the slot and punched the button and the pips stopped. “Venezuelan medical students,” he said. “There must be one. Are you sure there isn't one?”

Much rustling of paper. “Are you positive you didn't say Bolivia?” she asked. “Why did I give you Dr. Cabezas's name if you didn't say Bolivia? That's what I don't understand.” She was beginning to sound tetchy. “La Paz isn't in Venezuela, is it?”
Foreigners,
she was thinking,
why don't they stay at home instead of coming bothering us?
That was when she remembered the pips. “Are you using a public phone?” she asked. “Who did you say you were?”