Early One Morning (15 page)

On the other side of the door the heavy curtains were drawn, plunging the room into a curious half-light. Before him was a large desk, illuminated by an overhead light, and upon that desk was a large cloth which, judging by its contours, concealed an array of items underneath.

The woman who had spoken to him was sitting in a corner, visible mainly from the glowing tip of her cigarette. Without taking it out of her mouth she muttered, ‘Remove the cloth. You have ten seconds. Put it back. Tell me what the items were and tell me how they connect to each other.’

Williams stepped forward and, feeling like a cheap vaudeville magician, got ready to reveal what was underneath the cover. He pulled it away and his eyes scanned the motley assortment, mouthing them to himself, trying to put together a little mnemonic as he had been taught, or failing that burning the image of the tray and its contents into his visual cortex.

‘Ten,’ said the voice, and now he realised he knew the woman. ‘Tell me.’

He replaced the cloth. ‘A piece of glass. Venetian. Murano? A rose. A tartan biscuit tin with what looked like red paint on it. A stuffed animal. A vole? A tape measure. Postcard of Windsor Castle. A piece of writing paper with all the words scrawled out. A couple of model village houses. A snowstorm paperweight of … was it the Acropolis?’

The woman stood and stepped forward so that she was at the edge of the pool of light. Rose Miller, in uniform, with flying jacket. ‘Not bad. And the connection?’

His mind desperately shuffled the pack, first checking the initial of each to see if there was a word there, thinking what he would really like to do is have the Brains Trust standing next to him. A stuffed animal? Why? Then it came to him.

‘It isn’t a vole. It’s a shrew. They are all references to Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice, War of the Roses, Macbeth, Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labours Lost, Hamlet … the snow thing? The Tempest?’

‘Timon of Athens. But very good.’

Williams sighed with relief, suddenly wary. The constant testing and examination was draining. But perhaps that was the idea. ‘So what’s the point?’

‘Do you know your Kipling?’

‘No, I’m more of—’

‘An Eric Ambler man,’ she finished. Williams felt a jolt. He’d said that to Virginia out in the open air. Suddenly other little insights the instructors had had came back to him. Microphones. They are listening. All the time.

‘It’s a test. An observational and intuition test. We call it … Kim’s Game. After Kipling.’ She turned on the ceiling light, but it still left the room a gloomy yellow, as if smog had somehow crept in. ‘Come on. I want to show you something.’

Williams watched the two Bugattis pull away from the line, marvelling at the acceleration, irritated at the puff of smoke coming from the rear wheels of the one on the left. Not enough power to the floor, too much wasted in wheel spin. Brakes too early, allowing the other to nose ahead, makes it up with fluid acceleration through the banking, and a clean exit, into top gear and along the straight. He awarded himself eight out of ten.

‘How fast are you going?’

The abrasive sound of Rose’s voice shocked him out of his reverie. Kim’s Game was the first time he had seen her since that day in Kinross when she had commandeered the pub. Then there had been a come-hither edge to her, a spider-like seduction as she drew the potential recruit into her shadowy and beguiling world. Now that he and the others had discovered that spying, or at least the preparation for it, was, like much else in wartime, ninety-eight per cent mundanity, two per cent excitement, she was much more brisk and business-like. In front of them, projected on a small screen, was the footage shot by Maurice of the duel at Montlhery all those years ago. Now he could see all his mistakes in blurry, shaky black and white, realised how he was lucky even to come close to Robert.

‘How fast?’ Irritation in the voice.

‘Oh. Sorry. About one-fifty along the straight.’

‘Miles per hour?’

‘Yes.’

‘Looks bloody dangerous.’

Williams laughed. ‘It’s a damn sight safer than your parachute course.’

The camera jerkily swung around off the track and on to the spectators, making Williams feel slightly nauseous. His heart juddered when the image steadied and sharpened on to Eve, clutching a terrier to her breast, looking as if she was going to squeeze the life out of the poor dog in her anxiety.

‘She looks worried.’

‘She always did,’ said Williams, thinking of how she grew to hate him risking his life. And now he was risking it to get back to her.

Rose twigged. ‘Ah. That’s Eve is it? She’s very beautiful.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me. Why didn’t she come with you? Married to a British subject, she would have had no problems.’

On screen the flag came down on Robert as Williams tried a last minute piece of slipstreaming. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘Lights.’

Williams was suddenly blinking in the glare of bare bulbs. ‘Where did you get the footage?’

‘From the Prescott Hill Climb Bugatti Club. Drink?’

Williams nodded and they walked through rooms stripped bare of ancestral portraits and antique furniture to a well-appointed bar, where David, the white-coated barman, dispensed spirits, beer having disappeared a week before.

Unusually, it was deserted, the other recruits attending a lecture updating them on French politics in the thirties. Williams having been over there for all of that decade was excused in favour of the impromptu film show.

They ordered double scotches and sat down at a small table out of David’s earshot, a consideration which, he was both pleased and alarmed to discover, was becoming second nature.

‘I’ve read your interim report. Hopeless at Morse. Suspicious of all communications. Slow at lock picking. Swims like a house-brick. Runs into rooms without checking behind doors.’

‘So I’ve failed.’

‘Cheers.’ She took a sip. On the other hand, likes blowing things up, works well alone, drives like a demon. I quote: “a tough, resourceful individual”. Three nights of mock interrogations and you bore up well. You’ll do, Williams. So far, at least. You have your passing-out test yet.’

Williams knew he would be required to get inside some high security installation or police station or steal a military car or a weapon, some little assignment that would show he could pull off a stunt in a country on a war footing. ‘Why the movie?’ he asked. ‘I was there, remember?’

‘So was Robert Benoist.’

‘Robert?’

‘You are a lucky man, Williams. You have friends in that country. Friends I think might help you. And a wife. The others will never know who to trust, will get desperately lonely … might make mistakes.’

She was going too fast for him. ‘You want me to recruit my friends?’

‘Robert Benoist. I read his press cuttings. I would imagine here is another tough, resourceful individual.’

Williams laughed. ‘I can’t argue with that. But he is his own man.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I don’t know if he’d like being under anyone else’s control. Especially mine. Number two driver suddenly number one? Never a happy situation in a team.’

Rose took out a Woodbine, Craven A having suddenly been supplanted in the tuck shop by those and Players. She offered him one and smiled. ‘So you think he’s a waste of time?’

‘No, not necessarily. He’s a brave man—’

Rose snorted and quoted in her very cultured voice: ‘The man who can most truly be accounted brave, is he who knows best the meaning of what is sweet in life, and what is terrible, and then goes out determined to meet what is to come. Pericles. History of the Peloponnese War.’

‘I’m an Eric Ambler man myself.’

She smirked. ‘You get my drift. I have the feeling Robert knows the sweet things in life. Would he help? Would he put that in jeopardy?’

A few other recruits drifted in, but kept their distance. He could see Virginia talking animatedly to one of the instructors, a craggy Irishman clearly busy falling in love. She laughed, a little too loudly. ‘Why Robert? I don’t understand.’

‘There will be missions where we need the talents of men like you and Robert.’

‘Racing drivers?’

‘At a hundred and fifty miles an hour, a tyre bursts, a deer runs out, you hit oil … how can you survive, when everything happens so quickly?’

Williams paused, wondering what she was getting at. ‘It is only happening quickly to an outsider, an observer. The trick is to slow the world down, so that when things happen at one-fifty, one-sixty, they seem to be occurring at normal speed to you.’

‘Precisely,’ Rose said, ‘that’s why I want you and Robert. Men who think fast is slow.’

That’s an answer? he thought, but didn’t voice.

‘There is one other thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You drivers know what it is like to undertake a pursuit, and undertake it again and again, when you know the odds of you surviving shorten each time.’

‘That was never my favourite part.’

‘But it’s true.’

‘You never go out intending to be killed. Well, I never did.’

‘Good.’

There was a silence while she considered whether to go on. ‘It’s started over there. God only knows it took them long enough.’

‘What has started?’

‘Resistance. Fourteen, fifteen months since they invaded. Since then, nothing. Then four weeks ago a German was shot at the Barbes-Rochechouart Metro. A week later someone tried to kill Pierre Laval of the Vichy government at Versailles. Another week, a German soldier shot at Gare de l’Est. Twenty killings in all, and growing. They are ready to fight now, especially the communists. We can hardly keep up with the new names being bandied about—Liberation-Nord, OCM, Front National, FTPF—they’re the communists—and Armée Secrete …’

The list droned on and she saw his brow furrowing. It was as bad as pre-war politics. Actually, it was probably the same as pre-war politics—dozens of factions each with its own agenda. ‘You’ll be getting a lecture on them all, don’t worry. Whoever we decide to back, they will need guns. They will need instruction. They will need examples. They might even need the odd racing driver.’ She winked at him, an unnerving experience. ‘So, Robert. Where is he now?’

Williams thought and replied: ‘Probably brushing up his Pericles by enjoying the sweet things in life.’

Robert Benoist had grown used to the sight of Germans swarming across his city like a plague of green insects, but the shock of so many in a confined space, almost outnumbering civilians, took him aback. He looked at Eve on his arm and pulled her tight to his side. Over his shoulder he turned to the gaunt, worried-looking Dr Ziegler and whispered, ‘Stay close. We won’t stay long.’

Maurice’s apartment was fit to burst. As Robert threaded his way through the crowd towards the drinks table he picked up snatches of conversation that went over the usual topics. The price of lightbulbs—if you can find one—the black market, how to get an
Ausweiss
—a travel permit—the new rations, the best collaborationist leaflets to make fuel briquettes out of, the coming winter. The latter exercised most people. The one of forty-forty-one had been bad, and now temperatures were dropping again. The autumn sound of Paris was no longer the rustle of leaves in the Luxembourg garden—now given over to vegetables—but that of newspaper shoved into overcoats as insulation.

He heard his brother’s distinctive low level whisper, urging a guest to come and see him if he needed … but at that point the words became inaudible.

‘Maurice.’

‘Robert. Eve.’ His eyes raked her up and down with practised assessment. ‘You look lovely. No trouble getting here?’ Maurice had pulled some strings to arrange Eve’s journey to Paris, and he beamed when she shook her head. ‘Ah. Dr Ziegler. So glad you could make it. Drinks?’ Maurice swept glasses of champagne from a passing tray. ‘Robert. A word. Mother isn’t very well again. We should have her looked after.’

‘Anything I can do?’ offered Dr Ziegler.

Maurice smiled: ‘No, no. As you know, she’s a stubborn woman.’

Maurice steered Robert to a corner and hissed: ‘Are you out of your fucking mind bringing him here?’

‘He’s our doctor.’

‘He’s our very Jewish doctor.’

‘Yes. And he doesn’t have a telephone.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve cut off his telephone. I want you to get it back on.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. Come on, Maurice. In return for a girl. Or a dirty show. A painting. I don’t know how you do it, but you must help him. How can he work?’

‘I think that’s the general idea.’

Recently the first
rafle
, round-up, of Jews had occurred, with more promised. Jewish property and enterprises could now be confiscated. ‘Just do it, Maurice.’

Robert glanced back over the heads of the partygoers and saw a tall, blond man had moved in on Eve. ‘Who’s that talking to Eve?’

‘Ah,’ said Maurice, relieved to be off the subject of Ziegler’s telephone. ‘Neumann. Joachim Neumann. Assistant to Keppler. You remember Keppler? The Sportskorpsführer? Out in the open now. SD. Neumann’s not as bad as he looks. Quite a civilised chap, really.’

‘We all are, Maurice.’ It was Keppler, a man made doughy by many months of high living. ‘Robert Benoist. How nice to see you again. The last time was in England.’

‘And the last time you’ll see it,’ said Robert. Maurice blanched.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Mind you, I spend the day compiling lists of Wehrmacht men who will not use the official whores. I think we may have to postpone invading England altogether because our army have sore pricks.’ Maurice joined in the laughter. ‘We have decided to send anyone who catches VD to a Punishment Battalion. That should make them more careful where they dip their wieners, eh?’

Keppler followed Robert’s gaze over to Eve, who was looking at her feet as Neumann spoke in her ear. ‘Joachim. The ladies love him. I think it is the uniform.’ Keppler patted his large belly. ‘Somehow seems to fit him better than me.’ He saw the look on Robert’s face and said quietly, ‘Don’t cause any trouble, Robert. Striking a member of the SS is a capital offence. Tell me, whatever happened to that English driver, Williams? Where is he now?’