Fellow Passenger (13 page)

He broke out sobbing, and cursed either me or his fate in some expressive language which I presume was Latvian. He went out, and in his agitation forgot to shut the door. I shut it for him - but decently, after he had left the outer cabin.

Half an hour later he shoved my supper tray into my hands and vanished without a word. He looked harassed. He was already at the receiving end of the wireless messages from Riga. I don’t know whether they were yet relaying Moscow’s comments, but what Riga had to say was probably bad enough.

At midnight he put in his head to assure himself that I was still there.

‘Well, was I right?’ I asked.

‘You are to be kept alive at all costs.’

‘Is that why I have to spread my butter with a spoon?’

‘Those are my orders.’

‘Quite right, comrade. Don’t forget to remove my razor!’

He pocketed it with another tom-cat curse in Latvian. There were times when the self-renunciation of the Russian was entirely overcome by healthy Scandinavian irritability.

‘I warn you,’ he said, imposing himself in the only way left to a policeman, ‘that there is a sentry outside my door with orders to let no one pass except me.’

‘Very proper, Karlis. It is essential that I should not be disturbed.’

‘You are enjoying this!’ he accused me.

‘Comrade, I must smile or weep.’

I got him to talk a little, for, after all, the poor fellow had nobody’s shoulder but mine on which to lay his head. The captain washed his hands of the whole business. Riga was sending contradictory messages at the rate of one every half hour. They were even asking Karlis, a police officer of no importance, for suggestions as to how the situation could be remedied; but, just like civil servants anywhere else, were unwilling to commit themselves by explaining exactly what the situation was.

‘Comrade, if they do not approve of my showing myself to the passengers,’ I said, ‘there is only one remedy. All the passengers must disappear.’

‘But I am not a specialist,’ he protested. ‘I have not been trained for that. And I have not enough ammunition.’

‘Chuck’em overboard in the dark!’

I was not, of course, serious. It was unthinkable that the naive eyelashes of the tall American should be lost at the bottom of the Baltic. And nothing would drown Elias Thomas Conger. He would inevitably have floated up the Thames to Westminster. I was merely underlining the effect of my afternoon’s work: that it was quite impossible to stop the passengers’ mouths without getting rid of them.

‘Signal that I offer to help you,’ I suggested.

‘Very well.’

This proposal of mine that all passengers should be liquidated stopped the ship - literally stopped it. On Wednesday morning, with only two hundred miles to go to Riga, the engines were silent, and we rocked gently on the summer sea while my fate was discussed, I like to think, by the entire cabinet. Whatever they did to me, the passengers were still there to swear that the spy, Howard-Wolferstan, had escaped to Russia on a Russian ship. That simply could not be allowed. On the other hand, tempting though the solution must have been, there was no way of ensuring that all passengers met a convincingly natural death.

We were still motionless on Thursday. The captain, I heard, was unapproachable in his rage. Lieutenant Karlis and I recovered our old intimacy - so far as intimacy was possible with a haggard man living in a nightmare. The passengers and crew were told that the engines had broken down.

Karlis was receiving no more wireless messages now, but the silence on that silent ship was all the more ominous for that. The storm out of Asia was about to break upon our heads. Even I, the mischievous and unsquashable louse in the pants of the gods, wished that I had ceased from tickling.

It was my move, however. I had played for it, and I had to make it - though the occasion had arrived much earlier than I expected. The august irresolution was so unending that a little help from me might be decisive. I took his bottles away from Karlis, wrote a message for him and told him to translate it into Russian and send it off. He stared at my draft with eyes that were beyond reading.

‘Comrade,’ I explained to him, ‘I am ready to make the supreme sacrifice. The only way out is for the ship to put back and for you to hand me over to the British police.’

‘But they will torture you,’ he said.

‘I am brave.’

He made an appropriate gesture of heroic admiration.

‘But you know too much.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I told him. ‘Remind them that I don’t know where I stayed after my escape. I don’t know when I was taken on board or by whom. I can be landed as a stowaway and disowned. Don’t you see the propaganda value? The glorious People’s Democracies have nothing to do with espionage. We work for peace by cleaner methods than the fascist hyenas. Got it?’

‘What about your own organization?’ he asked.

‘Purely personal. I think they’ll see that by now.’

In the last forty-eight hours every scrap of information must have been collected - to the exclusion of all other business in the radio rooms - from any and every department which could conceivably have employed me, and it must have become obvious that I had never been employed at all. Whatever my insane motives, there was nothing of importance I could give away if brought to trial.

‘But me? Advise them what to do with you?’ Karlis protested.

‘You are not advising them, comrade.
I
am advising them,’ I replied superbly.

We knocked my proposal into his own officialese, ready to be sent off to Riga whence it would ascend, without a doubt, straight to the heights. Karlis’ attitude of reverence, even in his use of both hands to hold the final draft, was indescribable. He might have been some simple Ecuadorian Indian whom I had persuaded that he was able, via the local police post, to send a telegram to God.

The interval between my helpful suggestion and the reply was short - a mere twelve hours. At two a.m. on Friday I was woken up by the ship’s engines, and shortly afterwards Karlis hurled himself through the wardrobe into my cabin.

‘Your sacrifice,’ he panted, ‘your sacrifice has been accepted. We are returning to London.’

I was relieved but not surprised. That message from the ship, zealously relayed, must have fallen like manna upon the blotting-paper of those harassed men at the centre of their spider web. It was delightful to think of them - for who does not enjoy the role of benefactor? - wiping the sweat from chewed moustaches, complimenting themselves on their clarity of vision and wandering off arm in arm to punish the vodka and the sandwiches.

O eloquent, unjust and mighty Muddle! As I look back to that moment from my ignominious but distinguished present, I cannot resist a digression in praise of Muddle, for digressions, however unpardonable in a literary man, are historically proper to a Prisoner in the Tower.

Muddle, most powerful resort of the individual against the State, and yet how prostituted! With what ingenuity do we avoid taxes, when with the same weapon we might destroy the complacency of politicians! This world of technicians and economists is more vulnerable than any which preceded it, for there is more to muddle. Inject into it, with all the appearance of legality and innocence, the logic of Alice in Wonderland, and you shall find the planners groping in a world of your creation.

Yet remember always that the answer to Muddle is Violence! When my maternal ancestors were at last compelled to produce the accounts of their provinces or the nominal rolls of the quarter-strength regiments for which they drew full pay, they created Muddle but were careful to preserve their distance and some few rounds of ammunition that would fire. I, too, was assisted by geography to maintain my imaginary but unassailable status. In western countries the risk that the exasperated will resort to violence is slight. And yet, even if the chosen victim of your nuisance be but a municipal sanitary inspector, do not commit it, however great your necessity, before his face!

My fate now depended upon whether or not the captain had been instructed to wireless to London his true reasons for putting back. I thought it probable that the matter would be taken out of his hands. First secrecy, then drama with the utmost publicity - that would be the usual line. Karlis confirmed that I was right. The scandalous presence of Howard-Wolferstan on board was only to be divulged at the last moment.

For two days I gave Karlis no trouble at all. I was a model prisoner, helpful, resigned and silent. It was an easy part, for I needed rest. It was also sound psychology. Karlis had to have plenty of time to think about himself, not me.

He became more and more melancholy, sunk in a monosyllabic Slav depression. He would not let me into his cabin again, but used to sit with me and say nothing when he collected my empty tray. As soon as I thought his nerves were about ripe, I began to work on them.

‘A costly business,’ I remarked regretfully. ‘Fuel. Delay of cargo. And then the poor passengers.’

‘They are being given free air passages,’ he told me.

‘More money and trouble. How unjust life is, comrade! All this expense because I had to take advantage of your afternoon sleep.’

‘But why? Why? That is what I do not understand,’ he cried.

‘You do not need to understand,’ I answered gently. ‘There have to be some of us who are only expected to obey. But it isn’t bad, being a miner. You mustn’t believe all you hear. The State is humane. You get enough calories to enable you to work and a little money over. Think of me - tortured, beaten, rotting in a capitalist prison and then thrown out upon the streets to beg.’

He pounded his fist on the wall in indignation. When it was not his duty to be stern, he was easily moved by emotion.

‘And escape from the ship before I am landed is impossible,’ I said.

So it was, unless I could persuade him to go with me. Together we might have a chance.

‘Yes. There is no way out. It is my order to hand you over to the British as a stowaway,’ Karlis answered.

I left my bunk and sat side by side with him on the settee. I meant him to feel that we were partners. I said bitterly that I could never be any more use to the party and that at last I was entitled to look after my own interests. He put on his blank, Slav face. He saw what I was driving at, all right; but was afraid to commit himself to what might be a trap. It was hard to believe that a communist hero would countenance desertion to the West.

‘Comrade, think for a minute!’ I begged him. ‘I am sacrificed, finished. My only hope is to live out my life as a peasant in South America.’

It was a good moment to bury my face in my hands and weep. I can do that quite convincingly. I have only to imagine that I am making a manly speech to a Latin audience, and to repeat to myself the nobler sentences of my peroration.

‘After causing all this trouble,’ I went on, raising my streaming eyes to his, ‘after thinking I knew better than the party, after all this deviationist activity, what will be my fate? For the sake of old comradeship I may be allowed to live, but I shall never be trusted. No report of mine will be believed. When we talk now, we can talk as freely as one corpse to another.’

‘I am a servant of the people,’ he answered firmly.

‘Yes, Karlis. But you have no political convictions.’

‘You could guess that?’

I begged him not to be alarmed. Old political hands like myself were accustomed, I said, to dealing with men who were not fit for the party, but whose loyalty was undoubted so long as the cash was there on pay-day.

‘The first day I met you,’ I added, ‘I knew that you preferred Riga before the war to Riga now.’

‘Is life in England as good as Riga before the war?’

I assured him that it was, though personally I doubted it. You can’t honestly advertise as enjoyable to a foreigner a country in which - to use the jargon of economists - it costs a man-hour to buy a drink, and that without reckoning insurance and income tax.

‘I would be followed and killed,’ he said.

‘Not important enough, my dear Karlis,’ I replied, dropping that damned ‘comrade’ for good. ‘In England it costs a disproportionate amount of money and planning to have a man killed. You mustn’t believe all you read.’

‘Chicago—’ he began.

I reminded him that Chicago was not England, and that, anyway, his impression of it was thirty years behind the times.

‘You’ve been in the police all your life,’ I told him, ‘and you know as well as I do that if a man’s society isn’t that of potential murderers, he can rule out the chance of being murdered. Like everything else in the world, as we communists know, it’s just a question of economics. You can be done in cheap if you move in the proper circles. And if you don’t, the cost is prohibitive.’

‘But would the police ever let me go free?’

‘Yes. Ask for sanctuary as a political refugee. Don’t try any nonsense about wanting to free Latvia. They’d see through you at once. Just put it on the grounds of self-interest. Say you would be shot if you went back. That’s the sort of thing which impresses policemen. No damned nonsense about being converted from this to that!’

He asked how he would live, and I assured him it was easy. Lieutenants of security police were rare birds as refugees, and he could sell the secrets of the M.V.D to the Sunday papers.