Game Without Rules (22 page)

“When you deserted us,” said Mr. Absalom, “—I still do not understand why – we took him back to the embassy. He is there now. Asleep. I came back here to find out what had happened to you.”

“Ingenious,” said Mr. Behrens. “But not good enough. The police are planning to raid a number of brothels tonight. The boy has been planted in one of them. You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me which one it is.”

Mr. Absalom’s small black eyes shifted from Mr. Behrens’ face to the gun in his hand, and then back again.

“If you fire that,” he said, “a lot of people will hear it.”

“Were you aware,” said Mr. Behrens, “that there are twenty-six separate bones in the human foot. The astralagus, the calcaneum, the scaphoid, the cuboid, three different cunei-form bones, five metatarsals and no fewer than fourteen phalanges.”

As he spoke the last word he fired. Mr. Absalom gave a little squeal of surprise. The bullet had carried away the heel of his shoe.

“That was a sighting shot,” explained Mr. Behrens.

There were hurried footsteps in the passage. Mr. Behrens got up, picked up a heavy cylindrical ruler from the desk and stood behind the door. It was the coffee-coloured manager who came in. Mr. Behrens hit him very hard, on the base of the skull, dragged him into the room, locked the door and turned his attention again to Mr. Absalom, who seemed pinned to his chair.

“The last time I shot a man in the foot,” he said, “the bullet struck the entocuneiform bone – that’s the large one on the left – and broke three of the five metatarsals. He was three months in hospital, and the surgeons then cut off the foot. It was the only way of relieving the agony.”

He raised the pistol.

Mr. Absalom’s face was grey and his lips were quivering. He said, “I will tell you.”

“You’d better not tell any lies,” said Mr. Behrens. “I know the addresses, and if you happen to mention one which isn’t on my list—”

He fired again, and the bullet hit the leg of the chair Mr. Absalom was sitting on.

“Stop, stop,” said Mr. Absalom. “I am telling you now. It is a house in Spencer Street. At the corner. Number eighteen, I think.”

There was a rattling of the door handle, followed by a knocking. Mr. Behrens walked over and opened the door.

Mr. Calder was standing in the passage outside. From below came the sounds of shouting, crashing and the stamping of feet.

Mr. Behrens said, “I’m glad you managed to get here. What’s happening down there?”

As he spoke he was carefully wiping the gun on his handkerchief, and putting it away in the desk drawer.

“When I got your telephone call,” said Mr. Calder, “I persuaded our friends at Carver Street to organise a second raid here. I think it’s going to be more fruitful than the first. Have you found out where the boy is?”

“I have,” said Mr. Behrens. “The next thing is to get him out without a fuss.”

Mr. Absalom seemed to be trying to say something. His mouth was opening and shutting like an expiring frog’s.

“You will be too late,” he said. “Much too late,”

Nuri looked at the girl. She was lying back on the bed, her mouth half open, a smile of drowsy contentment on her lips. Her left hand, hanging down beside the bed, held a cigarette.

She must be entirely ignorant of the properties of bhang, he thought, or she would have realised at once, from the taste, what it was she was smoking. It was her third cigarette. The first had made her amorous. The second, fortunately, drowsy. The third was going to put her right out.

As Nuri watched her, her fingers parted and the half-smoked cigarette fell onto the carpet. Nuri picked it up and put it on the ash tray. Then he tiptoed across to the hanging curtains, and into the bathroom. Behind him, the girl stirred and said, “Where are you going?”

“Back in a moment,” said Nuri.

He was standing on the end of the bath, working at the catch of the window. It was a very small window, but Nuri was as thin as an eel, and nearly as slippery. He went through feet first and found himself on a sloping roof of slates, which led up to a ridgeway. This was a highway, threading among the chimney stacks, and stretching the whole length of the block. Halfway along it, Nuri paused.

Something was happening in the street below. He could see the lights of cars and hear the slamming of doors, followed by knocking and voices shouting. Nuri smiled. For the first time that night he felt happy, by himself, up among the sooty chimneys. The last of the fog had gone and from above his head the stars winked back at him in friendly conspiracy.

He made his way as far as the end house, and found a promising looking window. It was fastened, but he broke one of the panes of glass with the heel of his shoe, put his hand in and slipped the catch. It was an attic, and empty. He went out into the passage, made his way down three flights of stairs, first bare boards, then linoleum, then carpet, and out into a front hall. He got the front door unlocked and unbolted, and opened it a few inches.

There was a good deal of activity in the street, but most of it seemed to be happening at the far end. He slipped out, pulled the door shut behind him and ran.

As he turned the first corner, he saw a car parked, its lights out, and two men standing beside it. One he did not recognise. The other was Mr. Behrens.

On the way to the airport and the early morning flight which was being held for them, Nuri told Mr. Behrens and the stranger, who turned out to be a Mr. Calder, something of his adventures.

“I can feel things with my fingers,” he said, holding out a thin brown hand, “things which I could not see with my eyes. All our family have that facility. I knew, as soon as I touched it, that it was not the cigarette case which that fat pig Absalom gave me earlier. He had changed it for another. Probably in the car, when we were sitting squeezed together. Then it was clear that there would be something wrong with the cigarettes. Bhang, I guessed. What do you call it?”

“Hashish.”

“It is against the law to smoke it.”

“It’s against the law even to possess it,” said Mr. Calder. “If you had been found in that girl’s room with a case of reefers in your pocket, you really would have been for it.”

“It would not have been sufficient simply that I was in her room? She is a prostitute.”

“It wouldn’t have been good for your reputation, but it’s not illegal.”

“Curious,” said Nuri, “that the law should punish the lesser sin.”

“A lot of our laws are like that,” said Mr. Behrens. “Here’s the hotel. You’ve just time for a bath and breakfast.”

Three days later, several thousand miles away from the soot of Soho and the fogs of London Airport, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens were standing on the first-floor balcony of the Hotel Continentale. The town had been en fête since dawn. The streets were packed with the outlandish crowds that had poured in overnight from the country districts. Houses and shop-fronts still blazed with electric lights, now paled by the morning sun. Every roof and window showed a flag, or a portrait, or bunch of flowers or paper streamers.

In the distance a band struck up.

“They’ll be here soon,” said Mr. Calder. And added, “I hope so. I want my breakfast.”

“By the way,” said Mr. Behrens. “Did they catch that fellow Absalom?”

“No. He and Moustaq both got out by plane that morning. Fortescue thinks they’re in Cairo.”

“If they know what’s good for them,” said Mr. Behrens, looking down at the crowd below, “they’ll stay in Cairo. I hope they’ve made trouble for that club.” His head was still sore.

“The second raid was a great success. They found a lot of undutied liquor and a very interesting collection of blue films. Here they come.”

A burst of cheering heralded the head of the procession. First came a company of boy scouts, older than their English counterparts, some of them sporting quite impressive black moustaches, but all bare-kneed and serious. Behind them, the Red Cross and the St. John’s Ambulance. Then the massed bands. The municipalities. The fire brigade. The heroes of the Revolution, and the foreign diplomats. Mr. Behrens was glad to see that the procession had been organised to play down the military side. It was essentially a civilian jamboree. After the diplomats came several more bands, all playing vigorously, and all playing different tunes, followed by senior members of the government, and every male relative of the Royal House, each in a more gorgeous motorcar than the last.

Then came the mounted troops of the police, ceremonial lances at the carry, useful-looking carbines slung from their shoulders.

Then came the mounted troops of the police, ceremonial checks for a moment, and crashes down onto the shingle, came the roar of the crowd as the open, pale blue and silver Rolls-Royce turned the comer.

In the back, upright, serious and straight as a blade, sat Nuri.

“‘Upon the King,’” Mr. Behrens quoted softly, to himself. “‘Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children and our sins lay on the King.’”

In the last four days Mr. Behrens had grown very fond of Nuri. The boy had shown himself brave and resourceful. He knew what he wanted to do and would, if given time, learn how to do it. If he could escape the sudden bullet, and the planted bomb. If he could answer propaganda with deeds. He had captured their hearts. Now he would have to capture their minds as well.

Mr. Behrens thought there was a chance, an outside chance, that he might do it.

Mr. Calder sat behind the wheel of his old Ford Zodiac and stared out at the sodden world. It was four o’clock on a February afternoon and visibility was down to a hundred yards. It would decrease still further as afternoon fell away into evening.

Ahead of him, a length of white road crawled up toward the skyline, running with water in all its ruts. To left and right stretched unfenced moorland. The rain covered everything in a slowly moving pall.

A high-pitched whistling noise made him look down.

Headphones hung over the back of the passenger seat, the cushion of which had been taken out. In the open space where the seat should have been was a black, ebonite-fronted box. It had two tuning knobs and a single large dial graduated in degrees, on which a needle was rotating slowly.

The whistling stopped. The needle on the dial steadied and the voice of Mr. Behrens, distorted but clearly recognisable, spoke from the headset.

“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Back to eighteen. Steady on eighteen. Over to you.”

Mr. Calder put his thumb on the ‘speak’ switch of the microphone and said, “Two hundred and thirteen. I shall have to re-plot. Out for a moment.”

The map on his knees was mounted on plywood and covered with isinglass. He took a protractor from the pocket of the car, aligned it carefully on the isinglass and marked four points. Then he picked up a graduated ruler and joined the points so that they formed two intersecting lines. He peered down at the map. It was now so dark that he needed a torch, and it took a minute to get it out of the car locker and focus it.

Then he picked up the microphone and said. “He’s on the Nettlefold byroad, going north.”

The ghostly voice of Mr. Behrens answered, “I agree. We’d better get moving. We’ll take another cross-bearing ten minutes from now. If we keep on as we are, one of us ought to cut him off before he gets to Felshead. Out.”

Mr. Calder started up the engine, engaged gear and splashed off up the road, his windshield wipers working busily. . .

It was nearly two hours later, and quite dark, when he turned out of the minor road which he had been following, into a rather larger road. Ahead of him, his lights picked out a sign board.

“This looks like it,” he said to himself. “And about time too.”

The Bailiffs Arms was a dark crooked building, originally a posting-house, now a small residential hotel. Mr. Calder steered his car into the yard. There were two other cars parked there already. One was a Morris station wagon and belonged, he knew, to his friend, Mr. Behrens. The other was an old but solid-looking Mercedes.

Mr. Calder parked his own car, locked all the doors carefully and made his way through the back door of the hotel into the smoking room. A bright fire was blazing in the hearth. On one side of it Mr. Behrens was seated. On the other chair he recognised, with some surprise, the angular figure of Mr. Fortescue, who combined the offices of manager of the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank and of head of the Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Fortescue, who made few sartorial concessions, was dressed in the same black coat and striped trousers that he would have worn in his banker’s parlour.

“I didn’t know, sir, that it was you who was playing hare to our hounds,” said Mr. Calder.

“It’s the first time we’ve given the apparatus a field trial,” said Mr. Fortescue. “I thought I might as well do it myself. Since you both arrived here within five minutes of me, I gather it was effective.”

He put his hand into the side pocket of his coat, pulled out what seemed to be an ordinary cigarette lighter and placed it on the table.

“Extremely effective,” said Mr. Behrens. ‘‘How does it work?”

“It’s a transmitting set, which sends out a single VHF note. It’s battery-powered, and will transmit for two hundred hours. It’s tuned in to the receiving sets in your cars, which incorporate a direction finder. The whole thing’s a development of the device which the Germans used for locating transmitting sets in occupied France – only it’s much more accurate, and it works over a much longer range.”

“What sort of fix does it give you?”

“The makers say one mile at a hundred miles. That’s under laboratory conditions. But you can’t rely on that in practice.”

“I’ll say you can’t,” said Mr. Calder. “Every time your car passed under a power line, the beam jumped about like a performing flea. And another thing; you were doubling about – changing direction – going back on your tracks. If we were really after someone, and he didn’t know we were there, presumably he’d get on to some route nationale, or autobahn, and go down it damned fast. Every time we stopped to plot his position, he’d get ten miles farther away from us.”