Vagabond (51 page)

Denisov would not leave because he and Elena remembered how it had been in Milovice when the empire had collapsed. While Timofey had organised tankers to drain the underground storage tanks and bring fuel to the wire where queues of Czechs extended each night, reports had arrived that the families of military officers had been thrown out on the street. The wives were reduced to prostitution and worked each night in brothels. The husbands would fight for the right to drive a taxi from a popular rank. Their children were sent out each night to scavenge. Fear reigned. He could remember clearly how he had flown back to Ostend in the limping Antonov. He had shown the brigadier the cloth bag with a drawstring, and had tipped out the contents. They had taken the train to Amsterdam and had traded. He had given generously to his man, the former commanding officer, and Nikolai Denisov had kissed his hand. They would not leave him: they owed him the clothes on their backs and the food in their bellies. He would enjoy tomorrow’s dinner. She would have returned to Prague and Denisov would sit outside in the Mercedes and wait for him. In the meantime he would go to the old camp.

He did not have to go – his man could have done the business – but he never shirked detail. It was oxygen to him. He went into his dressing room.

Something was gnawing at him. He began to undress, then pulled on the uniform. The television played in the background. It was tuned to a satellite news channel and carried nothing about a killing. His reputation, which was precious to him – it brought work, advantage and reward – was based on his total reliability and every-time success. The newscasts told him nothing and it was past nine. He looked good in the uniform, but anxiety spoiled the moment.

He often walked. It was freedom for Matthew Bentinick to take a late commuter train to Waterloo, then stride along Lambeth Palace Road, past the Archbishop’s palace and over the bridge. Usually he would collect a coffee from the café in Horseferry Road and would go into Thames House through the side door. Past ten, and acceptable. The freedom came with the escape from his home. He was ashamed of the sense of liberation he felt when he closed the front door behind him and headed for the station. How Rosie survived was beyond his comprehension. That morning he had broken ranks with Service disciplines – disgraceful – and had said to her: ‘This isn’t for quoting but we’re looking at a sort of closure for Mary, a body in the cage. The vile little tradesman who did the shipments to that place is in our sights and we’re closing on him. I’ve a good man there – I’m confident he can do what’s needed. I’ll be late tonight because it’ll be developing. What’s to happen to the wretch? What I told George will suffice for you, my dear. We’ll nail him to the floor. Don’t wait up.’ A kiss on the cheek and he’d left her in the empty house. He had a spring in his stride that morning and the security men in the foyer would have recognised something about him that was almost jaunty. He might as well have shouted that a ‘good one’ was about to happen. The men and women on the bottom rung of the ladder were often the first to know when the Two Imposters that were Triumph or Disaster stalked the corridors. They possessed all the qualities needed to interpret body language. He went in, and wouldn’t leave until it was over. She was a sweet girl and deserved his best efforts. He took the lift.

‘Is he in?’

‘At his desk.’

It was an aside. She had a phone at her ear and flicked the hold switch. The director general was a perennial sniffer: he liked to come down from the sunlit uplands whenever an operation was close to fulfilment. It was as if he’d have preferred a hot line to the various armouries used by the agencies that did back-up when an arrest was imminent. Had he ever fired a Glock, been on a range, worn the ear baffles and let rip at a target? Jocelyn doubted it. But he had done time on Counter Terrorism, Islamist, and would have known the long nights leading towards the dawn hits when the rams battered down housing-association doors, or batons broke through the front windows of Victorian terrace homes.

‘Going smoothly?’

‘Well oiled.’

She flicked the button and went back to her call. It was loose-ends time and the need to get them knitted, to anticipate confusions and set in place the secondary plans that would circumvent chaos: a custody area, a flight with route permissions, the legality of a charge sheet and an issued warrant, deniability and a fog of secrecy on the ground. He backed away. He might or might not call in on Matthew Bentinick. People of any rank in the building rarely pitched up at that door in the corridor and expected to chew the fat and drink coffee. She thought Bentinick had lost his early cheer. Last time she had briefed him, fifteen minutes ago, he had seemed preoccupied, quiet. If it went sour he might not survive the deceit and illegality. Both could be excused by success but condemned, utterly, in failure. And if it went sour then George might be heading out of the front door, ID shredded, never to return.

She wondered if George knew the man that Matthew Bentinick had dragged out of self-enforced retirement, whether it burdened him . . . and whether the scale of the catch excited him. She had the target on her screen. An interesting face, caution ever present in the eyes. Not a pushover, but the worthwhile ones never were.

He rocked on his feet. Timofey Simonov had been at the front door, had shrugged on a loose coat to cover his best-dress Soviet-era tunic and had been called back. The bar at the bottom of the TV screen in the kitchen told him that a man was in police custody in south-west London. An assassination attempt had been blocked. Unconfirmed reports indicated a foiled murder threat on a Russian citizen whose application for political asylum was under consideration. Sources said a high-powered sniper rifle had been recovered. The sum of it was catastrophe.

He felt the sweat break on his neck. There was nothing Timofey Simonov could do. He turned to his butt for quips and insults, the man he abused. The brigadier looked away. He felt as though a rug had been pulled from under him. He was silent.

The brigadier said that Elena had made borscht and showed Timofey the flask. There were salami sandwiches and vodka to celebrate the conclusion of the business. Timofey saw the pistol in the shoulder holster when the brigadier’s coat flapped open. Was he losing control? His throat was dry, his mind churned and his legs shook.

He said they should go. If he was losing control new enemies would circle. He went down the steps to the car. How to recognise an enemy edging closer?

Daniel Curnow
was the name she wrote and, under it, the number and the address. It was a big package, awkward to handle, but the counter staff were helpful. On the back of the parcel she wrote her name and address in Honfleur. She had done this because the strange-mannered but devoted little man called Dusty had diverted a tourist bus to find her among the dunes. It was the painting she had made from that view overlooking the bay of the Somme. It might have been better to keep it for another two or three weeks, and work at it more, but she had not delayed.

With a certain recklessness she paid for a superior delivery service and was guaranteed that it would be there by noon the next day, Saturday. She could not say whether the investment was good or bad. She hoped it would be worth the effort. There was a saying in the Lofoten islands, passed down generations:
Rather suffer for truth than be rewarded for lies
. She believed it appropriate. The truth was that he must forsake battlefields and graves; he would lie that he had scaled back his commitment to them. She thought it one of her better pictures. She waited for the return of her card and remembered the few times they had been together, him almost frightened of her, him worshipping her but failing to take the last step and desert the graves. She remembered how it had been – not easy. Far from it. She left the post office, on cours Albert-Manuel, and walked home to the loneliness. Dusty had not known where he had gone or why, but she had sensed his fear. She walked fast and the sun threw her shadow ahead of her, deep and dark, without love and threatening.

Dusty was parked outside the bar. The guide was inside with the visitors. A break had been called. His phone bleeped:
Picture sent to you for delivery tomorrow, dunes and coast, sort of peace-offering for Danny and an opening of negotiations. Hanne xxx

He reflected. Others had been damaged, not just Desperate. Yorkie had sat in a room all night, no lights, cradling a Browning. No one had known till past dawn, but he’d gone that day to Aldergrove airport, the military wing. Gary had put in a request for a transfer to Germany and told the captain that if he didn’t get it he’d go AWOL. Phil had broken up a bar in central Armagh and been taken to the cells by the Red Caps. It had all seemed to wash over Dusty Miller, and he might have been the least stressed guy at Gough where they lived, worked, did the business with the informers, paid them, crossed them off the lists when they were left in a ditch and recruited more. Always plenty, never a shortage, and the money was crap. Dusty didn’t lose sleep, and he’d never heard that Captain Bentinick did. He wouldn’t leave. If Desperate headed off with the girl to those islands where they lived off dried cod, where winter froze your balls and in summer the sun never set – well, Dusty would hang on in Caen. There was Christine to keep him warm at night, and Lisette to cook: he would drive a minibus. It might be the only offer Danny Curnow would get. Be a shame to turn it down.

It was a pretty little village and the group’s discipline was fracturing. He fancied many had had their fill of graveyards, battlefields and the casualty statistics of war. The place offered no sense of danger. He didn’t think the guide did it that well. Danny would have livened it up, but he wasn’t there.

The guide would try to breathe the stench of war – burned bodies, brewed tanks – into them.

The British had arrived, infantry and mostly armour. They were purloining wine, scrounging food, peeing and catching up on sleep. Five weeks after the invasion, they had moved just twenty miles closer to the village.

The guide needed to play a big card if he was to regain control. He returned them to the previous evening, the German cemetery at La Cambe, and the grave of a young SS panzer officer.

Michael Wittman already wore the Knight’s Cross ranking of the Iron Cross and had been credited with 138 tank kills. He was in a Tiger Mark 6, with two crewmen. He came in his Tiger over the horizon and up the only street, and fought a brigade for a quarter of an hour. When he reversed away – tank ammunition exhausted – he had destroyed fourteen British tanks, fifteen personnel carriers and two anti-tank guns. It was a defeat for the British on a grand scale. On his side, Wittman was known as the Black Baron. He was ordered back to Berlin, heaped with more decorations and posted as an instructor. He slipped away to rejoin his crew.

Wittman was bagged by Joe Ekins, a gunner in a Firefly, who found him in the open, hit his Tiger at a half-mile range and lived to tell the tale, modestly, until his death at eighty-eight.

The story of Wittman’s end always cheered the visitors to Villers-Bocage. They muttered among themselves, confused, and wondered how a man who had such a pivotal moment in military history, Ekins, could have led a normal life afterwards. They moved on and were promised no more cemeteries, no more defeats.

‘I think he told the truth,’ Gaby Davies said.

‘You tickled his privates. I put a rod across his back. Same answer.’ Danny Curnow’s head was down.

‘He doesn’t know. He’s been told it’s the Milovice complex, not where it is.’

‘I have to believe him. The consequences of a lie are clear in his mind.’

They had moved: they were four doorways down the hill from where they had spent the night, and this building was in a worse state. The cat that had befriended him was hunting behind the door and twice they had heard rat squeals. Brutal sounds, but calming to Danny – something from Vagabond days: stalking, death, then on the move again. The sun was up but little of it reached the street. Some of its brightness hit the upper window of the hotel where a light still burned and the curtains were half drawn.

‘He’s a good man, but out of his depth.’

‘Heroes tend to be thin on the ground.’ He reflected. How many had he known who could have had that label pinned to their chest, gone to the Palace, then posed outside with the little thing dangling from a ribbon? None, really. Not those men. There had been some and he’d met them in car parks, at forestry picnic sites, by the shores of Lough Neagh and in corners of the library. All lived with the fear. It was partly greed that brought them to each meeting, the transfer of the envelope, and was partly love of the adrenalin surge that came from a double life. It was also bare-bollock bravery. Desperate had Dusty behind him with the H&K, watching his back like a hawk. The real hero lived with the fall of a shadow behind him, the slowing of a car coming towards him when he was blinded by the headlights, the knock at the door when he was changing a baby’s nappy: he got no medals but had won the war. The Joes had done it via infiltration. Danny Curnow had bought their treachery.