“You have lived long in France?”
“No, I have never lived in France; I have only been on visits.”
He blew a few specks of tobacco off the desk. He sniffed as if conscious of an artificial smell about the story.
“Your papers seem in order. When was this exit permit issued?”
My tongue stumbled. “Last week. I think you will see the date on it.”
“Present times are exceptional, M. Favel. Those who book passages in unimportant cargo vessels and attempt to board them at dawn for a noon sailing are apt to arouse special suspicions—at a time when every traveller is suspect.”
“I see that now. I am sorry.”
He began to cross-examine me about my work in Tangier and Casablanca before the war, about my movements during these recent weeks, about my uncle who offered me work in Rabat. I groped in my imagination for many of the answers and hoped they sounded more convincing to him than they did to me.
“Ah, well.” The Commissaire yawned and rubbed a hand distastefully over the stubble on his chin. “ That is the way of it. We are at sixes and sevens in this country just now.” He shovelled the papers together and thrust them at me. “I think you may catch your ship.”
I could have wept with relief. “ I shall be most grateful. Thank you.”
He blew smoke past his cigarette, and flecks of white ash floated over the desk. “Thank you,” I said again, putting the papers in my pocket.
“The police of this city,” he said, “are grossly over-taxed. All these extra duties. Watching the docks and the shipping offices. Keeping a check on the many aliens and refugees. At present we are looking specially for a criminal with newly healed scars on his hands, who it is thought may have come this way. He is wanted for the murder of a Nazi official in Switzerland. That sort of thing.”
I stood there as if all my blood had gone.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes,” said the Commissaire. “ Before you go, monsieur, please show me your palms.”
I knew then that this was the end. I knew that he had seen through my story all the time and had been toying with my excuses for his own amusement Forgetting the bandages had been the pitfall. This was an identification before which ordinary disguise fell away as useless.
Stiffly I took a step forward and extended my hands, palms upwards. It might have been much better if the chase had ended at Lucerne station and saved all the rest. Let M. le Commissaire get what credit and pleasure he could from the capture. I could only——
“Thank you, monsieur. That is all. Maurice will show you the way out.”
At the sound of his name the sleepy policeman at the other desk rose and surreptitiously stretched.
I stared at the Commissaire. He had looked at my hands and now was dusting away fresh cigarette ash which had fallen like snow on his desk. His expression had not changed. I looked quickly at my hands: in the electric light the scars were plain to be seen.
“Do you,” I began. “ I——”
“I, too, am an overworked man. Regulations and precautions. New instructions from this source and that.” He shrugged and his eyes blinked at mine through the smoke. “But one carries on. One tries to obey. And at the same time one tries to do one’s duty as one sees it.”
I struggled to speak. “Perhaps you will——”
He got up. “ Show this gentleman out, Maurice. Good day to you, M. Favel.”
I went out, walking with a distinct effort, not yet quite able to realise why I was free, not able to think as I should have wished a man who contrived to serve France in her downfall but did not forget old friendships or old friends.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I reached England in early December. We got into Liverpool one evening about six; although it was damp I spent the last hours on deck watching for signs of the land which had shown up some time ago but now had disappeared again with the fall of night. The cold air filled my lungs.
Arriving back was not quite so inconspicuous as departure had been. On the dock was Colonel Brown, limping and grey-eyed, to meet me.
I shook hands, surprised and slightly flattered that he was here. He peered at me in the indifferent light.
“Good to see you back, doctor. You’re looking tired. With reason, I expect.”
“I am a bad sailor,” I said, “and we have been at sea sixteen days.”
He smiled. “You’ll spend the night with me? Then you can go home for a rest—without any fear of internment.”
“Is my sister well?”
“Yes. But we could not notify her in time of your arrival. Also I wanted a private talk with you first.”
We drove to his hotel for dinner. It was, for wartime, a good dinner, but I was too concerned with other things to be able to savour it.
He had nad two reports, but naturally wanted me to fill them in. He was polite enough to wait until dinner was over. Then I told him the whole uneven story.
“Dwight,” I ended, “in the carriage Dwight destroyed everything he could lay his hands on. There would be nothing of value, I am convinced, found on von Riehl’s body when it was recovered. So, unless something unexpected of Professor Brayda’s was found, the record of his researches is likely to die with the two men.”
“Except for what you know.”
I shrugged. “If you will arrange me a meeting with Carruthers or Dyson or someone of their standing I will explain what I know, but it is hardly likely to be enough to work on. Even supposing you thought it desirable to work on it …”
Colonel Brown did not speak.
I said: “But I think I must warn you that scientific discoveries seldom occur in a vacuum. Sometimes there is one pioneer, but more usually it is as if the climate has become ripe for this or that discovery, and a man in Japan will be only a few months before or behind another man in Paris or London. At this moment there may be someone else somewhere in the world who is thinking along the lines of Professor Brayda.”
He frowned, his quiet introspective frown. “ It is a risk we have to take.”
“Yes, it is a risk we have to take.”
Silence fell.
He said: “ This has not been a pleasant experience for you, Dr Mencken. It turned out all so very different from the way we expected things to go. I’m afraid you’ll get no official thanks.”
“I did not expect it.”
“No … J.41 may even get a nomical reprimand. It is not the way we want to wage war.”
All this time I had been urgently wanting to ask him questions. “Am I to take it that reports have come direct from——”
“From J.41? Yes. He is back in Italy. Naturally I know no details. K.9 is also back.”
“K.9?”
“The woman agent you came in contact with.”
I moved muscles gone suddenly stiff K.9. To me only was she a woman, living and breathing, with fine skin and dark eyes and soft hair. To Colonel Brown she was K.9. It was strange that not until the very end of the adventure had I come so close to the conventionals of the trade.
“As for Captain Bonini,” said Brown. “ If he is of any further use he will be used. In this work we can’t afford to discard a traitor just because he is a traitor to both sides.”
“She is safe?” I said. “Where is she; still in Venice?”
His eyes met mine in surprise. “The woman? Yes, she is still in Venice.”
“I would think it dangerous for her to be there.”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “ if you are interested, there is no harm in your knowing that J. 41’s second report, just received, requests permission for K-9’s recall.”
“I am certainly interested! And greatly relieved.” Then with new alarm: “ For what reason?”
“In Milan a part of our organisation connected with a dress shop has been raided. Fortunately we were well forewarned. But there is the risk that through the shop some connection may be traced with K.9.”
“Dear God, yes! She is leaving?”
r /> “I have sent instructions,” said Colonel Brown Ityly.
“And how long will the instructions tske to reach her or Andrews?”
“About a week.”
“In the meantime?”
“In the meantime they will use their own discretion.”
I tried to see it reasonably. ‘The German police——”
“The Gestapo are flooding northern Italy. They are always the advance guard. If the Italians fail to organise their own war machine the Germans will take over. There will be no backing out or making a separate peace.”
“I know the Gestapo too well,” I said. “Their efficiency. Their ruthlessness. If Mrs Howard leaves it one day too late …”
“The German police have their limitations. They slipped up badly over you, didn’t they? I think it would be a mistake to worry unduly. J.41 is not above acting on his own initiative. Indeed, his one failing is that he does this too much.”
I said: “J.41 … Andrews … may have the one failing you speak of, but he seems to enjoy it. One is curious, against one’s better judgement, about his background.”
“I have not studied his dossier and could not give you the information if I had it. All I can tell you is that his name is not Andrews, that he was born in Swansea, the only son of a prosperous clergyman.”
“Of a …”
“Yes. I understand he led a sheltered life. His father bought him a junior partnership in a firm of architects and he went out to Italy to study. He never came back.”
“Oh,” I said.
“His father and mother are still alive. His fatner is Suffragan Bishop of—well, of a Welsh diocese. Their son has been a great disappointment to them.”
Through the grey smoke of the colonel’s cigar I seemed to see curling the ranker smoke of one of Andrews’s interminable green cheroots. I tried to imagine him deep in theological discussion with a shadowy, white-haired figure in gaiters. My mind would not face the picture.
I spent that night at the hotel, the best in the city. Half its bedrooms were uninhabitable; my window was boarded up.
I was back. I was home. Colonel Brown had expressed his government’s gratitude for services rendered and had said that my naturalisation papers would be through in a matter of days. Then I would be English officially, in fact, however much my deeper impulses remained polyglot.
There was now no longer any need to concern myself with Andrews. I could forget Bonini and poor Dwight and the rest. I could put away the perplexities of human nature and return to the more predictable reactions of the laboratory. By to-morrow evening I could be back at work.
The thought did not thrill me, as three months ago it would have done. If fifteen years of study and research had quite unfitted me for the dangers of secret service work, fifteen weeks as a secret agent had left me curiously, psychologically unfit for a return to the laboratory. At least to begin, I felt I should have no patience for it, no concentration, no singleness of mind. Almost, an invitation from Colonel Brown to take on some other task would have seemed, perversely, more inviting.
I had suffered a sea change. I would never be the same again. Introspection had been invaded by action. Mental tubes, previously clogged with the over-rational processes of civilised living, had been blown clear. This certainly had not made me a better man, but it had made me better suited, and perhaps more reconciled, to the age in which I lived.
I turned and tossed through half the night, thinking of Jane. The news that she was to leave Italy filled me half with elation and half with dread. Andrews would not have been prepared to dispense with her unless he was convinced of her danger. There were days of waiting ahead now, perhaps weeks, before I heard anything at all. Equally well I might learn of her capture and probable death or her freedom and another chance.
“I am not a quitter,” she had said. “After the war, Robert …”
But after the war was too long.
It would be a strange alliance if it ever came, someone like her, so much of the new world, with someone like me, so much of the old. The extrovert and the introvert, the attraction of opposites. A sudden enormously strong physical attraction which in a few meetings had quickly become something more.
But it hardly occurred to me that it might not work. We complemented each other; we did not clash. Her first marriage might be a warning that she could change: I did not care. It might on my part be the confidence of ignorance; what was it on hers?
I had come out of this traumatic adventure sure of very little; it was good to be sure of one thing, and it was good not to have to base that sureness on logic.
I only wished I could have been as confident that we should get the chance to try. How much was she implicated in Lorenzo & Co.? How quickly would the secret police move?
Towards morning I went to sleep and woke about eight feeling, without good reason, more rested in mind. Mornings are mot usually an optimistic time; perhaps this was some illusion of confidence induced by the slits of sunshine falling, this cold December morning, through a crack in the boards across the window. Only time would show.
There was a dark winter still ahead. But I felt we should see the spring.
Copyright
First published in 1966 by Bodley Head
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