Samson 05 - Hope, page 17
‘Gloria was looking for you,’ I said.
‘Well, as long as I’m not intruding.’ He gave another smile to show that he now considered himself a party to our conspiracy. Then saw the polystyrene box.
I said, ‘Gloria brought this package. She was looking for you. It came in the pouch from Warsaw.’
Dicky lifted it briefly to estimate its weight. Then he picked up my Swiss army folding knife, which, when Gloria arrived, I’d been using to pry open a catering-sized tin of powdered coffee. He used my knife to slash the sticky paper which sealed the two halves of the polystyrene box and the pieces fell apart to reveal a large jar. It was a preserving jar, the sort of heavy glass container used in kitchens back when wives stayed at home and cooked things, sealed at the top with a heavy wire clip and a red rubber washer. Its contents were completely hidden by a large label wrapped around the jar. ‘It’s in Polish,’ complained Dicky as he tried to read the typewritten label. Having given up on it he ripped the label off to see for himself what he’d been sent from Warsaw. ‘What’s that say?’ he asked, pushing the label at me.
Dicky said afterwards that he fully expected it to be a kilo of caviar, which he’d discovered to be relatively cheap and relatively plentiful in Warsaw. If so, the shock must have been all the greater as he impatiently ripped away the remaining parts of the label and held the jar aloft. It was filled to the top with liquid, almost clear liquid, apart from a few large specks of organic matter disturbed by the sudden movement. Held so close to the overhead light the jar shone brightly. The thickness of the glass distorted and elongated the shape of the contents but the clarity of the liquid provided a good view of the severed human hand that was suspended in it, with shreds of skin and tendon swinging and swaying in the glittering preservative.
‘Ahhh!’ said Dicky. His face contorted in disgust and he almost dropped it. Gloria took a step back. I was the last to look up and react because I’d been trying to decipher the typewritten label. ‘George Kosinski, it says,’ I told Dicky. ‘It’s an excerpt from a postmortem report dated last week.’
‘With gold rings still on his fingers?’ said Dicky, as if refusing to believe it was a human hand at all. He’d put the jar on the table by now, and was keeping his distance from it.
‘Fingers too swollen to get the rings off,’ I said. ‘They must have decided not to amputate the fingers if it was going back to the relatives.’
‘This will be definitive,’ said Dicky, plucking a succession of paper tissues from the box on the table and wiping and rewiping his fingers with them. ‘Now we’ll stamp out all this argument about Kosinski not being dead.’ He dropped the tissues into a waste bin and looked at me.
It was while we were looking at the jar our backs turned towards the door that it opened and the bearded man stepped in. ‘I’ll take that,’ he said, and reaching forward took the jar from the desktop and backed out through the door.
With the glass jar tucked under his arm, he put his other hand into the pocket of his jacket and pointed it at Dicky. ‘I don’t want anyone to get hurt,’ he said. ‘You just stay there and stay quiet.’ Then he backed out into the corridor, closed the door, and moved away still watching us through the glass panes.
As soon as the intruder was beyond our vision, Dicky was pulling the door open and racing after him along the corridor and out of sight. There came the sound of a shot.
‘I’ve got the bastard!’ shouted Dicky. When I got to the corridor I was amazed to see Dicky posed in that legs apart, knees bent posture that they started teaching at the training school when they replaced the traditional circular targets with ugly drawings of pugnacious humans. Clasping both hands together, Dicky was holding a revolver, another one of those old ‘Official Police’ models, and aiming along the corridor at the fleeing man. ‘Come on!’ said Dicky and fired, although by the time the shot rang out the bearded man had disappeared down the stairs.
Dicky raced along the corridor and I followed him. By the time I reached the far end of the corridor the bearded man had made the most of his good start. He was a small lightweight fellow, and in an excellent state of physical fitness, judging by the sound of his feet echoing in the narrow space of the stairwell.
I glimpsed Dicky as he raced down the flights of stairs but I couldn’t see the man he was chasing. As I got to the next level a shot rang out, and two flights lower I passed a long smear of blood on the wall and spots of it on the stairs. Then there was the sound of another shot. The sound of the footsteps continued uninterrupted, which made me guess that Dicky was firing as he ran and his quarry was simply running. There were more blood smears at the next level; one of them was a smudged handprint dribbling with shiny-wet blood.
As I got to the ground floor Dicky was flattened with his back against the corridor wall holding his .38 Colt at arm’s length. His face was flushed and glistening with sweat, his chest was heaving and his hand trembling.
But whatever shape Dicky was in, one glance along that long corridor, which led past three rubbish bins and the double back doors, made every fiber in my body go out to the poor devil who was trying to escape through the exit door alive.
‘Stop shooting, Dicky!’ I called loudly. ‘Let him go.’ But Dicky was past reasoning or listening or thinking. The adrenalin was pumping, his sinews stiffened, blood summoned up, and his eyes opened wide. He couldn’t stop. I know what it’s like, I’d been there.
Before I could claw at Dicky’s arm the crack of his gun deafened me. There was a whine followed by a doleful clank as the spent round ricocheted and hit a metal bin. It was the subsequent shot that brought the fleeing man down. It hit him somewhere about the middle of the back and threw him full-length, as effectively as a footballer grabbed by his ankles in a flying tackle. He crashed to the wooden floor with a sickening thud that would have hospitalized most men.
The jar flew from his clasp, went tumbling through the air and smashed against the wall, so that a sudden smell of ether and formaldehyde was added to the faint smell of the burned powder. But the little man got up from the spreading puddle of blood and chemicals. He staggered forwards a couple of steps and with a superhuman effort of will threw all his weight against the doors. His weight on the crush-bar was enough to activate the fastenings, and the door banged open as he fell through it into what must have been someone’s waiting arms, for there came the almost immediate roar of a revving car engine. Before Dicky or I could reach the back yard they were burning rubber on the far side of the car park. The parked cars were in the line of fire and there was only a blurred glimpse of the speeding car as, with horn blasting, it accelerated through the open gates and recklessly forced its way into the London traffic.
‘Did you get the license number?’ said Dicky, standing in the yard looking at the gates through which the car had gone.
‘I saw it.’ It was Gloria coming out of the back doors to find us. ‘I saw it all from the window. There were three men and a black Ford Fiesta. No license plates. I looked for the number but there were no plates.’
‘He must have been wearing armor,’ said Dicky. ‘Did you hear the clank as I hit him?’
‘No I didn’t,’ I said.
‘Well, thanks for all your help, Bernard,’ said Dicky with biting sarcasm. He was standing arms akimbo: panting, excited and angry. And frustrated that his quarry had escaped.
‘I wasn’t sure what it was you were going to do,’ I explained.
‘I would have thought your training and know-how would have taken care of that. I thought the instincts of an experienced field agent would show him what to do in an emergency.’
‘The developed professional instincts of all the field agents who survive tell them to get quickly out of the line of fire when the bullets are flying.’
Gloria looked at me. I’d disappointed her too, I could see it in her face. After all she’d heard about my exploits, the first time she sees me in action I demonstrate a remarkable capacity for self-preservation while Dicky does the tough-guy stuff.
‘Jesus, Dicky,’ I said in exasperation. ‘He didn’t shoot. He probably wasn’t armed. Can you imagine what sort of clamor there would have been if you’d killed him? Or even if we had him here now, badly hurt and unable to move?’
Dicky wasn’t listening. ‘I hit him on the run. My skeet-shooting days were not wasted. No, sir!’ Dicky was still glowing with the heat of battle and there was nothing for it but to give him time to cool off.
I went back into the building and looked at the broken pieces of glass,jar, the puddle of chemicals, and the severed hand unnaturally white and puffy that was sitting on the floor like some large and venomous species of spider.
Dicky came and looked too. ‘I suppose you are right,’ he said. Now it was dawning on him what he’d done. And what he’d have to say in his report.
‘Where did you get that Colt revolver?’ I asked him. It looked familiar.
‘I’ve had it since you took it from those gorillas in Warsaw.’
My God, Dicky. On the plane? Going through customs and everything? I would have died of fright if I’d known what that idiot had got concealed under his duty-free gin and Viyella pajamas. But I didn’t tell him that. I just said, ‘Better get rid of that piece right away. It might be ballistically identifiable all kinds of crimes may already be attached to it.’
Dicky didn’t respond. ‘We must get this place cleaned up,’ he said. ‘The staircase and the walls. Get on to the Works people, Gloria. I want it all done by this evening. Reliable people. We don’t want word to get out.’
Dicky put away his gun and nibbled at his fingernail. He was beginning to worry.
Gloria joined us to stare down at the severed hand and the pool of smelly liquid.
Dicky said, ‘This will prove wrong all those dotty ideas about George being alive, Bernard. This is George’s hand. It will be conclusive evidence.’
I said, ‘You won’t easily get a print from flesh that’s been marinating in that brew. That skin tissue is like wet Kleenex.’
‘Could you pick it up, Bernard?’
I balanced it upon the largest remaining piece of the broken jar, its thick saucer-like base.
‘What shall we do with it?’ Dicky asked.
‘Take it to the mail room,’ I said. ‘Tell them to put it in a plastic bag and send it to forensic by motorcycle messenger.’
‘That’s right,’ said Dicky, then, ‘He had a beard. That’s what baffles me. How could he hope to be inconspicuous with all that face fungus?’
‘He’ll shave it off, Dicky. Men like him don’t disguise themselves by growing beards when they can disguise themselves by shaving them off.’
‘Maybe,’ he conceded.
‘Can I use your phone, Dicky?’
He reached into his pocket and gave me his mobile phone. I punched in the number of a friend of mine in the Berne embassy. ‘Who are you calling?’ said Dicky, who’d watched what I was doing and recognized the Berne prefix.
‘Masterson at the embassy.’
‘I don’t, know him.’
‘No, probably not,’ I said. Masterson was a lowly toiler in the embassy ant-hill. He didn’t have the right school ties, the right accent nor most decisively of all the right wife, to win any decent position in the embassy rat race. Mrs. Masterson was a French socialist intellectual who used social functions to lecture her husband’s superiors on Britain’s failings. The fact that his wife’s criticisms were well-founded and well-argued was the final fatal blow to his career.
When the phone was answered, a girl came on the line. She’d come fresh from one of those training courses where telephone staff learn how to rudely deter callers from making contact with their employers. ‘He’s not here. He’s at a meeting. Call later,’ she told me.
‘Get him out of the meeting,’ I said. ‘This is urgent.’
‘Is it personal?’ she asked.
‘In a way,’ I said. ‘I’m his live-in lover and I’ve just been checked positive.’
She made a noise and went away for a long time, but eventually Masterson came on the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘Batty? It’s Bernie.’
‘Of course it is. Who else would phone up to offend my secretary and make trouble for me by pulling me out of a staff meeting with the First Secretary presiding?’
‘Those tourists who went to see my brother-in-law. Any of them feature a pigtail haircut, and beard?’
‘Yes, Bernard.’
‘Short, dark. About one hundred and forty pounds?’
‘That’s him. A Stasi major. We’ve got a smudgy Photo-fit picture somewhere if I can find it.’
‘Put it on the fax for me, Batty. You have Dicky Cruyer’s fax number on file.’
‘I’ll do that for you, Bernie.’
‘Thanks Batty. I’ll do the same for you some day.’
‘You’re always saying that, Bernard.’
I rang off. ‘Stasi?’ said Dicky excitedly.
‘Sounds like it,’ I said.
Dicky emerged from his melancholy mood. He could put aside his thoughts on how he would explain shooting an innocent passerby in Central London. ‘I knew it. I knew it,’ he said, and rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. ‘Incidentally, Bernard. A propos telephone procedure: in future I counsel you to simply inform Berne and such people that you are calling from London Central, and give them your priority code, so you won’t have to go through all that jokey rigmarole.’
Dicky looked at Gloria and smiled broadly to make sure she enjoyed this crushing directive. Gloria, whose feminine instinct for the right timing seldom let her down, returned this intimacy with a confidence. ‘I’m going to work for Mr. Rensselaer,’ she told Dicky. When Dicky seemed not to hear her, she reached out and touched hint on the arm to get his attention. I had no claim to her-of course, but seeing her make that most ordinary of physical contacts with another man was enough to make me want to shout my protest aloud. Despite whatever look of horror was written across my face, Gloria gave me her most beguiling smile and said, ‘And Bernard’s decided to go and work in Berlin.’ I suppose she wanted to be quite certain I couldn’t wriggle out of it.
‘Brilliant,’ said Dicky. He studied my face for a moment and said, ‘You’re fond of Frank, and Lisl Hennig is a mother to you. Berlin’s your home, Bernard. Admit it.’
‘It sometimes seems that way,’ I said. ‘And lovely Gloria stays in London,’ said Dicky, and looked at her and chuckled in a tone that sounded predatory.
Gloria laughed too, as if Dicky had made a very good joke that only she shared. It was a lovely laugh and came bubbling up like milk boiling over. I didn’t join in.
‘I’ll take the hand to the mail room,’ I said. ‘They may be a bit squeamish about touching it.’
Something in what I’d said or done or failed to say or do seemed to outrage Dicky. Perhaps he was expecting that his one demonstration of manly daring should bring expressions of admiration and respect. He seemed to forget Gloria’s presence. ‘You won’t be told, will you?’ he said, pushing his face very close to mine but keeping his voice soft and low in a studied demonstration of restraint. ‘I suppose you expect me to believe that George Kosinski bolting at exactly the same time that the stock market crashed is pure coincidence?’
‘Tell me, Dicky,’ I said, ‘do you think that London getting hit by a hurricane, at exactly the same time that the stock market crashed, is something more than just coincidence?’
‘You’re determined to believe that George Kosinski is still alive; not because you want to spare the feelings of his friends or relatives but just to prove that you are the clever one. You just have to show us that you remain skeptical, while all of us dullards are sucked in to some conspiracy … or whatever it is you think is going on.’
‘I just said I’d take the hand ’
‘I know what you bloody said,’ said Dicky. ‘It’s your whole superior attitude that gets up my nose. Now will you look at that hand?’ He pointed at it as if without his help my attention might be drawn elsewhere. I looked at it. ‘Do you see the signet ring? Look at the Kosinski family crest. It belongs to George Kosinski, and we both know that. Didn’t I hear you say it’s there because the fmgers are too swollen to get it off? Now will you see sense?’
‘I hear what you’re saying, Dicky.’ I spoke slowly and soberly in the hope that it would cool him down. ‘But the trouble I have with that is that the last time we saw George Kosinski’s signet ring it was in the palm of Stefan Kosinski’s hand, and he was telling us that he’d just brought it back from the police station where the cops were holding the murderers.’
‘But it’s the same ring,’ said Dicky, and all the wind went out of him.
‘The same crest, yes. I’m not so sure about the ring. Gold signet rings are usually pretty much the same for everyone in the family.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’
‘I’ll ask the lab to remove it,’ I said. ‘We can get a closer look at it then. Perhaps the size will show whether it belongs to some other member of the family. There may even be an engraved inscription on the inner side.’
8
SIS Offices, Berlin.
‘Hold on, Bernard, hold on. I’m just a simple old desk wallah. You’ll have to explain this one to me. You say this chap was a Stasi man?’
‘Looks like it, Frank,’ I said. Frank raised an eyebrow. ‘Dashed in, and grabbed this amputated fist or whatever it was?’
‘Yes, a hand.’
‘Well, why?’ He leaned back in his chair. Frank Harrington never seemed to grow older. His countenance, pale, stern and bony, and the stubble moustache he’d cultivated to make himself look more military, had given him this same appearance decades ago, when I was a child and he was an indulgent ‘uncle.’
‘I don’t exactly know, Frank.’
‘You don’t exactly know, Bernard? I won’t write that down, because when you say you don’t exactly know in that tone of voice, I am quite confident that you have a clever theory of some kind.’
