The Smoke, page 31
I closed my eyes and tried to take stock, but then my brain tapped me on the shoulder to tell me I was freezing to death and I began shivering uncontrollably. I’d been wearing Barry’s coat and a jacket once upon a time, but fuck knows what’d happened to them. I took another peek, and that’s when I noticed they’d ripped my shirt and pullover to shreds. Blimey, Messima must’ve really lost his temper. There were hardly enough tatters left hanging on me for me to know it was me I was looking at and there was definitely no sound of ice cubes clinking in a nice glass of single malt this time; all I could hear was the constant chattering of my teeth.
I tried tilting my head back farther, and what I saw nearly made me jump right out of my bloody skin. It wasn’t my legs being stark naked that made me break into a cold sweat, it was seeing that whole lengths of the flex they’d bound me with had been stripped to expose the bare copper wire. And worse, they’d gone and wound the bare flex around my upper thighs and, Jesus, even around my family jewels. Fair’s fair, but that was a bit much even for Messima. I mean, that’s why they’re called privates in the first place, isn’t it?
“He’s awake.”
The voice came from behind, although I wasn’t too sure at first, as somewhere in the back of my mind I was all but screaming my head off.
“Wet him down.”
I’d once been told that if you brace yourself for a shock it helps reduce the impact. Well, you be careful who you listen to. Always expect the unexpected, right? I did. I do. But what happened next was diabolical. At first I couldn’t make out what had hit me, I only knew that my chest had exploded. The cold-hearted bastards had thrown buckets of icy cold water all over me from two sides at once. I tell you, they couldn’t have done any worse damage if they’d used a pair of sawn-offs.
“Take it off.”
They tore off the blindfold and the gag, and light exploded behind my eyes, and it was as if I’d been buried headfirst in snow. I heaved for air, but all my lungs did was cough and wheeze like clapped-out accordions. And then I spluttered and gasped, and just started bellowing my head off, yelling every vile and nasty thing I could think of, turning the air around me crimson with the bluest, blackest swearing I’d heard in a long while. And I tell you, the things that I called Messima, well, even old Vi, God bless her, would’ve been proud of me.
The curtain of water running down my face reduced itself to a trickle, and I blinked the water away from my eyes and took a quick look around me. I was inside a machine shop. It was too small to be a factory, but I knew it was something to do with engineering, as I could see metal lathes and various bits and pieces of welding equipment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw big, double-wooden doors, which together with a very strong smell of paint, paraffin, and motor oil meant I was probably in a garage workshop of some kind. The workbenches were littered with tools and piles of rusted tins of this and pots of that, and I saw a line of ten-gallon oil drums, all shiny black and new, that’d probably fallen off the back of some khaki-coloured lorry.
I was wet through and cold beyond freezing, but I could feel warmth coming from somewhere. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a shovel scraping against a fire-grate. It must’ve been a little pot-bellied stove or something, because my nose began to twitch with the licks of smoke from the burning coal. And I remember thinking that they couldn’t have had a very understanding coalman, as there wasn’t enough heat to dry a drowned rat, let alone me.
I struggled against the chair for a bit, and yelled some more, but after getting no response from anyone, I calmed down and after all the racket that I’d been making, it almost seemed peaceful.
Then a voice said, “Hit him. Hard.”
Then some bugger hit me hard behind the ear, and I couldn’t hear myself yell for all the bells that were clanging in my head. Then the man with the fists moved in closer and got down to work, his leather turtles smashing into me again and again. It was like being hit by a pair of steam-hammers. And I tried to keep my chin down, but it didn’t seem to break his rhythm any, he just hit me with an uppercut and carried on.
I had to swallow it and keep myself focused, or it was all over for me there and then. So over and over in my mind, I said, “Whoever you are, Puncher, you shit-head, you better enjoy it while you can, because once I get out of this you’re a dead man.” Anyway, after he took the first five rounds, I just left him to it. I felt one eye begin to close under the weight of the blows, and then the other one closed out of sympathy. And I was blind again, but it didn’t matter much, I really didn’t feel like seeing anyone.
“Enough. I think that’s helped put us all in the proper mood.”
Puncher stopped rearranging my face, but that still left the voice of the bloke in charge ringing in my ears, like a bell signaling “seconds out.” It definitely wasn’t Messima, and it wasn’t one of the Tweedle brothers. It sounded all stuck up and very la-di-dah and I knew I’d heard it somewhere before. But what with my head thumping so much, I just couldn’t place it. I ask you, what on earth’s the good of having a memory if it doesn’t work when you need it to?
“It’s, Jethro, isn’t it? The infamous burglar and jewel thief? No, please don’t answer yet, all I want you to do for now is listen. You’ve put me to a great deal of trouble and expense, you know, Mr. Jethro? And the question is whether you’ve been a very lucky amateur, or whether someone has been helping you. Because if you really are as good as people say you are, then I can’t quite believe that you would have been so stupid as to burgle the same place twice. Unless, that is, you had no other choice but to do so.”
It felt odd having the voice come echoing out at me, from out of nowhere, it was a bit like listening to God speak. I thought it best that I should stay stumm.
“So why not be a good fellow, and tell me who you are working for, right now. And then perhaps we can avoid all this unpleasantness.”
The only sounds apart from the coal settling in the stove were the lick of the flames and my teeth chattering ten to the dozen. Then I heard someone give an exaggerated sigh worthy of Donald Wolfit himself.
“You can play dumb, if you so choose, Mr. Jethro, but it will only serve to make things that much more difficult for you as we proceed and in the spirit of fair play, I should perhaps warn you that you will talk in the end, everyone always does.”
I still didn’t think he expected a reply yet, whoever he was, so I kept my thoughts to myself. Funny thing, though, he didn’t sound like he’d be working for Messima. The way he spoke sounded much too educated and cultured, but then Chalkie Smythe-White had gone off to the big Inns of Court in the sky, hadn’t he, so perhaps Messima had hired himself a very posh new legal brain to do his threatening for him.
“Tell me who you were working for. Was it British Intelligence?”
When I didn’t say anything, Puncher hit me again. Then so did the voice.
“Let’s make it a little easier for you then, shall we? Just nod your head once for yes. The word ‘no’ needn’t concern you. Were you perhaps working for somebody in MI5?”
When I was hit again, my head fell onto my chest and I just let it stay there, which I think they took as a sign of me not co-operating fully. So they started hitting me again. Then it came to me in a flash, or it might’ve been another punch to the head, but I knew the voice. It was von Bentink. I tell you, I could be right thick sometimes. So I was in his hands then, was I, and not in the clutches of my dear old friend Messima.
It was his questions about British Intelligence that’d clued me in; the only spying Messima ever got involved with was in the canteen of West End Central police station or in the pubs around Scotland Yard. I never thought in all my life I’d ever miss Messima, but I did at that moment, and that told me just what a bloody awful mess I must’ve dropped myself into. Meanwhile, in between telling me how very irritated he’d been by the theft of those two little black books and his posh little set of skeleton keys, Herr von Bentink kept on throwing questions at me about the British Secret Service, and how much, if anything, they knew about him. He also asked me whether I read Charles Dickens or not, which I thought was a very odd question, as didn’t everybody? Puncher hit me every now and then, just to add all the proper points of emphasis and punctuation.
I must’ve blacked out or something, because all of a sudden it seemed like I was walking down a long white corridor, going towards someplace nice and warm and peaceful. And as it looked as if the corridor went on forever, I whiled away the time thinking about how everything had come to pass.
Truth was, I had no one to blame but myself. I’d had all those itchy feelings about being watched and followed, hadn’t I? And it’d got so bad at times that it’d felt like I was coming down with the chicken-pox. I think it was all that going on, inside me, that had dulled my senses, long before I ever thought of reaching for the whisky bottle.
The eyes in the back of my head were always on the lookout for Messima and his gang of thugs, which was only natural; it was all part of living in London, like avoiding the tallyman or dodging the taxman. Yet since that time Messima had had me in to speak to him, all the usual faces around London had seemed that much more suspicious, dark, and threatening, and it had given me the willies and no mistake. Watching out for yourself every moment on a rooftop at midnight is one thing, but having to also do it in the middle of a crowded street in broad daylight is quite another. It wears you down.
Of course, I’d had itches on my itches after that second Embassy break-in. And at first I’d thought it was the Ghost Squad, or DCI Browno, or even some of Bosanquet’s Special Branch friends that’d been stirring London’s muddy pond to see what turned up. And just maybe, I’d been cocky enough to want to let them do it, too, hoping that if ever von Bentink came out of the fog looking for me, I could at least scratch one of my itches and test myself against him, but I’d never really thought he’d ever come after me. Messima maybe, but not Flash von Bentink. No. He was just a picture in a society magazine, the smell of Turkish tobacco in an empty room, a photo in Walsingham’s file, or a ghostly voice in the night. He was a story to frighten children with, nothing more. He wasn’t really real. Then the brazen fucker had gone and broken into my flat in broad daylight and turned my neat little world upside down and I should’ve had Walsingham spirit me away to safety the moment it happened. Only I didn’t and now it was too late. I’d still been feeling so very guilty over Vi’s death. I’d wallowed in my misery like a little lost schoolboy. Then I’d gone and got myself stinking, steaming drunk. Clever me.
I’d been warned Messima might give my name up to von Bentink and I’d thought if it ever did happen, I’d be able to eel my way out of it just like I always did, but I’d well and truly gone and fucked myself now and no mistake. Yet I was still left with the itchy feeling that I’d been set up right from the start and that all I’d had to do was show up and not bump into any of the furniture, while everybody else just sat back and waited for everything to play itself out. Now here I was heading for the final curtain and in the hands of the real villains of the piece, the international cat burglar and spy Count Henry von Bentink, and his evil henchman, Major Zavis Krepstok.
“Fascinating. Was your mind wandering? Please don’t think of leaving us yet, Mr. Jethro, we have so much more to talk about.”
I had a sharp pain in my head, like someone had stuck a pitchfork up my nose, and I gasped for air and got an eye-watering whiff of ammonia. I put it down to me having been sick or something and so I just got on with my shivering. I could still hear von Bentink through it all, though, as the sound of his voice floated round the garage like some story before bedtime on the radio.
“The first time you burgled the Embassy, Mr. Jethro, I must admit, I was a little irritated, but also somewhat intrigued by what I regarded as your reckless daring. The ambassador’s wife and daughter, however, were very, very angry with you for stealing their jewellery, as was the ambassador for you having tarnished his diplomatic standing. And because you’d stained their honour and, with me being their guest, mine also, a bounty was placed on your head throughout the London underworld. Set a thief to catch a thief, as I believe you English say.”
He paused for a moment, as somebody stoked the fire in the stove, then we all got comfortable again and settled back for more.
“I know you will have already sold on all the jewellery, Mr. Jethro, and that is no concern to me. However, there is something, or should I say someone, that concerns me very much indeed. So let me ask you, again, did the British Secret Service mastermind the escape of the woman called Tanyia Arzhak? Or was it the Americans? The Anti-Communist League, perhaps? Only we found leaflets, but no, no, that was probably just a clever ruse, wasn’t it?”
I shuddered at the sound of Tanyia’s name on his lips, but given the condition I was in, I don’t think anyone noticed. My mind began to wander again, but I still didn’t think I was expected to say anything sensible yet. Then I heard noises-off and got a very bad feeling we’d come to Act Two in the proceedings, but truth was I felt so knackered I didn’t really care much what he said or did anymore and I think I showed my disinterest by dribbling blood and spit down my chin. Though with all the talk about things that’d gone missing from the Embassy, I did wonder why he hadn’t yet thought to mention the bloke who’d died that first night. The two of them must’ve been really close.
“You know, Mr. Jethro, all this blood on the floor concerns me. We can’t have you shuffling off this mortal coil quite yet, can we? So let’s just clean you up before we move on to something a little more sophisticated. No, don’t get up, we’ll come over to you.”
The noises-off stepped centre-stage. Then the voice was directly behind me, and I shuddered in fear.
“Mr. Jethro, are you listening to me? Good, because I want you to concentrate fully now. You work a lot with your hands, don’t you? And that’s very good; it simplifies things enormously. We’re going to start by pulling your fingernails out, one by one. Then, as I see we have all the proper instruments here, I think we’ll crush each one of your knuckles, and then follow that up later by breaking both of your wrists.”
I didn’t think I’d heard him right, at first. He might just as well have been ordering dinner in a restaurant up the West End. Trouble was, this time it sounded as if he was going to make a five-shilling three-course meal out of me, instead, and I didn’t fancy that at all. I started sweating cobs then, even in the cold.
“Good, I can see I’m beginning to get through to you at last. I want you to clearly understand what we’re going to do to you, as I’ve observed in the past that the anticipation of pain is almost as effective as the pain itself. The history of torture has so much to teach us, if only we take the time to learn. Isn’t that so, Herr Major?”
Krepstok must’ve been wearing new jackboots, because when he clicked his heels together it sounded just like Puncher’s fists hitting my face. I think, of the two, I’d have preferred taking another beating; at least I’d grown up with stuff like that. Even getting striped with a chiv was routine where I came from and you just learned to live with it, but all this talk of torture wasn’t natural and it was starting to get to me. I shuddered again and got on with my sweating and shivering.
Krepstok barked an order and someone loomed over me and bathed my face with what felt like a chamois leather filled with grit. Water dribbled down my swollen cheeks and stung like blazes. Then I felt someone’s fingers clumsily trying to pull my eyelids apart, and I yelled blue bloody murder at that. Although whoever had their digits in my mince pies probably didn’t hear anything but a few tired groans.
Then I heard more scraping noises and without warning I went up in the air and the world spun round and I think I was so confused I shouted out in terror. I didn’t know what to think at first, but all they’d done was pick up the chair and turn me round to face everybody. By which I mean my judge, my jury, and my executioners. It was quite a shock, but nothing compared to what was about to come.
I tried to see through puffy, swollen eyes, but it was nigh impossible. I tried again. I squinted and blinked, and blinked again, and very slowly details began to emerge. There were five of them—big, bulky, black shapes tinged with red. I tried not to shiver, but shivered anyway, and all of a sudden my eyes clicked into focus. They were all standing round an open stove, wearing warm overcoats, and hats, and gloves, and scarves. And they were all smoking away like chimneys, so somebody must’ve been handing around the fags like it was Christmas or something. One of them, wearing a short bum-freezer jacket, stood wiping something from off his leather gloves. The dark stains on the rag he was using could’ve been motor oil, but I just knew, somehow, that it was my blood. I shook my head and tried to gather what wits I had left. So, that was Puncher. He had a face like a fist and I tried to fix it firmly in my mind, and I promised myself again that I’d kill him if I ever got the chance. Next to him were two blokes that looked to be made of solid muscle from the neck up and the neck down and from the bored looks on their faces, I could tell I might just as well have been a piece of meat hanging in a cold-storage locker somewhere.
Then the big, black, unmistakable shape of Major Krepstok turned and slowly walked towards me. It was still a shock to see him in the flesh. He creaked as he walked and I think it took me a moment or two to realise it was the long black leather trench coat he was wearing that was making all the noise. I tried to sneer at him, but all I did was make the cuts and bruises on my face bleed all the more.
His beady little eyes looked at me with dull disinterest. He’d probably seen people in my state a thousand times before, because I noticed he didn’t even flinch when he came closer to inspect the damage. He leaned in, his breath smelling of something awful, but he didn’t say a word and didn’t even grunt, so I’m not sure whether I impressed him or not. Looking back on it now, I think he must’ve been trying to work out how much more pain they could inflict upon me before me and my carcass gave up the ghost for good. Either that, or he was already measuring me for a pine box.
