“So why are you still here?”
“I get a good pension. Just another ten years. Then I’m out.”
“Despite the Americans?”
He shrugged. He drew patterns on his glass. “I also believe in it. There’s wickedness out there. We may not eradicate it. We may not even make a dent in it. But would you have me stop trying?”
“There’s too many people with beliefs. That’s where the fighting starts.”
“Like your girlfriend? Finding her cause at last? Fighting for it. Like we were.”
“What was that again? I forget sometimes. Freedom, was it? Is this what freedom looks like? Is this what we do with it?”
“What a world-weary chap you are.”
“Don’t bloody patronise me, Gerald, old boy!” I felt a flush on my cheeks. I was angry with everything these days. “Sorry. It’s all such a mess.”
“Conscience?” he asked gently.
“For what?”
“Wilson. It was you, wasn’t it?”
I held his gaze. “I didn’t kill him. I don’t know what happened to him.”
He studied me. “Well, that’s all right then. I needed to know.”
I guessed. “They’ve found him?”
He nodded.
“Alive?”
He shook his head. “In the river. Very low tide. Body weighed down by chains.
Covered in burns. Looked like a gangland killing. There was talk, a while back, that he was on their payroll.”
I searched for some compassion in my heart and found none. Had I fallen so far?
Seen too much inhumanity? Like a camp guard? “Was this why you called me, Gerry?”
“Thought you might want to know. Also…”
“Yes?”
“Your girl. For what it’s worth, the Americans deny it.”
I nodded. He got up then. He pushed on his hat and gave it a firm tap. He smiled and walked out the door. He didn’t shake my hand.
TWENTY EIGHT
Winter laid siege to the capital and turned us all into hoarders. We hoarded coal and tins of Spam. We hoarded blankets and we hoarded our emotions. We each became an island of shivering humanity, too cold to talk, to meet, to reach out to each other. I filled another foot of shelf with bright orange Penguins, wondering, with each acquisition, if she would have liked it. I could afford more, now I’d given up the fags.
Surprisingly, business ticked over. I had a nice line in advising companies on security in their warehouses. Tommy Chandler had spread the word. It was enough to keep me in scotch and food. I’d cut down on beer too. I’d stopped going in to the George every night. It had got harder to keep up the banter with the lads after leaving Wilson to the hyenas. Even Stan looked like his conscience troubled him, or maybe he regretted giving up the blowlamp to someone else.
New Year came and went and there was no softening of winter’s grip. They began to cut rations again. Disillusion set in with Attlee and co. Fine promises but none of them kept. It was as though we were tipping back into the gloom of the war years. But this time – apart from winter itself – we had no common enemy.
Just each other.
I was sitting in my bedroom, a quilt pulled round my shoulders and the heat from two sullen briquettes cooking my shins. One hand peeked out to hold the latest book. The other nursed a scotch. It was early evening and sleet was falling past my window. The wet flakes sparkled briefly in the light from the street lamp and were gone.
The door was closed to my office but I heard footsteps on the stairs and then the landing. My outer office door was tried and opened. Someone entered. The steps were hesitant and soon came to a halt. I put down my book and shrugged off my quilt. I got up and opened the dividing door.
She was standing there, hands deep in her pockets, the scarf round her head dripping with melting snow.
“Can I come in?”
I inspected my glass.
“One too many.”
“Not like you, Danny.” Eve smiled and walked towards me.
“I’ve done with ghosts.”
“Oh, I’m real all right.” On cue the cat slid round the door and mewed. It ran forward waving its stumpy tail and wrapped itself round her legs. Eve bent and picked it up. She walked up close to me and dropped it on my chest. The cat hissed, sank its claws in me and leapt off.
“You’re real all right.” I rubbed at my wounds. “Are you staying? Dump your coat and come in. There’s a bit of a fire in here.”
She hesitated.
“Oh come on, Eve. You’re back from the dead. We can celebrate. A wee bit.”
She pulled off her coat and hung it on the hat-stand by the office door. She took off the scarf and shook it and hung it on top. She walked back to me. She looked good, but different somehow. It wasn’t till she came into the light that I realised her russet mop had grown back. It was also now a dark brown.
“Suits you. The hair.”
She fluffed it in embarrassment. I poured her a whisky and topped up mine. We sat, me on the edge of my bed, she on my chair.
“Cheers,” I said. We sipped.
“I’m not staying, you know.”
I nodded and waited.
“Danny, I’m sorry. So sorry.”
“For which bit exactly?”
“My vanishing act. Again.”
“Houdini’s got nothing on you. You could have told me.”
“It wasn’t planned. Not by me. Menachem arranged it. He sent two men.”
I remembered a voice from a radio transmitter in a big house in Berlin.
“How is Mr Begin? Bombed any good hotels lately?”
“Danny! That’s not fair!”
“Neither’s this, Eve! I loved you, you stupid woman. I would have died for you.
And what did you do?”
Her face twisted and tears started. A woman’s trick.
“Don’t you see? I loved you too, Danny.”
“I note we’re using past tense.”
“It was the wrong time.”
“And the wrong place. They should write a song about us. Why did you run away from me?”
“You fool! I didn’t want you hurt. I had to do this.”
“Didn’t want to hurt! Not a letter. Not a word. You could have been dead!”
“You would have known!” She drew herself up. “A long time ago I told you that there was a boy in my life. Before all this. He was big and blond, the perfect German. But he was a Jew. He was going to follow me, here. He never made it. He vanished in the round-ups of 1942. I pleaded with Mulder to find him, to let him go. But I knew he was gone. I knew.”
