Even at that instant Fernie did not allow the pain to influence him. He kicked. The radio set slid across the deck slowly, and gently fell over the side. There was a flash as the cable from the batteries shorted and a thud as the radio swung against the hull. At a slower speed, perhaps the radio would still have been plugged on the end when we hauled the cable in.
He was a character, this Fernie. He fell away and sat on the floor rubbing the arm I had so nearly broken. He said, ‘You know I could just throw you overboard — and no one could ask any questions?’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but there is just the chance that I’ll wring your neck while you’re trying.’
The electric cable had wrapped around the port screw, Augusto said. I heaved Fernie below into the cabin and into a bunk — he was too old for this sort of caper, he was badly shook up. I told Augusto to head back to Albufeira, using only the starboard motor. It would be a slow journey and the wind was backing against the dawn sun. This floating Cadillac was no sort of boat to face bad weather in. I retrieved my pistol, put it away and went across to Tomas.
‘I’ve got a Portuguese passport,’ Tomas said.
‘When you are in Tarrafal[32] you might wish you had some other sort of passport.’
‘I’ve served my time in prison; I don’t have to put up with the British Gestapo around my neck for the rest of my life.’
‘That doesn’t have to be too long,’ I said. ‘If you peddle narcotics across the world you must expect to attract a little attention. It’s captious to complain afterwards.’
‘Save your lies for when you write your report,’ said Tomas. ‘You aren’t interested in narcotics.’
‘No? What am I interested in, then?’
‘You’re interested in the “Weiss List”, the item I nearly tugged out of the ocean a few minutes ago.’
‘That’s exactly right,’ I told him, ‘I am.’
‘It’s lost,’ he said, ‘lost for all time. You can never get it.’
‘But you know what it consisted of?’ Tomas’s face went grey — he was frightened and he didn’t take fright easily.
‘Let me help you remember,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you one name that was on it.’ I named Smith. Tomas said nothing. ‘The man that you and your friend Ivor Butcher decided to blackmail,’ I prompted.
‘You know about Butcher,’ said Tomas. ‘Leave him out of it. He’s just a nice little fellow trying to help me. He’s not to blame.’
‘He’s not, eh?’ I said, but I didn’t disillusion him.
I sat down. I was as limp as a Dali watch.
Fernie tugged at his moustache, paused and then said, ‘I was the only survivor from the U-boat. I thought at first …’
‘Look, Fernie,’ I said, ‘I seldom interrupt people when they’re talking; especially when they are inventing complicated lies, because they are often far more interesting than the truth. However, for you I’ll make an exception; start telling the truth or I’ll sling you over the side.’
‘Very well,’ said Fernie affably, ‘where shall I start?’
‘You can forget all that fairy-story stuff about dead sailors washed up with sovereign dies and digging graves to prove it. Also forget any nonsense about your career in the U-boat. Unless you know what caused it to sink.’
‘No,’ said Fernie, ‘I don’t know that.’
‘Did your friend da Cunha deliberately open the valves before he rowed ashore with the “Weiss List”?’
‘No,’ said Fernie quietly, ‘he would never do anything like that. He is a man of great honour.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘you all are; you, Kondit and da Cunha. An honourable bunch of thugs. Look, Peterson’ — it was the first time I had used his English name — ‘you’re just trying to kick a step out of a moving staircase. Behind me is another agent, behind him another. I’m a soft touch compared with some of the yahoos that are going to descend on you in any part of the world you go. All they want back in Whitehall is a nice clean file with the word “Closed” written across the front so that they can put it in the cellar. Try to be a bit sensible and I’ll write a little note about what a help you have been. You never know when a little billet doux like that could be useful.’
‘What do you want to know?’ he said.
‘I don’t know what it is that’s missing until I hear it; if there are any bits you don’t want to tell me, miss them out.’
‘Very cunning,’ said Tomas, ‘the gaps tell you more than the story in between.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’m the Attorney-General travelling incognito with a Japanese tape-recorder under my toupee. Or it could just be that you are a little on the paranoiac side.’
Fernie sipped at the big glass of whisky I had given him.
He said, ‘Do you remember the Spanish Civil War? Do you remember the newsreels? Dead horses, wounded babies.’ He removed a fleck of tobacco from his lip. ‘Frightened, I was so frightened. People like you don’t understand. Do you?’ he said. He wanted a reply.
I said, ‘As long as you don’t say it’s my lack of imagination.’
He went on staring into space and smoking. ‘That was this same Spanish Civil War that H.K. said you were a hero of?’ I said.
Fernie Tomas nodded. For a moment I thought he was going to smile.
‘Yes, I was there. There are times you’re so frightened of something that you have to make it happen sooner. I was just someone who wanted to come to grips with my trauma. Everyone I knew who had volunteered had gone to fight for the government; so I went to fight for Franco just to be different. They posted me to an Italian unit. I was with General Queipo de Llano’s second division at the fall of Malaga. Kondit thought I was
‘You didn’t like it?’ I said.
‘Yes. I used to lie on the beach watching the cruisers
‘Who hasn’t nowadays?’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Tomas. ‘I remember …’, but he didn’t go on. It was as though he were dragging it out of a crystal ball. ‘I remember,’ he said again, ‘the last time I saw my old lady. I got compassionate leave because our house was bombed. The old man died of his injuries and my mother was living in the kitchen with a tarpaulin rigged across the ceiling. She didn’t want to go to a rest centre because of “all the happy times she’d had there”.’
‘Happy times.’ He shook his head as he remembered. ‘It was a slum, and she’d worked herself half to death there. She kept saying that they’d taken the old man to a hospital in “a proper ambulance, not one of these A.R.P. things”, she said, “it was a proper ambulance”. Well, that’s what Malaga was like; dead, swollen horses and a smell of brick-dust and drains.’
I could see that in some curious way the destruction in Malaga and London had fused into one, and he wouldn’t be able to sort them out. I remembered how, when he was arrested, he had said that it was all the same war. I wondered about that.
‘When I came back I joined the British Fascist Movement. I met Mosley in person. He’s a much misunderstood man, that Mosley, dynamic and honest. All the really Machiavellian supporters of the B.U.F. had seen the war coming for years and they buried themselves deep in the Conservative Party. Half the boys that give you your orders from Whitehall and gave us all those rousing anti-Nazi speeches were kicking themselves rotten that they didn’t have a nice big armament factory in Germany. But we were simple-minded idealists. Later, the war, and more especially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, had changed our minds. I stopped trying to understand it. I went into the Navy as a telegraphist and then got a commission …’
‘Was that difficult for you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Tomas, ‘anyone who bought a pipe, a pair of pyjamas and walked around with Penguin books about Paul Nash was singled out as officer material.’
‘No, I meant difficult on account of your having been so political.’
‘If they’d kept out the politicals in 1940 there wouldn’t have been enough recruits to man a dinghy. The only English people who knew the slightest thing about fighting a modern war were the people who had been in
