The English Assassin, Page 2

  After a number of false starts she brought the outboard to life and the screw began to turn. The boat moved into deeper water, going back the way it had come. It still made jerky progress, so that at times the girl in the yellow sou’wester, gasmask and oilskins was lifted completely from her seat. At last she disappeared round Tintagel Head, bouncing out to sea.

  As if commissioned to wash away from the bay all traces of these events, the sky let loose its rain.

  MAJOR NYE

  “Another age will see all this in quite a different perspective.”

  It was not certain what he meant as he stared about him at the little white laboratory, at the Formica-topped benches, the racks of test tubes, the specimen jars and the aquarium which occupied one whole wall.

  “So you say, general.” The young Japanese marine biologist sounded sceptical as he held a bottle of sea water up to the light from the plate-glass window which offered a view of the Atlantic.

  “M…” Major Nye put his hands in the pockets of his threadbare blazer and drew out a crushed wooden matchbox. He held it with the tips of his fingers, in both hands, as if afraid to damage it further. Part of the tray was still inside the box, but all the matches were gone. The label was predominantly blue, white and brown and the picture showed three dark-skinned men in blue loincloths and red caps trying to launch a sampan into the sea. Along the right edge the label was torn a little but most of the trademark was visible: a diamond with the word WIMCO printed inside it. In the top left quarter of the box was the slogan: SEA-FISHER. At the bottom centre: “SAFETY MATCHES Made in India”. On the reverse side of the box it said: These matches are made in India by the celebrated WIMCO works at Bombay. They are specially imported by THE CORNISH MATCH COMPANY Av. contents 45.

  Major Nye was a stringy man in his late sixties with a scrubby grey moustache and pale, introspective blue eyes. He was just above average height. The veins in his hands and wrists were prominent and purple and matched the ink-stains on his fingertips. The badge of his old regiment was stitched onto the breast pocket of his blazer and the badge was as faded and frayed as the blazer itself. He put the matchbox carefully back in his pocket. He cleared his throat and went to his seat behind the green steel desk which had been erected for him at the far end of the lab. There was nothing on the desk. He opened a drawer and took out a Rizla tin. He began to roll himself a thin cigarette.

  “I only agreed to do all this because my daughter was keen on it.” He seemed to be trying to explain his embarrassment and apologise for it. Not so long ago he had loved India and sworn loyalty to the Empire. Now he had only his children to love and only his wife demanded his loyalty. This was something of a comedown after a sub-continent.

  He lit his cigarette with a Swan Vesta, cupping his hand against a non-existent wind. He puffed hard and began to hum a tune—always his unconscious response to small pleasures like smoking. Through the window of the little square marine biology lab Major Nye could see the rocks and the grey, roaring sea. He was puzzled by this coast. Cornwall was alien to him; it depressed him. He could not understand the Celtic point of view. These people seemed to enjoy burrowing into the ground for no particular reason. Why else had they built their fougous? He had noticed, too, how they had turned quite naturally from wrecking to tourism without, apparently, any change of spirit. His right hand went to his thinning grey hair and smoothed it, descended to the grey eyebrows and smoothed them, came finally to the grey moustache and smoothed that. With both hands he tightened the small knot of his regimental tie and tugged at the frayed collar of his shirt, which was white with thin blue and red stripes which had almost faded to invisibility. There was a khaki handkerchief protruding from his left sleeve. The cigarette was now unnoticed and unappreciated in the corner of his grey mouth.

  A surly-looking laboratory technician, with long, black hair falling over the shoulders of his white coat, came in, hovered over a bench, picked up a rack of test tubes, nodded moodily at the Japanese and the Englishman. Then he left.

  Major Nye got up and went to look at the bound and spreadeagled assassin who lay on the slab just under the window sill. The wrists and ankles were in steel clamps.

  “How are you feeling, old son?”

  He had spoken awkwardly and gruffly. He cleared his throat again as if he wished he had been able to use a more natural tone.

  Jerry Cornelius snarled. A high-pitched screech broke from his writhing lips. He began, pathetically, to struggle on the slab.

  “Eeeeeeeeee! Eeeeeeeeee!”

  Gently, Major Nye frowned. “Damned shame. Poor old chap.” He turned his pale eyes upon the Japanese biologist who had been attracted by the screech and now stood beside him. “How long was he down there?”

  The biologist shrugged and scratched behind his left ear with his right hand. “A year? The brain has been flushed. The flesh, however, is surprisingly fresh. Like a baby’s, general.”

  Major Nye plucked at his heavily veined nose and rubbed the underedge of it with his right forefinger. “Poor old chap. Young, too, eh?”

  “Who can say? It is a strange physiology. Hard to guess the age without the proper instruments. We should have been warned. Then maybe we could have had some equipment sent down from London. As it was, he was just dumped on us. Like a baby on a doorstep.”

  Major Nye’s ulcer bit suddenly and he straightened his shoulders and firmed his jaw to take the pain. “Sorry about that,” he said. He removed the cigarette from his lips and dropped it to the floor. “There wasn’t very much time, as I understand it. It was ‘goodbye Dolly I must leave you’ and then ‘tramp, tramp, tramp the boys are marching’.”

  “I realise that. I was not complaining about your organisation, general. I was merely explaining our inability to do more than superficial tests.”

  “Naturally. You’ve done jolly well, anyway. Splendid show.” The major looked at his watch. It seemed to be losing again. “First class,” he muttered absently. “Not my organisation though, you know. Nothing to do with me. Friend of my daughter’s… Well, we’d better get off before dark. It’s a goodish run from here up to Sussex.”

  “You’re taking the truck?”

  “The old lorry. Yes, I thought so, unless—?”

  “No. No. By all means take it.”

  “Splendid. Good, well, shall we um?”

  * * *

  Jerry Cornelius was all but insensate. His eyes glowed, his lips curled back from his stained teeth, his fingers curved like claws and he still stank of brine and tar. Even after they had cleaned him up (using for the most part methylated spirits and linseed oil) he had continued to glare at them silently, like a mad gull.

  * * *

  Major Nye and the Japanese biologist wheeled the slab from the lab and out onto the concrete which had replaced the turf. Parked close to the cliff was a run-down 1947 Bedford two-ton military lorry with a khaki canvas canopy. Major Nye untied the canopy flaps, got into the back and let down the tailboard. He pushed two planks from the lorry to the ground so that they made a ramp up which they could roll the slab with Cornelius on it. They wheeled the slab to the far end of the lorry, nearest the cab, and secured it there using chains. Major Nye turned the key in the padlock and put it in his pocket. He straightened up and crossed back towards the tailboard. As he did so his foot struck a rusty spanner on the floor of the lorry. The spanner skidded and clanged against a greasy jack pedestal. Major Nye winced. He jumped down, slid the planks into the lorry, bolted the flap up and fastened the canvas. He shook hands with the Japanese, walked round to the cab, opened the door and climbed onto the tattered bench seat. He rolled himself another smoke in his Rizla machine before giving his attention to the controls. He had some difficulty starting the engine and getting into gear but at last with a wave he drove off down the bumpy mud track towards the tarmac road which led to the A30 and thence to the M5.

  The sky changed from cold white to cold, dark grey and a cold rain was falling by the time Major Nye left the l
ane and headed north between flat, grey fields.

  He shivered. Keeping his left hand on the steering wheel, he buttoned up his threadbare blazer.

  The lorry rattled and whined. It snarled with every gear shift. The noise did much to drown the occasional screech from the back. The fumes from the engine helped cover the smell of brine.

  It was nearly dark when they reached the A30. Major Nye rolled himself another cigarette as he waited to get onto the road. The rain was bearing down on the black tarmac. The Bedford’s single windscreen wiper clacked erratically. Moving out, Major Nye began to sing to keep himself awake. He sang ‘Hold Your Hand Out (Naughty Boy)’, ‘My Old Dutch’, ‘I Love a Lassie’, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘The Army of Today’s All Right’, ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’, ‘If It Wasn’t For the Houses in Between’, ‘Are We to Part Like This, Bill?’, ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, ‘You’re the Cream in My Coffee’, ‘Dolly Gray’, ‘On the Road to Mandalay’, ‘Rio Rita’, ‘Maxim’s’, ‘Only a Rose’, ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, ‘Jolly Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Sailor’, ‘Am I Blue?’, ‘Change Partners’, ‘Fanlight Fannie’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘White Christmas’, ‘The Riff Song’, ‘My Little Wooden Hut’, ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, ‘The Cornish Floral Dance’, ‘Mairi’s Wedding’, ‘Phil the Fluter’s Ball’, ‘My Old Man’, ‘Mammy’, ‘The Eton Boating Song’, ‘Yesterday’ (half), ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (part), ‘What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?’, ‘The Dying Aviator’, ‘When This Bloody War is Over’, ‘Sonny Boy’, ‘Sally’, ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner’, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, ‘Molly Malone’, ‘Land of My Fathers’, ‘Underneath the Arches’, ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, ‘Rose O’Day’, ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’, ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer’, ‘That Lovely Weekend’, ‘Lucky Jim’, ‘September Song’, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ (part), ‘The Physician’, until at last he reached Ironmaster House in Sussex croaking the last few bars of ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’ and stopped the lorry by the brook.

  UNA PERSSON

  “The peak was reached in 1808 and civilisation has been in decline ever since, thanks, in particular, to the Saxon race—many of whom happened to share my view. Here’s to Beethoven!”

  Prinz Lobkowitz saluted with his stein, lowered it to his lips, tilted his leonine head and swallowed a litre of Bil beer. His voice had been drowned almost entirely by the first movement of the ‘Pastoral’ played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Eugene Jochum which came from the two great Vox speakers on either side of the bay window. Wiping the foam from his moustache he went to the ornate Victorian mantelpiece on which stood the newish Garrard deck with its Sony amplifier and turned a knob to reduce the volume slightly, adding: “Open the window. It stinks of disinfectant in here.” The first movement ended and the second began.

  From a gilded chair upholstered in stained red-and-white Regency stripe, his mistress Eva Knecht efficiently rose and with long strides crossed the wide eighteenth-century room which was full of half-emptied packing cases, a grand piano with roses painted on its light walnut wood, scattered dust-sheets and piles of objets trouvés. Reaching the diamond-paned windows she raised her hands to the catch but paused as the huge bulk of a Zeppelin filled her entire field of vision; it was flying low over the ruins to the south-east of the city. It coursed towards the sunset. She smiled quietly and pushed open the double windows. The distant mumble of the Zeppelin’s engines reached her. She took a deep breath as if to inhale the sound rather than the stink which blew from the Koenigstrasse gravepit. She looked back enquiringly at the Prinz who waved his hand. “I suppose so. Though I don’t know which I prefer—that or the DDT. It’s about time something was done for Berlin.”

  There came a faint vibration and a faraway thump as the Zeppelin began to distribute its first incendiaries of the evening. Prinz Lobkowitz lit a Jamaican corona and burnt his thumbnail with the match when the beginning of the third movement (‘Merry Gathering of Peasants’) struck up. “Fuck,” he said, and then: “What’s German for fuck?”

  “I haven’t got that far yet.” She started towards the shelf of dictionaries in the far alcove.

  “Don’t bother. Nobody else does. What’s the point of trying to revive a dead language? Who wants a ‘national identity’ any longer? Politics has come down to rather more fundamental issues.”

  “Who wants to talk about it?” Eva smoothed her skirt. “That newspaper soon went back to English.”

  “The bloody language is always at the root of it.” He coughed and put his cigar in the Directoire chafing dish he used as an ashtray. “Do you still want to go to the waxworks tonight?”

  “Suits me.”

  “I bet it does!”

  He roared with laughter, frowned, and turned off the stereo.

  The house, most of which was still intact, had been restored in 1850 and was huge with lavish appointments. It had all the tatty grandeur of a Versailles, with the same fading gilt, fly-specked mirrors and chipped, painted terracotta.

  A gentle knock on the great oaken double door.

  “Come,” said Lobkowitz.

  The doors opened and a small black-and-white cat walked in, its tail erect. It stopped in the middle of the dusty Persian carpet. It sat down and looked up at them.

  It was followed by a beautiful girl in a black military topcoat and patent leather boots with gold buckles (from Elliotts). Her brown hair was cut relatively short and her face was heart-shaped, amused, controlled. She held a heavy Smith and Wesson .45 revolver in her right hand and her left hand was still resting on the doorknob as she paused and surveyed the room.

  Eva Knecht scowled. “Sebastian Auchinek’s sidekick,” she muttered. “Una Persson. What an actress!”

  Eva, only slightly beautiful, with the same kind of brown hair, felt herself fade. She wished that she were wearing something other than the fawn Jaeger twinset and green spikeheels as she hissed: “Proper little heroine of the revolution, isn’t she?”

  Prinz Lobkowitz ignored his mistress. He flattened one palm against his waistcoated diaphragm and made his dignified way towards the door, the other palm extended. He was wearing a black frock-coat and pinstripe trousers. In the lapel of his coat was the tiny button of the Legion de Liberté. Under the trousers were the outlines of his brown riding boots. He had forgotten to take off the silver spur attached to his right heel. He smirked (though he thought the expression one of friendly dignity) and as a consequence ruined the handsome lines of his face. He rumbled some pleasantry, of which his smirk made ingratiating nonsense, and introduced himself to the newcomer. “Prinz Lobkowitz.”

  “Una Persson,” she replied contemptuously. “Auchinek said you would take delivery.”

  “I thought it was tomorrow.” Lobkowitz looked vaguely about him. “Tomorrow.” Slowly the smirk dissolved.

  “I saved time by coming through Czechoslovakia.” Una Persson put the gun into her deep pocket. She turned and snapped her fingers. Four unhealthy Slavs stumbled in. There was a pine coffin on their shoulders. The coffin was stamped VAKUUM REINIGER (ENGLISCH-PRODUKT). The Slavs put it down on the Persian carpet. They trotted off.

  Una Persson reached inside her maxi-coat and withdrew a document and a blue ballpoint. “Sign both copies, please,” she said. Lobkowitz put the papers on the lid of the walnut grand piano and signed without reading. He handed them back to her. “And how is Auchinek?”

  “Very well. Shall I open the box for you?”

  “If you would.”

  She slipped out her Smith and Wesson and accurately shot off the bolts on the coffin’s four corners. One of the spent bullets narrowly missed Eva Knecht. With the barrel of the gun Una Persson plucked away a blanket, revealing the glaring countenance of Jerry Cornelius, still stinking of the sea.

  Lobkowitz backed off and went to put the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in A on the deck. />
  “Mein Gott!” said Eva self-consciously. “What caused that?”

  Una Persson shrugged. “Some form of hydrophilia, I gather. A disease with symptoms similar to enteritis in cats.”

  “I mourn the Age of Steam,” said Lobkowitz returning with a box of Rising Sun matches. They were made by the Western India Match Co. Ltd.

  “A peculiar diagnosis.” Eva Knecht bent to look more closely at the creature. “Where was it found?”

  “On the coast of North Cornwall, eventually, but he’d been seen once or twice earlier. They think he went in somewhere around the Bay of Bengal. I was to take delivery of five cases of M16s?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Lobkowitz indicated the crates laid out under the grand piano. “With ammunition. Shall I get someone to load them for you, or…?”

  “Thank you very much.”

  Lobkowitz pulled a frayed velvet bell rope near the mantelpiece. “This is the old Bismarck mansion,” he told her.

  “I gathered.” With a battered brass Dunhill Una Persson lit a long brown Sherman cigarettello. “I should like to wash my hair before I leave.”

  As best she could, Eva Knecht flounced from the room. “I’ll check if the water’s on.”

  Four ex-POWs with shaven heads and wearing stained blue dungarees came in and began to take the crates of M16s outside to Una Persson’s SD Kfz 233 armoured truck. The ornate ormolu ‘Empire’ style telephone commenced to ring. Lobkowitz ignored it. “They all do that. It means nothing.”