Rogue Male

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Текст книги "Rogue Male "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

In the late afternoon I gave Muller a couple of lemonades to brace his courage, and asked him what he wanted to do. Would he rather return to London and report himself, or vanish off the face of the earth? He was very nervous at the thought of not going back to tell what he knew of Quive-Smith’s death.

‘You’ll have to explain why you told so many lies at the farm,’ I reminded him. ‘The family can bear witness to the fact that you were alone. Nothing prevented you from telephoning to London.’

He promptly begged me to take him with me wherever I was going. The man was quite incapable of standing by himself. As soon as he was detached from one support, he began waving frantic tentacles in the hope of gripping another.

I replied that I couldn’t take him; he would have to disappear by his own individual route.

‘They would follow me,’ he cried. ‘I would never have any peace, sir.’

‘They won’t follow you if they think you are dead,’ I said.

I explained to him the plan: that he and the rubber boat were to be thrown overboard when we were a couple of miles from shore, and that I would give him £500 with which to start a new life. He brightened up a bit at the thought of money, but then was appalled by the difficulties facing him when he reached the shore.

Well, there was one thing Muller could be trusted to do: to follow orders. So I gave them.

‘Your clothes will be in the boat,’ I said. ‘When you land, put them on. Rip the boat to bits, and hide them under a rock. Walk to Cascaes and take the electric train to Lisbon. Don’t go to a hotel. Spend the night where you do not have to register. If you drink a coffee at any of the bars in the centre of the town, I expect some way of passing a discreet and pleasant night will occur to you. In the morning go to the docks to meet an imaginary friend who is arriving by ship. Pass back again through the customs as if you came off the boat and get your passport stamped. Then buy yourself a visa and a ticket for any country you want to visit, and leave at once by another ship.’

‘But suppose they look for me in Lisbon,’ he said. ‘They will see that I entered and left.’

I explained to him that I should make it clear he was dead; once they were sure he had never landed in Tangier, they wouldn’t look for him in Lisbon or anywhere else.

He seemed to think that he was a person of importance, and that they would ransack the world to find him. I repeated that so long as they thought Quive-Smith alive, they would not spend an hour or a fiver hunting for a useless agent whom they believed to be dead.

‘I know too much,’ he protested.

‘You don’t know a damn thing,’ I answered. ‘I doubt if you even know what country you were working for.’

‘I do, sir,’ he said, and mentioned it.

By God, it was the wrong one! I suppose it’s a commonplace that the underlings of a secret service should not even know the nationality of their employers, but it seemed to me remarkably clever.

I told him he was wrong, and proved it by the major’s papers. After that I had no more trouble except his natural funk of the sea.

We were a little ahead of schedule, and the Cintra hills were in sight at sunset. That suited me well enough; we could get the job over while the passengers were at dinner. So that no one should be sent in search of us, I told the chief steward that I wasn’t feeling well, and that my secretary would be looking after me.

Muller undressed in the cabin, and I tied the money round his neck in a fold of oilskin. As soon as the alleyways were clear we took the suit-case on deck, and unpacked and inflated the boat in the shelter of the deck-house. We could see lights on shore, so he knew in which direction to row. I made Muller repeat his orders. He had them pat, and he put them crudely. Then I lashed his clothes and the paddles to the bottom of the boat, and looped the other end of the long line around his waist.

The wash of a ship isn’t inviting. The poor devil sat on the rail shivering with cold and panic. I didn’t give him time to think, but hurled the boat over and snapped at him that he would drown if he let the line tauten. I saw the boat, a dark patch bobbing on the white wash, and I saw him come to the surface. A second later, the only sign that he had ever existed was a dressing-gown lying on the deck. Good luck to him! With the right job and a positive boss, his qualities of Second Murderer should ensure for him a secure and happy life.

I returned to my state-room with the suit-case and dressing-gown, and went to bed—his bed till midnight and my own till morning. When the cabin steward called us, he naturally assumed that my secretary was already up and about.

The day was abominably long. There was some doubt whether we should arrive at Tangier in time for passengers to land that night; if we didn’t, I had no hope of keeping Muller’s disappearance secret. I missed breakfast and passed the morning in concealment, acting on the general principle that nobody would think of us if neither were seen, but that, if one were seen, there might be enquiries about the other. At lunch-time I entered the saloon to tip my table steward, but refused to eat. I told him that both I and my secretary had been badly upset by our food, and that I had prescribed for us a short period of starvation. There was nothing like starvation, I boomed pompously, for putting the stomach right; that had always been our experience in India.

While the cabin steward was off duty between two and four, I packed the bags and took them on deck. Cape Spartel was in sight. The purser confirmed that we should certainly be able to leave the ship before the customs closed. I collected the two landing-cards. Then again I went into hiding until we dropped anchor.

As soon as the tender arrived and the baggage had been carried off the ship, I visited and tipped the cabin steward in a great hurry. He was not exactly suspicious, but he felt it his duty to ask a question.

‘Is Mr Muller all right, sir?’

‘Good heavens, yes!’ I answered. ‘He packed up for me and took everything on deck. He’s on the tender now with the baggage.’

‘I hadn’t seen him all day, sir,’ he explained, ‘so I thought I had better ask.’

‘I haven’t seen much of him myself,’ I replied testily. ‘I understand he found an old friend in the engineers’ department.’

He let it go at that. Muller was my servant. I was eminently respectable. If I saw nothing wrong, nothing could be wrong.

The worst danger was on me now. Lest the tally should be wrong, I had to surrender two landing-cards while appearing to surrender only one. I am no conjurer; the simplest card trick defeats me if it demands sleight of hand. This confounded business worried me far more than the job of throwing Muller overboard. I loitered near the head of the gangway, hoping there would be a rush of passengers descending to the tender. There never was. Most had already left the ship. The rest came one by one.

I dashed into the smoking-room and stuck the two landing-cards lightly together with the gum from a penny stamp; they were of thin cardboard, and I hoped that the Assistant Purser who was collecting them wouldn’t notice that I had shoved two into his hand. If he did notice, I proposed to say that Muller was already on the tender and that he must have gone down the gangway without surrendering his card. If someone then had a look at the tender and found he wasn’t there, I could only show amazement and pray that I didn’t find myself in the dock on a capital charge.

I went through the entire murder trial while I stuck these two cards together: the black and incontrovertible evidence that I had concealed Muller’s absence, the discovery of my identity, and so on. My fantasy had developed as far as shooting my way out of the magistrate’s court when I walked down the gangway and the Assistant Purser received my two cards without a glance. Ten minutes later I was on the Tangier mole, surrounded by a yelling mob of coffee-coloured porters draped in burnouses of sacking.

Passing through customs, I had my entry carefully noted. I took pains to see that the French immigration official wrote down the company director’s name correctly spelled. From then on there could be no shadow of doubt that Major Quive-Smith had duly entered Tangier, and alone.

As for Muller, his late employers’ discreet enquiries at the offices of the line would be duly passed on to the ship. The stewards would remember that Muller had not been seen for twenty-four hours. The Assistant Purser would remember that when he checked the landing-cards he found two suspiciously stuck together. The engineers’ department—if the steward remembered my remark—would say they had never heard of Muller. And it would be reported back to Liverpool that there was indeed grave reason to fear that something had happened to Mr Muller. Whoever had put the enquiry on foot, having found out what he wanted to know, would then laugh at the serious faces of the directors, and explain that Mr Muller was perfectly safe and sound, and that—well, any yarn would do! Mr Muller, for example, had feared to be cited as co-respondent and had taken steps to conceal his movements.

I drove to a hotel, deposited my baggage, and booked a room for a week, telling the proprietor that I had a little friend in Tangier, and that, if I didn’t turn up for two or three nights, he was not to be surprised. I had an enormous meal at his excellent restaurant. Then I put a razor, a bottle of hair-dye and another of stain into my pocket, and walked off into the deserted hills. Besides money, the only thing I carried out of my past life was this confession, for I began to see in what manner it might be useful.

I do not think that in all my life I have known such relief and certainty as in a valley between those sun-dried hills, where the water trickled down the irrigation channels from one hand-dug, well-loved terrace to another, and no light showed but the blazing stars. My escape was over; my purpose decided, my conscience limpid. I was at war—and no one is so aware of the tranquillity of nature as a soldier resting between one action and the next.

I buried that company director’s passport and my own, with which I have probably finished for ever. I shaved off my moustache, stained my face and body, and dyed my hair. Then I slept till dawn, my face in the short grass by the water’s edge, my body drawing strength from that warm and ancient earth.

In the morning I strolled to the upper town, where I had not been the night before, and completed my change of identity. I bought a thoroughly Latin suit, spats, and some beastly pointed shoes, posting my other clothes in a parcel addressed to the Public Assistance Committee, Rangoon. I trust there is such a committee. I went to a barber, who duly doused me with eau-de-cologne and brushed my luscious black hair straight back from my forehead. When this was over, my resemblance to the photograph on Quive-Smith’s Latin passport was a lot closer than my resemblance to the company director.

The regular packet was leaving that day for Marseilles. I got a French visa on my passport (my fatherland is as awkward as all other American countries—I can travel nowhere without a visa) and bought a ticket in my new name. Since I had no baggage, it was easy to bluff my way on to the ship without passing the control. Thus there was no record for inquisitive eyes that this courteous and scented gentleman had either entered or left Tangier, and no means of connecting him with Quive-Smith. I think they will be looking for their vanished agent between Atlas and the Niger.

EXTRACT FROM THE LETTER WHICH

ACCOMPANIED THIS MANUSCRIPT

My Dear Saul,

I write this from a pleasant inn where I am accustoming myself to a new avatar. I must not, of course, give you any clue to it; nor would the trail of the gentleman I describe as Latin—even assuming it could be followed—lead to where or what I am.

I want these papers published. If necessary, have them brushed up by some competent hack and marketed under his name. You won’t, of course, mention mine, nor the name of the country to which I went from Poland and to which I am about to return. Let the public take its choice!

My reason for publishing is twofold. First, I have committed two murders, and the facts must be placed on record in case the police ever got hold of the wrong man. Second, if I am caught, there can never again be any possible question of the complicity of H.M. Government. Every statement of mine can, at need, be checked, amplified, and documented. The three parts of the journal (two written accidentally and the last deliberately) form an absolute answer to any accusation from any quarter that I have involved my own nation.

Forgive me for never telling you of my engagement nor of the happy weeks we lived in Dorset. I first met her in Spain a couple of years ago. We hadn’t reached the point of an announcement in The Times, and we didn’t give a damn about it anyway.

The ethics of revenge? The same as the ethics of war, old boy! Unless you are a conscientious objector, you cannot condemn me. Unsporting? Not at all. It is one of the two or three most difficult shots in the world.

I begin to see where I went wrong the first time. It was a mistake to make use of my skill over the sort of country I understood. One should always hunt an animal in its natural habitat; and the natural habitat of man is—in these days—a town. Chimney-pots should be the cover, and the method, snapshots at two hundred yards. My plans are far advanced. I shall not get away alive, but I shall not miss; and that is really all that matters to me any longer.

modemport's original commercial release April 02 2011

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Cover image: Georg Baselitz, Canalettos Hund; © Georg Baselitz; photograph by Jochan Littkeman, Berlin; cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Household, Geoffrey, 1900–

Rogue Male / by Geoffrey Household; introduction by Victoria Nelson.

p. cm.—(New York Review books classics)

1. Hunters—Fiction. 2. England—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6015.O7885R68 2007