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I drank the sweet black coffee; it washed the dried blood out of my mouth. ‘Good china, I mean really good, is essential in a home, a really nice home, I always say,’ I told him.
The Brigadier picked up the phone. ‘Let’s have some hot soup and a bacon sandwich along here right away.’
‘On toasted brown,’ I said.
‘Sounds good,’ he said to me, then into the phone, ‘Make that two bacon sandwiches on brown and toasted.’
This boyo knew the system. He was going to stay kind and understanding whatever I did. I ate the sandwich and drank soup. He gave no sign of recognition, but as I finished drinking he offered me a cigar. When I declined, he produced a packet of Gauloises and insisted I keep the packet. It was very quiet here. In the gloom beyond his desk I could see a large grandfather clock; it ticked very softly, and as I watched it, it discreetly struck 10.30. Here and there antique furniture and heavy curtains announced a man important enough to have shipping space devoted to his gracious living, even here on Tokwe Atoll. The Brigadier went on writing. He was very quiet, and without looking at me said, ‘Every time some stinking detail comes up I find myself doing it.’ I thought he was referring to me, but he passed some photographs across his desk. One was a sepia-toned vignette such as any small town photo studio would take for a dollar. The other two were official identity photos, full face and side view. Each was a photograph of a corporal about twenty-two–twenty-four years old, fair-haired, open face. I’d guess a mid-west farmer’s son. There was a fourth photo, a poor blurred snapshot. This time with a young girl, pretty in a conventional way – they were standing alongside a new Buick. On the back it said, ‘Schultz Drug Store. 24-Hour Foto Service.’ I handed the pictures back.
‘So?’ I said, ‘a soldier.’
‘A very nice soldier,’ the Brigadier said. ‘He has been in the Army six months. You know something? The first time he saw the ocean he was passing through Frisco last month.’ The Brigadier got slowly to his feet. ‘If you’ve finished your coffee I’ll show you something.’ He waited as I finished.
‘It could easily be a long time before my next,’ I said.
‘It certainly could,’ he agreed, and smiled like the man who’s pleased with himself in the last photo of the Canadian Club ads. ‘We’ll go back to your room,’ he said.
The corridor was lit by blue strip-lights and I found Waiting Room No. 3 unlocked. I opened the door and suddenly it wasn’t 10.40 P.M. any more. It was morning.
The light was blinding: the big shutters had been drawn back letting in midday tropical sunshine. The chair and phone were still there, so were Confidential, Screen Romances, Gals and Gags and two Reader’s Digests. Against the wall was the olive-coloured metal Army stretcher that I had so recently vacated. The blue blanket on the stretcher was still specked with my blood. There would have been no detectable change in the room at all if a horribly scarred, naked corpse had not been occupying the blanket and stretcher.
The Brigadier walked across to the body. ‘This is Corporal Steve Harmon,’ he said. ‘I’m writing to his folks; he’s the boy you killed last night.’
24 (#ulink_35984708-c83a-5623-a1f9-0de804078ca0)
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Irksome regulations seem to impede your progress, but do not be impulsive. Chances to meet lots of new exciting friends.]
Of the next twenty-four hours I probably spent about fourteen with the Brigadier, although doctors and psychiatrists gave me the usual working over. That same evening we were back in his office. There was plenty of hot coffee and plenty of toasted bacon sandwiches. The Brigadier poured himself his sixth cup in half an hour and broke the long silence.
‘You’re marked down on my dossier, Colonel, with three stars – like Michelin it’s the highest rating we use. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good at your job, it means that you are a three-star potential danger to us. As far as I’m concerned though, it’s a rough guide to the fact that you are a skilled investigator. Now I don’t claim to be that. I’m just the feller they send to places like this to check the barbed wire for moth holes. You tell me you didn’t signal to that Russian submarine on Thursday night. I want to believe you. OK. Thread up my information and show me your movie, mister.’
I appreciated that the old man was being even nicer than his role demanded, especially considering that he was sure I had connected his nice new tower to his nice new electric line, and made a cinder out of one of his policemen.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m not convinced that the submarine didn’t fire its own flare,’ I said.
‘Don’t get really smart with me, sonny, it’s obvious that it did.’
‘OK. So why does there have to be an agent working here at all?’
‘Look at it this way, sonny, we monitored the signal for one thing …’
‘I keep asking you what sort of signal but you won’t tell me!’
‘The one you sent, sonny, the one you sent … because you’re …’ he searched for a word, ‘just dirty, just dirty.’ He flushed in embarrassment at his outburst and began cleaning his spectacles. ‘I’m too old for your sort of war, I suppose …’
A good agent follows up any debating advantage, especially when it’s a continuation of his life that’s the subject of discussion. I said, ‘I thought we were pretending that I’m innocent for the purposes of this short interrogation.’
He nodded and said, ‘The signal was high-speed electrical impulses. Just as Morse can be sent in such high-speed bursts that long messages can be transmitted in seconds, recorded, then read slowly later, so the scanning of a TV picture can be sent. Last night a camera-transmitter, small enough for one man to carry, was directed towards the mountain, and no matter how much the camera was joggled about, the speed of the impulses transmitted clear pictures.’
‘Just as a slow-motion movie would be less subject to camera shake,’ I said, just to sound intelligent.
‘Exactly,’ said the Brigadier, who had no doubt that I had used this equipment the night before and was just sending him up.
‘But last night was really dark. Could it have got pictures in that light?’
‘I shouldn’t really tell you but since we’ve started this comedy …’ He lit a cigar from the ivory box. He lit it with a match as a connoisseur does a good cigar, he rolled it in his mouth, then removing it he exhaled and studied the bright red ash ‘… our boys are not really sure: perhaps the high-speed impulse gives an unprecedented aperture enough to photograph in the dark. If not, perhaps the submarine put an infra-red searchlight on to the cloudbase for reflected light. It would be invisible to human eyes of course.’
‘Then …’
‘Then why the flare? Yes, it’s a contradiction, the flare, but with a zoom lens, one that would change its focal length, at an extreme length, the sort of thing they use at ball games, the light transmitted would be very little. But with the flare and the high-speed transmission, it would be possible to get very close-up pictures of the mountain. Probably the flare was triggered automatically by the reception apparatus as soon as the “picture”, so to speak, was too dark. The camera was held on to the mountain by an electro gyroscope controlled by a compass set to the correct bearing.’
‘They don’t leave anything to chance, do they?’ I said. He gave me a sour look. I went on, ‘It’s a wonder they couldn’t do without the flare, then no one would have known about any of it.’
‘Not at all, we monitored the whole thing as I keep telling you. I’ll demonstrate if you like. You won’t do anything silly, will you?’ the old man asked. ‘Because …’
‘I’m not under-rating you, sir,’ I said.
‘Swell,’ he smiled. ‘Nor I you,’ and carried on. ‘Obviously the party last night was because of what we were doing on the mountain. I don’t have to tell you that.’ I tried to look like a man who knew, but in reality kicked myself for being fooled so easily. A party: I should have suspected that it wasn’t that social here. I wondered if Dalby knew that secret experiments were planned for that night of the garden-party. The Brigadier had been there perhaps to make sure we were. It all made sense now. I guessed that it was the neutron bomb that they were about to explode.* (#litres_trial_promo) The information we had been given about it being a Uranium 238 bomb with a SUVOM trigger had been true but on the night of the party a team of people had been ‘crash programmed’ into the explosion area to modify the bomb. Without a break in the conversation I said, ‘You mean the insertion of the neutron device?’
He nodded.
‘What did you do, a ’copter shuttle from the flat top?’
‘Something like that,’ the Brigadier said, with a smile like a scythe.
He wheeled a metal trolley to the centre of his office. He began to talk as he threaded up the 16mm projector that stood on it.
‘We have infra-red cameras on towers monitoring the road and the shipping channel. Some towers are manned, most are remotely-controlled. Each camera transmits on the same frequency and the receiving apparatus shows …’ He threaded the last loop of the big crackle-finish grey machine, and closed the metal gate. The desk lamp went out and a grey scratched rectangle of light fell across the wall as a screen rose into position with a soft purring sound. 15. 14. 13. The large leader numbers gave place to the hastily processed film.
The Brigadier continued ‘… shows the pattern as a distorted map of the side of the island.’ The screen was dark except for a white worm-shape that came into the frame from the bottom centre, moving upwards. ‘That’s your car,’ the Brigadier said. I guessed that it was a composite of Dalby’s car and my car but said nothing. As the short white worm-shape got to the top of the screen there was a horizontal flip across the screen.
The Brigadier said, ‘That was when the manned tower was connected to the electric cables. That camera went out of action then, of course, but luckily we have overlap on the camera fields. Now you see.’ The white worm had shrunk to a dot as my car halted, and suddenly the screen became a confusion of very intense horizontal bands of varying widths and intensity. ‘That’s the high-speed TV transmission; so fast that we are getting hundreds of TV pictures per frame.’ The bands became darker now. ‘Somewhere here the flare went off.’
Apart from the small white dot made by my Lincoln the screen was quite black.
‘Egg beaters.’ The two helicopters came in from the side of the frame; they were quivering little blotches. I watched them return to my car and circle round it. So far the film had shown me nothing of which I was not already aware. But the film lab had been very thorough, they had spliced on the end of the film the incident of my arrest: Two cars coming down the road from the top of the screen, one up into the frame from the bottom. Now I had learnt something. This equipment showed a distinct difference between one car and two. I knew that Dalby had made that journey a few yards ahead of me along the highway. It meant that Dalby had found a way of making his car entirely invisible to the radar defences of the island.
It was easy to understand the small slip of paper I’d found in the cranberry box now. The VLF radio wavelength was a standard method of speaking to submerged submarines. The compass bearing was to set the electro gyroscope on the camera. My only luck in the whole deal was in not putting that slip in my pocket.
Furthermore the TV transmission was required because a neutron bomb is not one big flash like an H-bomb, it is designed to hang over a city, bombarding it with neutrons. Only pictures of its progress would be any use. A still picture would reveal little or nothing.
The next day they showed me the black metal twisted parts of the HSTV unit. The big heavyweight handles were less twisted than the thin metal casing. They showed me photos and stuff. It seemed they’d got a pretty fair set of finger-prints off the unit. They were mine, of course. I’d never touched the damn thing, but I didn’t doubt that everyone was being sincere.
25 (#ulink_564d2b68-100b-580b-875f-00b813592355)
[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) Handle the people around you with tact. New acquaintances could provide prospects of travel and excitement.]
The days following were clotted together in an inseparable mess. It stayed 4.22 all the time – one long fluorescent day punctuated by interrogations like TV commercials in a peak-hour play.
For an hour each day I was medically examined. I had IQ tests, interviews, and was told to write my autobiography. I matched triangles and circles and put wooden rods into racks. I was tested for reaction, speed, co-ordination and muscular efficiency. My blood was measured, and identified, its pressure checked and recorded. Birth marks, I never knew I had, were photographed and tape measured. Cold showers and hot lights blurred into a month, like blades of grass blur into a field. I ceased to remember that Jean or Dalby existed, and sometimes I doubted if I did.
Sometimes the guards would tell me the time, but mostly they’d say it had just turned 4.20. One day or perhaps night, it was the first guard change after cornflakes, anyway, a US Army Captain came into Waiting Room No. 3. I didn’t get up off the stretcher, I had begun to feel at home there. He was about forty-two and walked like a European, that is, like a man who wears braces to hold his trousers up. His hands were wrinkled and looked like no amount of soap would ever remove the farm soil that lay dark and rich in his pores. The lobe of one ear was missing, and it was easy to imagine the village midwife, tired and clumsy in the small hours of a Balkan morning.
‘Jo napot kivavok,’ he said.
I’d met this greeting in the Café Budapest a couple of times and had always found that ‘kezet csokolom’ (kiss your hand) had given good mileage with the younger waitresses.
With this boy it went over like a lead balloon.
‘Make on the feet, mack,’ he said, changing his approach.
He spoke with a heavy accent liberally sprinkled with idiom. The idiom was to convince you he was the all-American boy, and gave him respite during which to translate the next sentence.
‘No spik Inglese,’ I said, giving a characteristic shrug and presenting the palms of both hands upwards.
‘Op, or I kick you some!’
‘Just as long as you don’t damage my watch,’ I said.
He opened the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and unfolded a white paper about 10 in by 8 in.
‘This is your deportation order, signed by the Secretary of State.’ He said it like he was going to paste it into the back of his vest pocket edition of Thomas Paine. ‘You can think yourself stinking lucky that we are exchanging you for two fly boys that know senators, or you’d be for a slow tcheeeek.’ He made a revolting noise as he ran his finger across his windpipe.
‘I don’t dig you, Uncle Tom,’ I said. ‘Why is England exchanging me for two fliers?’
‘England ho ho ho!’ he said; it was a merriment symbol. ‘England! You’re not going to stinking England, you pig, you going back to stinking Hungary. They’ll like you there for fouling up the detail. Ho ho! They’ll tcheeeek ho ho!’
‘Ho ho to you,’ I said. ‘I’ll save you some black pudding.’ I didn’t take the idea of being sent to Hungary very seriously at first.
There was little I could do. Neither Dalby nor Jean had had a chance to speak to me. I could reckon on little or no help from any other source. Now there was this Hungarian stuff.
I worried about it for two hours then a medic came with a long trolley and an enamel tray containing ether, cotton wool and a hypodermic. He fluffed up the clean white pillow on the trolley and smoothed out the red medical department blanket. He took my pulse, pulled up my eyelids and listened to my chest with a stethoscope. ‘Would you lie on the table, please. Relax completely.’
‘What’s the time?’ I asked.
‘Two-twenty, roll up your sleeve.’ He rubbed a little ether on the skin and eased the sharp shiny needle into the unfeeling flesh with a professional flourish.
‘What time?’ my voice boomed out.
‘Two-twenty,’ he said, again.
‘What, what, what. Time, time, time.’ It wasn’t me talking; it was a curiously metallic echo, ‘Time, time, time.’ I looked up at the white-coated boy and he grew smaller and smaller and smaller. He was standing far away near the door now, but still he was gripping my arm. Was it possible? Time, time, time. Still gripping my arm, arms, I mean, both of them. Both those men, both my arms. So far away; such little men near that tiny door.
I rubbed my forehead because I was slowly going round and round on a turn-table and sinking down. But how did I get up again because I kept going around and down but I was always high enough to go sinking down and around again. I rubbed my forehead with my huge heavy hand. It was as big as a barrage balloon, my hand; you’d expect it to envelop my head, but my forehead was so wide. Wide. Wide as a barn. I was being wheeled along. Towards the door. They’ll never get huge me through that little door. Not me, never. Ha ha. Never, never, never. Thud, thud, thud, thud.
Into my subconscious the drumming of engines brought me almost to the threshold of awakening. But each time there came a body bending low over me. The sharp pointed pain in the arm brought the noisy throbbing nausea breaking over me in feverish waves of heat and intense cold. I was moved on stretchers and trolleys over rough ground and polished wooden corridors, handled like a dust particle and like a dustbin, dropped into trains, helped into planes; but never far away was a blurred moon bending over me, and that sharp pain that pulled the blanket of unconsciousness over my face.
I came up to the surface very, very slowly; from the dark deeps I floated freely towards the dimblue rippling surface of undrugged life.
I hurt, therefore I am.
I hugged close against the damp soil. By the light of a small window I was able to closely inspect the broken wristwatch upon which I was gently vomiting. It said 4.22. I shivered. From somewhere nearby I heard voices. No one was talking, merely groaning.
I gradually became sentient. I became aware of the heavy hot humid air. My eyes focused only with difficulty. I closed them. I slept. Sometimes the nights seemed as long as a week. Rough bowls of porridge-like stuff were put before me, and if uneaten, removed. It was always the same man who came with the food. He had short blond hair. His features were flat with high cheek-bones. He wore a light-grey two-piece track suit. One day I was sitting in the corner on the earth floor – there was no furniture – when I heard the bolts being drawn back. Kublai Khan entered, but without food. I’d never heard his voice before. His voice was hard and unattractive. He said ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’ I looked at him for a minute or so. He said it again, ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’
‘So what?’ I said.
He walked towards me and hit me with his open hand. It didn’t need much to hurt me at that stage of my education. K.K. left the room and the bolts were closed and I was hungry. It took me two days to discover that I had to repeat the things K.K. said after him. It was simple enough. By the time I made that discovery I was weak from hunger and licked my food bowl avidly. The gruel was delicious and I never missed the spoon. Sometimes K.K. said, ‘Fire is red; cloud is white,’ or perhaps, ‘Sand is yellow; silk is soft.’ Sometimes his accent was so thick that it would be hours later when I had repeated the words over and over that I’d finally understand what we’d both been talking about. One day I said to him, ‘Suppose I buy you a Linguaphone course; do I get out of here?’ For that I not only remained unfed by day, but that night he didn’t bother to bring the paper-thin dirty blanket either. I learnt what colour the sky was by the ninth day. By then K.K. merely pointed and I reeled off all the junk I could remember. But I’d done it wrong. Somehow ‘Sky is red; silk is blue.’ K.K. shouted and hit me softly against the face. I had no food or blanket and shivered with the intense cold of the night-time. From then on sometimes I got things right, sometimes wrong, according to the colour K.K. had decided everything was that day. Even with gruel every day I would have become weaker and weaker. I passed the ‘wisecrack stage’, the ‘asking questions’ stage, the ‘do you understand English?’ stage. I was weak and exhausted and on the day I got everything so correct that K.K. brought me a piece of cold cooked meat, I sobbed for an hour without feeling sad – with pleasure perhaps it was.
Every morning the door was opened and I handed out my slop pail; every night it came back again. I began to count the days. With my fingernails I incised a crude calendar in the soft wood of the door, behind it I was out of sight of the peep-hole. Some of the days were marked by means of a double stroke; those were the ones I heard the noises. They were generally loud enough to wake me, the noises, when they happened. They were human noises but difficult to describe as either groans or screams. They were somewhere between the two. Some days K.K. gave me a small slip of paper; typewritten on them there were orders such as ‘The prisoner will sleep with arms above the blankets.’ ‘The prisoner will not sleep in the daytime.’
One day K.K. gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. As I sat back to puff at it he said, ‘Why do you smoke?’ I said I didn’t know and he went away; but the next day Grass was Sepia, and I got beat about the head again.
After I had marked twenty-five days on my calendar K.K. brought me a slip that said, ‘The prisoner will receive a visitor for six minutes only.’ There was a lot of shouting in the corridor and K.K. let in a young Hungarian Army Captain. He spoke reasonably good English. We stood facing each other until he said, ‘You requested a meeting with the Great Britain Ambassador.’
‘I don’t remember it,’ I said slowly.
K.K. pushed me in the chest with force that thudded me against the wall of my cell and left me breathless.
The Captain continued, ‘I don’t question. I say this. You ask.’ He was charming, he never once stopped smiling. ‘A secretary is without. He sees you now. I go. Six minutes only.’
K.K. showed a man into my cell. He was so tall he beat his head against the door jamb. He was embarrassed and awkward. He explained reluctantly that the decision wasn’t his, that he was only the third under-secretary, and that sort of thing. He explained that there was no record of my being a British citizen, although he admitted that I sounded like an Englishman to him. He was so embarrassed and awkward that I almost believed that he was the British official he purported to be.
‘You wouldn’t think me impertinent, sir,’ I said, ‘if I asked you to give proof of identity.’
He looked madly embarrassed and said, ‘Not at all,’ a few times.
‘I don’t mean papers of identity, you understand, sir. Just something to show that you are in regular contact with the old country.’
He looked at me blankly.
‘Everyday things, sir, just so I can be sure.’
He was keen to be helpful; he came back with the everyday things and a load of reasons why the Embassy could do nothing. His greatest anxiety was in case I should implicate Dalby’s group, and he was always fishing for news of any statement I was going to make to the Hungarian Police.
Doing this while maintaining that I wasn’t a British subject was a strain even for old-school British diplomacy. ‘Don’t get sent to a Political Prison,’ he kept saying. ‘They treat prisoners very badly.’
‘This isn’t the YMCA,’ I told him on one occasion. I began to wish he’d stop coming. I almost preferred K.K. At least I knew where I was with him.
Every day seemed hotter and more humid than the previous one, while the nights became more chilly.
Although K.K. knew enough English for everyday needs, that is, to feed me or punch me on the nose, I found I could get a cup of sweet black coffee from one of the guards when I learnt enough Hungarian to ask. He was an old man looking like a bit player in a Ruritanian smaltz opera, sometimes he gave me a small piece of chewing tobacco.
Finally the tall British man came to see me for the last time. They went through the shouting and preliminaries, but this time it was only the Army Captain who spoke. He told me that, ‘Her Magestyries Government’ under no circumstances can regard me as a British subject. ‘Therefore,’ he said, ‘the trial will proceed under Hungarian law.’ The man from the Embassy said how sorry he was.
‘Trial?’ I said, and K.K. smashed me against the wall again, so I kept quiet. The British man gave me a sorry-old-chap look with a flick of the eyes, put on his rolled-brim hat and disappeared.
K.K. had a rare flash of altruism and brought me a black coffee in a real porcelain cup. Surprise followed surprise, for when I sipped it, I discovered it had a shot of plum brandy in it. It had been a long day. I curled my feet as near to my head as possible and curling my arms close, I went to sleep thinking, ‘If I don’t get out of here quickly you fellows are going to miss each other.’
