Heavy, p.40
Heavy, page 40
“Bribery,” Ernie corrected. “The Americans dump them in Hong Kong to try to show off how good it is in the West and the Vice Distribution Workers take them around showing the People what filthy decadents the West are and—”
“And they mysteriously lose some in every city,” finished Foley. “Today, to Maureen.”
Pig half-expected Maureen to look disappointed by this undermining of her prowess, but she only lit a cigarette and rubbed her hands together cheerfully.
* * *
They ate the remaining Compact Rations that night. Pig waited for Ernie to say something spiteful about what happened when there were no more rations, with Pig around, but he only muttered something about a fire being out of the question, and rolled himself up in every bit of clothing that he could find.
It was bitingly cold. The mosque afforded little protection, but Pig still guessed it many degrees below freezing inside. The right conditions to fall asleep and never wake up.
He woke, though, while it was still dark.
Someone was moving around the room, doing their best not to be heard. Pig’s chest contracted painfully – he reached behind him, found Ernie still wheezing in the dark, even breaths and surprisingly warm. He left his hand on the man’s shoulder, and peered about in the overpowering blackness.
Clothing rustled.
Miss Gaitskill lay before him. He could feel the back of her flannels, the woollen blanket rising and falling. He could hear Foley’s unchanged breaths.
The rustling moved away.
Maureen slipped out of the building, into the night.
Pig crossed his fingers over Ernie’s shoulder, a childish gesture in hope, now that prayer could no longer be offered. Maybe she was looking for food; maybe she would come back.
He dropped back into an uneasy sleep on the thought that maybe she was involved in something he had yet to determine.
* * *
On the morning of their fourth day in the Moslem Church Irene steeled herself and went, unbreakfasted, to interrupt Captain Foley’s observations from the upper window, up the winding stair of the minaret.
He had a cigarette in his lips – a Strike, although she couldn’t tell if it was one of his own or one of the ones Maureen had stolen, requisitioned, from the Chinese – and he was looking down through the nearby buildings to the road, his gaze fixed somewhere farther off.
Irene choked on her words and thought about the phrase ratting out for a moment. She told herself not to be silly. The mission required absolute trust between its constituent members, and one of those – two of those members were known to be seditious, and the other one had blots in his copybook that rendered it more ink than paper.
She took a breath.
“Irene,” said Captain Foley, beckoning her. “Come and enjoy the view.”
She went to the window. There didn’t seem to be much to enjoy: a cluster of empty buildings in a style she wasn’t familiar with, each fenced off and covered in the same official notices that had been on their own borrowed building. Some of them had fallen-in roofs. One had clear fire damage; she recalled the church in the wilderness, with its strange bulbous spire, the black shadow of the cross on the wall.
“Sir,” she began, “I’m afraid that—”
“I think,” Captain Foley added, pointing to a larger set of taller, stranger, more-recent buildings half-hidden by the dim air in the distance, “that’s the oil refinery.” His cigarette smoke and the steam of his breath made their own tiny replica of the London smog, and Irene was acutely homesick.
“Sir,” she repeated, dutifully looking at the oil refinery. “Maureen was gone for several hours last night.”
“Mm hmm?” said the Captain, apparently unconcerned. He moved his pointing finger further along the skyline. “That’s probably the area we want to be looking out for, you see down there? That’s more Party-related buildings.”
“I heard her get up and I think she went through some of our supplies first too,” Irene said, her stomach knotting itself up into a ball of self-loathing. She recognised the feeling all too well – mirrors had brought it out, and the feeling of stares, and her scalp began to ache as if she was still trying to comb her hair straight. All the common memories of her childhood.
“Is that a fact?” said the Captain. He sounded light, cheerful.
Irene tried once more. “I couldn’t say for sure, Sir, but I heard paper moving.” She looked back up at him, and found him smiling an indulgent, almost paternal smile.
“Good,” he said, “that’s satisfactory. Quite why she chose the middle of the night is beyond me, but I imagine you know by now Maureen is terrifically fond of unnecessary risk.”
Irene stared at him uncomprehending. She recalled the unexpected lenience he’d shown when she smuggled Mr. Shoe away to the house in Walthamstow – it felt as if it had happened in another life – and the same sensation then, of a rug being smartly and sharply tugged out from under her feet to reveal depths she had never been aware of.
Deep inside her chest the small voice that had once whispered he’s like you of Ernie said softly, Maureen’s not the only one.
“Sir?”
He dropped his hand on her shoulder. “I oughtn’t tell you this,” said Captain Foley with a boyish smile, “but it’s too good, I can hardly keep it to myself. Colonel Braithwaite will love this.”
Irene stared, blinked, and stared again. The Captain’s hand felt heavy. She could smell the cigarettes on his gloves. These must be the Chinese Strikes he was smoking, because the scent of them no longer made her feel reassured of the certain dominance and necessity of her organisation’s work, only a little queasy.
“Sir?”
“I left a selection of messages coded,” he said, “and she’s been out finding the drop site. I mentioned it in passing. You can’t tell that girl anything directly, she just takes it as an invitation to behave like an irresponsible hot-head.” He dropped his head closer to hers, and added in an amused whisper, “I also ‘let slip’ that they’re messages back to England reporting on our progress and in particular her good work, because really, she has an ego like a hot air balloon.”
“But they’re not?” Irene whispered back, her heart clutched in a vice. Snow began to fall outside the window; this one, at least, was intact. It was still extremely cold.
Captain Foley threw his head back and gave a sudden laugh. “No, no, they’re not.”
Irene waited. She wanted to put her hands in her pockets, but it seemed disrespectful. The Captain put his cigarette back in his mouth, his hands into his own pockets, and puffed for a moment.
“Sir?” Irene asked, when the silence had gone on for long enough.
“Oh well,” the Captain said, raising his eyebrows at her. “You’ll appreciate this, I think. I’ve got her dropping notes for a couple of contacts. Rather fitting, I think. They certainly not messages praising her for any kind of daring do, whatever she may think.”
“She has been awfully steadfast,” Irene heard herself say.
Captain Foley pulled his cigarette from his mouth and said, “You’re so well brought-up, Irene, I’m sure you’d tell the Devil himself he had good table manners to stop him from feeling slighted. It’s kind but it’s just not practical.”
With this smarting remark, he flicked the cigarette to the floor and extinguished it under foot as he left.
The snow began to blow this way and that as the wind returned, outside the window. Irene frowned at it, her hands in her pockets at last. She hadn’t thought she was being unrealistic about the situation; Maureen had been steadfast, in her own strange way, even when the going was undeniably tough. She was silly and loud and had too much enthusiasm for everything but she hadn’t exactly… been…
Irene recalled that, boisterously foul language aside, her response to being on fire had been one of blithe practicality and immediate concern for everyone else.
But she was a Leftist and a lunatic and in all probability—
In all probability.
Irene grimaced as her stomach clenched.
It was preposterous to be upset. They were deep into enemy territory and the Captain knew what he was doing and Maureen was a noisy, immature amateur nosy-parker who thought the whole world was one big adventure. That was all there was to it. Making use of the girl’s delusions was good Resource Management.
She shivered. The snow went past the window horizontally.
And Ernest Shoe and his sad dark eyes was a traitor. That was all.
* * *
The drop had been easy enough to locate. Maureen was almost disappointed by the simplicity of it; she’d been expecting scads of secrecy, hidden compartments, tricky locks and false panels somewhere in the mix. Instead, when she’d worn herself a blister on her foot tramping around the city with her hair tucked into a scarf – fewer people stared if they couldn’t see the red – it proved to be a perfectly ordinary letterbox at a perfectly ordinary half-finished row of flat blocks.
They went up into the sky like grasping fingers – Maureen tried to imagine the same sort of thing populating London, but the city just wouldn’t be the same without the grimy terraces – and funnelled the wind between them in a fashion that seemed almost spiteful in its lack of concern for, among others, a lone cyclist she saw skid halfway across the wide road.
He toppled off his bicycle a few feet from her legs, and Maureen – quite forgetting that she was an undercover enemy agent – leapt to help him up and untangle him.
He was a little shorter than her and skinny and had glasses and looked as horribly cold as she felt. Maureen pulled him to his feet, propped up his bicycle, and gave the chap an ironic salute. He looked surprised, but returned it. He said something – Maureen pretended not to be able to hear him – and when she looked back he was still standing in the road beside his bicycle, holding it by the handlebars and frowning.
With the location of the drop committed to memory, Maureen was quite free to undertake Mission Number Two. This was more nebulous in its parameters, she thought, and required a certain degree of lurking and also of interacting. She marched away from the half-finished towers and toward the distant pipes and bulbs of some sort of industrial centre, her coat wrapped around her over the flannels. How anyone eked out a living in this windswept wilderness was quite beyond her – it would have been easier to build a city at the bottom of the bloody ocean.
She missed the beret rather sorely. The scarf did a marvellous job in protecting her ears but it just wasn’t the same.
* * *
In what was, as far as she could tell, the “centre” of the sparse and underpopulated city, Maureen hung about and watched.
There were not many people outside: hardly surprising. Everyone seemed to be on a bicycle or, more often, sitting in a car with three or four other people steaming up the windows. Deliveries took place: men and women, largely identical from more than a few feet away in their flannels and layers of clothing, stamped chits which fluttered angrily in the hands of others. No one was milling about the place singing drunkenly or holding aggressive contests over who could tell the tallest story, the way they did on street corners at home. Maureen supposed the weather forbade it. In the summer, no doubt, they gossiped and argued out of doors like everyone else.
She backed into an alley-way between two older-looking buildings as two men who had the unmistakable bearing of police officers stopped to talk to a woman carrying a box of smaller boxes.
The policemen loomed over the woman with her boxes. Maureen jammed her hands into her pockets and held her breath. One couldn’t rush out and box the ears of foreign police just because they looked like cads. It wasn’t done. It would be risky.
A conversation took place. The policemen took a couple of boxes. One of them took a few more. They said something to each other. One of them pointed down the street to a building with an incongruously white stucco front, out of place among the future and the past of architecture in this place.
The woman nodded with a bright smile and tense shoulders. The policemen went away, laughing to each other, carrying double handfuls of the boxes.
Maureen squinted. They were cigarette cartons.
It was imperative, she thought, that she had an excuse for being out this long. And she hadn’t had a bloody cigarette in hours and the supplies were dwindling and Captain Foley was a pig who wouldn’t bloody well share his and Mr. Shoe didn’t have any and the others didn’t smoke.
She held her breath. One couldn’t simply march up and take a packet – she would be sure to summon the police back, and Maureen had no great desire to try to bluff her way out of an arrest in a language she didn’t speak. It was hard enough in English.
The woman with the cigarettes came to the entrance of the alleyway – Maureen flung herself back behind a large metal bin. It was full of refuse, and stank.
The woman dropped the box, turned on her heel, and walked off, looking nervously around her.
Maureen stepped out of the shadows, pocketed several cartons, and shot off down the other end of the alleyway before the woman could change her mind and come back to her abandoned contraband.
She ducked around the buildings and doubled back onto the street the discussion had taken place on. A man with a red armband went into the alleyway, picked up the cigarettes, and walked on down the same route Maureen had taken.
Well, thought Maureen, if that isn’t the most brazen underground operation I don’t know what is.
Mr. Shoe would be set here, she thought. There was little else to do besides look for something to eat.
* * *
“So you have it straight,” said Captain Foley that evening, as they worked their way through separate cigarettes in the untiled room behind the main one. “This one—“ he pointed to a small square of paper with a bloody smudge in the corner, “is for Drop One, and goes back to Braithwaite, in London, and this one is for Drop Two, and goes back to Zen. If Drop Three isn’t being watched this one goes to Witham. If it is being watched, destroy it. Got all of that?”
“Got it,” said Maureen, watching the ember at the end of his straight. It illuminated the man’s face in shadows that radiated out from his mouth. It was interesting, she thought. If one looked him in the eye he was a guileless, absolutely upright fellow. With only his mouth truly lit, he looked rather more like a species of monster.
She put the messages in her pocket.
When the others were asleep, as instructed, Maureen heaved herself out of the broken window and down through the maze of fences. There were street lights, here. It was quite the novelty; the street lights in England seemed like a strange remnant of a bygone era, black poles for tethering dogs to or for spivs to lean on. She didn’t think she’d ever seen one alight past five o’clock in winter evenings, the whole of her life. Black Out Means Black Out, after all
Under the light of one, the street deserted, Maureen removed the one-time from her other pocket and lit a cigarette. Messages for England. Did he think she was an imbecile?
For a start, she thought, it was impractical to run three drops separately in one city, even if it was more secure. If one kept the operators in the dark about each other they would waste time chasing each other down.
Stymied by the lack of reference code, she turned the first message around in her head as she took the first pull on the cigarette.
For another, how exactly were these messages to get back to England, to Finland, with every communication under surveillance here, just as at home? Did the drop-operators run some sort of ham radio operation? Highly unlikely.
She puffed on her cigarette, and took off toward the first drop at a slow lope.
For the last thing, she wouldn’t have trusted herself with the truth if she were Captain Foley, and odds were he didn’t damn well trust her either. Something else was in these messages. No sense in upsetting his plans or letting on that she knew he was Up To Something, not yet…
Maureen pinched out her cigarette and put it back into her pocket.
* * *
She snatched a few hours of sleep on her return; Captain Foley disappeared up to his little eagle’s nest without so much as a thank you, dragging Irene with him. Maureen breakfasted on a cigarette and melted snow and kicked herself for not requisitioning some more bread. The last lot had fallen into her hands rather, and she wasn’t the sort to question luck, but she was damn hungry.
Mr. Shoe sat in his huddle of dejection and muttered at Mr. Ridell. Mr. Ridell sat at the perimeter of his imprisonment circle over Mr. Shoe, and sulked. They looked for all the world, Maureen thought, not wholly surprised, like a couple who had been subject to the most fearsome row and now hadn’t wound down enough to make it up.
It was rather a nuisance, though. While Mr. Ridell sat so obstinately close to Mr. Shoe – taking his role as the man’s guard all too seriously – she could scarcely pass on any of her reconnaissance findings to the latter.
She couldn’t tell him about the messages, either, although Mr. Shoe would surely be expecting something like that. It was hardly as if Captain Foley would bring them to this city to keep them in a mosque indefinitely without some sort of Plan being Afoot. Anyone could see that.
And Mr. Shoe, of course, being an experienced hand at this sort of thing, in this country even…
She hit upon it.
“Mr. Shoe,” she said, rifling through Captain Foley’s belongings without hesitation, searching for scraps of paper, a pencil of some sort, “it occurs to me that if I am to look for supplies again I shall need to be able to excuse myself if I’m questioned.”
Maureen scribbled underground movement here without apparent fear of police. Swapping contraband. Foley sent me to drop messages, possibly to agent provocateurs, on the piece of paper.
“Would you be so good as to give me a rough translation so I can wave it at ‘em?” she asked, ostentatiously passing the pencil and the slip of paper to him over Mr. Ridell’s seated head. “Or even an approximation, you know: this girl is dumb and deaf or this girl is an imbecile and running an errand. Something that will allay suspicion and whatnot.”
