Читать книгу Faith - Len Deighton - Страница 10

‘You just leave it to me, Mr Samson,’ said the cheerful ordnance lieutenant.

The army is always there when you need it. My father’s loyalty to the army remained no matter how long after his army service he worked for the Foreign Office. And Frank Harrington’s devotion to the army was renowned. The army looks after its own and was always ready to take under its wing those who understood the obligations this entailed. And now it was a young army lieutenant who, without any up-to-date paperwork or even a telephone call, had put me into the cab of one of his trucks heading down the Autobahn. The soldiers were posted back to their depot. They were in convoy for Holland, and the ferry to Harwich in England. But I was on my way to Switzerland.

‘We’re getting near to the place you’re wanting, sir,’ said the driver without preamble. ‘You’ll hitchhike south from there.’ He had a Newcastle accent you could cut with a knife, and my German upbringing had left me unable to comprehend the more pronounced British regional voices. ‘Going home,’ he added, doing his best to make me understand. ‘We’re all going home.’

‘Yes,’ I said. You could see the joy of it written in the faces of all these soldiers.

‘What about you, sir?’

‘Yes, I’ll soon be going home too,’ I said mechanically. The truth was I had no home; not in the sense that these men had their homes in Britain. My English parents had brought me up in Berlin and sent me to the neighbourhood school, frequently reminding me how lucky I was to have two languages and two countries; two lands in which I could pass myself off as a national. But as I got older I discovered just how tragically wrong they were. In fact even my most intimate German friends – boys who’d been close chums at school – had never regarded me as anything except a foreigner. While the British – not the least those men who sat behind the desks at London Central – regarded me as an unreliable outsider. I had none of the credentials essential for anyone who wanted to join their ranks. I wore no school or university tie, nor that of any smart regiment. I rode with no hunt, loitered in no Jermyn Street club, had no well-known tailor chasing me for payment. I couldn’t even name a seedy local pub where I regularly played darts and could get a pint of beer on credit.

‘You’ll need money,’ the corporal warned me. ‘Hitchhikers are expected to pay their fare nowadays. It’s the way things are.’

‘I’ve got enough.’

‘You should have bought a couple of bottles of duty-free booze. That’s what most of the boys do. Do you understand me?’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I wish I’d thought of it.’

The army in Germany – squeezed tighter and tighter by a German prosperity that shrank the pound sterling – had learned a great deal about saving money. The driver knew all about picking up a lift from one of the endless streams of heavy trucks that head south from Holland through Switzerland to deliver their freight to the Euro-Community warehouses in Italy. ‘Good luck,’ said the corporal. ‘And persevere. It won’t be easy. They’ll think you are a soldier, and these fat civvies all despise squaddies until there’s a bomb needs defusing or their plane gets hijacked. Keep asking; you’ll get a lift eventually.’

It was a frosty night with a wind that cut through the moth-eaten lining of my old trenchcoat. I regretted for a moment leaving all my personal baggage – shaving kit, linen and change of clothes – behind in the kid’s apartment, but it was a necessary part of giving the Berlin office the slip. My airline seat reservation would keep them content until morning: they were endearingly simple souls in the Berlin office.

The night was cold and dark. The sky moonless, starless and unremittingly black. ‘It’s good weather,’ the corporal added. ‘You’ll be in Italy in no time. But get yourself cleaned up; you’ll never get a lift if you’re scruffy.’ I suppose it was good weather from a driver’s point of view. A dry road, without the prospect of ice or snow, and visibility as far as the headlight’s beam stretched.

The corporal had dropped me off at what he said was his favourite interchange: two great cross-Europe highways meeting and intertwining in a desolate reach of rural Germany. The complex was lit like a football stadium, the ferocious glare illuminating a white haze of diesel pollution that wound in and out of the gas pumps and buildings like skeins of silk. From a distance the interchange looked like some huge and malevolent interplanetary vehicle forced-landed upon the empty black German countryside. But upon arrival it proved no more than a plastic oasis, a limbo land occupied by drowsy downcast Gastarbeiter. No one lived here, no one slept here, no pedestrian would be mad enough even to attempt to get here. It was simply a ‘stop’; a place where cramped and weary travellers paid extortionate prices for the basic essentials of the travelling life – fuel, hot food, cigarettes and aspirin – before resuming their trip.

After buying soap, a disposable plastic razor, toothbrush, clean underclothes and a tee-shirt in the silent fluorescent-lit shop, I purchased a shiny plastic shoulder bag emblazoned, for reasons known only to the tortuous minds of the merchandising experts, with a crudely drawn skyscraper and the words New York New York. I went and shaved and changed. Then, following the corporal’s advice, I walked into the special canteen reserved for long-distance truck drivers. It was a cheerless place, with long plastic-topped tables for men in dirty coveralls who wanted to keep an eye on the floodlit truck park to be sure their cargoes were safe.

Here at the self-service counter, East met West. An identical array of spicy flour-thickened stews was saved from anonymity only by the exotic labels promising Madras curry, Hungarian goulash, Irish stew and Mexican chilli. With no wish for journeys into the culinary unknown, I took a bowl of noodle soup and a cheese sandwich before moving from table to table soliciting a ride. Eventually I was lucky. After half a dozen negative responses a wavy-haired Dutchman signalled to me from across the room with a barely perceptible beckoning finger.

‘Where are you headed, stranger?’ His use of American vernacular was awkward and unconvincing. He was a muscular man with a puffy face and fair skin reddened at the cheeks and nose by the wind and weather. His neat moustache and eyebrows, like the wavy hair on his head, were blond, so that from a distance he looked like a plump angel who’d fluttered down from the loft of some baroque church. Under his battered brown leather jacket he was wearing what I recognized as a very expensive rainbow-striped silk shirt. On the table in front of him, aligned as if for inspection, there were a bunch of keys, a leather bag, a flashlight and a red plastic folder containing a batch of manifests, registrations and customs documents needed for him to take his truck and cargo across ‘frontierless’ Europe.

‘South. Switzerland. Anywhere in Switzerland,’ I replied.

‘After that you’ll pay your way?’ he asked mockingly.

‘I’ll pay you,’ I offered, ‘if it’s not too much.’

‘Keep your dough in your pocket. Take the weight off your feet. My name is Wim. I’m transporting cars to Milan. I can do with the company; rapping keeps me awake.’

I sat down opposite him and drank my soup and ate my sandwich while he finished his steak. ‘I’m not permitted to take hitchhikers,’ he said with a furtive glance over his shoulders. ‘Plenty of big-mouths in here tonight. Better you wait by the exit from the truck park.’ He tore a bread roll in half, wiped the plate using the crust, and then stood up to drink the final mouthful of his coffee. On his hand there was a heavy gold signet ring and a tattoo that artfully incorporated his fingers into its continuous design, and gave emphasis to his gold wrist-watch. Driving long-distance heavy trucks was a well-paid job. It was not unusual to find such nomads spending their wages on personal luxuries rather than equipping the homes they seldom saw.

He stood up, flicked crumbs from the front of his shirt and picked up his flashlight after putting the rest of his belongings into his leather bag. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the show on the road.’ It was the smooth American-style accent that those brought up speaking Dutch and German often assume. I was to find that his whole education and experience was derived from Hollywood films. From them he could quote episodes and dialogue with the effortless assurance of a preacher summoning Bible texts. I guessed he was going to use me as an English-conversation lesson, but that seemed a fair exchange. ‘You leave now. You’ll spot me all right. I’m driving that rig with the brand-new Saabs on it.’ He was toying with the flashlight and he switched it on to be sure it worked. He did it automatically, more a neurotic habit than a test of its batteries.

The vast car transporter swayed and groaned as it came across the car park to where I was standing at the exit. It stopped with a squeak of brakes and I got in, slammed the door and looked around. This was Wim’s world, and it came complete with air-conditioning, embroidered silk cushions and pin-ups. He ran through the gears and spun the steering wheel with one finger, grinning at me as we sped along the ramp and slid into the stream of traffic heading south. I need not have worried that he would interrogate me or want to be entertained with the story of my life. This fellow Wim wasn’t like that: his idea of entertainment was having an audience for the story of his life.

It was the sort of yarn to be heard in the bars of almost every big town in the modern world. With difficulties in reading, a self-confessed truant and thief, he was well able to manage his spoken English, and German and Italian too according to what he told me. He handled his huge transporter truck with the same casual ease. Sentenced to three years in prison for large-scale car thefts and an armed assault upon a policeman, he had served seven months before being released on a technicality and his police and prison records erased. Thirty-one years old, he had five children by two different mothers: ‘a ready and willing piece of ass in Stockholm and another in Turin’ was how the unrepentant Wim described his present situation. One of them he’d married, but Wim gave no money to either family, for he thought it was the government’s duty to provide for all. Didn’t he pay his income tax? he asked rhetorically. ‘She can give a heart-wrenching plea about money to feed the kids. I said: “Give ’em canned dog-food, at least they’ll have good teeth and hair.”’ He laughed as he remembered this response. ‘Never get married,’ he advised. ‘Once you’re married they demand everything; never a word of gratitude whatever you do. Girlfriends expect little or nothing. And it’s love and kisses when you bring them a box of chocolates.’

I listened, head lolling against the seat and dozing off during his long asides about the failings of society to look after its victims, among which Wim numbered himself. His droning voice was soporific but his caustic jokes jolted me awake from time to time. Despite my reservations about almost everything he said, he was an engaging personality; I could see why so many women had fallen under his spell. And yet his diatribe brought a growing realization of how much I had changed since that fateful night I left Germany for California. I had never cracked, the way the doctor there had warned me I might, but the enforced tedium of my days there on the far side of the Western world – and the pitiless repetitions of my debriefings – had deadened my mind and slowed my reactions, as I’d seen happen so often to those who survived psychoanalysis. Worse, I was taking life day by day … taking things as they came. I’d always despised people who took things as they came.

Frank Harrington had recognized the change in me of course. I could see it in his eyes as soon as we exchanged hellos. The shift I’d seen in Frank’s attitude to me during the uncomfortable interview I’d just had in Berlin had its roots in some new and inadequate something that Frank detected in me.

And Wim’s domestic predicaments were not without an echo in my own consciousness: ‘You live in London but you’re heading south?’ he’d remarked, using that animal instinct which informs such street-wise semi-literates.

Perhaps the look on my face revealed something of the confusion in my mind.

‘Running from one wife to another?’ he said. ‘Or running away from them both, like I am?’

I responded with a soft derisive laugh, but in a way he was right. Perhaps I was going on this excursion to Zurich in order to get vital information from Werner. Perhaps I was going there in order to put off that terrible time when I would be in London and forced to start sorting out my personal affairs. What did I have left of my relationships with two women I loved – with Fiona, my wife, and with Gloria who had patiently pieced together a new life for me when I was at my lowest? And what of my relationships with my two children, who were doubtless as confused as any of us?

‘Be a real man,’ urged Wim, flexing his arm in a lewd signal of machismo. ‘The man makes the decisions; women wait for him to make up his mind. That’s what nature intended. It’s the way life is.’ He offered me a swig from a bottle of Old Jenever that he had tucked into a toolbox behind his head. I declined and he smiled and put the gin away. ‘Drinking and driving don’t mix,’ he said, with that smug air of accomplishment with which we all use cliches in a foreign tongue.

It was beginning to rain. Big droplets hit the glass and then moved sluggishly downwards, flattened by the air flow into wavy patterns. He switched on the massive wipers, which slid across the windscreen with a thirsty slurp and a contented whine from the motor. The weather had changed. It was no longer good weather for driving, for hitchhiking or for anything else.

The heating was switched fully on in the cab of the transporter. I became drowsy and, eyes closed, I found it difficult to respond to Wim’s commentary and his occasional questions. Perhaps he was also succumbing to the warmth, for when I asked him what time he thought we’d cross the Swiss frontier he said: ‘Go back to sleep, it’s a long way yet.’ He changed to a lower gear for the long incline ahead. ‘At the next chance I shall pull over and check the load. I think I hear a rattle. Sometimes the car doors come open. It will take me only a minute or two.’

He slowed as he spotted a likely place and pulled the transporter into one of the wide spaces provided for emergency stops on the Autobahn. He switched off the engine. It was dark, the rain beat upon the road and ran in torrents from the tall fir trees, beating noisily on the roof of the cab like impatient fingers. ‘Stay in the dry,’ he said, and tugged his arms into a short plastic coat with a hood. He opened the door and climbed down, cursing all the while. I saw the flashlight beam and heard him making a circuit of the long vehicle, checking that his six brand-new Saabs were well secured. Eventually he climbed back into the driver’s cab, waved the flashlight and switched it off and gave a sigh of content.

I felt a draught of cold air and flicks of water as he took off his coat. Eyes half-closed, I was slumped in the corner with my head resting against the seat back as Wim leaned across me as if to check that my door was safely locked. It was the tension and sudden movement of his arm that caused me to move my head. I rolled aside and the blow that should have knocked me unconscious only tore my ear lobe off. The heavy metal flashlight he wielded spent most of its force against the upholstered head-rest, landing with a loud thump.

‘You bastard!’ shouted Wim, whose rage I had long since figured could be directed against anyone who stood between him and his immediate wishes. I lashed out to defend myself as he came at me again. He was right-handed, and from his position in the driving seat, on the left side of the cab, this proved a disadvantage. I brought my right fist round and hit him as hard as I could. Then hit him again. But in the confined space movement was difficult. The first punch hit only his shoulder and the other did little beyond grazing my knuckles on his earring. We were both aiming wildly as we thrashed around in the confines of the cabin, punching, pushing and grappling like wrestlers. Twice I tried to pin his arms, but he was strong and I could hold him for no more than a moment before he wrenched himself free. He butted at me but I was ready for that, and brought my fist up and gave him a jab full in the face which made him snort and shake his head.

As he rolled back from the punch I saw his bloodied face and eyes shiny and demented. He swung round at me, this time bringing the flashlight right across his body from his left shoulder and delivering a blow that landed. It made my head sing and paralysed me with shock. I heard a distant scream of pain without at first realizing that it came from me. Anger took over. I struck out at his silly face. My fist connected but he was a tough street kid and had reached that stage of fighting madness where such blows meant nothing to him. Wim had done all this before; that was obvious by his confident persistence.

I reached out to grab his throat. ‘English bastard!’ he said, and managed to get a grip on my jacket, holding the bunched fabric tight, so that he could give me a good decisive blow with the flashlight. Made of heavy metal it was a vicious weapon, but within the confines of the cab, and impeded by the big steering wheel, he couldn’t bring his arm back far enough to put lethal force into it. I deflected a second blow with my upraised arm and chopped at his throat with the edge of my hand. But already he had turned his head far enough for the neck muscle to shield the windpipe. For a moment we both paused, overcome by our exertions. He was breathing heavily and noisily, and there was a pattern of blood on his temple and more running from his nose. His mouth was half-open and a line of frothy spittle had formed on his lips. What wouldn’t I have given for the 9mm Makarov pistol that I had dumped into an East German ditch only twenty-four hours previously.

The first extravagant exchange of blows was over and I had survived. He was cautious now, and determined to make no more errors of judgement. He used the flashlight as a prod, lunging to jab at my face. Twice I deflected it, and as I dodged around I looked for something to use as a weapon but there was nothing in sight. As he came at me the third time I struck at the flashlight with anger and reckless disregard, and hit it hard enough to knock it from his hand. It clattered to the floor and rolled under my seat, where neither of us could get to it without becoming totally vulnerable. He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of a hand and gave me a fleeting grin.

I slid my back away from him to get into the corner, where I curled up into a ball. My posture – knees drawn up to my chin and arms crossed on my chest – told Wim that I’d given up hope and resistance. Perhaps that’s what had happened with his other victims – they’d simply cowered away, pleading for mercy – but Wim wasn’t the sort who dealt in mercy. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he shouted at me, and despite the anger that was boiling up inside me, it was easy to imagine the way that kind of threat had effectively removed all resistance from some wretched girl or skinny kid who were no doubt the sort of victims he looked for.

He came at me with his hands extended and fingers splayed. He intended to strangle me. There was no big spilling of blood with a strangulation. And if the body was disposed into the scrub and ferns at such a lonely section of road, who would ever guess where the victim had disappeared to, or what had happened? Only Wim would know, and in his pocket he’d have cash and any other valuables that a hitchhiker might carry.

‘Help!’ I called in a strangled voice, and with a note of terror that was easy to simulate.

Wim grinned widely. He was a sadist, and the prospect of a victim terrified and paralysed with fear was exactly what excited him. I put my elbows back and braced myself against the seat. My whimpering was enough to relax the tension that had racked his bloody face. I needed him nearer, and nearer he came. He whispered: ‘There’s no one here to help you, mister.’

He didn’t complete the sentence, for at the last word I kicked out, kicking harder than I had ever kicked before, even harder than I’d kicked for the football team my father had organized for the German kids and drafted me into. The sole of my heavy East German shoe – with its metal heels – hit Wim full in his grinning face. My timing was right and so was my judgement of distance. He went hurtling back, his spine hit the steering wheel and his head hit the glass window with a bang loud enough to make the metal cab ring with the sound.

Then I was on to him. I scrambled around to find the metal flashlight from where it had rolled under my seat, and, taking all the time I needed, I hit him across the side of the head. I suppose I went mad for a moment. The release of the fear I’d suffered made me lose all restraint. At the second blow his eyes closed as he screamed out with pain. I didn’t stop. I hit him again and again until his cries became whimpers and then silence and his body slumped down with his knees on the floor of the cab and his body skewed sideways on the seat, arms trapped in the steering wheel like a man at prayer.

I stopped myself then and sat back on my seat to collect my thoughts. What was happening to me? Everything I’d ever learned had been abandoned in that moment of rage. The last thing I needed was a murder investigation on my heels. I took the Dutchman’s arm: his pulse was weak but steadying. He would probably come round eventually; it was hard to judge how long it would take. His face was bloody, his jaw broken, he’d lost teeth and was badly cut. I touched him carefully, avoiding getting blood marks on my clothes.

I opened the driver’s door. Using my foot, I slowly pushed his unconscious body through the door until it overbalanced and crashed on to the ground. Then I went through his pockets to find his keys. I took them and made sure that all the doors of the cab were firmly locked, and the thief-alarm on, before tossing the whole bunch of keys into the undergrowth as far as I could throw them. They would not be easy to find unless the cops brought a metal detector into use.

I searched his other pockets. There was a billfold at his hip. In it I found a couple of driving licences, a few Dutch, German and Italian currency notes, a handwritten letter in Dutch, four snapshots of different undressed women – Wim’s recent conquests no doubt – and some plastic credit cards. I removed everything that might reveal his identity and buried it in the mud. The money I pocketed: motive robbery. Then I pulled off Wim’s jeans and leather jacket and silk shirt, bundled them all up and hid those too. When I came back he stirred but did not recover his wits. I dragged him off the tarmac and into a cold muddy puddle.

Having done all I could to delay Wim’s return to the real world, I put the bag over my shoulder and went out on to the road and began to signal passing cars and trucks with the flashlight.

The rain soaked me to the skin, and passing trucks and cars sprayed me with muddy water without even slowing at the sight of me. I began to believe that I would stand there for ever. Fighting Wim off, and the narrow escape from death, had shaken me. The cold rain beat down upon my head and my resolve dwindled and was gone. I was bruised and battered; my head was still singing from the blows with the metal flashlight. Even worse was the near-mortal blow that had been delivered to my self-confidence. How could I have been so easily caught off-guard by a muscle-bound bird-brain like Wim? Only a year or so ago I would have recognized such a thug at first sight, and knocked him cold before he could raise a hand against me.

For perhaps the first time in my life I saw Bernard Samson as so many others had always seen him. I’m not talking about any kind of symbolism: my despair was practical, not philosophical, just as my joy had always been. But I was only in this predicament because I had gone out of my way to disobey orders from London Central about contacting Werner. I’d beaten Wim more ferociously than was necessary to escape him, and no doubt left enough evidence for an energetic police inquiry to trace me back to the ride I got out of Berlin. Worse was the fact that I had no one to turn to for help. Who at London Central would risk their career covering for me? Not even Frank would go that far. The two women in my life had nothing to thank me for, and Werner seemed to have gone to a great deal of trouble to make contacting him difficult. I was totally alone, in deep trouble and friendless. But I must get to Werner nevertheless: he was the only person who would understand my predicament. The fact that he was in no position to help me was a secondary consideration.

The nudges and winks, the hints and outright slanders I’d heard over the past few weeks, about Werner’s sudden departure from the Departmental payroll, had not fooled me. If any of those stories, about Werner embezzling money or otherwise upsetting the applecart, were true, the Department would have put out a worldwide alert, found him and punished his misdeeds. But they had not done that, they’d left him in Switzerland to wither on the vine. That suggested one thing above all others. I knew only one sin that London would temporize, compromise and negotiate about: betrayal. Werner must have let something slip when he was over there on one of his business trips. It was easy enough to do. I would hate to be called into account for all the times I had sailed close to the wind. But for the time being Werner was in no position to help my career, even if he had the inclination to do so.

Rain washed my bruised and bloody face and squelched inside my shoes. The highway was completely silent and the sour stink of diesel fumes grew fainter as it was washed away by the rain. At this time of night even long-distance drivers are tempted to find a spot on the road to shut their eyes for an hour or so. I had no alternative but to wait, but so much time was passing that I walked back past the slip road which led to Wim’s transporter. Several times I fancied I saw him walking around under the trees there, but they were no more than shadows conjured up by my troubled imagination. All the same, not wanting to take the risk of Wim spotting me at the roadside, I walked farther along the road, back the way we’d come. I was still walking when a car caught me in its main beams and slowed to pick me up.

It was a dented Audi with a middle-aged German in a damp raincoat sitting at the wheel. As he wound the window down cigarette smoke billowed into my face. ‘What are you doing out here at this time of night?’ he said in a quarrelsome tone.

‘I had a breakdown,’ I said. ‘Could you take me to the nearest town?’

‘Get in,’ he said.

I didn’t get in. It was at that very moment that my mind suddenly exploded, and the events of the last hour or so assumed a new and terrifying pattern. How could I have mistaken Wim for a psychopath who killed skinny kids and foolhardy girls for kicks, or to get his hands on their meagre cash and belongings? My narrow escape had been from an assigned hit by a KGB professional. Wim had been sent to kill me. It all fitted together. He had been waiting in the right Autobahn interchange at the right time and selected me in the driver’s canteen. He had beckoned me, and when getting me aboard had stopped at the ramp, a place where he made sure that no witnesses were around to see him picking me up. It had all been carefully planned: the offer of a swig from his gin bottle, and the heater turned fully up to make me drowsy. No firearms: bullets would leave bullet holes and too much blood.

I shuddered. It was a narrow escape. Had my luck not prevailed Wim would now have just finished burying me in a shallow grave by the roadside, where a body could lay undiscovered for years, maybe for ever. Wim was not some homicidal maniac; he was a professional killer.

The driver of the Audi was looking at my well-worn coat and the cheap bag with the skyscraper on it. ‘Do you want a lift with me, or are you waiting for a Rolls-Royce?’

I suddenly became aware that I was standing in the heavy rain and looking at him blankly. ‘Yes. Yes, thanks,’ I said.

‘Get in,’ he told me again, and I threw my bag into the car and climbed in after it.

‘I thought no one would ever stop,’ I said.

He didn’t reply. He was about forty, overweight, with slicked-back hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. ‘You’re not German,’ he said accusingly.

‘Yes, I am.’ My hands were trembling as I thought about Wim and the men who might have sent him. Had I not been thinking of something else I would not have claimed to be German. It would have been easier to be a British soldier on leave.

‘Maybe. So where did you get the accent?’ he said, examining my face carefully. Over-confident, I’d been careless. He’d heard some false note and one false note was enough. He narrowed his eyes: ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

‘No, you don’t know me. I’ve been away in Canada,’ I said. If Wim had been positioned to pick me up and kill me, he would have a back-up to support him. If the site chosen for his attack was prearranged, why not have this toughie sweep up along the road to make sure that it had all gone according to plan? If it hadn’t gone according to plan, if I was still alive, the back-up could stop and offer me a ride and make sure of me.

‘Bullshit,’ said the man. ‘Canada; bullshit. And what the hell have you been doing? Fighting?’ Despite the darkness he could see my face and its bruises and marks. One of my eyes was getting so puffy that it was impeding my vision.