The German Numbers Woman

‘You heard me. Out of my sight!’ in a tone suggesting he would bark at someone afterwards to mop the floor where his shoes had been placed – and who could fault him? Such a man wouldn’t act without a picture of Richard taking the parcel from his contact. He’d been shopped all right, maybe a couple of times, which finally set the captain onto him. ‘Clear out.’

A hard spark in the old man’s eye indicated relish for the play whilever he stood there. Better a yes sir, not even that, only an about turn and head on fire with chagrin at his stupidity at having been caught, wondering how many seamen and officers the captain had thrown off ships during his lifetime.

That was it. No more Merchant Service for him. The more occupations you had, the longer life seemed. There was a lot to learn, so he went into the game full time, and nobody had made the connection with him yet. Few got caught out of many who did it, and he soon gave good if not plenty of unique service, especially with his intercepted wireless material. The only way to get caught – apart from redhanded, which would put him down for twenty years if the consignment was a big one – was if whoever moved the pieces wanted to get rid of him, and put a few words in the right direction. But he would never be such a one, having built up his own intelligence file, and should they ever pull that kind of stunt he’d tear such a large part of the fabric down that the sound of ripping would be in their ears forevermore. He wasn’t the naive tourist recruited in Bangkok or Turkey. If and when he got out of the trade it would be under his own terms, and in safety, the only assurance on his side that he would keep his lips tight forever.

Called to the flat on Harley Street, where the crew assembled before a trip, Richard caught a glance of deference from Mr Waistcoat, looking like a prosperous surgeon who had made pots of money pulling the tonsils out of rich Arabs. Richard called him Mr Waistcoat because he wore such a garment of the fanciest design. Richard would like to ask where he got them, except he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing one. In any case, it was best to act as if you knew your place, which at crisis time would be a more rarified locality than such a ponce could ever know about.

Waistcoat sat on the mock-Jacobean Harrods sofa and, by continuing to manicure his nails and not inviting Richard to sit down, showed his origins as rather different to those which would have led him to becoming an eminent Harley Street surgeon. Neither did the timbre of his voice suggest as much, and Richard wondered how many years in jail had been necessary to make the transformation. He was no longer a person who would feel at ease weaving through the crowds on Oxford Street, but the sort to grow pettish if a Rolls wasn’t waiting to ferry him from place to place. He was one of those who looked as if he didn’t need to shave yet shaved twice a day. As for his age he could be anything between forty and fifty, forty because he had spent twenty years inside, and fifty because he had struck it rich too young, with the canny ruthlessness never to get caught. He put his well-cared-for hands in the pockets of his open navy-blue smoking jacket so that you couldn’t see how short his nails or how burnt his fingers were.

Either way, he could be tricky and dangerous to argue with, though Richard, strengthened by years in the navy, when he hadn’t given a toss for anyone since he felt indispensable and therefore untouchable, and because his work at the wireless gave him a certain mystery (and due also to the natural power of his self-esteem) felt no need to argue. He stood, waited, and listened out of habit as much as desire, an attitude in no way allowing Waistcoat to think that not being asked to sit down meant anything to him at all.

Even so, he wasn’t surprised, or didn’t show it, when a chair was pointed out to him. ‘Take a pew.’

He didn’t care to sit when Waistcoat stayed on his feet. ‘I’d rather stand. Naval habit.’

‘I like that.’ Waistcoat leaned against the mantel shelf. ‘I like it.’

He would have to like silence as well, till he explained what he wanted. The other man, whom Richard hadn’t so far met, sat four square on an upholstered chair, by a mahogany corner cupboard whose shelves were laden with old pewter mugs and plates. Across the room was an oak chest, and an oak cupboard above containing the same sort of pewter but behind glass. Against another wall was a dwarf chest of drawers with an oval mirror on its top, the whole place like an antiques clearing house, confirming his assumption that Waistcoat had done a course or two in collectables while banged up. He felt an impulse, couldn’t think why, to come in one day with a sledge hammer and take such relics to task, half of which were no doubt fakes, the only way to get confirmation as to what sort of person Waistcoat was.

A foolish fantasy, of course. Times were good, and the future impossible to imagine, so you hoped it would go on being good, which gave no alternative except to live in the present, and since that was the only way he had ever been able to live, it posed no great difficulty.

‘It’s a short boat ride he’s got in store for us this time,’ the other man said, ‘but it ain’t through the tunnel of love.’ Richard thought if that was the case he should size the man up, who introduced himself as Jack Cannister: long greasy hair tied back in a tail, a dark three-day growth, and a ring in his left ear – steel rather than gold. He was in his late thirties, and Richard wondered where he had been dredged up from, though he had worked with worse on the boat jobs so far done. The fairly lavish payment was for sailing with such people, as much as for the quantity of stuff he helped to deliver – whatever Waistcoat might think.

‘It’ll be a little boat,’ Waistcoat said.

Cannister gave a slit-mouthed laugh. ‘Saving on petrol, are we?’

‘Shut up, prick!’ Waistcoat snapped. ‘It’s a big job for us. Simple, though, if you listen to me.’ He opened the chest of drawers, and took out a chart of the Eastern Channel, spread it on a rosewood folding table in the middle of the room. ‘Your skipper will be waiting in Rye. And he won’t be bringing back baccy for the parson nor brandy for the squire. The goodies are scattered a bit more among the population these days, if they go thieving and mugging to pay for it.’

Richard waited for him to say that England this day expected every man to do his duty, but maybe he was saving it for another time. He walked to Victoria, liking the exercise, a hundred and twenty paces to the minute. Good to rattle the limbs and test the breath, knowing he could coax some of it back on the train going home.

The mission would be an easy one, Waistcoat had said, a piece of piss, though it didn’t do to think so till it was over. Three men on a thirty-two-foot boat sailed out of Rye Harbour, set for a weekend of pleasure in Boulogne, where they would pick up a consignment and come back as if on the last leg home. When the motor got them clear of the canalised river Cannister hoisted the sail, and the skipper, whose name was Scuddilaw, gave a course. The sea, fair to calm, made progress pleasant if not easy. Richard felt sufficient apprehension to know they would bring the job off, though the others, half tanked up even when coming on board, fetched a crate of lager and sent empty tins flying over the stern.

Visibility was soon a bit off centre, when they needed to cross two lanes of Channel shipping, but Richard found the beacons on the radio, separated Boulogne from the rest, and called a course to set them straight. Scuddilaw scoffed at his fancy position system from the Consol beacon in Norway, and said he didn’t need it. He could get there blindfold. ‘And as for beacons, you can stuff ‘em. Just keep your eyes skinned for the light. My glasses aren’t as good as they used to be.’

Cannister altered course towards the wake of a tanker without being told. The weather worsened, the boat chopping up and down, but at the entrance to Boulogne harbour, nearly four hours from Rye, Richard felt obliged to do things by the book and put on the courtesy act, which meant getting on deck to haul up the French tricolour on the starboard halyard. He thought the Jolly Roger would suit them better, but the rain was horizontal, and the rope tangled, became stuck halfway, so he brought it down again and went through a clumsy unthreading with wet hands. Scud called that he should wipe his arse on it, but he reduced time into slow motion and threw back the hood of his anorak so that he could at least see, till rope and flag slid up the mast without hindrance.

They found a berth in the yacht harbour and tied up. Cannister went loping into town for a few flagons of red wine, to drink while in port, as well as get fags and booze for their duty-free, while Richard and Scud sorted out the galley to produce a fry-up and brew tea. The French harbourman called to collect their dues. ‘We’ll have to stay up all night,’ Scud said when he’d gone. ‘They could bring the stuff any time, and we have to be on hand to stow it safe.’

Richard took the weather forecast in morse from Portishead, the paper on his knee, legs twisted at the chart table so that the others could get up and down. They didn’t like his news, that by tomorrow the wind would blow up to five or six, maybe on to gale. ‘Whatever it is, we’ve got to clear out.’

While steering outward bound across the harbour Scud was suddenly aware that an Enterprise cross-Channel ferry was coming straight at them – and not too far off, at that. Richard, cursing the French flag down, heard Cannister shout through the squall: ‘Wipe the wet off yer glasses, Skip. We’ve got a visitor at the door.’

The huge white building, all lit up and merry, came head on for the crunch, and Richard thought, well if this is how it’s got to end, so be it. The life jacket might just keep him afloat, but at least he could swim. People fishing at the end of the pier looked on, as well they might, laughing at such stupidity, or misfortune.

How they missed it he would never know – God protect me from such shipmates – but Scuddilaw jeered as the escarpment went by, comic-book passengers with big eyes and red hands looking at them through the murk – and as welcome a slice of luck as Richard had so far known.

Bracing themselves for the wash, the boat went up and down like a piece of balsa, though it was nothing to when open sea struck them beyond the harbour walls, a prelude to the leg back, which was the worst small-boat journey he’d ever put up with, eight hours of corkscrewing through high waves, when the next was always hungry enough to tip them over and under.

After four hours edging way from the French coast Scuddilaw set the engine going while Richard pulled down the jib and put two reefs in the main sail, but left it up to steady the yacht under power. They stayed by the wheel, leaving chaos below deck to look after itself: better to be in the open than go down and sick your guts up, which didn’t stop Cannister spewing before they were halfway across. Richard, who boasted guts of concrete, said it must have been the meal they had in town – when Scuddilaw went to the rail as well.

Under the lee of Dungeness the sea was quieter, all of them happy to reach the welcoming arms of the river mouth that had been in sight for over an hour. The tide took them neatly between the red on port and green on starboard, and suddenly into calm water. ‘We won’t stop for the customs,’ Scud said. ‘We’ll do a Lord Nelson, and go straight on into town. Let the bastards come for us.’

The neat concrete walls to either side, holding the mounds of shingle and sand beyond, channelled them reassuringly back into nanny England, though adrenalin beat through Richard at the thought of what they carried. Even before reaching the berth a man from the customs post followed them along the straight road on his low-powered motorbike.

Tying up was quick and efficient, slotting in without trouble. ‘Here he comes,’ Scud said. ‘Let me talk.’

‘Didn’t you see my signal? You should have stopped at the harbour,’ were his first tetchy words.

‘Come aboard. To tell you the truth, we didn’t. We’ve had one hell of a bloody crossing. I think none of us had eyes except for the berth. We’re just about done for. It took eight hours from Boulogne. Some pleasure trip that was. I thought it was going to be the last.’

He looked down into the saloon, and Richard could have laughed: a mass of dirty bedding, food, pots and pans, radio, charts and logbooks, all Swiss-rolled into a disgusting mess. ‘What do you have on board?’

‘Our duty-free’s somewhere down there,’ Scud told him.

‘I’ll get it.’ Cannister jumped up. ‘If you like. It’s in them plastic bags.’

The customs man was halfway down. Let him cut into it if he was in the mind to. He’d need a sharp knife. Going the rest of the way, he opened a cupboard or two, and came back up. He might have been suspicious, but couldn’t take the boat to pieces on his own. ‘Next time, stop at my signal.’

When the noise of his half-stroke put-put bike diminished along the road they brought out the bundles. Rain came warm and wetter than wet from seawards, but they had something to sing about as they took them under their coats to Cannister’s Land-Rover so that he could set off for London.

‘He’d never have found it, anyway,’ Scud said when he and Richard sat down to a meal in the galley after a quick tidying. ‘I’ve never known such weather for this time of year.’

‘Maybe that’s what saved us.’ The thought of surviving another such trip put him in a low mood, yet they were all the same, and none exactly alike. As the spaghetti and rich meat sauce went down, helped by two bottles of wine, he could only look forward to collecting his pay. Hard to know how Waistcoat had been so sure they would accomplish what he’d sent them to do in such foul weather.

‘Bad trip, I hear?’ Waistcoat said the next afternoon.

‘It was all right.’

‘Smoke, if you want to.’ He offered a cigar. ‘I’m glad you were with them. You might not think you’re essential, but you are. You keep them in order, just by being there.’

So that was it. Thank you very much, fuck face. Without him they might run off with the stuff.

‘Or do something silly,’ Waistcoat said. ‘You never know.’ He flashed the gold lighter under Richard’s cigar. ‘But a chap like you, well, they feel safe. Anyway, it’s good to have a radio officer on board.’ He took an envelope from the pocket of his smoking jacket – plum coloured this time. ‘I hope this keeps you happy.’

Best to be a man of few words. Make him think he’s got a bargain. ‘Thanks.’

‘The next trip will be in a bigger league altogether. Much larger boat. All engine power. We’ll fly to Malaga, and bring it back from Gib.’

‘I’d like a date.’

‘Don’t know myself yet.’

‘As soon as you can, let me have it, then.’

Meeting over. The next stage was to face Amanda’s righteous anger for not having told her where he was going and how long he would be away. He brought that one off as well, in spite of them screaming at each other that there was nothing else to do but end the marriage.

‘Next time,’ he said, a shake in his hands as he fitted the corkscrew into a bottle of wine from Boulogne, ‘and for me anyway it’ll be hemlock before wedlock.’ Which made her laugh, the crisis over, leaving him to wonder how many more times he would get away with it.

He sat again at the radio and checked all frequencies. Nothing was coming through that could be used. At half-past six everyone had signed off, so he picked up the phone and dialled Laura’s number from his address book. She had a young woman’s voice, and seemed more than happy when he said his name. ‘If it’s all right with you I’ll knock on your door tomorrow evening, sometime after supper.’

‘About eight o’clock? You’ll be able to have coffee. Howard will be thrilled when I tell him.’

EIGHT

Sunspots had given so much trouble that Howard hadn’t heard Moscow for a week, no sound of Vanya on his usual qui vive. A wobbly-wobbly note, like the noise of a bathtub eternally filling, might turn into his reappearance, but the sound died, though he listened assiduously and long for anything intelligible. Ionised gases and the sun’s ultraviolet rays in the upper atmosphere, bending the radio beams back to earth, were troublesome at dawn and dusk, and solar flares played havoc for days.

The magician’s cabin was full of complications, a test bed of patience needed even from the most devoted. He became angry when things weren’t perfect, always hoping for something, maybe a signal from God’s miracle department saying that the application in triplicate to get his sight back had been approved. Neither the in-tray nor the out-tray held any such plan. The condition had been so long with him that he was beyond that kind of hope, more an animal longing he ought not to need anymore, but necessary for him to go on living.

You could always hope, because sunspots altered by the hour. A special radio station devoted to news of them morsed out periodical bulletins from a place called Boulder:

‘FORECAST SUN ACT LOW TO MODERATE. MAG FIELD ACTIVE TO WEAK STORM. HF CONDITIONS NORMAL TO MODERATE,’ followed by a long dash from the beacon.

Atmospheric conditions varied with the equinox, yet he doubted this was the reason for Moscow’s demise, because certain random whistles and occasional taps at the key were beginning to come back, or the tuning-up of transmitters (that fizzled to nothing) or muffled voices too far out to identify.

Either there was no work for Vanya, or no planes were flying because of bad weather, or everyone was on holiday, or the system had been discontinued for lack of use, or the frequency had been changed for security reasons, or the transmitter had broken down and Vanya had gone back to his village till a telegram arrived by landline saying the equipment had been mended.

Whatever the reason, Moscow came back, and Vanya was his unmistakable, competent, idiosyncratic self. Howard’s typed log soon filled with latitudes and longitudes, and the serial numbers of Russian aircraft grew into a column on his typewriter. He recalled kids on street corners before the war writing on penny jotters the number of each car that passed, a futile pastime he’d laughed at, but which he now seemed to be following with his collection of Russian plane numbers.

Last year at the end of the tourist season Laura had taken him to Paris, and he resisted the temptation at both airports of asking her to note the numbers of any Aeroflot planes she might see on the tarmac. At London Heathrow, going through the security screen, the man took the morse key and oscillator from Howard’s bag and asked what it was for.

‘Looks like one of them little tap-tap things,’ the girl assistant said.

Howard explained that indeed it was, and gave a demonstration to prove it was no part of a secret terrorist weapon.

‘I’ve always admired blokes who can use one of them,’ the man said. ‘It must be wonderful to send messages like that.’

Howard was gratified at being wished a good journey.

‘He’s blind, as well,’ he heard the girl say. ‘Did you notice?’ as Laura led him away for coffee.

At evening in the hotel he took out his key to send an item or two to himself. Rich days of different air and unusual food, and going around galleries with a hired commentary plugged into his ear – perfect for a blind man – demanded some therapy before going to bed, a few paragraphs of impressions:

‘Light comes out of darkness as I see the paintings, according to colours conjured up by myself. The shapes, too, face and bodies, seascapes, buildings and sunsets and harvest fields. I smelled petrol but we leaned over the bridge and caught an odour of water. I touched the stones of Notre Dame, their surface like the sides of a well-used matchbox. Inside, the world of peace expanded in all directions.’

Sitting in a tearoom on the rue de Rivoli, after a couple of exhausting hours in the Jeu de Paume, he heard the German Numbers Woman counting in her precise and authoritarian voice. He flushed red and felt a thudding beat of the heart. How could she be in Paris? Her employers were so happy with her year-in and year-out duty at the microphone that she had been awarded a special excursion to France. They even paid a woman to look after the children while she was away.

Laura was frightened when he half stood for no reason, clattering his cup, a spoon falling. ‘Oh, it’s her!’ he cried, then sat, because the recitation of numbers had stopped, the bell of the till rang her off. ‘Does she have children?’

She couldn’t think what he meant. ‘Who?’

‘The woman going out.’

‘She’s only a German tourist.’

‘What was she like? Tell me.’

‘There was a man with her. They were deciding what tip to leave. I hardly saw her. Tall and blonde, I think.’

His hands shook. Something had upset him, the heart pounding through his shirt. Her happiness was in knowing he couldn’t see her tears, surreptitiously dabbed with the napkin. ‘What was she wearing?’

‘I’m not sure. I only saw her in the mirror. A red see-through mac.’

‘Did she have a hat on?’

Such holidays were difficult, but she wouldn’t give them up. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Weren’t you sure?’ He turned his head in the direction of the door, hard to stop himself blundering out to follow her. Perhaps she was in Paris with the American boyfriend he had given her, and someone in her small German town was taking care of the children as a favour, without payment. From then on he imagined her a few paces behind, or one room in front of them in a museum. Where had she gone? Useless and hopeless. He would never catch her in the crowds. The darkness grew more sombre than it had for weeks.

Laura noted that for the rest of the holiday he was edgy, moody, and apologetic about his behaviour, which upset her even more. Back home he couldn’t find the German Numbers Woman on the airwaves for a week, proof if he needed any that she was still in Paris.

Hearing Vanya again was like resuming touch with an old friend. Maybe he hadn’t been off the air at all, simply that his services were so infrequently needed that Howard hadn’t tuned in at the right time. As simple as that. He often lost patience while waiting for transmissions, moving from atmospheric emptiness to a search for equally interesting items, of which there were still many. But here was Vanya, bouncing out his wares with the usual alacrity.

Astute due to his aircrew training, Howard made guesses as to where planes were going to and coming from. If a plane received two positions within a certain time he could, with Laura’s help (though he called for it as little as possible) calculate the airspeed and work out the plane’s direction, and speculate on what was being carried if it was not travelling on a usual airline route. One vector suggested a flight to Tripoli in Libya, taking God knew what, then Vienna, to bring back vintage bottles of the Blue Danube maybe, another to China for chopsticks and tinned dog, one over the Himalayas to India for tea, and one to a place in Afghanistan, no doubt a bit of private enterprise for drugs.

He plotted one to Archangel, and one to Spitzbergen, while still another was on its way to Yakutsk for a cargo of smoked reindeer meat. The speed of one plane was calculated as so fast, at 1175 miles per hour, that it must have been the Konkordski, going from Rostov to Samarkand. Another plane trundled along so slowly it could only be piston engined – or the wind was so strong it almost stood still. Or was it going in circles? Or it had landed somewhere and taken off again between the two calls. Or Vanya’s mechanism had got the second position wrong, which sometimes happened.

He went into the wireless room instead of waiting for Laura to read him the newspaper he had just brought back, and picked up stations so far west they were still belting out good mornings. With others it was good afternoon, so by knowing the time zone of their messages he could guess the longitude. The radio officer of a ship coming up Channel fixed his oscillators to tinkle out the first bars of ‘My Darling Clementine’, a ruse to wake the coast stations. Another ship’s operator was sending ‘Three Blind Mice’ to get himself into a social mood. Howard decided to concentrate on the eight-megacycle band. Let the spectrum live for me. I don’t care when I die. Short wave will go on pulsating after I’m dead, and even then my soul will find a home between the earth and the heaviside layer.