Be Shot For Six Pence (18 page)

“Would you mind telling me what the devil you mean.”

“I shall tell you nothing if you make a scene about it.”

“You’ll get no scene from me,” I said stiffly. “Just tell me the story. Where did you find the lighter?”

“It was picked up, on Pleasure Island, by one of my men, on the night Studd-Thompson disappeared. We knew it was his. Trüe had seen it many times—”

“And you had it planted on Messelen so that I should see it and lose my head and kill him. Before he could have me killed.”

“Your synopsis is accurate, with one exception. I did not for a moment imagine that you would lose your head. Or, if you lost it I knew that you would recover it very quickly. Perhaps you would be agreeable now to telling me what happened last night.”

“Why should I?”

“Why should you not?”

“Because—” Fury came bubbling up in a great cold wave, like the seventh wave of seven, taking away my breath, overwhelming me, blinding me—”because for all I know, as soon as it served your purpose you will inform the police about me, as easily and as quickly and as treacherously as you have broken every promise you have made since I came here—”

“And did I ask you to come?”

That pricked the bubble. I subsided into a chair, feeling limp, and with nothing left to say.

“You must also remember—” having achieved his effect Lady performed another of his lightning changes and became sweet reason itself—”that you who are, you will pardon the expression, an amateur, have elected to play a part in a match of professionals. A match which is played to its own rules, of which you know nothing at all.”

“And want to know nothing,” I mumbled.

“Nevertheless I will explain the rules to you. I think you have earned it. The first is that you trust no one unless you are forced to. The second is that you tell no one anything unless it pays you to do so. Pays
you,
not him. When an opponent at bridge gives up a trick, you do not say: ‘How kind of him.’ You ask yourself: ‘Why did he do it? What future advantage does he hope to gain?’ The third—”

“Spare me the third.”

“The third is even more important. You start from the assumption that anyone might betray you. Anyone. Not only your opponents but your associates as well. In any organisation such as this it pays to base every plan on the absolute assumption that your opponents will have succeeded in introducing one of their side in to your team, or more simply, in corrupting one of your team.”

“Like Major Piper’s blonde secretary.”

“Oh, yes. Of course, Major Piper knows she is a spy. And by now, she knows that he knows. Her employers would replace her, if they could, but Major Piper will not dismiss her because he knows where he is with her.”

“Also,” I suggested, “because she is his mistress.”

Lady considered this. “I can see no logical connection,” he said.

“I have always been lead to suppose that the female spy seduced the Intelligence Officer so that he would babble his secrets to her when in her arms.”

“Your ideas are old fashioned. Now when I am in bed with a woman I never speak at all. I—”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll leave it there. I take it, from what you say, that you have a traitor here.”

“Of course.”

“And you know who it is?”

“Well, I have a very shrewd suspicion. After all, the field is not wide. It might be our host and hostess. Unlikely, perhaps? I agree. It might be their son, the Herr General. Or the dutiful Gheorge. Or the experienced Lisa. Or the so sweet and so disingenuous Trüe.” His tongue flickered for a moment between his teeth. “Or it might have been Studd-Thompson. Or it might be you.”

“If a joke, a poor one.”

“Or it might be me?”

“I hope you’re not serious.”

“Of course I’m serious. Put yourself in the shoes of our opponents. If they wish to buy themselves an ally in our organisation, what more natural and effective than to choose the head of it.”

“Really,” I said, weakly. “If you had been a traitor, you’d hardly have taken the risk of suggesting the idea to me.”

“I fear that your bridge playing has led me to overestimate your mental ability. However, to business. I have a proposition to make to you. Much of what I have said has been leading up to it.”

“Almost everything you have said has been calculated to make me distrust you.”

“Exactly. That is why I put my proposition in the form of a bargain.”

“I have nothing to sell.”

“That was perhaps true, yesterday. Now it is not true. It is absolutely essential to me to know what did happen last night, after you left the cinema. You are unlikely to tell me of your own free will and I have no way of making you talk, or no quick and easy way. Therefore I will buy the information.”

“For what?”

“In exchange I will tell you exactly what is going on here.”

“I have been told two different stories already. How am I to know that the third will be the truth?”

“Even you should, I think, be able to recognise the truth when you hear it.”

“It has a certain rarity value round here,” I agreed. “Very well.”

I was aware that I was placing my neck at his disposal, but there was a certain relief in getting the story told.

Lady made me describe the house, the grounds and the wood. And then identified them to his own satisfaction on one of the large-scale maps on the wall.

He did not seem interested in the precise location of the body. “A vineyard,” he said. “I think that was a fortunate inspiration. The vignerons are very regular in their habits. And they have no reason to dig deep. Tell me again about the car.”

I went over that part of it again.

“You parked the car outside his flat? Just as he had left it? And you are certain you left no prints? On the gear lever? On the brake?”

I thought hard. “No, I polished both of them. And I drove wearing gloves. That must have rubbed off any marks that were left.”

“Yes. A certain amount will depend on how soon someone drives a cart down that track. What about the lighter?”

I took it out of my pocket and banded it over.

“The incinerator, I fear,” said Lady. “Am I now to fulfil my part of the bargain?”

“If you please.”

“For myself, I should be delighted. It was you that I was thinking of. What I have to tell you really
is
a secret. It is at present known, in full, to perhaps six people in Hungary, and a dozen in the West.”

“I should feel privileged to join the circle.”

“Yes,” said Lady. “Do you carry poison?”

My feelings must have been apparent because Lady smiled. “It is quite a simple precaution,” he said. “No real trouble, and not as dramatic as it sounds. Studd-Thompson, I know, did so. In a very small, metal, container which could be braced without discomfort to the inside of his mouth. He took it out at night, I understand.”

“Just like dentures,” I said. “Suppose you tell me the secret and let me judge what precautions are necessary for its preservation.”

“Very well,” Lady sighed. “You will understand me when I say that military espionage is now almost as out of date as the bow and arrow. The last people to recognise this are, of course, the military intelligence departments. But it is nevertheless a fact. The days when Mata Hari lavished her charms upon senior generals and extracted from them, between the sheets, the tonnage and performance of the latest tank are, alas, gone. Nowadays if we want a military secret we buy it. It is a question only of paying sufficient. Either in money, or in kind. And even if this were not so, you will agree that it is futile to expend blood and effort in obtaining information which will be out of date six months after you have obtained it.”

“So what do you do?”

Lady said: “It has been called psychological warfare and it has been called propaganda. In Communist circles it is sometimes referred to as mass indoctrination. I have a simpler and easier word for it. I call it interference.”

“Right,” I said. “They interfere with you. You interfere with them. More particularly you interfere with Hungary. You throw Spanners into Works.”

“Exactly.”

“And what particular spanners are you now engaged in throwing?”

“It is, of course, axiomatic that you attack an opponent where he is weakest. The weak spot of the regime in Hungary, as you may know, is the industrial worker. He has a scarcity value. There is not enough of him to go round. It gives him a bargaining position.”

“Well that’s the way it works in the weak-kneed Western democracies,” I agreed, “but I fancied that totalitarian countries enjoyed certain powers of persuasion.”

“You can take your horses to the water. They will not always drink. Do you know that last winter, so short were they of miners, the Budapest police were driven to round up criminals, gypsies – prostitutes even? It was not a success.”

“I should have thought the miners would have loved it.”

“After a number of unfortunate incidents the women, anyway, had to be released. But you can judge from that – which, by the way, is absolutely true, I have a most reliable informant in the coal mining centre at Pec – how vulnerable the Government is likely to prove on its industrial front.”

I thought about it. It seemed to tie in with what the Baron had told me.

“Just what are you planning?”

“A General Strike.”

The words floated quietly out. From Lady to me. Into my head and out again. Through the windows, over the trees, across the mountains, across the plains.

The words turned into ideas and the ideas into pictures. Half a dozen men in a small back room, smoking and talking. A knot of workmen meeting in the shadowy corner of a huge workshop. A crowd in an open place, in the rain, listening to a man in a rain coat, talking, talking, talking. The rain drumming on the cobble stones. The crowd surging and breaking. The drumming of the rain changed to the metallic chatter of machine guns.

A man screaming.

“How can you keep such a thing secret?”

“You cannot, altogether,” agreed Lady. “The Hungarian Government know of the danger of industrial unrest. They must be aware that agitators are increasingly active. They may even suspect that they are being subsidised and encouraged from abroad. But exactly what we plan and when and how – that much I think is still hidden from them.”

“Do they know of
your
connection with it?”

“There are signs of uneasiness. The troop movements I mentioned look like an attempt to seal this particular section of the frontier. And yet, I don’t know. We shall see.”

“When and where does it start?”

“That is a thing that David Szormeny would give up to the half of his treasury to know. I think you would be happier without the information.”

On reflection I agreed.

I can’t remember if anything more was said. I had a lot to think about, and I think better if I move, so I walked in the garden, in the twilight. The bats were out, swooping and fluttering. I find them no more sinister than mice or cockroaches. My cousin Michael’s old rectory is full of all three.

My mind was on strikes. I had never considered them before from the view point of the strike-maker. The fomenting of strikes was traditionally one of the things that the Communists did to us. Not we to them. And yet why not? If that was the new warfare, must we not learn how to wage it?

Not trumpet and drum, but the manifesto. For powder and steel, the ballot box and the vote. For poison gas, the human voice. Arise, Hungarian proletariat. Cast off the chains of your bureaucratic masters.

After dinner I made myself unpopular again by refusing to take a hand at bridge. I walked out and sat on the terrace. What I needed to do was think.

Mostly I thought about Lady. It gave me an odd and unpleasant feeling to think that he should have used me so calculatingly. Something of surprise, something of annoyance, but a distinct touch of fear, too, no getting away from it.

That he should have sent me out, so cold-bloodedly, hoping that I would kill Messelen for him, but not caring if, in the process, I lived or died! Granted he had no reasons to love me, for I had butted, unasked, into the delicate mechanism he was controlling. But that he should have commuted this into a positive feeling of dislike was the uncomfortable thing. Had he disliked Colin in the same way? It was quite possible. Despite his frankness that afternoon he had not really explained what Colin’s part in the enterprise was meant to be. Had Colin outstayed his welcome too, and been expended by his host in some equally cold and forlorn experiment?

I got up and looked through the window. Lady was sitting with his back to me. As I watched he selected, with great care, the two of clubs from the remaining cards in his hand and laid it on the table.

Lisa, who had taken my place, looked unhappily at it, dithered for a bit, and played the ace.

I dragged my feet upstairs to my room. I was confident that I should get no sleep.

When I opened my door I stopped. There was a patch of lightness on my bed where none should have been.

“Don’t turn on the light,” said Trüe.

When I got further into the room and my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw that she was sitting up, in the middle of my bed, wearing my pyjamas.

“Who told you you could wear those?”

“No one.”

“Take them off at once.”

“But of course.”

I was wrong. I slept very soundly that night. And for some nights to come.

I am certain that outwardly my relations with Trüe did not appear to change at all. But Lisa, of course, knew.

Only once, in the course of that week, did she say anything about it. I was alone on the terrace and she came and sat down beside me.

“You find Trüe sympathetic,” she said.

“Very.”

“Be warned then. She had Pisces in her horoscope.”

“And that, I suppose, makes her a slippery customer.”

“You must not laugh at the planets.”

“I don’t laugh at them,” I said. “I just don’t believe in them.”

“How can you not believe them, when what they say comes true?”