Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (21 page)

‘I know,’ said Stilton. ‘Surprised me too – but that was the tipoff. Down with the down-and-outs in St Martin-in-the-Fields.’

A young curate approached them – the permanent smile of the righteous rictus-stapled to his lips.

‘Can I help you? It’s not often we get a visit from the Constabulary these days.’

Stilton didn’t bat an eyelid at this. Just flashed his warrant card and said, ‘D’ye know Fish Wally?’

The young priest beamed. ‘I should have known. Our Mr Wallfiçz. There he is, right at the back under the pavement arches.’ He pointed down the crypt. Cal and Stilton stepped
over the prostrate, drunken, incontinent bodies and headed towards the glow of a kerosene lamp.

A ragged man sat bolt upright on an upturned crate. Half a dozen newspapers scattered around his feet, another clutched in hands that seemed to Cal to be more claw than flesh, the arc of the
lamp shining upon on it. But he wasn’t reading it. He stared off into a lost middle distance, lost in some landscape of the mind.

Stilton waved a hand in front of his eyes. Fish Wally blinked once and said, ‘Stilton? Long time no Stilton. I had heard you were looking for me.’

Stilton pulled another beer crate closer and plonked himself down on it. Cal stood back, half in the shadows, outside of the small circle of light, watching.

‘If you knew I were looking, why didn’t you call me? For that matter you were supposed to tell us if you moved digs – but you didn’t, did you?’

Fish Wally looked lazily at Stilton, heavy-lidded eyes half closed.

‘The answer is the same to both questions. I have other things on my mind.’

‘Such as?’

‘We’re about to be invaded. That may mean nothing to you. You come from a complacent race. We Poles have seen it all before – I somewhat more recently than 1066.’

‘All the same, you should have told us. You don’t want me reporting this to the Squadron Leader, do you?’

‘Do your worst, Stilton. He knows I am kosher. And so do you. You have found me – you have the larger part of my attention, for the while at least – what else
matters?’

‘Since you ask . . .’

Stilton laid out the photos across his knees, on top of Fish Wally’s newspaper.

‘These two were in the Marquess of Lincoln, Monday last. So were you.’

Fish Wally picked up the photographs, angled them into the light.

‘The young one – the blond one. He asked me to help him get a room. The older one merely said he might have to move in the foreseeable future. I told him to tell me later – I
do not deal in maybe. I never saw him again.’

‘You’re sure it was them?’

‘The scar on the blond puzzles me. It is a likeness this sketch, no more – it has not caught the man.’

Stilton twisted his neck to look up at Cal. The first acknowledgement he’d made of his presence since they crossed the room.

‘Never mind,’ he said to Fish Wally. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

‘Yes – it’s him.’

‘And the older one?’

‘Definitely him.’

‘Good – now, did you get the young one a room?’

‘Of course. I took him to my cousin.’

‘Your cousin?’

‘My cousin. Why else did you think I came to London? Did you think I washed up on these shores like Gulliver in Brobdingnag? Stilton, I told you last year I had family. I have a cousin
Casimir – been here since 1932. A naturalised Englishman. He lets rooms. I send him people from time to time. Mostly I send him Poles. But we would consider any refugee.’

‘I’m not addled, Wally – I remember you had a cousin. I tried to find him three or four days back. I don’t recall that he let rooms.’

‘In those days he didn’t. He had one room on Fulham High Street. Things changed after the fall of France. You know that as well as I. We have lived in a new world ever since. The
blond man said he was Czech. Sounded Czech to me. So we arranged to meet outside the London Palladium just after closing time. I took him round to Cash Wally.’

‘Cash Wally?’

‘Casimir – Casimir Wallfiçz. Hence, since yours is a tongue that must mangle what it cannot spell, “Cash Wally”. A man aptly named. A greedy man in every respect.
A mean man. I live on the handouts he gives me and the work I can pick up.’

Fish Wally held up his mangled hands.

‘You will appreciate, Walter, that is not much.’

‘And where does Cash Wally have this house of exiles?’

‘23b Marshall Street – the one in Soho. As you would say, spitting distance from the Palladium. I even know the room number. He is in four – the second-floor front.’

Stilton quickly scribbled down the address.

‘And you Wally, where are you living now?’

‘I have a new room in Drury Lane.’

‘From Drury Lane you could shelter in the tube at Holborn or Covent Garden or the Aldwych. Why on earth would you want to come down here? If your cousin pays you a wage and you’ve a
room of your own, why here, why down here with the drunks and the tramps?’

Fish Wally looked off into the crypt – stared a moment at the ranting monologuist, then fixed his gaze on Stilton and sighed. It seemed to Cal that through his precise, cultured English he
was talking to Stilton as though he were an exasperating child to whom he must state the obvious once too often.

‘I like it here. It reminds me of the last time I saw Poland. Before the Germans came we were workers. Teachers, engineers, policemen even. After the Germans came we were fighters. Then we
lost. We became runners. Some of us ran all the way to Hungary, some of us ran all the way to the sea. I stayed with my unit. Thirty of us, retreating north, we tramped five hundred miles on foot,
dodging Germans every step of the way. Those who fed and housed us the Germans shot – so we took no food or shelter. We lived off the land. And when the winter froze the soil, we starved. We
sank to the bottom of Poland. And most of us died there, and some of us went mad. I saw half a dozen comrades turn mad as hatters. My last sight of my brother Stanislaus was him standing in a
Polish forest ranting at the trees like that witless idiot over there. We became raggedymen, all of us raggedymen. We looked, we sounded, we smelt no different from this lot. We were the dregs of
Poland, the last scum of a scorched earth. ‘And I alone am escaped to tell thee.’ To tell thee, Stilton, to tell the Squadron Leader. You took me in. England took me in. And I sank to
the bottom of England. And so you find me here, as deep as I can go. And now it is England’s turn. Soon England will fall before the Panzers. Tell me, Stilton, how deep can you go? Try it
– learn. I am here to replenish my sense of reality. I have lived too easy this last year or more. I have a pillow for my head and coins to jingle in my pocket – but I can go deep,
straight to the bottom. One day soon we will all know this madness. How deep can you go, Walter?’

Outside Cal said, ‘What was that about?’

‘My fault, lad. I shouldn’t have asked. Not as if I haven’t heard it before. It’s pretty much what he said day after day when we had him out at Burnham-on-Crouch last
year. It’s . . . it’s Wally’s vision, I suppose. He’s cast himself as the wandering Jew. At least the Catholic version of it.’

‘Or Ishmael. “And I alone am escaped to tell thee.” That’s
Moby Dick
. I know, I skipped to the last page when I realised I was never goingtoget
throughitall.’

‘Oh,’ said Stilton, a bit dismissively. ‘I’d just assumed he was quoting the Bible. No point in skipping to the end o’ that, is there? We all know how it
ends.’

Marshall Street was as close to the heart of things as could be. Regent Street was only a few yards west, Oxford Street a few yards north. Stilton drove in silence. There was a
new tenacity to the man – just when Cal thought they’d both been flagging, the prospect of getting close to the quarry had invigorated him. He wished he felt the same. He thought of the
prospect of meeting Wolf again with a mixture of sadness and fear. He voiced none of it. Better by far to let silence prevail. Anxieties could only alarm Stilton – as would questions, and
there was one question he was biting back. If he’d been the one to talk to Fish Wally, he’d’ve asked why total strangers came to him for help, and how they knew where to find him.
Could be Fish Wally might not know the answer, but that did not invalidate the question. It nagged. It burst the logic of pursuit they had set up for themselves. Walter, after all, had been
emphatic. Wally was clean. And if they really were only minutes away from catching up with Stahl, what did it matter?

23b Marshall Street was a ramshackle house, but at least it still stood. Cal estimated it to be about as old as his country. They were probably laying these bricks as Jefferson pondered life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Three items currently in short supply.

The door looked rotten, as though one good kick from Stilton would send it flying from its hinges. It wasn’t locked. Stilton pushed gently at it – a miasma of steam and frying fat
filled the air.

‘Reckon we caught Cash Wally at his trough,’ Stilton whispered, and walked softly towards the back of the house with Cal treading on his heels. The trail of steam led them straight
to the kitchen. It was a filthy parody of Edna Stilton’s kitchen. A big room, a centre table, strewn with dishes waiting to be washed. A patina of grease on every surface, into which months
of dust had settled, giving solid, inanimate household objects an illusion of life – they had fur, so they might breathe or move also. In the fireplace stood a three-legged gas stove, propped
up at its fourth corner by a pile of bricks. And on the hob a pan of potatoes boiled furiously, while three sausages nestled deep and crisp in a cooling pan of lard.

‘Good God,’ Stilton said softly. ‘How can he live like this?’

‘And where is he?’ Cal added. ‘It’s like we’ve pulled up alongside the
Marie Celeste
.’

Stilton beckoned to Cal, they stepped into the stairwell.

‘Is our man likely to be hostile?’ he whispered.

‘Walter – I’ve no idea. He’s on our side. If that makes any sense.’

‘Thenweplayit byear.’

Cal rather thought that this was what they’d been doing for a week already. He followed Walter up the stairs, step for step, pausing as he paused at every crack and creak to listen for any
response. The house was deathly silent, much as Cal resisted the adverb.

Stilton stood on the far side of the door. He rapped on it. There was no answer. There was no sound of any kind. He rapped again. Then he turned the doorknob and pushed. The door swung in onto
an empty room, banging back against the wall. Cal put his head round the door jamb. Stilton leaned in from the other side.

‘Bugger,’ Stilton said.

They stepped into the room. In complete contrast to the kitchen this room had been cleaned and dusted. The bed stripped. Every surface wiped. You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes’
magnifying glass to know there’d be no fingerprints. Stahl had left no tracks. Not a scrap of paper, a burnt match or a bus ticket. It looked to Cal like a thorough, professional job. This
man meant to vanish.

All the same, Stilton peeked under the bed, opened the closet, pulled out the drawers in the dresser and uttered the conclusion Cal had reached minutes before.

‘He’s flown the coop. Not so much as a toothbrush or a pair of socks.’

‘Always one step ahead of us,’ said Cal.

They heard the slam of a door downstairs. They looked at each other. Stilton all but tiptoed to the landing. The sound of someone banging about in the kitchen drifted up the staircase.

Stilton put a finger to his lips and set off down the stairs. At the next landing Cal grabbed him by the arm and whispered, ‘Let me do it.’

‘It’s not Stahl – that would be too good to be true,’ Stilton whispered back.

‘No matter. We’re a team, aren’t we? My turn.’

Stilton yielded silently and let Cal pass. Down to the ground floor on feet of glass. A gentle twist of the door handle, and a sudden thrust. A spidery, thin man in a tatty sweater, all elbows
and knuckles, his hair standing up as though galvanised, was seated at the table in front of a plate piled high with mashed potato, the mash peppered with sausages – and a brand new bottle of
the ubiquitous British brown sauce clutched in his hand ready to gloop.

‘Casimir Wallfiçz?’ Cal said breezily.

The man stared at him, his hand still poised over the base of the bottle ready to give it the baby-bottom slap that would send the sauce gushing over his feast.

‘Wod?’

‘You are Casimir Wallfiçz, the proprietor of this establishment?’

‘Proprietor?’ Cash Wally said, a much more heavily accented voice than his cousin’s. ‘Proprietor be buggered. Is my house, I own it lock, stock and sausage. Now who you
and what you want? As if I couldn’t guess.’

‘Calvin Cormack, US Intelligence. My colleague, Chief Inspector Stilton. You don’t mind if we join you?’

Cal snatched the plate from him. Slammed himself down in a chair and said, ‘The guy in number four. He checked out. When?’

‘How should I know?’

Cash Wally reached for the plate. Cal held it away from him at arm’s length, like a schoolyard bully teasing a child.

‘You know, Casimir, I think you know damn well, because you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who lets his lodgers do moonlight flits. Besides, you’ve two pound notes and a
ten-shilling note stuck behind the clock on the mantelpiece, so somebody’s just paid their bill.’

Cash Wally tried to look stubborn. He succeeded only in looking hungry. Cal picked up a sausage and bit into it. From the look on his face, Cal might just as well have bitten into Wally. It was
agony, the tortured passion of the eating man.

Cal wolfed the sausage. Cash Wally moaned out loud. His head shook from side to side, his eyes rolled. As Cal finished the second, Cash Wally beat the table with his hands and screamed.

‘No. No. Nooooooo!!!!’

Cal took up the third sausage, worked it around in the neck of the sauce bottle, worked up a good head of gloop, and pointed at him with it. He dared not look at Stilton – so much as a
smile from Stilton and he knew he’d corpse.