The Paper Chase (14 page)

Applegate had half-expected that he would be trailed up to London, was half-disappointed that he had seen no sign of a trailer. Wandering round the bookstalls at Charing Cross Station he looked again for Craigen or the boy Arthur. He found nothing to disturb him and turned again to the bookstalls. Men and women were snatching at evening papers and throwing down coppers and silver with frantic eagerness. What was the urgent need they felt to get home, he wondered, as he stayed on the edge of the crowd and placidly turned the pages of a woman’s magazine? What were they returning to, the men with paunches and the chicken-necked women, the neat but spotty boys and the girls lacquered with smartness? An hour in the garden and the evening paper, leftover supper and a cold bed-sitter, a cinema ticket or a motor-bike ride. Something that grotesquely parodied what they heard on radio or saw on TV or read in such magazines as the one whose pages he was turning now. The fantasy life of the mass, Applegate said to himself with delicious sententious superciliousness, the snob’s desire to move one step up the social scale. It is not art, but the
Tatler,
that life really mirrors.

He was reflecting that there was something wrong with this epigram, beside the fact that it was borrowed from Oscar Wilde, when a voice said, “Quite done with that, sir?” Unable to confront the assistant’s yellowly bilious gaze he hurriedly put down
Woman’s Home Life,
bought the
New Statesman,
the
Spectator
and
Tribune,
and scuttled away to the platform where the Ashford train was waiting. So long had he brooded at the bookstall that he had hardly more than a minute to spare.

With mild self-congratulation Applegate told himself that this was an astute move. He was scrutinising with particular care the three passengers who had passed through the barrier behind him when a green flag was waved and a whistle blown. He pulled open a carriage door and scrambled in just as the train was beginning to move. Poking his head out of the window he saw that in fact nobody had boarded the train after him. The three people he had been looking at all stood waiting placidly for a train on the other side of the platform. He had outwitted his possibly non-existent pursuer. The train was fairly full, but he found a seat in the dining car opposite a dowdy, middle-aged woman, and ordered dinner. He knew better than to expect a meal at Bramley Hall.

He was thinking about Bogue when he changed on to the Romney Marsh line at Ashford. Some of the things that had puzzled him were cleared up by Tarboe’s story. Bogue had been short of money because his income from the drug traffic had been cut off, and the mystery of his employment on official missions was cleared up. But he had learned nothing from Tarboe that explained the mystery of Bogue’s legendary fortune or told him why crooks should be gathered round Murdstone like wasps round jam. By this time, also, Applegate had in fact become fascinated by Bogue’s character, and his biographical interest was more than a pretence. We like to think that there is a centre to every man and woman, a central coil of motive from which their actions spring, but in Bogue there seemed to be no such central coil, but merely a persuasive voice and various disgraceful actions. He had reached this point in meditation when a voice said: “Had a good day?”

There was only one other person in the carriage, and Applegate had summed him up as a local man who had gone to Ashford for the day or the afternoon. Not a farmer, but someone connected with the land. He had a homely air, although there was nothing particularly rural about his pepper-and-salt suit, rather shiny at the elbows. A man of fifty perhaps, cheeks slightly ruddy, thinning hair neatly brushed, and a certain warm solidity about him.

“Pretty good, yes.” The answer was involuntary, but one quick glance revealed the reassuring fact that both his companion’s ears were fully equipped with lobes.

“Mind if I smoke?” The stranger took out a pipe and began stuffing it with square, capable fingers. “I suppose you saw Tarboe?”

“How do you know that?”

“Been following you most of the day.” The stranger, Applegate saw, managed to be both markedly an individual, and yet inconspicuous. You would not look at him twice in a crowd, yet if you did look at him you could not fail to be impressed by the face’s placid forcefulness. “Saw you go into ESS and then into ENOS. It was a fair bet you’d seen Tarboe. Get anything from him?”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

“I might be of some use to you, that’s all, if I knew how much Tarboe had told you.” Smoke rose from the pipe. “Depends how much that was. Did he mention me? My name’s Shalson, or at least that’s the name I used then.”

Applegate had thought himself proof against surprise, but the fact that he was face to face with the man who had accompanied Johnny Bogue on his last journey surprised and delighted him.

“Tarboe said he thought you might be growing flowers.”

Shalson laughed. “I ran a market garden for a couple of years but couldn’t make a go of it. You need capital, that’s the trouble.”

“Who is Tarboe exactly?”

Shalson looked slightly surprised. “Thought you’d know that. He was a colonel in the war, in charge of a home security section after he lost an eye helping the Resistance.”

“Home security. Do you mean counter-espionage?”

“Call it that if you like. Security, espionage, counterespionage, they all merged into each other. What Tarboe does nowadays I don’t know, but I should guess it’s more of the same.”

“Why were you following me?”

Shalson puffed deliberately at his pipe. “Now, look, young fellow, I may be able to help you with some information, but before I do I’ve got to know where I stand. What’s your interest in Bogue?”

The train rattled into a station. A man walked up and down shouting: “Ham Street, Ham Street.” The train started up again on its slow journey through the Marsh. Fields and sheep could still be seen in the gathering dusk. It seemed to Applegate that this man knew too much to be deceived by the tale he had told Tarboe.

“You know about Eddie Martin’s death?” Shalson nodded. “And Montague?” Another nod. “I got mixed up in all that and became interested in it. Afterwards I might have left it alone, but I was threatened by some of Bogue’s old friends –”

“Eileen and Craigen?”

“And Jenks.”

“Is he in with them now? He’s a real character, that one, always gets the dirty end of the stick. And?”

“That’s about all. I want to know what it’s all about, why I’m being threatened, what the gathering of the clans is for.” He saw no reason why he should tell Shalson about Bogue’s fortune.

“Ah. Tarboe told you I was with Bogue on that trip to Madrid?”

“Yes. He said all the others – pilot, co-pilot and Bogue – had parachutes that failed to open. Remarkable coincidence.”

“Um.” Shalson eyed him over the pipe. “What did you think of that?”

“I thought it was very much like murder.”

“Would you say so now? Fact is, Tarboe spared your feelings a bit. Bogue was clever, I don’t have to tell you that. He suspected something might be wrong, I don’t know why, something to do with the way Tarboe shut down on his drug-running game perhaps. He told you about that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Johnny always looked out for number one. He had his equipment checked at the last minute, discovered the parachute was dud and had it changed. He told me that as we left the airfield. ‘In case you’ve any doubts about it, Skid, I’ve got a substitute pack on,’ he said. ‘Accidents will happen, I know, but I don’t want one to happen to me. My life’s too infinitely precious to be lost through any kind of accident.’ I was always called Skid then. He must have seen something queer about the way I looked, because he began to talk about making my fortune.”

“How?”

“That’s what he didn’t say, not precisely. But he told me he could do it. He said he had all the money in the world and there was enough for both of us to share.” Shalson looked a little sideways. “You know anything about that?”

“Tarboe didn’t say anything,” Applegate replied truthfully. “And then?”

“Then the port engine caught fire, as arranged. Bogue looked at me and saw I had expected it. ‘Come on, Skid, we’ll jump for it,’ he said. And he got the hatch open. I knew his parachute was all right.” Shalson sucked deliberately at his pipe. “So I did what I had to do. I shot him twice. Through the head.”

It was quite dark. The train ran into Lydd station. One or two doors banged, footsteps sounded on the platform. Applegate felt for some reason desolate, as if a familiar landmark had been removed, or he had heard of the death of an acquaintance once well known but not seen for years. This was the end of a quest, the end of his paper chase, the trail inevitably led nowhere, it ended abruptly in an aeroplane. In the aeroplane had ended a life of many twists and turns, the life of a man engaged desperately in a struggle to outsmart the world. But none of us outsmarts the world, Applegate thought, not the slickest crook nor the most innocent player of the stock market. Life had its plan for every individual, and any escape from it was illusory. At the end of one escape road there waited the unexpected bullet in the aeroplane, and another was suddenly revealed as a
cul-de-sac
from which there was no honourable return, no recourse but the revolver placed in the mouth. Every variety of escape is an illusion, Applegate thought, and the part of a wise man is to conform, to accept everything. Accept the bowler hat and the striped trousers, accept strap-hanging and head crouched over office desk, take out insurance policies on a non-existent future, accept cancer, tubercle, wasted kidney, cirrhotic liver, that lead to death called natural.

These somewhat cheerless thoughts were perhaps reflected in his expression. Shalson said gently, and it seemed irrelevantly: “I’m a Jew, you know.”

“What?”

“A Jew, a German Jew. That’s partly why I had it in for Bogue.”

“I don’t understand. I thought that Bogue helped Jews to escape from Germany, from the Nazis.” Covertly he studied Shalson’s face and – so great is the power knowledge exerts on us – the features that had seemed obviously those of a Kentish native now took on a Jewish cast. He observed the wide, fleshy nose, a little curved perhaps, and seemed to discover something Semitic in the hand gesture with which Shalson greeted his remark.

“He helped them, oh, yes. He helped them as a man helps somebody away from a firing squad and drops them into a sewer where they choke to death. Have you never heard of the deal the Nazis made with the Jews, to get them out of Germany?”

“No.”

“You are very innocent. In 1938 there were still many Jews left in Germany who had not been accommodated in the concentration camps. There was a Jewish organisation called Mossad le Aliyah Bet, the Committee for Illegal Immigration, which helped Jews to get away from Germany, and also arranged their illegal immigration into Palestine. The Mossad leaders made a direct deal with the Nazis. The Nazis wanted the Jews out of Germany. They knew that those smuggled into Palestine could be relied on to cause trouble. Eichmann, head of the German Central Bureau, set up facilities in Germany for the emigration of Jews, but he told Mossad that the actual transportation must be left to the Jews themselves and also to private enterprise. Bogue was part of the private enterprise.”

“How do you mean?”

“By the end of 1938 the Gestapo was insisting that Jews should leave Germany at the rate of 400 a week, and at the same time they organised a travel bureau through which all emigration activities had to be arranged. The Nazi officials, Eichmann and others, took so much per head for transporting Jews into ships which weren’t seaworthy. These ships could not be German, you understand, or there would have been immediate protests from other countries, Britain in particular. Some of them were provided by a half-German Greek ship owner. Others were bought by or through Mossad. Others were registered in the name of a Greek called Koudopoulos. They were the rottenest, filthiest, least seaworthy boats that the people who bought them could lay hands on. The boats sailed from a dozen different ports – and they were packed with Jews, most of whom had paid all the money they possessed to sail in them. The people who went in those boats were pushed together like cattle. They had little food or drink. Sometimes the journey took weeks, especially after the war started and British Intelligence tightened its grip, and the boats were held up in one port or another. You remember how the
Fede
was held in La Spezia and those on board threatened to blow up the ship as soon as a British soldier set foot on it? No, you were too young. But that was only one case. Sometimes the boats were too rotten, and sank.”

“And the Jewish underground agreed to all that? They let Jews sail in those boats?”

“What choice had they got? What other way was there of getting Jews out of German-occupied Europe?”

“And Bogue?” But Applegate almost knew the answer.

“Bogue was the English contact behind Koudopoulos. He was one of four Fascist sympathisers – respectable ones, not directly connected with the party – who helped to arrange sailings. Bogue dealt with the Mossad, he also dealt with Koudopoulos, and of course also with the Germans. Some of the money he got went to the Germans, no doubt, but he must have kept a packet for himself. Money is a curse,” Shalson said with a passionate bitterness, a kind of terrible zest. “Filth. Destruction. Touch it and you’re done for.”

“So the way Bogue helped the Jews was by helping to get them on those boats?”

“Yes. I sailed on one of Bogue’s boats, the
Zaline
, which sailed from a little port in Bulgaria called Mancic, early in 1940. My mother and father were on it. My father owned a small chain of clothing stores. He knew all the right people, used to be invited to Goebbels’ dinner parties. Thought they would never touch him, his connections were so good. When his windows were smashed and clothes looted he went to Goebbels in person. The little doctor laughed at him, told him he had better get out while he had a whole skin. My father talked to Goebbels about principle, perhaps he should have talked about money. For money a man will do anything.