The Refuge (31 page)

I nodded to the chair by which he stood.

‘Don’t be afraid, Mr. Martin. If you know anything about newspaper offices, you must know that in the general room it’s impossible to listen to other people’s private conversations.’

He seated himself, drawing down the corners of his mouth and raising his shoulders in a shrug of exaggerated resignation, as if he regretted, after all, having come. On his knee he rested a satchel of imitation crocodile skin which would have placed him fairly accurately even if he had not said a word in his rather thick foreign voice. As usual, I waited for him to speak, while I made a note in my mind of his clothes, from the wide shoes of foreign make over dark purple socks to the padded shoulders (‘self-raising shoulders’, my father would have called them) of his costly brown suit. He was one of those Europeans who seem to have been born to shrug, roll their guilelessly watchful eyes, and to do things with their mouths and hands in a fashion so hypnotic that, without remembering a word they ever say, one has a lasting recollection of them always doing those things, like images on a motion-picture screen not wired for sound. He might have been French, Hungarian, German Jew, or—except for his accent—a native of southern Italy, Cyprus or Malta; I never found out whence he came, but that was his sort of manners and dress and colouring.

‘I hope you may be able to help me,’ he said with a meaning flash of his eyes that meant nothing to me. ‘I am in search of someone very dear to me. A lady.’

He popped the word out impressively, with a following upward jerk of his mobile eyebrows; then, getting into the swing of it, held towards me one manicured hand, palm-upwards, in graceful supplication. ‘No, no—please, please do not laugh.’

I was not laughing, and I told him so; I had suddenly seen what was coming, and was waiting for it.

‘The lady is my sister. Irma. Irma Martin . . . little Irma.’

There were genuine wet tears in his eyes, and he was watching me so closely for a moment that he could not bear it himself, and had to rest those lustrous dark eyes by looking away from mine for a full second before resuming his intense stare, which I returned so irresistibly that I was able to see, as though magnified several times, the burning brown of the irides, minutely ridged and grooved like creased velvet under water, surrounding the mysterious receptive holes of the pupils, sooty black with a pin-point of light at the bottom of them. They made me think, irrelevantly, of some novel display in the window of a chemist’s shop, made of cloth and coloured glass in a setting of enamelled cardboard.

He must have leaned forward in order not to miss any slightest reaction of mine to that name; for I saw him slowly sit back on the wooden chair and avert his bold, hooded gaze to the satchel, which he began to open fussily on his knees. I still said nothing, for I now disliked him so heartily that I knew my face must have remained perfectly blank under his brutal inspection. I also knew without doubt that for all his soft and emotional manner he was probably dangerous.

‘You do not know her? Come—I think you do,’ he said coaxingly yet threateningly—as I thought—while he looked up from the satchel with a coming-and-going smile that had little to do with his eyes or his hushed voice. Then, with a positively melodramatic glance round the room behind him and on either side, he slowly withdrew from the metal lips of the leather bag a silver photograph-frame containing a portrait which he hid with his spread hand; but in doing this he accidentally allowed the satchel to slip to the floor, and, in leaning to snatch it up, afforded me a brief glimpse of the face of the sitter. It was, as I had known it would be, Irma’s face, grave as a ghost’s. Moreover, I knew enough about police photography to recognize even in that brief glance that it was a photostatic copy of an original photograph—not quite the sort of thing a loving brother would carry, frame or no frame, as a momento of his missing sister.

He had in one awkward movement recovered his satchel and turned the portrait face-down, not realizing he was too late. A more skilled scoundrel—for I was now convinced of his scoundrelism—would have withdrawn it face-downwards in the first place, if he had wished to conceal it from me.

‘Look,’ he said, unruffled by his little scramble, ‘I will show you her picture and you will remember her. No one could forget. Not even you, my friend, who must see so many faces . . . See.’

He held the thing out suddenly at me, as though, like his announcement of her name, the revelation must confound me into showing all I knew in my face. I had time to observe that a rubber stamp in the top right-hand corner of the original had been imperfectly erased.

‘Yes,’ I said slowly, very slowly and as it were thoughtfully, a man making an obvious effort to remember. ‘Yes . . . I seem to know that face. Irma Martin, you say?’ I shook my head with a smile. It is horribly easy, it is a pleasure, to lie to a man about whom one feels as I now felt about this creature before me, with his hypnotic gestures and his evil watchfulness.

‘I do not know that name, Mr. Martin.’

‘Never mind.’ He permitted himself to seem very excited. ‘You know her! My sister I begin to think is maybe dead, how do I know? She is here, my Irma! Tell me, please tell me where is she?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Ah.’ He sank back, snapping the smile from his lips. ‘But you have seen her.’

‘Perhaps—a long time ago,’ I said. ‘She arrived in some ship with hundreds of other refugees.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘the
Empire Queen
. . .’

‘How do you know that?’ I said abruptly. A man who is himself perfectly clear about the facts of the case can seldom help giving himself away if you omit one you believe he thinks important. ‘You thought she might be dead. You say she vanished. Yet you know what boat she travelled in. What else do you know?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ he said, pleading with his face and hands. ‘That is why I come to you, to beg you . . .’

‘Why not the police?’ I said. ‘It is their job, not mine, to trace missing people. You should go to the Missing Persons Bureau.’

‘Not the police,’ he said warningly. ‘Irma would be frightened—very frightened. Always in Holland she is frightened—the dam’ Gestapo, you know.’

‘The dam’ Gestapo’ must have sounded singularly weak even to him, for he made haste to cover it with an explanation he doubtless thought would convince my Australian simplicity: ‘We are—you know—Jewish, Irma and me.’ He rolled his eyes a little, and sighed.

Just for one moment I felt a bloody impluse to clench my fist and smash it into his insolently grimacing face. The words ‘Irma and me’ brought home to me as nothing less than witnessed violence could have brought home the fact that her former danger had never been imagined at all. I looked at the person calling himself Martin, and saw him clearly for what he was—a pimp, a back-alley killer who would use a knife or poison—women’s weapons—not for gain but because he was a coward and a hireling without hope of escape from his employers; a dangerously humble creature who would indulge to the full such appetites as were permitted to him; perverted in body, mind and soul ever since some fateful mistake of over-confidence had put him in the power of those who could find a use for him on such occasions as this . . . A feeling of sickness came into my throat.

‘If the police frighten her, she must have something to hide,’ I said coldly. ‘In that case, is it not unwise to come to me, on the faint chance that I might know where she is? The police are friends of mine.’

For all his prompt grimacing, he could not conceal the momentary look of hatred and contempt in his dark, full eyes; but again he had his answer ready.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘there is nothing. It is just she is frightened of even the name:
police
. For so long we have been . . .
on the run
, as you say in English.’

I perceived that he did know enough about Irma, or at least about people of her kind in similar circumstances, to give me cause to be careful.

‘What makes you think she should still be on the run in Australia?’

It stopped him only for a few seconds.

‘If the police are your friends, you must know, Mr. Fitzherbert, there have been Nazi agents even in your own wonderful country.’

‘That may be so, but they have not drawn attention to themselves by Jew-baiting. Is your sister a Communist?’

‘No, no,’ he said again hastily. ‘Not now. Once, you understand, we were all—sympathizers—but we have been betrayed.’ Once more the eyes upturned towards the ceiling, the little resigned sigh. He was in a quandary, for he could not be at all sure how much, if anything, I knew of Irma’s past. The photostat copy of her portrait, which he had put away with many cautious glances about him, was probably an N.K.V.D. one if what she had told me were the truth; and I had no further reason to doubt her on the facts. The camera had not missed those faint traces of a circular rubber stamp’s imprint in the corner, suggesting that the original was a file copy.

‘I do not quite understand all this,’ I said, purposely to provoke him. ‘You say your sister is not a Communist, which means she has nothing to fear from anti-Communist elements which may be in this country from abroad. You say first you had lost all trace of her and were beginning to think she was dead, yet you later tell me the name of the ship she arrived on. If you knew what ship brought her, you had only to go to the police and tell them. Sooner or later they would have found her. She need not even have known they were trying to trace her, if you had asked them to keep it dark. Our police may have different methods from those of the police you have had to do with in other countries’—I watched him blink at that—‘but they are not fools, nor are they gangsters. In spite of all this—and I assume you had the wits to think it out for yourself long ago—in spite of all this, you come to me, to tell me in a rather peculiar tone that you think I know your sister, even when I say I do not. Why?’

He was discountenanced, and showed it. Even the talk of Irma as his sister had been unreal from the start, a crude attempt to cover the fact that he had come—no doubt by direction—straight to me, which he would only have been told to do if there had been strong evidence somewhere that I knew more about her than I admitted to knowing, or at least that I had seen her more recently than on the distant August morning of her arrival. As far as I knew, only McMahon had seen us within speaking distance of each other, apart from Barbara, whom I trusted, and the wireless monitor . . . and of course the copy-boy—and Miss Werther—and Jack . . .

It was absurd. The only person in a position and at the same time with conceivable reason to betray to these unknown hunters the possible fact of any association between us since her arrival was McMahon, whom Barbara had described as an under-cover man. I would only need to mention him, with his notorious habit of drunkenness, to hear all knowledge of his very existence denied. Such a denial would make any explanation even more impossible to this sly, lying, dangerous sneak who was now obviously trying to think of a credible answer to my question.

‘Why come to me?’ I said again. He had lost his manner of caution and appeal, and began to look sullen, though not in the least frightened as I had hoped.

‘You were seen with her . . . recently,’ he said at last, bringing out the words unwillingly and with difficulty, like a man suddenly uncertain of the idiom of the language he is using.

‘Impossible,’ I said more coldly than ever; and then, to my own surprise, I began to laugh silently. The whole situation was absurd. He had mishandled his part from the beginning, and thanks to his careless lies I had him, as they say, on toast; and I was glad, I enjoyed watching his sullen discomfort, which was for himself alone, for his collapsing vanity, more than for the futility of his mission. He dared not tell me who had seen Irma with me, even if he himself knew. Mention of the always-intoxicated McMahon would not only have made him look ridiculous, but would have threatened or actually destroyed the future usefulness of that friendly under-cover gentleman.

‘Look here, Mr.—Martin or whatever your real name may be,’ I said at length, ‘you have come to the wrong man. In fact, I suggest you have come to the wrong country. Wherever your sort go, they expect to inspire fear, or to arouse a fear already dormant. In Australia we have never had to live in that sort of individual fear as yet. I doubt if we ever shall. You come to me with the obvious purpose of finding out the present whereabouts of someone you say is your sister. That alone shows how little you know of things here. No reputable newspaper man—no one but a drunken sneak,’ I said, for I was becoming angry again at the thought of McMahon, ‘would give your sort of person the information you seek, even if he had it to give, which I have not. On the contrary, he would, if he could, get into touch with the young woman at once and warn her of your presence and your inquiries. It seems to me you do not mean this young woman any good. Do you know what I shall do next? I shall telephone to the police—they are, as you know, my friends—and I shall give them a very careful description of you, and advise them to look into your papers and your history. Make no mistake, Mr. Martin—they will find you and find out all about you, and decide whether or not you, as an alien, are a desirable person to have at large in this country which you seem to think is populated only by fools, knaves and traitors like yourself.’

I was so angry, for the first time in years, that I was enjoying it without shame. The pompous words, however quietly spoken in that busy room, sped from my lips as glibly as any rehearsed speech, and with furious conviction. As for him, he actually shrank against the hard back of the visitors’ chair, his face paling to a faintly greenish tinge and the rubbery smile coming and going on his face with the effect of a nervous tic. He even held out one hand as though begging me to desist.

‘Recall,’ I said, ‘that we are at war with Nazi Germany, and so, technically, with her allies. If by any chance you come from either the one or the other party, beware. A nation at war, Mr. Martin, does not waste time arguing with spies and foreign pimps in its midst, not even a nation as easy-going, as slow to suspect strangers, as this one. As you give me the impression of being a liar employed by other liars who do not care to reveal themselves in person, you are probably everything else that is bad and contemptible. I suggest you go—not only out of this office, but out of the country . . . if you can get out of it fast enough with a whole skin. If I could find it in myself to do so, I should take every possible step to make you suspected by the people who hire you, and you know what that would mean. Read the papers, Mr. Martin. See how often one after another of you foreigners is beaten up or found mysteriously dead in some back room somewhere, or drowned in the harbour or fatally injured by an unidentified vehicle that failed to stop after the—accident. Read the papers, Mr. Martin. They do not tell one half of what happens in the shadows of this city or the other big cities of this continent. Think carefully of what I say, and take my advice and go—if you can—or join the Australian army where you have a chance of being lost even to your fellow-thugs, if the Army authorities do not decide to hand you over to the police at once. And now I must ring the police Aliens Squad.’