A Bitter Field

CHAPTER EIGHT

If the pub in which he had drunk with Vince was a smoky den, the Lamb amp; Flag in Covent Garden was equally bad, though the clientele tended to be better heeled. The walls and ceiling were dark and so nicotine stained they were near to the colour of the dark-brown wood of the bar, as well as the furniture that lined the outer walls.

Cal, being a non-smoker, was not much of a man for pubs because of that, but at least at the Lamb, in the summer, you could drink outside on the cobbled cul-de-sac and enjoy the warm weather. There was no piety in his being a non-smoker; he had, like every young man of his generation, been once addicted to the weed.

He had decided to give it up when he had seen a fellow officer on the Western Front take a fatal bullet in the side of his head a second after he lit up. Some people said cigarettes could kill; he knew they could, just as he knew that the desire for one was best avoided when you could not be certain of a decent supply.

Snuffly Bower smoked like a chimney; he was also a man so enamoured of his expensive camel-coloured Crombie overcoat that he would wear it on what was a warm day. The rest of his clothing was of equal quality, if a little loud in the dog-tooth check. Again, as usual, he had on his brown bowler hat and was at a full table surrounded by fellow drinkers, all of whom, in too-sharp suits and shifty appearance, had the air of those who existed on the edge of the law.

An illegal bookmaker by trade and undoubtedly a fence, Cal had often wondered what Snuffly’s given name was, though he had no doubt how he had come by his moniker by which he was known. Snuffly’s lips never moved without the accompaniment of a twitch of his substantial purple hooter and a loud sniff, followed by a touch of his knuckle as, like that of a gloved boxer, it swept across the tip.

His illegal beat was the nearby fruit and vegetable market and in this locale it was well established that he was king. Anyone who wandered into his patch from nearby Soho or from south of the Thames would be welcome as long as they were not on the fiddle, for if they were, he could be brutal. The hail-fellow-well-met, which was his natural front, was just that; Snuffly was a villain to his toecaps and a very handy man with the knife he always carried.

‘Mr Jardine, as I live and breave!’ he cried when he spotted Cal in the doorway, before turning to his companion. ‘Move your fat arse, Freddy, old son, an’ let a real gent park his.’

Freddy slid out quickly, with Snuffly still beaming. ‘What can I get you?’

‘I’m on my feet, Snuffly, it’s my shout.’

‘Did I not say he was a gent?’ came the reply, aimed at those still sitting with him. ‘Pint of Bass then, Mr Jardine, if you don’t mind.’ The nose twitched, the air was inhaled and the crooked thumb moved. ‘You up west for a bit of fun?’

Cal just shook his head before moving to the bar to order a whisky and water as well as Snuffly’s pint. By the time he had been served and turned to go back the man was on his own and soon they were sitting side by side talking in subdued voices. To begin with it was small talk: business was bad, the coppers were bent and there were folk — ‘You would not believe it, guv’ — who did not see the need to make sure that his life was peaceful.

As soon as it got to the real purpose of Cal’s visit, Snuffly removed his brown bowler hat, put his elbow on the table and held it out so it covered their faces; he had, as Cal knew from past visits, a morbid fear of lip-readers.

‘I need two passports and driving licences to go with them.’

As Cal said this he passed under the table the set of photographs he had just had done as well as a slip of paper with the necessary details, names and addresses taken from the telephone directory, to cover himself and Vince.

‘One of these days you must tell me what it is you get up to.’

‘One of these days, Snuffly, I will,’ Cal replied, which was as good as saying, ‘In your dreams.’

There was no temptation to ask where Snuffly got his passports, not that he would have got an answer any more than he was prepared to provide one himself, but it had to be the case that some of his contacts were ‘dips’ working the West End and beyond: the theatres, hotels and, further afield, the train stations.

Either that or they were housebreakers; it made no odds — the documents he had provided for Cal in the past were of top-notch quality and, since he also obviously had a forger on tap, quick as well.

‘Need a few stamps on them too, Snuffly, to make them look used.’

‘Will be done, Mr Jardine.’

Cal reached into his jacket to fetch out his wallet, only to feel an immediate hand on his arm, surprisingly firm in its grip from a man he never associated with physical strength. ‘No need for a down payment, guv, is there?’ Sniff. ‘Not for you.’ Sniff. ‘You can pay when you collect.’

Cal smiled and nodded, pleased because he suspected it was a lot harder to get an account with Snuffly than it was to get one at Coutts Bank, just down the road on the Strand. He exited to streets full of the detritus of the nearby market: abandoned boxes, discarded paper blown on the wind and the odd drunk — hardly surprising in an area where the public houses, to cater for the thousands who worked and came here to trade, opened at six in the morning.

The taxi driver smoked too, so that by the time it dropped him in West Heath Road, and once he had paid off the driver, looking across to the heath under its canopy of trees in full leaf he was tempted to go for a stroll to clear his lungs. That had to be put aside till later; the man with whom he had an appointment was ever busy, and even if he considered him a friend, it was not a good idea to keep Sir Monty Redfern waiting.

The first surprise was to find a strange female answering the door when he had his hat raised and a winning smile on his face to greet someone else entirely. Expecting a young lovely, what he was presented with was a rather dumpy woman in shapeless clothing, with untidy hair on her head and a great deal more of that on her face, none of it made more attractive by the guttural voice with which she enquired as to his reason for calling.

‘Where’s Elsa?’ he asked, once he had been shown into the large drawing room overlooking the garden that Monty used as an office.

If the furniture was as valuable as the substantial Hampstead house, which ran in total to some twenty-eight rooms, the man who owned it did not look the part of a Jewish millionaire. Careless about dress, Monty looked his usual scruffy self. For all his wealth he rarely polished his shoes or worried about the crumpled state of his clothing.

‘Our little beauty is in Prague, Callum, doing good work with refugees.’

The name of the Czech capital gave him pause, but Cal decided not to mention it as his destination for the moment. ‘How bad is it?’

‘As bad as it gets with that bastard Hitler breathing down people’s neck. Already they are moving away from the Sudetenland, and not just Jews, but those with eyes to see that the Nazis won’t stop at that. The Commies they will shoot and the socialists can expect a holiday in their concentration camps for some gentle education. Thousands are trying to get out, and if the Germans do invade you and I might have to do a bit of business again.’

It was Monty who had financed Cal’s work in Hamburg; the aforementioned Elsa had been part of the last family he had managed to extract — herself, her father, mother and her three brothers — and it had taken the assistance of a reluctant Peter Lanchester to actually get them to England.

Elsa Ephraim was indeed a beauty, so unlike her successor: young, lithe and inclined to have her employer cursing his age as well as what his wife would do to him if he so much as let one eye wander in her presence; Mrs Redfern would be more than happy with the replacement.

‘If she safe there, at her age?’

‘Hey, Callum, am I safe here when she is walking around with those legs of hers? And that figure and those eyes, my God!’ He looked to the heavens before adding, in a less jocular voice, ‘Elsa is eighteen now anyway and can get out when she wants. I spread a few shekels and got her a British passport. And if she does get into trouble I will blame you. If you had not been so busy with those damned Bolsheviks in Spain I might have asked you to go and do the job.’

‘They were anarchists.’

‘And that is supposed to make me feel better?’

‘I can’t imagine Papa Ephraim was happy about her going to Prague.’

‘He was not and neither was I, ’cause she was good at her job. But that girl has balls, I tell you, and can she argue.’ Monty raised his hands to the heavens and grinned, the wide mouth under that prominent nose spreading in mischief. ‘Hey, maybe she told her Papa he would be my father-in-law to get him to agree.’

‘Or your wife.’

‘You want I should have a stroke?’ Monty replied. ‘I don’t have to tell you who chose Marita.’

‘The lady who answered the door?’ Monty nodded, gravely.

The talk of her attractiveness and any hint of impropriety with Elsa was, of course, an act; Monty might like the fantasy but he was more of a father figure than an old lecher, a man who, while he had a huge and very profitable business to oversee, was too preoccupied anyway for such a game. He spent most of his time running his various charities, as well as harrying his fellow Jews, both in Britain and around the world, to provide money, sanctuary or both for those in peril from the Nazis.

‘And the Government is being as stingy as ever with visas, I suppose?’

Jewish immigration was a hot political potato, not aided by a residual and far-from-disguised anti-Semitism in the upper reaches of British society, peopled by the kind of dolts who admired Mussolini and Hitler for bringing order to their countries, while blithely shutting their minds to the measures used to achieve it.

No Jew fleeing persecution could get residence without someone to sponsor and promise to support them; they would not be allowed in if they were going to be a burden to the taxpayer. So Monty spent as much time lobbying for those permits as he did seeking the funds to support emigration.

‘It’s like drawing teeth, the crooks,’ Monty cried, ‘and the Americans are no better, bigger crooks than us even, with the space they have.’

Time to drop the bombshell. ‘It so happens that I am off to Prague, as well.’

Cal was thinking that Monty hid his surprise well, just as well as he managed to keep off of his face that his mind was working to see if there was some connection.

‘You can look Elsa up, maybe?’

‘Maybe not.’

‘So it is not open-door, this visit to Prague?’

‘No.’

‘Does old Monty get an explanation, maybe?’

‘I was going to ask you to lend me some money-’

‘Boy, do you know how to spoil an old Jew’s day,’ Monty scoffed, cutting across him.

‘-or at least make some available. Quite a lot, in fact.’

The reaction was typical, but Monty did not make the obvious comment, which was ‘why?’ He knew very well that Callum Jardine had his own private income, just as he knew where it came from, the profits of his father’s successful trading in both France and Germany before the Great War, both countries in which the family had taken up residence.

With a blood connection to one of the great trading dynasties of the world, Jardine pere had been in a position to make a great deal of money doing deals in a fluid market, buying and selling goods to ship between the Far East and Europe. His son could have done the same had he been so inclined and his cousins would have backed him; blood was blood to the Scots as much as it was to the Jews.

‘I can carry a certain amount of money and I will do so, but to conceal big sums is impossible, apart from being too risky. I did some business in Czechoslovakia recently…’

‘I won’t ask in what.’

‘The trouble I had in transfers, getting to Switzerland and back again, held everything up for weeks and that was before the Nazis marched into Austria. In what I am proposing to undertake, if I do need funds, and there is a chance I will not, I don’t think I will have the time to put the arrangements in place, and I am certainly disinclined to travel the way I did previously now that Hitler controls both the borders and the route.’

‘Makes sense,’ Monty replied.

‘You do trade in Czechoslovakia, don’t you?’

‘A bit,’ he shrugged, ‘but maybe not much longer.’

‘Even if you still do business in Germany?’

That got Cal a hard look. ‘So, shame me. I have mouths to feed.’

Monty’s business was chemicals; he had built up an international trading empire over several years and, being Jewish, he would seek opportunities and profits wherever they could be had. If that included Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy so be it, though he no doubt salved his conscience by the way he used the money he made to aid those he saw as being in ideological peril.

Cal was one of the few people to whom he had been open about that; he had been obliged to in order to fund Hamburg and he was not ashamed of it. He had started out as the child of immigrants selling bags of bicarbonate of soda door to door in the East End of London as a youth, for pennies. That was also something Monty never forgot: he knew where he came from and he was never going to risk going back.

What his international contacts gave him was an ability to shift large sums from country to country, even to the notoriously difficult Nazi Germany, without anyone taking too much notice, while it also allowed anyone purporting to act on his behalf to withdraw levels of cash in foreign banks that would not raise an eyebrow. At the same time, with a phone call, he could raise credit in another country in a way denied to mere mortals.

‘I need access to an amount of money that is too open-ended to calculate, as well as a letter of credit and documentation saying I am representing Redfern Chemicals, and I will guarantee redress when I come back home.’

‘Cal, I know you are not on your uppers, but that could be a lot of lolly. I would hate to see you needing my charity.’

‘The loan is not to me, Monty, it’s to the British Government.’

That narrowed the eyes. ‘I am not skint but I think they have more lolly to spread around than me. And why should I give those crooks a loan, already?’

‘Don’t worry, I intend to give details.’

Which he did, leaving out nothing: the machine guns for Spain were explained, if not appreciated, as well as how he had been found and asked to help, every part of that except the firefight he had got into outside La Rochelle, but most importantly why he needed to avoid taking money directly from the Secret Service account. Monty listened without interruption, nodding occasionally, then frowning at one or two of the proposed actions or suppositions as to where matters might go.

‘So you might need cash in Germany, as well?’

‘I shouldn’t, but you never know. I like to think if I end up there, people will act from principle, not for money.’

‘Take it from Monty Redfern, Cal, if you think like that you will be sadly disappointed.’

‘I know it’s a lot to ask for.’

‘It’s too much to ask for, Cal.’ Sensing the disappointment he was quick to explain. ‘You I trust, and I mean that with my life, but these crooks in Whitehall would promise the moon to get what they want, then say it’s cheese when the time comes to pay. I deal with them already, my boy, and I know that what I say is true.’

‘I could try and get some kind of guarantee,’ Cal replied, wondering what kind of sum Peter Lanchester could get committed in the kind of arrangement they had discussed, or indeed, whether he could get any committed at all.

Cal said that without the faintest idea of how he might achieve such a thing. The only matter on which he was certain was this: that if he needed sudden large sums of money while abroad, and his experience told him he might, the Government machine moved too slowly to oblige, quite apart from the fact that there was no way of keeping such transactions secret from the kind of people who had already got him and Peter Lanchester into trouble; getting funds from HMG could be fatal.

It was with obvious caveats that he outlined what he hoped would happen with SIS and Monty softened somewhat; he was happy to match any sum already committed as long as he had assurances that Cal would be in a position to reimburse him. If he sensed the assurances he was given were speculative he had the good grace to keep that to himself and he did have one possible solution.

‘Look, in Prague, you go see Elsa. She knows how to contact me, and if the need is a good one — and she will have to be convinced — then maybe we can do something.’

‘I’d still like the documentation.’

Monty nodded. ‘That’s easy, I’ll have Marita do the letters and, because it will make you safer, I will send cables to Germany and Czechoslovakia to say that a representative of mine might call to do some personal business.’

‘I won’t be travelling under my own name,’ Cal said, pulling out the same details he had given to Snuffly Bower, ‘and as well as your letters I need you to use your clout to get visas for Czechoslovakia and Germany.’

Monty shook his head and took the proffered list. ‘God alone knows why you do these things, Cal, but if it is any help, I am glad you do.’