Horse Under Water

44 W.H.O. is part of this not me

We left the old Citroën down the road and walked the rest of the way. Our feet sank into the dry red earth as we moved around the rear of the low building. A light was on at the far end and the sound of water gulping down a drain was loud in the night. Above us hydrangea flowers walked along the walls, and from the lit window came the atonal, knife-edge sound of a fado. I raised my head slowly above the sill. I saw a grimy room with long lines of machinery teetering away into the darkness. A draught of hot air was coming from the heater fans. It seemed a strange luxury in this sub-tropical night. Nearer to me an electric vacuum pump was pounding gently. Harry Kondit walked across the room, his white T-shirt marked with bright yellow stains. The smell of vinegar was almost overwhelming. I felt Charly’s hand on my back as she looked over my shoulder and heard her swallow to avoid coughing on the acrid fumes. H.K. went across to the little electric pulverizer and pulled the switch. The sound of the motor almost obliterated the music from the gramophone, so H.K. turned up the volume and the fado added to the din.

This was no ice-melting experiment, and this lab. hadn’t cost anything like seven thousand pounds. This was a small morphine-processing factory: pulverizer, vacuum pump, drying-room, everything to turn morphine into heroin before it was sealed into sardine-tins for export. Harry Kondit, I thought; Conduit — a channel or pipe through which supplies travel. I leaned through the open window, raised the pistol and aimed with care. The Smith & Wesson kicked in my hand and the sound thrashed around inside the walls. The gramophone record exploded into a thousand sharp black knives.

‘Switch off the pump and the pulverizer, Harry, or I will,’ I said. For a moment H.K. stared, then he did so and silence descended like a candle-snuffer.

‘Now walk slowly across to that door and open it.’

‘But I …’

‘And don’t say a word,’ I said. ‘I haven’t forgotten that you killed Joe with dynamite.’ H.K. turned to me to explain but decided not to. He went to the door and slipped the bolt. I gave Charly the pistol and she walked around the building to the door. While I was saying, ‘Just stay as you are, Harry, and I won’t blast any of the expensive machinery …’ H.K. was biding his time, waiting until I had to move away from the window, but when Charly put the barrel of the.38 against his belly-button he realized that he had been fooled. Charly moved H.K. back at a professional range. I joined her, closed the door behind me and bolted it again.

The three of us stood there in silence until H.K. said, ‘Welcome to the dream factory, fans.’

We said nothing.

‘So you were a cop after all,’ said H.K.

‘You mean you weren’t sure when you bombed my car and killed Giorgio out on the U-boat.’

‘You got it all wrong, Ace,’ said H.K. He was tanned darker than ever, and the skin where his watch had been was like a white bangle. His shallow forehead wrinkled like a washboard and he wet his lips with a large pink tongue. ‘It’s no use to explain,’ he continued, ‘I thought you were an O.K. guy. No hard feelings. When winter comes you know which trees are the evergreens.’

‘It’s going to be a long, hard winter, Harry,’ I said. He looked at me and gave a rueful smile.

He said, ‘You’re using a thirty-foot voice for an eighteen-inch conversation.’ He was as calm as the Serpentine in June.

‘How did you get into this racket?’ I asked him quietly.

‘Can I sit down?’ he asked.

I nodded, but took my pistol from Charly and kept it handy.

‘We all got problems, Ace,’ said H.K. as he sat down heavily, ‘and problems obey the laws of perspective; they look big close-to.’ I threw him a cigarette and a box of matches. He took his time lighting up.

‘You don’t have to worry about telling me more than I know, Harry. I know a lot,’ I said.

‘F’r instance?’

‘I know that I’ve been given the run-around by the phoniest set-up this side of Disneyland. I traced a red-haired Englishman who fought in the Spanish Civil War (we have files on all of them) and I find he’s a black-haired man who stays out of the sun for fear of getting some English-style freckles.’ I paused before adding, ‘Fernie Tomas was in a good position to know things about sunken U-boats; like that a certain one would be full of heroin.’

‘Yeah, full of horse, you are right,’ said H.K. reflectively, and he nodded and suddenly began to talk.

‘That green canister was just crammed with old heroin that some Nazi was scramming with. Fernie Tomas brought it to me and said did I know anyone who would handle it. I suppose you could say that neither of us was very keen about it, but that canister was worth a lot of dough. I couldn’t afford to pass it up. My pal Harry Williams-Cohen was on a tax rap at the time and it looked like he was going up the river for a telephone number.[29] We got enough on that horse to pay off his tax and penalties. Then Fernie and I decided to plough our money into this factory which was just going to close.’

‘Brooklyn boy saves Portuguese fish factory,’ I said, ‘with U.S. know-how and a couple of kilos of diacetyl-morphine.’

‘Be smart,’ H.K. pleaded, ‘go home and see what someone paid into your bank account.’

‘Thanks, Harry,’ I said, ‘but no.’ H.K. drew on the cigarette I had given him and waved it gently in the air. His initial burst of nervous talking had passed and now his speech was slower and more cautious. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘In another five years the government are going to legalize the import of reefers. I know for sure. Then the big business boys will take over; there’ll be tastefully designed packs, and colour ads in Life magazine with two ritzy models saying, “I never knew smoking could be FUN until I got hooked”.’

I said, ‘But this is now, Harry, and people who break the law and make money out of it are often misunderstood.’

‘You’re such a wise guy,’ Harry said. ‘O.K. So I did it for money and as I got it so I spent it. You know how money is.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘How is it?’

‘It’s as tricky as uranium but ten times more dangerous. It disappears like youth or multiplies like enemies.’

‘You have a fair share of those,’ I said.

‘Yeah, it took me a lot of time and talent to make those enemies.’

‘And Fernie Tomas is one of them?’

Harry grinned. ‘I know him too well to be a friend,’ he said.

I waited while he fooled with his cigarette. I knew he’d have something to say about Tomas.

‘You think Fernie’s a really subtle character-study, don’t you? Young naval officer hero goes over to the enemy — all that stuff. You can’t figure out anything like that, you government men. Real puzzling it must be.’

He threw the cigarettes back for me to catch. But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I kept the.38 aimed at H.K.’s T-shirt, the cigarettes fell against the pistol and splayed across the floor. H.K. made a move towards my feet to pick them up, but seeing the gun-barrel move a fraction of an inch he thought better of it and sank back into his chair. We looked at each other; I shook my head, and H.K. smiled.

‘No hits, no runs, no errors,’ he said.

‘Just tell me how us government men can stop being puzzled about Tomas,’ I said.

‘He’s a malcontent,’ said H.K. ‘“Whatever it is, I’m against it” is Fernie’s motto. The only reason we didn’t come to a knock-down, drag-out fight once a week was because I’m such an easy-going sort of slob. He plants an old twenty-dollar bill into the green canister just so that if anyone steps out of line he can put one from the same batch where it can do the most damage. He’s a nut.’

I nodded. I thought that the twenty in H.K.’s shirt was too convenient to be true. I said, ‘Everyone’s against you, Harry, and yet you are such a nice guy at heart,’ and I smiled. I was thinking of Joe, but I smiled at H.K.

‘Round outside means a soft centre,’ H.K. said with a grin.

He pointed to a cigarette near his foot. I nodded and he picked it up and lit it from his stub. ‘This man isn’t a martyr, idealist or intellectual. He thinks with his muscle. Guys like him work themselves into an early grave organizing wildcat strikes or breaking up political meetings. In wars they get V.C.s or court martials. Sometimes both. Fernie said he had been recommended for a D.S.A. at the time of his capture.’

‘A D.S.O.,’ I said.

‘Well, there you are. Like I told you, no sex, no drink, no politics, a dedicated malcontent and maybe the best underwater man in Europe.’

‘The best now, maybe,’ I said, ‘but until there was a fatal accident out on the ocean floor not too long ago, he was number two.’

H.K.’s face tightened like a clenched fist. He said, ‘Fernie would never do that. I don’t like the guy but he would never kill in cold blood, believe me.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘we’ll leave that for a minute. Tell me how da Cunha fits into the picture. And before you start: I’m not a cop; my directions don’t include bringing you in. I’m here for information: set up the facts and then you can fade as far as I’m concerned.’

Charly rose to her feet.

‘Fade?’ said Charly. ‘Do you know what sort of filthy business this man is in?’ She moved in on the equipment like a Luddite and swept some of it to the floor with a crash of disintegrating glass and dented tin.

I said nothing. H.K. said, ‘Sure he does, sweetheart, he’s just too smart to mention it before he has all the info. he can get.’

Charly froze. She said to me, ‘I’m sorry,’ and sat down.

‘I’m not kidding, Harry,’ I said, ‘I’ll break you up as far as staying in Europe is concerned but I’ll give you a chance to get clear.’

‘I’ll sing,’ said H.K., ‘what do you want to know?’

‘Who is da Cunha?’ I asked.

‘Boy, you’re really skipping the easy ones,’ he said. ‘Da Cunha; they think a lot of him hereabouts. He says he’s the V.N.V. agent for the district. He says that when the revolution comes he will be the Governor of the district.’

‘But you don’t believe him.’

‘One Fascist bastard is much like another as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that I have paid him a sum of three hundred dollars per month via a New York bank in exchange for a promise that the new government won’t snoop too close around here.’

‘Insurance?’

‘Yes, that’s it. I could afford to throw him a little dough on the off-chance — a load of good it did me, eh?’

‘Don’t be bitter, Harry,’ I said. He kneaded his brown face with a hairy hand, and as his eyes and nose emerged from the open fingers he smiled a humourless smile.

‘And Fernie,’ I said, ‘how did he get along with da Cunha?’

‘O.K. Nothing special. Just O.K. is all.’

‘Did you ever go into a room and hear a snatch of conversation between them that you weren’t supposed to hear? Any scientific talk, for instance?’

‘Loads of times, but it was never anything special.’

‘That’s all,’ I said, ‘we’ll play it your way. You think you’re the blue paper in my potato crisps, but I can work you over my way and still have enough left to shovel up for the Lagos cops.’

‘F’r instance,’ said H.K., but his voice was a little hoarse.

‘Well, I’ll tell you, Harry, if we can’t have a gentlemanly chat I’ll warm up a nice big dessert-spoonful of warm water and lactose and give you a generous ten per cent dose of the stuff in that pulverizer over there …’

‘Just try,’ said H.K.

‘You’ve got me mixed up with those weedy accents that play policemen on English TV, Harry,’ I said. ‘I will try.’

There was a short sharp silence.

‘I’m not a hop-head,’ said H.K. His tan had disappeared now. ‘A ten per cent dose will kill me.’ He folded his arms tightly.

‘You may swell a little but you’ll survive for the second dose and the others until I hand you over to the cops. Then you can rest until I call back for you in a week’s time. You’ll talk, Harry, believe me. Just look upon it as sales research — it’s probably tax-deductible.’

Harry’s head sank forward and he rocked gently in his seat as he tried to wake up in a morning in which I did not exist.

When he continued to speak it was in an impersonal monotone, like an announcer with a weather report which he didn’t believe. ‘Fernie worked for da Cunha. Fernie had a great respect for him. Even after we had enough money not to worry, Fernie would continue to say “sir” to him. Fernie had contacts all over the world, and they all liked him. Maybe you find that hard to believe, but it’s true. Fernie had only to whisper about something he wanted done and, bingo, it was done. Fernie arranged the supplies of the morphine base, I processed and arranged sales.’

‘How did the morphine base arrive?’ I asked.

‘By ship once a month. The ships didn’t stop. Only an expert frogman could do it. We went out in the boat and then Fernie used his frogman gear and a powered undersea sled to get under the hull of the moving ship and remove the container that was held on the bilge keel by magnetic clamps. We processed the stuff here and sealed it into sardine-cans. Then Fernie fixed the consignment to a ship heading Stateside. I notified my contacts in New York. They gave the ship time to clear customs, then had a frogman go under it while it was at the quayside and prise the horse loose. Easy. How am I doing?’

‘You are doing O.K.,’ I said. ‘Your boat; did Fernie ever use that?’

‘Sure, he was a mile better sailor than I’ll ever be. He borrowed it whenever he wanted to. It was da Cunha borrowing it that made me sore. I’d never trust the old guy alone, I don’t care if he was an admiral in the Kraut navy.’

‘Did they always use a similar amount of fuel?’

‘Yeah,’ said H.K., ‘I checked on that out of curiosity. They went up the coast about twelve miles, give a little, take a little.’

‘Tell me more about da Cunha,’ I said.

‘Da Cunha rides around the town in that old 1935 Ford like it was a Thunderbird. Thinks he owns the town. He closes his eyes; it’s night. When he sends Tomas along to borrow the boat it’s like he’s doing me a favour. Da Cunha; wise guy. One day I get here; he’s loading himself a crate of sardines. “I’ve gotcha red-handed,” I say, smiling like I might be joking. “Better the red face than the black heart, Mister Kondit,” he says — an old Portuguese saying it is, he says. “So who cares?” I say. “I do,” he says, “and I’m the only one,” and off he drives with the sardines.

‘He’s in deep with the local church, and last week there was a gang of business tycoons down from Madrid. Whatever he intends to do for Portugal it certainly won’t include moving the average wage up from four dollars a week.’ H.K. raised his head and said, ‘You’re not kidding me about letting me scram, are you? Because if I’m shooting my mouth off for nothing …’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you can talk your way out as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Boat and all?’ asked H.K.

‘Boat and all,’ I said.

‘I bet that da Cunha’s V.N.V. is a local branch office of the Young Europe machine. You know what I’m talking about?’

‘Talk on,’ I said.

‘It’s a network of Fascists throughout Europe, Rabat to Narvik. The O.A.S. in France, the Belgian M.A.C. As far as these boys are concerned the present régime here in Portugal is Socialist.’

‘What can you offer as proof?’

‘Not a thing, pal. I wish I had something, it’s been my big dream to iron him out.’

‘Looks like you’re too late now,’ I said.

‘The Fascists will tumble; historically it’s all part of the class struggle.’

‘Class struggle,’ I said, ‘that’s hilarious, coming from you. You are the spokesman for the Hopheads and General Narcotic Dealers’ Union?’

‘Yeah, the dope outfit — I’m the chief dope,’ said H.K.H.K.’s eyes held mine. I decided to try a bluff. ‘The English visitor,’ I coaxed gently, ‘don’t forget the English visitor, Harry.’

‘Pal of Fernie’s,’ H.K. said. ‘Nice little guy, great sense of fun.’

‘His name?’

‘Ivor Butcher,’ said H.K., ‘great sense of fun.’

‘Great sense of fun,’ I said. Now it was shuffling its way together. Ivor Butcher knew Fernie. A messenger? A courier? Did Smith tell Fernie what to do or was it the other way round? In either case: why?

I looked around at the darkened factory: the oily machinery, the great piles of tins.

‘Harry,’ I said, ‘I want Fernie Tomas here; get him here and you can go.’

H.K. sucked his cheeks in and snorted a laugh down his nose. ‘You can get him as easily as I can,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to rub my face in the dirt.’ He walked across to the sink and washed his hands with the strange flecked Portuguese soap that looks like Roquefort cheese, dried them, put on his wrist-watch and turned to face us. ‘You did the hero bit already, pal. Now I’m walking out of here, hardware or no hardware.’

‘You think so,’ I said, but I did nothing as he walked across to the chair and picked up his cashmere cardigan, and nothing as he walked down between the machines towards the door. He looked back once to see how I was reacting. I put my gun into my jacket pocket and he looked reassured. It was then that a flash roared across the tension and echoed through the piles of empty tins like a piranha in a goldfish bowl. Charly had fished a pistol out of her handbag and let fly at H.K. I saw him spin around and fall forward against the pressing machine. I reached out to take the gun from her. The gun crashed again and the heat bent the hairs on the back of my hand. The bullet nicked the machinery with a clang and whined off into the darkness. My hand closed over the barrel to drag it from her, but it was hot enough to burn me and I dropped it with a crash. I flung my arm around Charly and held her captive.

From behind the machinery H.K.’s voice asked, ‘Where did that loony dame get a gun?’

I looked at the old Italian Victoria 7.65 automatic on the floor. ‘Out of a Christmas cracker by the look of it,’ I said. ‘Now beat it, fade, before I change my mind.’

Charly beat her fists against my button-down madras and yelled, ‘Don’t let him go — he killed your friend!’ over and over again. She stopped to draw breath. ‘You just aren’t human,’ she said quietly. I held her tightly while H.K. limped away with a big red hand clamped across his forearm.

I sat Charly down. Finally she blew her nose into my handkerchief and told me that she worked for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Washington, and that I had just messed everything up. It was her damaged esprit de corps she was crying about as she sat in Harry Kondit’s dream house.

‘Then you knew that the smell of vinegar was acetic acid and would be coming from the processing of morphine. Why didn’t you tell me the real story?’

She blew her nose again. ‘Because a good operator lets other law-enforcement agencies spearhead his actions,’ she quoted between sniffs.

At that precise moment we heard H.K. start the engine. ‘He’s taking our car,’ said Charly, ‘we’re going to be left here.’ She began to giggle.

It was a little over three kilometres to Albufeira. We skirted the huge plantation of fig trees and smelt the olive crop ready for the press. Charly took her shoes off after one kilometre and stopped sniffing after two. For the fiftieth time she said, ‘You’ve let him get away. I must phone the police.’

‘Look,’ I finally said, ‘I don’t know what they teach you in the Treasury Department,[30] but if you think your prestige there depends on putting the iron bangles across H.K. you are quite nutty. Let him go spread panic among his pals. If he goes to the end of the world you can be there in a day or phone there in an hour. This is a strictly cerebral business and just because I wave an old war-souvenir pistol around to impress you, it doesn’t mean you have to go off your trolley. You might hurt him.’

This last remark stung Charly into a fury and she said I was just as bad as H.K. As for hurting H.K., if it hadn’t been for me getting in the way she would have killed him and a good thing too.

You can’t help envying these narcotics sleuths. The governments of the world are all so keen to prove themselves blameless that, far from asking awkward questions about firearms, they will steady up your gun elbow while you’re firing. I couldn’t afford luxuries like remembering that H.K.’s desire to remove the evidence had certainly killed Joe MacIntosh.

My position wasn’t quite so pretty. I couldn’t have Charly phoning up the police and attracting attention to our enterprise. At least not before I contacted Singleton, folded up the equipment and faded out. I began to be aware of a silence and realized that Charly had asked me a question. ‘Umm,’ I said, as though I was considering it carefully.

‘It’s so confusing, isn’t it?’ Charly said.

‘Confusing,’ I replied, ‘of course it’s confusing. You involve yourself in industrial espionage and then you complain about it being confusing.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Charly. ‘I’m not involved with industrial espionage.’

‘Aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Narcotics is a multi-million-dollar industry. Half of that industry is devoted to making money, the other half to making you confused.’ There was a silence. ‘In one way or another,’ I added.

‘Just exactly what does that last crack mean?’

‘It means authority can be confused in many ways, by bribes, codes, camouflage, false informers or even by pressures so powerful that the law can be changed to suit the lawbreaker. But the most confusing thing of all is old-fashioned lying by old liars: like H.K.’

‘Why, was a lot of what he said untrue?’ She stopped in the centre of the road and pulled her shoes on again.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but like all first-class lies it had a firm foundation of truth, like margarine with twelve and a half per cent butter.’

‘What did he say that was true?’ asked Charly.

‘Well, suppose you get those smart boys at the Treasury Department to work it out for you. I’ll just say he didn’t leave us in any doubt about the way our investigations should continue. Providing that we want it tailored one hundred per cent to the convenience of Harry Kondit.’

‘Yes,’ said Charly obediently, and she hugged my arm. I wish I had listened to my last remark more closely.