Riptide

§ 23

Cal had no grasp of London’s geography, but even the walk around London last Sunday morning, after the big raid, had told him that it lacked order. Following your nose only worked if you weren’t going anywhere. What London needed was a grid. True, the Washington streets he’d grown up with had nothing as romantic as Piccadilly or as historically obscure as Rotten Row-the best they could come up with was a prosaic Avenue C or M Street, and you’d never while away a lazy five minutes wondering about the origins of ‘M’-but they led somewhere. Major L’Enfant, Washington’s genius, had taken the stripes off the flag, drawn them as a grid across a swamp in Maryland, thrown the stars at them, one for each of the fifteen states at the time of the city’s inception, and where they hit declared a road junction and linked up the diagonals. What could be simpler? An easy-to-use city, with a few statues thrown in.

It was scarcely beginning to get dark as Stilton steered him across the urban chaos that was the East End, but blackouts were already being pulled tight in the houses they passed. One or two of the oncoming cars had put on their dim, hooded headlights. In real darkness, enough to see each other coming, not enough to see where you were going. A sense of caution seemed to have grown into the British motorist as a consequence. Cal doubted that Stilton clocked more than twenty miles an hour the whole way. He realised he would come to crave real darkness soon enough.

‘You’ve said nowt,’ Stilton said after about ten minutes of crawling along the half-empty streets.

Nowt? Cal tried to think of a rhyme, the key to meaning, unwilling to admit he didn’t know what the man meant.

‘You were going to tell me your theory about the killing.’

‘Oh, I see. Let’s get back to Stahl for a moment. I, I mean we, don’t know what Stahl is looking for. We don’t know why he doesn’t simply come in. It’s been implicit from the start that he’s running. But running from what?’

‘From the Germans, of course. I should o’ thought that’s pretty bloody obvious.’

‘Sure, and if he’s running, why shouldn’t they be chasing?’

‘Eh?’

‘If Stahl has been blown. If Germany knows he’s an American agent-then they’d try to kill him before he told us whatever it is he has to tell us. They’d have sent someone after him, wouldn’t they?’

‘Smulders?’

‘Was that the guy’s name?’

‘Said he was a Dutchman, a master printer from Delft. He may well have been Dutch. There’s plenty of Quislings around.’

‘Suppose it was Stahl he came to kill?’

Stilton said nothing to this. Cal could almost hear him thinking.

‘You mean like a hypothesis?’

‘Sure… if that helps, think of it that way.’

‘OK. I’m listening.’

‘The hypothesis is that Smulders came to kill Stahl.’

‘If you say so.’

‘And if he did, then the implications are serious.’

‘Eh?’

‘Think about it. He came after Stahl. Came to kill Stahl-but wound up getting killed.’

‘OK-I get your drift.’

All the same Cal spelt it out to him.

‘Suppose Stahl got to this guy before he got to him. And at that right under the nose of your man Dobbs. Think what it means. It means Stahl’s one step ahead of the Germans and two steps ahead of us. If he doesn’t want to be found…’

Cal let the sentence trail off.

‘There is one thing,’ Stilton said after a while. ‘We lost Smulders. Just for one night, you understand. But for more than two hours we’d not a clue where he was. If he encountered Stahl in that time…’

Now Stilton had no conclusion to his sentence.

‘Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’ said Cal.

Stilton paused again. Another breathing, thinking space as he pulled the car off Mile End Road and headed down towards the river.

‘Mind-like you said, it’s just hypothetical…’

‘If you say so.’ Cal echoed his own caution back to him.

‘You know, Mr Cormack, you’re not as green as you are cabbage-looking.’

Now what the fuck did that mean?

Stilton stopped the car in a side street. Pulled up the handbrake between the seats.

‘Are we there?’ said Cal.

‘Welcome to Jubilee Street.’

They got out. Stilton dug into his pockets looking for his keys. Cal looked around. For all he had seen in the last few days, nothing had prepared him for what he now saw. He had seen public ruins, ruins on the grand scale. Public places blasted into vacancy, open to the sky. This was different. These were homes, human habitations. And in all the street only one house still stood. Alone in a desert of rubble stood the home of Chief Inspector Walter Stilton. A big, five-storey double-fronted house, once the centrepiece of a late

Victorian terrace-that surely, was the Jubilee celebrated in the street’s name? Even his passing knowledge of British history covered Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887-and its windows were patched in cardboard, its paint peeled back to raw elm, and its walls were jagged as a row of rotting teeth, where they had once locked neatly into the house next door. But there was no house next door. Next door, in the literal sense, looked to be the best part of quarter of a mile away. What remained of the surrounding houses appeared to be sunken pools. Cellars into which the structure of the houses had collapsed upon impact from a bomb-‘pancaked’ was the local jargon-only to fill up with rain in the days and weeks that had passed. Cal had learnt on Saturday night just how flimsy-how unexpectedly flimsy-London was. He’d watched bombs slice through houses from top to bottom like they were made from nothing more substantial than tinfoil. Unexpected, -because London was old. Older than America. Older than his family home in Fairfax County-and that had withstood a three day siege by the Union Army. London, so elegant, so redolent of lived history, seemed to him to be no more than an Anacostia shantytown. Hitler huffed, Hitler puffed and he blew your house down.

Over the slaughtered houses a tall factory chimney stack was visible-as prominent among the ruins of the East End of London as the Washington Monument in the great fields of the Mall. How had they managed to miss it? Whatever the Luftwaffe left standing propelled Cal to wondering how? Why? Why this building? Why not that? Why wasn’t London razed from East to West and North to South. How did they stand it, how did they survive, how, put simply, did they live?

‘It’s nowt grand, you’ll understand,’ said Stilton fiddling at the lock with his key chain. ‘We live plain.’

The door, warped in its frame, jammed. Stilton muttered ‘alf a mo’ and put his shoulder to it. The door scraped across the linoleum with a shriek and Cal found himself in a long corridor, with stairs ascending and descending, and the steamy smell of cooking wafting up from below.

‘That you, Stinker?’ a woman’s voice yelled.

‘Who else would it be? You’re not expecting your fancy man, are you?’

‘E don’t comeround Thursdays!’

Stilton clumped down the wooden stairs, Cal trailing after, into a huge kitchen. Hot with cooking, a dozen aromas mixing in the air. A fat, fiftyish woman in a flowery apron, grey hair pinned up in a bun, stood by a large cast-iron cooker, the like of which Cal had not seen before. It was four or five feet across, and six or seven pans stood bubbling on two giant hotplates, their covers hinged back against the chimney breast. She flipped a couple of pan lids. Stirred their contents with a wooden spoon.

Stilton crept up to the woman, hugged her around the waist. Lifted her gently off the ground and whispered in her ear. She prised him off less than gently. Rapped his knuckles with her spoon and said “Ands orf. Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Then she noticed Cal.

‘You daft so-an’-so. You didn’t say we’d got visitors.’

One hand unconsciously smoothed down her skirts where Stilton had ruffled them, the other clutched the dripping spoon.

‘This is our Mr Cormack. Mr Cormack is a Yank. First one we’ve ever had. Mr Cormack, the missis. Our Edna.’

‘How do you do, Mrs Stilton?’

Before Edna Stilton could answer Stilton said, ‘You can fit in another for dinner, can’t you Ed?’

‘Comes the day we can’t! O’ course we can. But you’re early, Stinker, I’m all behind tonight. What with Kev and Trev home, and Kitty says she’ll be along later, there’s been a lot to do. You’ll have to make yourself scarce for half an hour. I can’t be doin’ with you under me feet.’

Out in the street once more Stilton said, ‘We’ll go for a swift half.’

‘A what?’

‘We’ll go to the pub.’

‘Again?’

‘I don’t mean the same pub. There’s plenty of pubs.’

It was, Cal knew, a classic British understatement. They were, Stilton professed, just ‘nipping round the corner’, but this still entailed passing what looked to Cal like a perfectly decent pub. But pubs, as he was learning, were a matter of ambience and nuance. It was not for the uninitiated to pronounce.

‘We’ll kill twenty minutes in the Brickie’s Arms,’ said Stilton. ‘You’re going to love this. A real treat this time o’ night.’

Stilton pushed at the door of a blacked-out, glazed-brick and red-tile building on the next corner. Inside it was warm and moist and brown. The room was not large, but it was pretty well full, and it existed in nondescript hues of brown, from the oak and mahogany of the furniture to the dirty sawdust on the floor and the nicotine mist on the ceiling, to the faded, featureless pattern in the forty-year-old wallpaper. It might once have been red, but it was brown now. Above the bar a portrait of the Prime Minister took pride of place and contributed the only splash of colour with its trailing ribbons of red, white and blue.

‘Evening Stinker,’ said the barman. ‘What’ll it be?’

‘Two halves o’ best. You don’t want stout again, do you Mr Cormack? I doubt Eric’s got an aspidistra to water.’

Cal did the merest double-take at this and accepted the offer.

‘Chief Inspector…’

‘Call me Walter, lad.’

‘Why do they call you Stinker?’

Stilton grinned. ‘It’s not what you were thinking.’

‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’

‘Cheese, lad. Cheese. Where I come from, up north, Derbyshire way, they make four or five varieties of cheese. Two of ‘em called Stilton. A white one and a blue one. The blue does niff a bit.’

‘Niff?’

‘Stink.’

‘Derbyshire?’

‘Aye.’

‘So you’re not a cockney?’

‘Nay lad, or did you think I talked like this for the fun of it?’

‘I thought you talked like that guy on the radio.’

Stilton took this quizzically.

‘What guy on the radio?’

‘The late-night guy. Priestley. J.B. Priestley.’

‘No, no. He’s Yorkshire. Not the same thing at all. They still live in mud huts in Bradford. Now, the wife’s a cockney though. She was born in that house we live in, and all her brothers and sisters along with her. And all our kids too.’

They carried two brimming halves of best bitter to a table. Three chairs, one of them occupied by a morose-looking man with a glass of fat beer in front of him, as though he had spun it out since opening time and now given up on it.

Stilton knew him. Made the introductions.

‘This is the sheriff, Station Sergeant George Bonham. He runs the local nick, don’t you, George? Mr Cormack. Our Yank.’

Bonham looked up. Did not smile, did not object to their presence.

‘We saw your protégé today, George.’

‘Me what?’

‘Protégé. The wunderkind. Sergeant Troy.’

Something resembling a smile rose and withered on the man’s face.

‘I’ve not seen him in a while,’ he said. ‘Not since…’

He left the sentence unfinished. Stilton elbowed his beer. A minute passed with neither of them speaking, then Bonham bent down under the table, picked up a policeman’s helmet from the floor and stood up. Cal was in awe. At six foot and more he was quite accustomed to being one of, if not the tallest in any room. But this man had to be six foot six, and that was without the silly hat.

Bonham muttered goodnight and vanished.

‘Was it something I said?’

‘Nay, lad. It was me. I was only trying to cheer him up, but I should have known when he and Troy last met. His wife’s funeral. Ethel Bonham copped it in the Blitz just before Christmas. George is taking it very hard. I shouldn’t have mentioned Troy. Troy was his boy at the local nick, trained him up from nowt. Now he’s the darling of the Yard, just when old George needs him.’

‘I had kind of meant to ask you about that.’

‘About what?’

‘Well, the Blitz, the street. Your street. How many people died?’

‘Oh, I see. One, as a matter of fact. Just the one. Mrs Bluit at number 72. But she was ninety. Died in her sleep. When the all clear sounded, there she was, stretched out in her bed. Stone dead. Natural causes, the doctor said. Her house lost its windows and its roof and most of one wall, and in the end Heavy Rescue bulldozed it before it could fall on anybody, but there wasn’t a mark on her.’

‘I don’t get it. It looks like… like Armageddon.’

‘Everyone else was down the tube station at Liverpool Street. Now, don’t get me wrong. The Jerries blew the street to buggery. We were lucky. It was December, day after Boxing Day-same raid as killed Ethel Bonham. I reckon there was more’n a bomber a minute for the best part of four hours. That makes about two

hundred and fifty planes. Biggest raid I’d ever heard till last Saturday. Now, if it’d been September, then it might’ve been a different story. We weren’t expecting ‘em then. Everybody’d pulled out or sent their kids to the country in ‘39. By 1940, when nothing much had happened, they were drifting back. Last September we weren’t ready. We lost a lot of people. There’s plenty of folk ‘round here lost someone. George, if he’d just snap to and take a look around him, would realise he’s not the only one, that everybody in Stepney Green knows how he feels. Everybody’s lost someone. Or everybody knows somebody who’s lost someone. We’ve lost more civilians so far than soldiers-and that includes Dunkirk.’

Cal let this one settle. He’d never felt more like an outsider.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’d hate to have to explain that back home.’

‘You don’t have to. That’s why we’ve got Ed Murrow.’

Cal heard the silent touché in Stilton’s remark. They’d touched swords again.

‘I am trying, you know. I know that to the English I represent a rich, complacent nation with no commitment to the war. I know that to the English I’m “Yank” or “lad”-but I’m trying.’

‘Would you rather I called you Captain Cormack?’

‘No. I’ll settle for lad, and only because I don’t think I could ever stop you. But my name’s Cal.’

Stilton roared with laughter and slapped him on the back. As the breath burst from his lungs, he could just hear the barman calling for order.

‘Right, shut up you lot, the bugger’s on again!’

The room fell silent. A crackle of static filled the air, someone tuning a wireless set, then the burble, hiss and hum of a station found and the first words of speech upon the airwaves.

‘Garmany calling, Garmany calling.’

The room went mad. A deafening explosion of noise.

‘Garmany calling, Garmany calling. Haw bleedin’ haw bleedin’ haw!!!’

A noise rippled forth like a thousand farts as every man in the room stuck his tongue between his lips and blew a Bronx cheer. Two jokers in Wellington boots, their trousers stuck into the tops, inarched up and down in front of the bar with black combs pressed (o their top lips, the other arm out to the heavens, legs kicking higher and higher with every goose’s step.

Two short, fat men nipped smartly in front of them. ‘I zay, I zay, I zay. Mein hund has kein nose!’

‘Your hund has kein nose. How does he smell?’

‘Like ein true-bred Aryan!’

They stomped off holding their noses. Their entire audience yelled ‘Phwooarrr!’ and another thousand farts rippled forth.