The Conduct of Major Maxim

Chapter11

Corporal Blagg had spent his childhood – those parts of it the local authority hadn't been able to control – in the courts, alleyways and concrete 'gardens' of Rotherhithe's blocks of flats. He had learned to fight there, to ride there, to play football there, and at last how to get his hand inside Betty Tanner's jeans there. He knew those courts and gardens, not just as places and secret short cuts, but as a whole pattern of life and behaviour. And he knew immediately that the two men walking towards him didn't belong, were wrong. They couldn't have been more wrong if they'd worn Father Christmas suits.

But they'd seen him the moment he saw them, so he kept on walking towards them. They might not know him by sight, or might not be looking for him at all. They weren't police; one of them had a rather foreign look. He put his hand casually into his jacket and touched the butt of the Spanish copy of the Colt.38. They were about five yards apart and he was just deciding they weren't anything to do with him when they both took out pistols.

He shot one twice, in the middle, and he collapsed against the other, blocking Blagg's aim. The second man brought up his gun and fired from the cover of his wounded companion. Blagg tried for a head shot and missed, felt a punch in the chest that made his knees fold, but he fired again and saw the pistol fall loose. Then the man was running, and Blagg could have shot him in the back but he had only one round left.

The first man lay there, moaning. Blagg started to run, too, in the other direction. He moved fast and confidently, but when he had gone only three hundred yards he began to feel breathless, long before he should have done, and realised whatthat one shot might have done. He started desperately to think of a place to hide.

Something in the sea air must act as a mind-blowing drug on English architects, Agnes decided. Mining towns, garrison towns, purpose-built New Towns – all those were fairly hideous in their own ways, but they offered no contest to the English seaside. There, an impregnable first line of defence against any invader with visual taste, stood hundreds of miles of small houses that could have been assembled by retarded monkeys dipping randomly into a box of building styles.

The little semi-det that Maxim's parents had bought when they retired to the outskirts of Littlehampton sported a Georgian bow window, timber cladding above the garage – which had a metal door – and tile-hung patches around the first-floor windows, whose balconies were just big enough for a seagull to stand on. And that was restrained compared with the green pantiles, Spanish ironwork, Provençalshutters and stained-glass leaded windows spattered along the rest of the road.

Or maybe they just didn't have architects within three miles of the sea. Maybe it was all done by builders' baby daughters: "Draw Daddy a nice house and Daddy will build it. "

Maxim's mother was a cheerful, bustling little woman; his father wore a moustache, smoked a pipe and said very little but, Agnes guessed, listened a lot. She learned that Maxim had an elder sister – oddly, she'd always assumed he must have been the first child-who had married a Quaker schoolmaster and lived up North, had three children and didn't work, "Except at disapproving of the Army," Maxim added. They were just finishing the apple pie when the phone rang.

Everybody looked at Maxim. Probably his parents didn't get more than half a dozen calls a week, Agnes realised.

Maxim answered it, then said: "Speaking," and mouthed to Agnes: "It's the Fun Palace," and took the phone into the hallway, out of hearing. Nobody else said anything, and Agnes suddenly saw that Chris was pale and rigid with apprehension as he sensed his weekend turning lonely. But his face said nothing; a soldier's face. You poor little bugger, she thought.

Maximcame back and beckoned Agnes out. They stood just outside the front door.

"A gun battle in Rotherhithe. One badly wounded, police looking for two more, at least one of them thought to be wounded. As much as anything, I think George was just wanting to make sure I was still here."

"I'll give you an alibi. What do you think it is?"

"The same as George thinks it is. I don't know how often Rotherhithe goes in for gunfights, but this could be one of ours."

Agnes nodded gloomily. "It's a bit late for bank hold-ups and a bit early for night-club ructions. "

"I'd better get back."

"Can you give me a lift?"

She let him go in alone to break the news to Chris. Across the street a lace curtain twitched. The neighbours would be interested in whom that nice Major Maxim was talking to on the doorstep, too.

After driving in silence for ten minutes, Maxim said suddenly: "I was a bloody fool. Blagg told me he'd thrown away the revolver that woman gave him. Soldiersdon't throw away guns. They join the Army to^ef guns, and they're always in trouble for possessing one illegally or swiping a few rounds of ammunition. It's crooks who throw away guns. I've been thinking like a crook. "

"Six months at Number 10 would do that to anybody," Agnes sympathised. "Are you a gun nut as well?"

"You can't be a soldier – not an infantryman, anyway -without liking weapons. And liking some more than others. It's like a pilot having opinions about aeroplanes, nobody thinks that's odd. Don't you get any firearms training in your mob?"

"Oh, we're supposed to know something about handguns, and fireoffafew rounds every so often. I usually manage to dodge that. I've only had to carry a pistol once, just a few hours. And I've never used one. "

Maxim nodded. They had passed through Arundel and were coming over the ridge at Whiteways Lodge roundabout,heading for Petworth and then the A 3 at Milford. It was far the best route into London from the South. He was driving fast but safely and, Agnes noted, not as well as she could have done. Still, she had the training and he didn't. Being able to handle a car was for her far more important than playing Annie Get Your Gun.

"If it is your wandering corporal in hospital, what were you planning?" she asked.

"Oh, I wasn't thinking it would be him. "

"Really?" Without glancing at her, he knew she had her eyebrows at full stretch.

"I'd back Blagg at any fun and gamesofthatsort. He could be hurt, but he wouldn't be the one left behind. "

"I forgot, he's one of your Hereford Superstars. But even so -"

"I assume whoever-it-was wanted to capture him, not kill him. If they'd got him badly wounded, they'd have taken him away, wouldn't they?"

"Much in what you say," she agreed reluctantly. "So do you have any ideas where Blagg could be?"

"None. I'll just have to go looking."

"Of course. I suppose that would be the one way to make things worse. I should have had more faith in you. "

This time Maxim did glance at her; she was staring straight ahead, nodding gently to herself.

"What do you mean?"

"Harry, do you have any conception of the strife you have caused so far?"

"By thumping those two gits from Six?"

"Not just that. If that were all, I'd applaud it as a wise and public-spirited action and I hope it starts a trend. But it was very far from all, wasn't it? Until you came along, Century House was right out on a limb. One of their sections had gone hog barmy and set up an operation that turned into a shoot-out in a friendly country with an apparently innocent citizen getting killed. They'd followed that up by mounting a major surveillance job in London without clearing it with us or the Co-ordinator or anybody. Their private parts were firmly jammed in the wringer and all it needed was for somebody togive the handle a slight nudge… So then you came galloping to the rescue. You concealed knowledge of a deserter, you actually helped him stay deserted, and They can make out a case for saying you still are. You messed up their surveillance, you beat up their agents, you went in forexactly the same unauthorised adventurism as they had – and so let them off the hook. Now if they pull it off everybody'11 heave a sigh of relief and their methods will be forgiven, and if theydon't then it'll all be Numberid's fault and that would probably suit their book just as much as coming good on Plainsong itself."

Maxim took a deep breath and said reluctantly: "I suppose… I do see most of what you say. I just thought Blagg was getting a raw deal. And now it seems they're loading the whole blame for Germany on him, and he's only a corporal and the Army's his whole -"

"Forget Corporal Blagg!" Agnes shouted. "Forgetall the bloody corporals inall the bloody Army! Just get it through your tiny I9i4-pattern mind that you have started a constitutional crisis! Haveyou got that, or should I send it in cipher?"

There was nothing to cause an echo in the car, already full of engine and wind noise, so it was probably only in their minds that her voice seemed to fade in throbbing waves, as across a vast canyon. Both of them were rather shaken; Maxim slowed abruptly and sat up straighter in the seat.

"I haven't lost my temper with anybody in years." Agnes was speaking through teeth clenched against any further emotion, and fumbling in her handbag. "In my job you're not supposed to. Does that dashboard lighter work?"

"I think so. I didn't know you smoked."

"I don't often. I want to now. " She rammed the lighter knob viciously, and lit her cigarette with trembling fingers. "I understand you also told George that you had a rehearsal in Rotherhithe the night before you tried to reform the Intelligence Serviceby forcemajeure. What was the score there? – one busted arm, one ruptured spleen. Had you thought about howthat might look in the public prints? Thank God Husband doesn't know about that, not yet, anyway." Her voice was small and hurried. "Stop at the next phone box, would you?"

They drove in total silence for five minutes until they found one.

Agnes got back into the car shaking her head. "Nothing new, but I've asked our people to bend an ear that way." She lit another cigarette, but now her hands were steady; Maxim drove off, changing gears very precisely.

There was still perhaps three-quarters of an hour of daylight left, but the sun was just glimpses of coppery gold between vast castles of cloud stacking up on the horizon. It was only the breeze when the car was moving that made the warm air breathable. Agnes watched the clouds, the incredible impermanent detail of the cumulo-nimbus that had fascinated all the English landscape – and seascape – artists.

"I don't get out of London enough, " she said. "You have to get out to see what thejob's really about. London doesn't give you enough reasons."

"Were you country?"

"Worcestershire. My father kept a small flat in London and commuted for the week. It made it a weekend marriage, but it seemed to work. I remember loving Friday nights, when he came home… I suppose that's usually your set-up, too."

"Usually." But this Friday he was drivingback to London. "What would you be doing now if you hadn't come down?"

"Cooking."

"Sorry. Did I get your evening wrecked?"

"No, it was only going to be me and Mozart. If I can get three or four dishes into the freezer I can do a dinner party without worrying about being home in time to cook. " Realising she'd never invited him, she moved the topic on quickly. "Do you cook?"

"I'm learning."

"Don't they teach you cooking in the Army?"

"A bit, but it mostly seems to be with rats and hedgehogs and seaweed."

"You're joking."

"No. The only cookery I got taught was survival training in the SAS."

"Lord. Do you get used to it?"

"I hope I never know." He took a deep breath. "You mentioned a constitutional crisis. Did you mean that?"

Agnes threw the last of her cigarette out of the window. "So much for preserving the beauty of the countryside… I don't think you quite realise how much money's being bet on Plainsong. If they can really get a hook into this Eismark, a member of the Secretariat and likely to be there for years, it'll be quite a coup in its very quiet way. Something the West Germans or Uncle's boys or the French couldn't do. For once there could be enough credit for everybody who wants it. Scott-Scobie, he's one of the most ambitious young men at the Forbidden City. I don't know what he wants, it could be the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, it might be the next Director-General of Six… And Guy Husband, he's new to the Sovbloc desk; if he pulls this off in his first few months, he could become a living legend. "

"Does he want to be one?"

"Oh yes. It's their top word. What else can they want if they're in these behind-the-arras jobs? They're never going to get rich or famous, but they love thinking they'll one day be legendary to Those Who Really Know. As for Dieter Sims, I don't know much about him except that he's been building up the East German unit under Husband's wing. Maybe he'll have to be content with merely doing all the work, but there's compensations in being indispensable, too."

She looked at the few cigarettes left in her pack and then impulsively threw them all out of the window. "The hell with the countryside… The whole of what's usually called the Intelligence Community's feeling a bit frisky at the moment. I imagine you've noticed that our dear Prime Minister doesn't exactly go a bundle on us, on any of us?"

"That was why he invented my job, wasn't it?" An all-too-nearly-public scandal caused, that time, by Agnes's service had prompted the PM to appoint an Army officer to Number 10, although it hadn't prompted him to decide exactly what Maxim should do once there.

"That's right. He's always been paranoid about intelligence, seeing plots and hidden microphones and leaks to the media • •. he kept the money tight, too. Now it seems he won't bewith us for ever. He's not a well man. "

"Did George say that?"

Agnes thought long enough for Maxim to glance at her, making sure she'd heard. "No-o, not in so many words. But we have sources of our own. We're supposed to know what goes on in this country, and the PM's health is a national asset, so… But he isn't responding to treatment."

"I thought it was just bronchitis."

"By now it's pneumonia. It's probably only that old quack Hardacre feeding him the wrong antibiotics -" Agnes shared George's view of Sir Frank "- but if each course takes five days before they decide it isn't working, it can run on. He's over sixty and he's had chest trouble before. And every day he spends in bed wastes away a little more of his authority: Parliament doesn't like sick leaders, it casts them out to die on the cold, cold slopes of the House of Lords. Quite right too, of course. But that makes now a good time for a little discreet character assassination, suggest the old boy can't even control his own Private Office. That's you. "

"They're using me to try and bring him down?"

"They're using anything they can find. Yes, they're using you."

Maxim was silent for a while. "And there's nothing I can doaboutit."

"You could give up consorting with deserters and street fighting in all its forms… I realise it'll be tough, trying to cut it down, but just say to yourself-"

"None of thiswas planned, was it?"

"Oh Lordy me, no. You leave the conspiracy theory of history to the professors, and keep your eye on the opportunists. A sense of timing's always been more important than mere dishonesty."

They were on the choppy, wavelike hills before Milford, a narrow road with too much Friday evening traffic heading south, against them, for Maxim to risk trying to overtake an elderly truck in front. He resigned himself and let the car drift back to a comfortable fifty-yard gap. A fat Jaguar promptly swerved past him, closed up on the truck and started weaving in and out, forced back every time.

"Everybody's a contender," Maxim said, so softly that Agnes had to think for a moment to be sure what she'd heard.

"Aren't you?" she asked sharply. "Don't you want to run the Army? Or even a battalion?"

"I think I did once," Maxim said slowly. "But now… now I just don't know…"

Agnes let it go at that. He might go on to talking about his dead wife, Jenny, and she didn't want to hear about her. She wanted to know, she just didn't want to hear.