The Tightrope Men

Thirty

Armstrong was digging another hole. He had filled in the first one and left Carey to replace the turf. Carey did his best but still the lawn in that place was bumpy and uneven and, in the circumstances, he did not feel like stamping it down too hard. He looked towards Armstrong who appeared to be systematically wrecking a flower bed. ‘Found anything?’

‘Not yet.’ Armstrong pushed again with the spade, and then stooped quickly. ‘Wait! I think there’s some—’ before he finished the sentence Carey was by his side — ‘thing here.’

‘Let me see.’ Carey put his hand down the hole and felt a flat surface. Flakes of something came away on his fingers and when he brought up his hand his fingerprints were brown. ‘Rust!’ he said. ‘This is it. Careful with that spade.’

He looked back at the house and thought it was fortunate that Mrs K. had gone shopping and taken her son with her. A bit of good for a lot of bad. Earlier in the afternoon she had been out in the garden hanging out the weekly wash to dry, and then she had come over and chatted interminably about the iniquities of the planning authorities, the ridiculous prices in the shops and other matters dear to the housewifely heart. A lot of time had been wasted.

He said, ‘If the trunk is corroded we might be able to rip open the top and take out the papers without making the hole any bigger.’

‘I forgot my tin opener,’ said Armstrong. ‘But this might do.’ He put his hand to the side of his leg and from the long pocket of the overalls designed to take a foot rule he extracted a sheathed knife. ‘Bought it in Helsinki; thought it might come in handy.’

Carey grunted as he saw the design. He took the knife from the sheath and examined the broad blade and the simple wooden handle. ‘The Yanks think Jim Bowie invented these,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever try to tackle a Finn with one; they’re better at it than you. And probably the Russians, too, in these parts. It’ll do quite nicely.’

He cleared earth from the top of the trunk until about a square foot of rusty metal was showing, then he stabbed at it with the sharp point of the knife. The metal was rotten and the knife punched through with ridiculous ease. He enlarged the hole and bent up the metal into a tongue which he could hold in his fingers. He gripped it and pulled and there was a tearing sound.

Within five minutes he had made a hole in the trunk big enough to take his hand, and he groped inside and touched a hard square edge. His fingers curled around what felt like a book but when he tried to pull it out he found he was in the position of the monkey gripping the nut inside the bottle. The book was too big to come through the hole so he dropped it and concentrated on making the hole bigger.

At last he was able to get the book out. It was a school exercise book with hard covers and, when he flicked the pages, he saw mathematical symbols and lengthy equations in profusion. ‘Jackpot!’ he said exultantly.

The next thing out of the lucky dip was a roll of papers held by a rubber band. The rubber snapped at a touch but the papers, long rolled, held their curvature and he unrolled them with difficulty. The first pages were written in Finnish in a tight handwriting and the first mathematical equation came on the fourth page. From then on they were more frequent until the final pages were solid mathematics.

‘How do we know what we’re looking for?’ asked Armstrong.

‘We don’t — we take the lot.’ Carey dived into the hole again and groped about. Within ten minutes he had cleared the box which proved to be only half full but, even so, the books and papers made a big stack.

Carey took some folded paper bags from his pocket. ‘Fill that hole; I’ll take care of the loot.’ He looked at his watch with worried eyes. ‘We haven’t much time.’

He filled three stout kraft-paper bags with documents and sealed them with sticky tape. Armstrong said, ‘There’s not enough earth to go back. It’s filling the trunk.’

‘I’ll see to that,’ said Carey. ‘You nip along and fetch that wheelbarrow. You know where it’s planted.’

‘The empty house at the end of the street. I hope young Virtanen parked it in the right place.’

‘You’ll soon find out. Get going.’ Carey began to fill in the hole and, as Armstrong had said, there was not enough earth, so he took more from other parts of the flower bed and took care not to pack it too tightly. It took him quite a while but when he had finished Armstrong had not yet returned.

He took the brown paper bags from where they had been lying among the long-stemmed flowers and hid them more securely in some shrubbery. His watch told him that time was running out; they had to get back to the paper mill and smuggle the papers aboard the bus. That had been arranged for but it would take time and there was little of that left.

Impatiently he went to the front gate and was relieved to see Armstrong trudging back with the wheelbarrow. ‘What kept you?’

‘The damn fool hid it,’ said Armstrong savagely. ‘What did you tell him to do?’

‘To put it just inside the wall and out of sight.’

‘He put the bloody thing in the cellar,’ said Armstrong. ‘I had to search the house to find it.’

‘A misunderstanding — but we’ve got it. Come on.’

They put the documents into the wheelbarrow and covered the bags with dirty sacking. Armstrong put the spade and the detector on top and picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow. He was about to push off when he stopped. ‘Someone’s coming.’

Carey turned. A man was coming up the garden from the side of the house. His whole attitude was one of suspicion. ‘What are you doing in my garden?’

Carey stepped forward. ‘Grazhdaninu Kunayev?’

‘Yes.’

Carey reeled out his story, then said, ‘Your wife knows about it, of course. We’ve made very little disturbance.’

‘You’ve been digging holes? Where?’

Carey pointed. ‘There — on the lawn.’ He refrained from drawing attention to the flower bed.

Kunayev walked over and prodded at the turf with his toe. ‘You’ve been neat, I will say that.’ He stamped hard with his foot, and Armstrong winced, thinking of the bomb below. ‘Does this mean you’ll be coming in earlier?’

Carey frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

‘With the bulldozers.’

‘Not that I know of, comrade. That’s not my department. I’m concerned only with water pipes.’

Kunayev looked at the house. ‘I’ve liked living here; it’s a good place. Now they want to pull it down and put up another damn factory. I ask you; is that right, comrade? Do you think it’s right?’

Carey shrugged. ‘Progress sometimes means sacrifice.’

‘And I’m doing the sacrificing.’ Kunayev snorted. ‘I’m being transferred to the new housing development on the other side of town. A cheap, rotten, new house. Not like this house, comrade; those Finns knew how to build houses.’

‘Meaning that Soviet workers don’t?’ asked Carey suavely.

‘I didn’t say that,’ said Kunayev. He walked towards the wheelbarrow and picked up the detector. ‘Is this your water diviner?’

Carey tightened his lips. ‘Yes.’

‘Like the mine detector I used during the war. I was at Stalingrad, comrade. Fourteen years old I was then.’ He strolled towards the fence separating his garden from the one next door, still holding the detector. ‘Boris Ivanevitch, are you there?’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ whispered Armstrong. ‘What do we do now?’

A woman called back. ‘He’s just going on duty,’

‘Good afternoon, Irina Alexandrovna; ask him to come round here. I have something to show him.’

‘Let’s just leave,’ urged Armstrong.

‘We can’t leave without that detector,’ said Carey through his teeth. ‘It would look too suspicious.’

Kunayev came back from the fence. He had put on the earphones. ‘Seems to work just like a mine detector, too. Not as big and heavy, of course; but they’re clever with their electronics these days.’

‘It works on a different principle,’ said Carey. ‘But we’ve finished here, Grazhdaninu Kunayev; we must go about our work.’

‘No great hurry, comrade,’ said Kunayev carelessly. He walked over to the patch of relaid turf. ‘You say you found your water pipe here?’

‘A pipe junction,’ said Carey, gritting his teeth.

Kunayev nicked a switch and walked back and forth several times. ‘It works,’ he said. ‘I could find that junction blind-fold — see if I can’t.’ He closed his eyes and walked back and forward again. ‘Am I there?’

‘Right on the spot,’ said Armstrong.

Kunayev opened his eyes and looked past them. ‘Ah, Boris Ivanevitch,’ he said. ‘You’ll be interested in this.’

Carey turned around and felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. Boris Ivanevitch was a policeman.