Only When I Larf. Len Deighton
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restaurants and international hotels where we spent our ill-gotten gains. It was merely a trick of fate that I was not, in reality, the President of Amalgamated Minerals or some similar concern in the world of international commerce. Or was it. Perhaps I was just fooling myself, as I was expert at fooling others. Perhaps I was just a criminal as my mother had once told me I was. ‘A hit and run driver,’ she had called me, banging into people’s lives and causing them pain and distress. She had been referring to the divorce and to the swindle in Frankfurt 1946. I came almost unscathed out of both, but as a prediction it was not too wide of the mark. I was a disappointment to her, after my dashing career in the army nothing was beyond my power, and precious little beyond my ambition.
Karl Poster, the tall thin mark. I had a feeling he wasn’t completely convinced at the very end. As I went out through the office door I had looked at him, and he had doubt written right across his face. I’d been worried that he’d follow me out of the building. What could we get. It’s hard to say, but if the city put up a really astute attorney there could be a dozen or more charges. Using that building as a site for a fraud was probably an offence, and then our fancy cheque was a forgery. Can you imagine ten years in prison. I’d never live through it your honour. Very well, says the judge, just do as much as you can of it. Very funny. Ten years, fifteen perhaps. Would an American prison be better than a British prison. I’d often thought of that. Central heating, running water, better food but more violence. Greater chance of being hurt by the other prisoners. Still I’d survived the war. I’d done a bloody sight more than survived it; I’d thrived on it. That’s why I’d never stopped fighting it. This was my war, and Liz and Bob were my army. Not much of an army, but then a commander has to adapt to his resources. That was the secret of command in battle; flexibility and full utilisation of resources. Terrain, men, weapons, skills and surprise. Now I was talking to myself as though I was a mark. This was a war all right, but I wanted to sign a separate peace. I’d taken all the combat I could handle. Ten years in prison; that was the sort of wound from which I would no longer recover. Each time I seemed to make more mistakes. I covered them, but they were mistakes. In the old days I made none. Liz had stalled them in the lobby, very well, but I should have made sure that that damned hire car arrived exactly on time, not five minutes early. Bob’s stutter, why didn’t I think of that, I might have guessed he’d try to use it. It was the most unconvincing stutter I had ever heard. The stupid little fool. Well, I’d make sure he never tried that again.
One more operation. I must have a very small drink. I reached the flask from my inside pocket. I must have a very small drink. The old crone in the next seat is looking at me in a disapproving way. Where does she think she is, the Royal Enclosure? It’s a bloody aeroplane madam and I’m having a drink. Your health. Look at her face. She heard that last bit. Damn her. Damn them all in fact. I’m the victor laureate, and that’s a two hundred and sixty thousand gun salute in that black case. I won. So why don’t I stop worrying, I won and I’ll go on winning. A man doesn’t burn himself out, that’s bosh. Liz loves me, adores me. I’m the leader and she’s the kind of girl who stays with the leader. Bob will never be a leader. She knows that. She’s told me so a million times. He’s pathetic, that’s what Bob is, a cipher, a psychological archetype orphan, brave as only the brainless can be. I’ve seen regiments of Bobs under fire, without enough imagination to be scared. I’ve got too much imagination, that’s my trouble, if I have any trouble, which I don’t for one moment admit. Perhaps I had less imagination when I was young, perhaps that’s why I was so brave. As you get older, you get wiser and less brave, that’s why the higher you go in command the farther from the fighting line they put you, until the man who really controls the battle is not even in artillery range. Ten years. My God; ten years. Would Liz wait. Would any woman. Why should they.
Check the stewardess call-button, adjust the air supply, tighten the lap strap. Chocks away. The aeroplane drones on and all I can see below me is endless white cloud. Richthofen’s Flying Circus would be over the lines this morning. Fancy sending half-trained kids against them in crates like these.
Across the grey German sky, dawn slashed bright red weals. Tackatackatacka. Kick the rudder bar, there goes young Bob; a black feather dipped in red flame. The wind screams in the wires as I turn, tighter than the Red Baron. Tackatacka … tackatacka. Mercilessly the twin Vickers guns stitch the bright fabric. Inches below my fuselage the thin wirelike tracers curve and fall away. Roger Wilco. Left, left, steady. A small shed, the intelligence officer said, in it enough heavy water to put the Nazis months ahead in the race for the atomic bomb. Steady, steady. Another fierce cannonade all around us, followed by the ominous rattle of shrapnel against the engine nacelle. Losing height. The others were stealing sidelong glances at me. My jaw stiffened. Losing height rapidly now. Steady, bombs gone: Down they go. Down, down, down until they are the merest specks against the green of the airfield. Crash, an indescribable explosion. It’s as much as I can hold the control column. Intelligence were right. Enough heavy water to destroy the whole of southern England. Lower now. We are done for. This is it boys, too low to use the brollys I’m afraid. Hold on to your hats fellows, down we go. What a landing skipper, who’d believe that three engines are feathered and the whole fuselage shot to shreds. I just smile back. What’s our best chance? Split up chaps, it’s no O flag for me, it’s cross-country, and living on the land, travel by night, lie up by day, and avoid the villages where the dogs bark. It’s the compass in the button, and silk scarf map of the Rhineland that have been with me for fifty-five missions. Oh well, this is it chaps. See you all in blighty.
‘Please fasten your seat belts we are about to descend for London airport,’ said the stewardess. I’d need warmer clothes than this in Britain. I could use a cup of coffee. Damned uncomfortable things aeroplanes.
4
Bob
I’d walked straight out of the bank carrying a bag full of folding money, and feeling as conspicuous as hell dressed up with blue and white uniform, badges, artillery and all, but not a passer-by gave me so much as a glance. I separated from Liz and walked into the men’s toilet of the Continuum Building. The brown paper bundle of clothes was where I had left it in the towel disposal bin. I locked myself in a cubicle. I pulled out the cloth zipper bag that was sewn into the lid lining of the cash case. I put the uniform and toy pistol into it, closed it, locked it and dumped it. I removed the Security Company metal plate from the case and it became an ordinary leather document case. The chain I unclipped and dropped into the toilet cistern. They only check them every twenty years. I went into the washroom, put a dime into the electric shaver and shaved off my moustache. Vroom vroom. I’d had it for two years and I was sorry to see it go. It was a real Pedro Armandariz. I trimmed it back to a Doug Fairbanks and finally a thin Errol Flynn before demolishing it altogether. Easy come, easy go. I put a little talc across the white upper lip and I was a new man. I’d been frightened that one of the bank clerks would come into the men’s room while I was killing my face-fungus, but I needn’t have worried. They have their own toilet right there in the bank.
Liz was waiting. She’d reversed her coat and put on a hairpiece which hung loose at the back. She looked no more than nineteen with that little-girl hairdo. She looked great, great! I know that she was angry at me for staring at her, but it would have been more suspicious not to have stared. She looked sensationnelle. Oh boy, she did. She’d reversed her coat to become an ocelot.
That helicopter trip is a futuristic freak-out. It’s like throwing yourself off a skyscraper in slow motion. Can you imagine that big jet copter inching off the edge of the Pan Am building, then suddenly 57 floors below, Park Avenue full of yellow cabs slides under us. Almost near enough to touch is the Chrysler spike. I looked for the Continuum Building where those two little toy men were guarding the front of that false safe; crunch. I opened the envelope that had my air ticket and expenses in it. (Silas would be angry if I spent any of the operation money en route). There it was, a neat type-written slip with plane times and a bar in London where I should leave a message if there was an emergency. Just like a military operation. Silas sat up the front and never looked out of the window. Liz was just looking at her nails and looking at the men who were looking at her, which gave her quite a lot of action. At Kennedy I changed on to the big jet plane. For hour after hour it hummed on across the Atlantic with the stewards trying to sell cheap lighters and artificial