“You’re looking awfully tired, father,” Malplacket said, hopefully. “You’re not overdoing things, are you? At your age—”
“Pluck and dash. That’s what the man in the street wants. That’s what Winston wants.”
“Mmm.”
“Confusion to the king’s enemies.”
“Well, I’ll try. That sort of thing’s bound to be awfully hush-hush.”
“Of course it is. No rose without a thorn. You must take risks. Don’t think of me. Britain is at war. Your life is a sacrifice I must be prepared to make, if necessary.”
“I see.”
“Pluck and dash, Ralph. The blood of English buccaneers throbs in your veins, remember.”
Malplacket had agreed enthusiastically because he knew he would never be expected to duplicate Randolph’s mad exploit. Now, however, that was what Lester constantly talked about. The idea of strolling around Benghazi obsessed him. Lampard wouldn’t take them on a raid, but to walk around a German-occupied city was a far better story. He discussed it with Dunn. Then he came back and discussed that discussion with Malplacket, who could not be as discouraging as he wished, but who played devil’s advocate. The major obstacle, he pointed out, was transport. Lampard would never give them a jeep.
“We could walk,” Lester said stubbornly.
“My dear fellow, we could skip, hand in hand, singing quaint old English folk songs as we went. But it will probably be twenty-five miles there and the same distance back. When did you last walk fifty miles?”
Lester grudgingly agreed that walking was out of the question; but this setback only made him more determined. The rasp of triumph was in his voice when, in the aftermath of the firefight, he found Malplacket doing a little looting and he said, “Did you know that Lampard’s taking some of these kraut trucks? You realize what that means?”
Malplacket was trying on various German hats. He looked inside a soft, peaked cap, much worn. “A Hauptmann Lessing owned this… No, I don’t. What does it mean?” He had found Lessing’s mirrored sunglasses on the ground, beside the cap. He tried them on and gazed invisibly at the American.
“For one damn thing,” Lester said, annoyed by Mal-placket’s blandness, “it means if we bump into any Beaufighters you’ll never become Lord Blanchtower the Second.”
“Fifth, actually.”
“Whatever. And more important, it means if I can find a truck that works, we’ve got transport into you-know-where. Also some German clothing to wear.”
Malplacket tried on the cap. “Just a hint of the Chelsea Arts Ball, don’t you think? But I’ll take it. Have you asked Lampard?”
“On my way now. You’d better come too.”
Thus it was that Malplacket, without ever being given the luxury of making a choice, tacitly agreed to go with Lester to Benghazi. Why am I getting involved in anything so foolhardy? he wondered. Is it to please Blanchtower? Or is it to spite him, since the odds are that I shall be shot as a spy, leaving him with neither a son nor a propaganda victory? Is it that I can’t abandon Lester? Or has Lester manipulated me into this recklessness, like a schoolboy dare? As he trudged through the African heat, polishing Lessing’s sunglasses with his shirt tail, Malplacket felt that perhaps the real reason was that he simply didn’t care. His life had gone on long enough. It was an overcrowded planet. Time to step aside.
He listened while Lester told Lampard what they planned to do, and what they needed. “I assume you’re taking your patrol into the Jebel. During your operation, whatever it is, we can be doing a Churchill and Maclean in Benghazi. We get what we want. From your point of view, if we’re killed or captured you’re not responsible, and you’ll be free of us. If we get out, we just tag along behind you until you get home, and we vanish. I sort of fancy that olive-green Fiat station-wagon over there.”
“Bloody dangerous.” Lampard’s voice was as blank as his face.
“You reckon? Listen, if Malplacket walked through Cairo dressed like that, what would happen?” Lester tipped Lessing’s cap to a more rakish angle.
“He’d get a few salutes and lots of offers of dirty postcards.”
“There you are, then.”
“I’ll think about it.”
He thought about it for five minutes. “All right,” he said. “Take the station-wagon. But I want something in return. I’m not having my career prejudiced just because you two go playing silly-buggers in Benghazi. If you get killed, and I think you will, that affidavit of yours must be destroyed, unopened. I want a letter to that effect, to your lawyer. Tell him to burn the bloody thing, in my presence.”
“I’ll do it now.”
“Do it later. We’re leaving now.” Lampard climbed onto his jeep. “Start up!” he shouted.
He had put the prisoners in the captured vehicles. The patrol drove in a widely scattered formation in case Stukas arrived from the north. But no aircraft appeared. Gibbon navigated them through the Jalo Gap during the midday haze, and they crossed the Tariq el ’Abd in late afternoon. Lampard was pleased. He found a familiar wadi on the edge of the Jebel and they camouflaged the trucks with camel-thorn. They had covered the best part of two hundred miles without incident, without even a puncture. The men walked back toward the desert, smoothing out the tire tracks with bunches of fern. There was rum and lime-juice for everyone. “I can smell Hun,” Lampard said. His whole nervous system felt boosted.
“That’s jolly useful,” Malplacket said. “What does it smell like?”
“Hard cheese,” Lampard said instantly. It wasn’t a joke; he just said the first thing he thought of; yet it made them laugh, so he smiled and took the credit. They were good men, his patrol. For an instant his tired mind strayed, and he wondered why Pocock wasn’t present. Then he remembered. Hard cheese on Pocock.
Paul Schramm was not forty-four. He was twelve, and naked, and running to catch a train that might leave at any second. The station was crowded and he was horribly ashamed of his nakedness, but all his clothes were on the train. He kept shouting at everyone to get out of his way. Nobody listened. The harder he ran, the slower his legs moved. He had to force each pace. Then, to make it worse, he couldn’t run straight because his left leg was too short. He was struggling, the train was leaving, and now the station was deep in a thick, syrupy fluid that trapped his legs and made him wade laboriously, exhaustingly. That was when he found the knife in his hand. It hadn’t been there before, but now he had it and he struck out at the idiots who wouldn’t get out of his way because they didn’t care, they weren’t going to catch the train, they were too ugly to go anywhere. So he hacked and stabbed and slashed furiously with his rubber knife, and he was helpless, useless because his wrists were firmly held by Benno Hoffmann.
Later, much later, after his batman had given him a wet towel to rub his face and body, followed by a dry towel and fresh pajamas, and had stripped the bed of the sweat-soaked sheets and remade it, and had finally gone away, Schramm stopped trembling. He summoned up all his twelve-year-old strength and asked: “What time is it?”
“Four-forty,” Hoffmann said.
“Oh.” Schramm took a deep breath, so deep that his chest shuddered when he let it out. “Christ, that was a madhouse. I’ve never been there before. Did I get you out of bed?”
“That’s all right, I had to get up. Somebody was having a nightmare. I could hear it all the way down the hall.”