I came back from Zurich next day and went straight to the man in the iron lung’s flat to collect my pay and report the success of my trip. Stanley opened the door with a sombre look on his face. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Has the firm gone bust?’
He let out a cry: ‘That’s just not bloody funny, Michael. Come quickly. The boss wants to see you.’
‘I’ve got to see him,’ I said, ‘because I’ve some bad news.’
I had the satisfaction of seeing him jerk back from me: ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just this,’ I shouted. ‘I’m fed up with doing these trips at three hundred a shot. I’m one of your most experienced men, and I think four hundred would be nearer the mark, so from now I’m putting in for a raise. This bloody Volga Boat Song has gone on too long as far as I’m concerned.’ I threw my smuggler’s coat at his feet for him to pick up himself or leave there to rot.
He tried to calm me down. ‘All right, Michael, maybe you’ll get it, but for God’s sake be careful and break it to him bit by bit because I tell you he’s in an awful state today. Arthur Ramage has been caught on the Lisbon run.’
He looked closely at me as he broke the news. ‘How do you expect me to feel?’ I cried. ‘He was the champion, the best man ever known in the trade. What do you expect? A smile because it wasn’t me? Goddamn it, somebody couldn’t keep their mouth shut.’
As if full of grief and rage, because that was my only chance of not being killed as I walked through that door, I knocked Stanley aside and barged into Jack Leningrad’s pad with as much violence as I could muster. Cottapilly and Pindarry, two men I hardly knew were standing by the iron lung, but I rushed the whole length of the floor screaming that Ramage had been sold down the river, that Leningrad himself had done it, had picked up the phone to make an anonymous call to London airport because he thought Ramage had gotten too big for his elastic-sided boots and had wanted to split the organization so that he could take charge of part of it with the idea of one day snapping up the lot. So he’d gone the way of all flesh, just the same as William Hay, who Jack Leningrad had also framed.
‘It’ll be my turn next,’ I ranted on, ‘I can feel it coming. I’m working for a nest of vipers. You’re hand in glove with the customs men yourself and you can do what you like with us. Cottapilly and you, Pindarry, you’ll go after me, don’t worry, and that fat pasty-faced paralytic slug knows it. We’re puppets to him, wax figures that he’ll throw into the deepest jail as soon as he sees fit or gets frightened enough. He’s paranoid. We’re loyal, but he thinks we’re all set on doing the dirty on him. And if it’s not that, he now and again gets a spiteful little fit of sadism and thinks to pass the time on and gratify himself by getting a few of us caught. And when this happens he makes sure that the one he’s going to have pulled in has three-quarters of his load in false gold.’
I was on my knees, screaming all the preposterous things I could think up, then on the floor, then standing up against the wall only ten yards away from him, sobbing, keeping him in good view all the time. His pale face grew yellow, and I could see a twitch at the temples under the border of black sleek hair that went thinly over his head. Out of the speakers came his raging voice, from every side of the room in stereo. ‘Stop it, you lying vandal. It’s not true.’ He held a heavy revolver and pointed it at me.
‘I’ve been loyal,’ I said, calming down, ‘I’ve worked hard, Mr Leningrad. You can rely on me to do my utmost. Maybe I said too much just now, but the news went through me like a knife. It’s terrible. I’m blinded by it. I can’t go on.’
He actually smiled: ‘You have to, Mr Cullen. We’re in a tight spot. We’ve got a rush job on, urgent. If you’re loyal, as you say, you must stay with us.’
I stood by his lung: ‘If I do I’ve got to have four hundred a trip. I can’t do it for less because I’ve bought a house, and my overheads are appalling.’
His eyes narrowed. He hated my guts, but wouldn’t at the moment say so: ‘You’re not getting married, by any chance?’
‘Never. But I’ve got to have a quiet place I can go to between trips, if I’m not to have a crack-up.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Berkshire,’ I told him. ‘A cottage, but it cost the earth — and a bit of the sky.’
He chuckled and put down his gun. ‘All right. Four hundred. But you’re off to Athens in the morning.’
My only thought on the way out was to hope the plane to Greece crashed with me on it so that all my troubles would come to an end. Because was I in trouble? I knew who’d arranged for Arthur Ramage to be caught. It was Claud Moggerhanger, either by an anonymous phone call to London airport, or because he wanted to give his old friend Inspector Lantorn an easy job to do, in the hope that Lantorn would keep his claws off the Moggerhanger operations for a week or two. And who had told Moggerhanger that Ramage went to Lisbon every Friday laced-up with gold? His darling daughter. And which unthinking love-crazed flaptrap had told Polly? Me, not imagining that she’d even take it in, never mind relay it so accurately and with such deadly intent. And why had he done it? Not only to play havoc with Jack Leningrad, because that seemed rather an obvious thing to do, but precisely to warn me to go in head and bollocks with the Moggerhanger conspiracy-takeover, or vanish the same way as Arthur Ramage. It was as plain as the dismal day, that the great intriguer of the age had been caught in a vast and sticky web, with a murdering spider ready to come from each corner and scoop out his guts. All this went through my mind when Stanley broke the news, and I knew that the man in the iron lung would have it in for me as being the only person who could have published Arthur Ramage’s itinerary. Maybe he would kill me on the spot, such was his ugly mood, and for that reason I threw my medieval fit and ranted for a higher wage. It had worked, for the moment. He was almost bound to have me followed or watched from now on. I had to take care even of the air I breathed, and that was no sort of life for me.
But to abandon everything would mean slipping into oblivion, and that was not part of me. I had come too far through the keyhole of myself to do that. I wanted Polly, in spite of her absolute and rotten treachery. She had been set on to me from the first, and of that I could only be certain. But I wanted Polly more than ever, even because of her treachery, for by that alone I felt we were made for each other, that she had more depth and dimension than I’d ever dreamed of. I had fucked her countless times, and she had now monumentally fucked me, so that while I had made us one flesh, she had made us one spirit, an element of fatal cooperation I had never encountered in anyone else nor was likely to. She seemed so much larger now that I couldn’t have noticed her before, but I knew I was as far from having her — or her having me — as I’d ever been, because even if I threw in everything and worked for Moggerhanger, it would mean little in the end. I thought I was fit enough to live in a jungle, but now I was certainly beginning to doubt my ability to survive in this little corner of it. How could I go off with an easy heart to Athens when I expected any minute that Moggerhanger would think to pick up the phone and stop me?