"The favours of a Thai whore… "
Colt grinned, and the Colonel laughed. Colt sat upright in the chair, there was less ache in his spine that way, less of a throb in his kidneys. His body was still a rainbow of bruises.
"Colt, will you tell me about your father?"
He spoke in a flat monotone, suppressing all the emotion he might have felt. " H e comes from what in England is called a good family. His parents had status, what a good family means.
He is 70. Being of a so-called good family doesn't mean much these days, and the sort of money required to keep things ticking over a few years back doesn't get you anywhere now. After the war, when he was out of the army, he tried his hand at several things, and they were all pretty much a disaster. The money he had inherited with the house just wasn't enough. He tried business, just about anything. When I was a child he was selling insurance, then he was offloading imported sheepskin coats in the London street markets, then it was free range eggs. None of them worked. I really don't know where the money comes from these days They live, him and my mother, in one of those damn great draughty houses in the country. I suppose it's just about falling to pieces. It was after the war that he married. My mother is French, they met in the war. Truth is that everything that was best in my father's life happened during the war. He was a young regular officer, Brigade of Guards, at the start of the war, and he went to France with the Expeditionary Force. You'll have heard that they lifted the army off the beaches at Dunkirk. They took most of them off, but the rearguard and the wounded were left behind. My father was in that last line that protected the beach-head. When he knew they were going to surrender in the morning, he slipped away from his unit. I suppose you could say that he deserted. He moved out into the countryside, and eleven months later he was back in England. He had moved himself right across France and through Spain to get himself repatriated.
Early in the war, in London, they set up something called Special Operations Executive, and my father was a natural for it. He was recruited. In the next three years he was twice parachuted into Occupied France. There are parts of France, used to be anyway, where he was almost a legend. Won't be too many places he'd be remembered these days, all those who could remember him are dead, or trying to die. He was an explosives man. Signal boxes on the railway, power lines, bridges. When they sent more men across, to liaise with him, it didn't work. He was his own man, never a team player… As long as the planes came to drop his explosives he didn't give a damn for the rest of the war effort.
When it was over he was given a Military Cross by the British, and the Croix de Guerre by the French. It was the best time of his life, and everything since has been second best. He's older than his years and I don't know how much longer he can last."
" You are proud of him?"
" We used to fight, morning, noon and night. Once with fists and boots and teeth."
"Is your father proud of his son?"
He could remember clearly, when he had last been at the Manor House, the day he left. His mother had been crying as she had rifled the house for money for him, and as she had made sandwiches to put in greaseproof paper because it would be dangerous for him to stop at cafes on his way to the airport. His father had followed him from room to room, half a dozen strides behind him all through that late afternoon. When the telephone call had warned that Micky and Sissie had been arrested, there had been no option but to run. There was bound to be something in their squat that would lead the police to him. He had gone out through the kitchen door. He had left his dog tied to a drainpipe by the kitchen door, so that it could not follow him. At the end of the kitchen garden, by the stile to the open fields, he had looked back. They were framed by the kitchen doorway. His mother's head was bowed in her tears. His father had stood erect, his arm round his mother's shoulder. His father had not spoken a single word to him, just followed him around the house, not a solitary word. His mother had waved him on his way, not his father.
"I doubt he'd think there was much to be proud of."
The Colonel bent to retrieve a sheet of paper from his briefcase, then pushed the decoded typescript across the desk towards Colt.
Colt read the letter that had been written that same morning, in haste, by his father.
"I need to go home, sir."
James Rutherford, first thing after he had closed the door behind him, took a tumbler of malt whisky up the narrow staircase to his wife.
Penny said, " If it doesn't kill the prawn bugs, it'll finish m e . "
"Are we on the mend?"
"Reckon so."
" Dan called by today. You're not alone, his missus has the same."
Rutherford knew that his wife liked Dan Ruane, always had a good word for him. Service wives were not generally involved in the social scene, only when it was an American evening. Penny would have known more wives from the Agency and from the Bureau than she would have met wives from the Service. She was sitting up in bed, and she drank, spluttered, and grinned.
"Brilliant… what did Dan want? Sorry, sorry, wasn't thinking … "
She was the well-drilled Service wife. She had to be. Service wives did not grill their husbands about bloody work. She made it her rule that Belfast, the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, casual atrocities never crossed her lips, not after his last trip away, because the man who had come back to her from Northern Ireland had been frightened of his own shadow. She hoped to God that he would never have to go back there again.
But James Rutherford didn't give two tosses for that particular tenet of Service discipline.
" The American killed last week in Athens, Agency man, looks like he was shot by a Brit."
"You're joking?"
"No. Some sort of renegade, some dreadful little creature looking for a cause to pin himself to, I expect. The Library's trawling for him."
"And how was Dan?"
"Didn't really have a chance to talk to him. He'd a chap in tow who is doing the case. Civil enough young fellow, bit gauche, bit wet behind the ears."
Penny giggled. The malt was working the colour back to her cheeks.
"Well, he's American, isn't he?"
Erlich sat in his quarters in South Audley street. He had half an hour before Ruane took him to dinner. There was a card game next door whose progress he could hear through the partition wall
When he had left the University of California, Santa Barbara, he had taught literature at a school in Battle Creek, Michigan.
He taught the children of ''Cereal City". Everyone worked for Kelloggs, and the plant turned out, each day, enough for ten million people's breakfasts. The kids didn't want to know about life outside Battle Creek. They wanted to get on the production line and turn out more breakfasts. They were enough to stretch a teacher who wanted them to learn the beauty of poetry. They'd stretched him, but they hadn't snapped him. While he had been kicking his heels yesterday he had spent an hour in a tiny bookshop in Curzon Street and had come away with a paperback edition of the Parsons Rosenberg and the Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes's anthology. He had left home so hurriedly as to have packed not one of the poetry volumes that he was very seldom without
While he waited lor Ruane to be announced from the hall desk, he read.
Red fangs have torn His face,
God's blood is shed.
He mourns from his lone place
His children dead.
His father would never have heard of Isaac Rosenberg, an English poet, killed in the last weeks of the "war to end all wars". His father had died at somewhere called Due Co that was somewhere in the Central Highlands in Vietnam. He thought of the cruel death of Isaac Rosenberg and the death of his father in the breaking of the siege of the Due Co Special Forces camp.