He straightened up. Stuck out a hand.
‘Stilton. Walter Stilton. You must be Mr Cormack.’
Cal shook the hand. Tried once more to place the accent and couldn’t.
‘Do I look that much like an American?’ he asked.
‘You said it, lad, I didn’t. Now. What’s your poison?’
‘A pint,’ said Cal, hoping it was what was expected of him.
‘Pint o’ what?’ Stilton replied, piling on the confusion.
‘What do you have?’
The barman answered. ‘Bitter, mild, stout…’
Bitter sounded… well… bitter. Mild sounded pathetic. Had to be stout.
‘Fine,’ said Stilton. ‘Jack, bring ‘em over. Mr Cormack an’ me’ll be in the snug.’
The snug turned out to be a room the size of a closet, partitioned from the main bar by an elaborately etched glass door. He guessed that Stilton wanted privacy. The snug was empty, but then so was the bar. Thursday evening was clearly not their rush hour.
‘I’ve not been told a lot, you understand. Just the basics. You’ll have to bring me up to date as best you can.’
Cal stared at the poster on the wall above Stilton’s head. A caricature of Hitler, all cowlick and toothbrush moustache, had been worked into a repeated motif for wallpaper-little Hitlers spiralling down the poster-and the caption ‘Walls have ears’. He’d seen posters much like this dotted all over London in the last few days: ‘Walls have ears’-‘Careless talk costs lives’-‘Keep Mum She’s Not So Dumb’-and no one seemed to pay a blind bit of notice.
The barman set a pint of black stuff in front of him. Stilton put a few coppers on the table and waved Cal down when he reached for his wallet.
‘Cheers,’ said Stilton.
Cal sipped at his pint. It tasted like mud. It was so thick you couldn’t see through it. He must have pulled a face.
‘Not to your taste, lad?’
‘No, no,’ Cal lied. ‘It just takes a bit of getting used to. So many things do.’
‘Now-to business. About this Jerry we’re after. Colonel Ruthven-Greene got on the blower to…’
‘The blower?’
‘Telephone, lad. I left a message for him at Broadway. He called me back. Filled me in. Told me to lend you a hand.’
Cal wondered again about the English. Reggie had ‘filled him in’. Over the telephone? A little Hitler caught his eye.
‘Scrambler, o’ course,’ Stilton added, as though he had read Cal’s mind. ‘He called me on a scrambler.’
‘Did he say where he was?’
‘Where he was?’
‘I’ve been calling him at the Savoy since Monday. I got through to him once. It’s Thursday now. We’ve lost the best part of four days.’
‘Can’t help that, lad. They didn’t bring me in till Tuesday. It was yesterday before Colonel Ruthven-Greene called me back and…’
‘OK, OK. I know it’s not your fault,’ Cal conceded. ‘Perhaps you had better tell me what you have to tell me.’
He listened while Stilton told him what he knew, nodded, said ‘yes’ when it seemed necessary, feeling all the time that the little Hitlers in the wallpaper were watching him, only him, and that if he looked up quickly he would catch the beady eyes upon him.
At the end of it Stilton asked simply, ‘D’ye have any questions?’
‘Do I have any questions?’
‘Well. Do you?’
‘If you put it like that-yes I do. Can we find him?’
‘If he’s in London we’ll find him.’
‘That’s part of the problem. Reggie was convinced Stahl would come to London. He could be here now.’
‘He could. But not without we know about it. Now…’
Stilton rummaged in an inside pocket. Found his wallet, pulled out a piece of paper and stared at it.
‘Would this be anything like your man? Six foot or more, light hair, blue eyes, thirty or thereabouts. Weight about thirteen stone.’
‘Thirteen stone?’ Cal said, feeling slightly stunned by the speed with which Stilton had changed course.
‘Thirteen stone. About one hundred and eighty pounds.’
‘Six foot, blond, one eighty. Yes, that could be Stahl.’
‘D’ye reckon he could pass for a foreigner?’
‘He is a foreigner.’
‘I meant, could he be taken for Swiss if he tried to pass himself off as one? To a Swedish crew, I mean.’
‘Of course. He’s an Austrian. Both countries speak German. I don’t think the finer points of a German accent would be all that obvious to the Swedes, or to the English for that matter.’
Stilton spread the sheet of paper out on the table.
‘Appen this is him, then. On the seventh a Swedish merchantman was anchored overnight off Hull waiting for the tide.’
Stilton paused almost imperceptibly, changed tone, threw in the next line almost as an aside.
‘Hull’s a big port up Yorkshire way. About two hundred miles north of London.’
Well, thought Cal, I asked for the High School geography lesson, didn’t I?
‘Next morning Immigration and Special Branch sail out with the pilot to check out the crew. Matter of routine with neutral shipping, these days. One man was missing. Erich Hober, aged thirty, signed on in Stockholm. Papers showed he’d shipped out from Danzig before that.’
‘Missing? How does anyone go missing from a ship at sea?’
‘Easy lad. They’d be within sight of land. Hull’s a good way up an estuary the size of the Thames. They’d not be at sea, they’d be in the dredger channel. A good swimmer could slip over the side and make for the shore. If that’s what this chap did, he’d have eight hours’ start on us. He’d’ve been in London before they were even looking for him in Hull.’
Cal had that sinking feeling. The one that had set in with Ruthven-Greene’s last phone call. Stahl had got here before him. Stahl was doing whatever he had come to London to do. And Cal had been dumped. Fobbed off with a pensionable policeman who spoke a language that baffled him with every other sentence.
‘That could be him. It sounds like him.’
‘Good, now all we’ve got to do is find the bugger.’
Stilton downed most of his pint, a dusting of froth on the ends of his moustache, smiled at Cal. Cal left his beer untouched. Good God, they’d given him a grinning fool.
‘Where,’ he asked, ‘where do we even begin to look in a city of five million people?’
‘More like six and a half, lad, and we look in all the right places and ignore the wrong ones. I know what you’re thinking. And I wouldn’t blame you. But tracking Jerries is my job. My speciality. I’ve narks in every immigrant quarter in the city. You’ll find the refugees tend to gravitate to the pubs and restaurants around their own exiled governments. And the poorer they get, the further they fan out. A bit like tribes around the wigwam. I’ve Poles in Putney, Czechs in Bayswater, Norwegians in Kensington, French in Piccadilly, a few Dutch here and there and a handful of Belgians. There’s nowhere this bloke can go and not surface sooner or later, and if he surfaces in the wrong quarter, tries a bluff too far, then they’ll spot him, and we’ll get a tip off. A lot of these people hate each other-that’s Europe for you after all, ten centuries of hating each other-but they’ve one thing in common. They all hate Jerry. There are times I think they hate us too-most of ‘em learn just enough English to order a meal.’
‘Then you’d better leave the talking to me. I’ve got my specialty too. German.’
Stilton was grinning at him again. One bushy eyebrow slightly up.
‘Where d’you learn the lingo?’
‘Family. My grandmother’s family were Germans. Moravians. There’s a lot of Moravians in the Southern States. We all got German handed down to us along with the family bible. It was a good start. I polished it at school. And I’ve spent the last two years and more in Zurich.’
Stillon was nodding now, not grinning quite so much.