‘From the Germans, of course. I should o’ thought that’s pretty bloody obvious.’
‘Sure, and if he’s running, why shouldn’t they be chasing?’
‘Eh?’
‘If Stahl has been blown. If Germany knows he’s an American agent-then they’d try to kill him before he told us whatever it is he has to tell us. They’d have sent someone after him, wouldn’t they?’
‘Smulders?’
‘Was that the guy’s name?’
‘Said he was a Dutchman, a master printer from Delft. He may well have been Dutch. There’s plenty of Quislings around.’
‘Suppose it was Stahl he came to kill?’
Stilton said nothing to this. Cal could almost hear him thinking.
‘You mean like a hypothesis?’
‘Sure… if that helps, think of it that way.’
‘OK. I’m listening.’
‘The hypothesis is that Smulders came to kill Stahl.’
‘If you say so.’
‘And if he did, then the implications are serious.’
‘Eh?’
‘Think about it. He came after Stahl. Came to kill Stahl-but wound up getting killed.’
‘OK-I get your drift.’
All the same Cal spelt it out to him.
‘Suppose Stahl got to this guy before he got to him. And at that right under the nose of your man Dobbs. Think what it means. It means Stahl’s one step ahead of the Germans and two steps ahead of us. If he doesn’t want to be found…’
Cal let the sentence trail off.
‘There is one thing,’ Stilton said after a while. ‘We lost Smulders. Just for one night, you understand. But for more than two hours we’d not a clue where he was. If he encountered Stahl in that time…’
Now Stilton had no conclusion to his sentence.
‘Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’ said Cal.
Stilton paused again. Another breathing, thinking space as he pulled the car off Mile End Road and headed down towards the river.
‘Mind-like you said, it’s just hypothetical…’
‘If you say so.’ Cal echoed his own caution back to him.
‘You know, Mr Cormack, you’re not as green as you are cabbage-looking.’
Now what the fuck did that mean?
Stilton stopped the car in a side street. Pulled up the handbrake between the seats.
‘Are we there?’ said Cal.
‘Welcome to Jubilee Street.’
They got out. Stilton dug into his pockets looking for his keys. Cal looked around. For all he had seen in the last few days, nothing had prepared him for what he now saw. He had seen public ruins, ruins on the grand scale. Public places blasted into vacancy, open to the sky. This was different. These were homes, human habitations. And in all the street only one house still stood. Alone in a desert of rubble stood the home of Chief Inspector Walter Stilton. A big, five-storey double-fronted house, once the centrepiece of a late
Victorian terrace-that surely, was the Jubilee celebrated in the street’s name? Even his passing knowledge of British history covered Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887-and its windows were patched in cardboard, its paint peeled back to raw elm, and its walls were jagged as a row of rotting teeth, where they had once locked neatly into the house next door. But there was no house next door. Next door, in the literal sense, looked to be the best part of quarter of a mile away. What remained of the surrounding houses appeared to be sunken pools. Cellars into which the structure of the houses had collapsed upon impact from a bomb-‘pancaked’ was the local jargon-only to fill up with rain in the days and weeks that had passed. Cal had learnt on Saturday night just how flimsy-how unexpectedly flimsy-London was. He’d watched bombs slice through houses from top to bottom like they were made from nothing more substantial than tinfoil. Unexpected, -because London was old. Older than America. Older than his family home in Fairfax County-and that had withstood a three day siege by the Union Army. London, so elegant, so redolent of lived history, seemed to him to be no more than an Anacostia shantytown. Hitler huffed, Hitler puffed and he blew your house down.
Over the slaughtered houses a tall factory chimney stack was visible-as prominent among the ruins of the East End of London as the Washington Monument in the great fields of the Mall. How had they managed to miss it? Whatever the Luftwaffe left standing propelled Cal to wondering how? Why? Why this building? Why not that? Why wasn’t London razed from East to West and North to South. How did they stand it, how did they survive, how, put simply, did they live?
‘It’s nowt grand, you’ll understand,’ said Stilton fiddling at the lock with his key chain. ‘We live plain.’
The door, warped in its frame, jammed. Stilton muttered ‘alf a mo’ and put his shoulder to it. The door scraped across the linoleum with a shriek and Cal found himself in a long corridor, with stairs ascending and descending, and the steamy smell of cooking wafting up from below.
‘That you, Stinker?’ a woman’s voice yelled.
‘Who else would it be? You’re not expecting your fancy man, are you?’
‘E don’t comeround Thursdays!’
Stilton clumped down the wooden stairs, Cal trailing after, into a huge kitchen. Hot with cooking, a dozen aromas mixing in the air. A fat, fiftyish woman in a flowery apron, grey hair pinned up in a bun, stood by a large cast-iron cooker, the like of which Cal had not seen before. It was four or five feet across, and six or seven pans stood bubbling on two giant hotplates, their covers hinged back against the chimney breast. She flipped a couple of pan lids. Stirred their contents with a wooden spoon.
Stilton crept up to the woman, hugged her around the waist. Lifted her gently off the ground and whispered in her ear. She prised him off less than gently. Rapped his knuckles with her spoon and said “Ands orf. Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Then she noticed Cal.
‘You daft so-an’-so. You didn’t say we’d got visitors.’
One hand unconsciously smoothed down her skirts where Stilton had ruffled them, the other clutched the dripping spoon.
‘This is our Mr Cormack. Mr Cormack is a Yank. First one we’ve ever had. Mr Cormack, the missis. Our Edna.’
‘How do you do, Mrs Stilton?’
Before Edna Stilton could answer Stilton said, ‘You can fit in another for dinner, can’t you Ed?’
‘Comes the day we can’t! O’ course we can. But you’re early, Stinker, I’m all behind tonight. What with Kev and Trev home, and Kitty says she’ll be along later, there’s been a lot to do. You’ll have to make yourself scarce for half an hour. I can’t be doin’ with you under me feet.’
Out in the street once more Stilton said, ‘We’ll go for a swift half.’
‘A what?’
‘We’ll go to the pub.’
‘Again?’
‘I don’t mean the same pub. There’s plenty of pubs.’
It was, Cal knew, a classic British understatement. They were, Stilton professed, just ‘nipping round the corner’, but this still entailed passing what looked to Cal like a perfectly decent pub. But pubs, as he was learning, were a matter of ambience and nuance. It was not for the uninitiated to pronounce.
‘We’ll kill twenty minutes in the Brickie’s Arms,’ said Stilton. ‘You’re going to love this. A real treat this time o’ night.’
Stilton pushed at the door of a blacked-out, glazed-brick and red-tile building on the next corner. Inside it was warm and moist and brown. The room was not large, but it was pretty well full, and it existed in nondescript hues of brown, from the oak and mahogany of the furniture to the dirty sawdust on the floor and the nicotine mist on the ceiling, to the faded, featureless pattern in the forty-year-old wallpaper. It might once have been red, but it was brown now. Above the bar a portrait of the Prime Minister took pride of place and contributed the only splash of colour with its trailing ribbons of red, white and blue.