Fish Wally looked off into the crypt-stared a moment at the ranting monologuist, then fixed his gaze on Stilton and sighed. It seemed to Cal that through his precise, cultured English he was talking to Stilton as though he were an exasperating child to whom he must state the obvious once too often.
‘I like it here. It reminds me of the last time I saw Poland. Before the Germans came we were workers. Teachers, engineers, policemen even. After the Germans came we were fighters. Then we lost. We became runners. Some of us ran all the way to Hungary, some of us ran all the way to the sea. I stayed with my unit. Thirty of us, retreating north, we tramped five hundred miles on foot, dodging Germans every step of the way. Those who fed and housed us the Germans shot-so we took no food or shelter. We lived off the land. And when the winter froze the soil, we starved. We sank to the bottom of Poland. And most of us died there, and some of us went mad. I saw half a dozen comrades turn mad as hatters. My last sight of my brother Stanislaus was him standing in a Polish forest ranting at the trees like that witless idiot over there. We became raggedymen, all of us raggedymen. We looked, we sounded, we smelt no different from this lot. We were the dregs of Poland, the last scum of a scorched earth. “And I alone am escaped to tell thee.” To tell thee, Stilton, to tell the Squadron Leader. You took me in. England took me in. And I sank to the bottom of England. And so you find me here, as deep as I can go. And now it is England’s turn. Soon England will fall before the Panzers. Tell me, Stilton, how deep can you go? Try it-learn. I am here to replenish my sense of reality. I have lived too easy this last year or more. I have a pillow for my head and coins to jingle in my pocket-but I can go deep, straight to the bottom. One day soon we will all know this madness. How deep can you go, Walter?’
Outside Cal said, ‘What was that about?’
‘My fault, lad. I shouldn’t have asked. Not as if I haven’t heard it before. It’s pretty much what he said day after day when we had him out at Burnham-on-Crouch last year. It’s… it’s Wally’s vision, I suppose. He’s cast himself as the wandering Jew. At least the Catholic version of it.’
‘Or Ishmael. “And I alone am escaped to tell thee.” That’s Moby Dick. I know, I skipped to the last page when I realised I was never going to get through it all.’
‘Oh,’ said Stilton, a bit dismissively. ‘I’d just assumed he was quoting the Bible. No point in skipping to the end o’ that, is there? We all know how it ends.’
§ 40
Marshall Street was as close to the heart of things as could be. Regent Street was only few yards west, Oxford Street a few yards north. Stilton drove in silence. There was a new tenacity to the man-just when Cal thought they’d both been flagging, the prospect of getting close to the quarry had invigorated him. He wished he felt the same. He thought of the prospect of meeting Wolf again with a mixture of sadness and fear. He voiced none of it. Better by far to let silence prevail. Anxieties could only alarm Stilton-as would questions, and there was one question he was biting back. If he’d been the one to talk to Fish Wally, he’d’ve asked why total strangers came to him for help, and how they knew where to find him. Could be Fish Wally might not know the answer, but that did not invalidate the question. It nagged. It burst the logic of pursuit they had set up for themselves. Walter, after all, had been emphatic. Wally was clean. And if they really were only minutes away from catching up with Stahl, what did it matter?
23b Marshall Street was a ramshackle house, but at least it still stood. Cal estimated it to be about as old as his country. They were probably laying these bricks as Jefferson pondered life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Three items currently in short supply.
The door looked rotten, as though one good kick from Stilton would send it flying from its hinges. It wasn’t locked. Stilton pushed gently at it-a miasma of steam and frying fat filled the air.
‘Reckon we caught Cash Wally at his trough,’ Stilton whispered, and walked softly towards the back of the house with Cal treading on his heels. The trail of steam led them straight to the kitchen. It was a filthy parody of Edna Stilton’s kitchen. A big room, a centre table, strewn with dishes waiting to be washed. A patina of grease on every surface, into which months of dust had settled, giving solid, inanimate household objects an illusion of life-they had fur, so they might breathe or move also. In the fireplace stood a three-legged gas stove, propped up at its fourth corner by a pile of bricks. And on the hob a pan of potatoes boiled furiously, while three sausages nestled deep and crisp in a cooling pan of lard.
‘Good God,’ Stilton said softly. ‘How can he live like this?’
‘And where is he?’ Cal added. ‘It’s like we’ve pulled up alongside the Marie Celeste.’
Stilton beckoned to Cal, they stepped into the stairwell.
‘Is our man likely to be hostile?’ he whispered.
‘Walter-I’ve no idea. He’s on our side. If that makes any sense.’
‘Then we play it by ear.’
Cal rather thought that this was what they’d been doing for a week already. He followed Walter up the stairs, step for step, pausing as he paused at every crack and creak to listen for any response. The house was deathly silent, much as Cal resisted the adverb.
Stilton stood on the far side of the door. He rapped on it. There was no answer. There was no sound of any kind. He rapped again. Then he turned the doorknob and pushed. The door swung in onto an empty room, banging back against the wall. Cal put his head round the door jamb. Stilton leaned in from the other side.
‘Bugger,’ Stilton said.
They stepped into the room. In complete contrast to the kitchen this room had been cleaned and dusted. The bed stripped. Every surface wiped. You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass to know there’d be no fingerprints. Stahl had left no tracks. Not a scrap of paper, a burnt match or a bus ticket. It looked to Cal like a thorough, professional job. This man meant to vanish.
All the same, Stilton peeked under the bed, opened the closet, pulled out the drawers in the dresser and uttered the conclusion Cal had reached minutes before.
‘He’s flown the coop. Not so much as a toothbrush or a pair of socks.’
‘Always one step ahead of us,’ said Cal.
They heard the slam of a door downstairs. They looked at each other. Stilton all but tiptoed to the landing. The sound of someone banging about in the kitchen drifted up the staircase.
Stilton put a finger to his lips and set off down the stairs. At the next landing Cal grabbed him by the arm and whispered, ‘Let me do it.’
‘It’s not Stahl-that would be too good to be true,’ Stilton whispered back.
‘No matter. We’re a team, aren’t we? My turn.’
Stilton yielded silently and let Cal pass. Down to the ground floor on feet of glass. A gentle twist of the door handle, and a sudden thrust. A spidery, thin man in a tatty sweater, all elbows and knuckles, his hair standing up as though galvanised, was seated at the table in front of a plate piled high with mashed potato, the mash peppered with sausages-and a brand new bottle of the ubiquitous British brown sauce clutched in his hand ready to gloop.
‘Casimir Wallficz?’ Cal said breezily.
The man stared at him, his hand still poised over the base of the bottle ready to give it the baby-bottom slap that would send the sauce gushing over his feast.
‘Wod?’
‘You are Casimir Wallficz, the proprietor of this establishment?’
‘Proprietor?’ Cash Wally said, a much more heavily accented voice than his cousin’s. ‘Proprietor be buggered. Is my house, I own it lock, stock and sausage. Now who you and what you want? As if I couldn’t guess.’