Nothing to do on a sunny morning but shop for socks and a couple of preposterously expensive shirts. The prices of clothes depressed him. Or something did. He wished he hadn’t come home. He wished he had stayed in Larissa another week or so. If he had put off the trip till a more reasonable date, he wouldn’t have encountered Pyotr Grigorievitch Kusitch or be wandering along Bond Street on this bright day plagued by anxiety about the little man. Anxiety? Or simply the tantalising probability that he would never know for certain whether the little man had been the central figure in a melodrama or just plain mad?
He turned left into Oxford Street, descended the stairway of the first underground station, bought a ticket, and stepped onto the escalator. He did it all reluctantly, under some inward protest. His mood went down, down, down with the moving stairway. Then he touched bottom, and his mind suddenly cleared. He walked round and stepped onto the ascending escalator. He thrust his ticket into the hand of the collector and hurried on, afraid that the man might challenge him. He hadn’t used a train, yet he had a feeling of guilt, as if he had broken a contract with the London Transport Executive. He hurried away from the scene of the crime towards the telephone booths. He took up the directory A-D, and flicked over the leaves. Bla… Blan… Blandish! His moving finger halted. He made a mental note of an address and walked out into the sunlight again.
For the first time since his homecoming, he felt like a man with a purpose. He swung round one corner, strode on, turned another corner, and slowed a little, noting the numbers. The odds were on one side, the evens on another. He crossed the road. A few more paces and he was there.
The Blandish Gallery had an elegant front. It had a beautiful door of burnished bronze and one small Dufy in a large window. A hand-lettered placard in a bronze frame announced an exhibition of water colours by Christophe Chambord.
Andrew Maclaren had the sensation of something inside him dropping with the gravitational abandon of a plummet. It was something extraphysical, something completely unscientific and quite beyond material diagnosis. You could approach it only through the figurative. It was as the falling stick of a spent rocket. It was the dead meteor hope.
The exhibition of sculptures by Ruth Meriden was over. The press notice preserved by Kusitch might have been clipped a month ago or a year ago; it was all the same now. Andrew went back gloomily to the tube station and bought another ticket.
When he let himself into the flat, he saw the Green Line Coach Guide lying on Roger Lang’s desk. He picked it up and threw it into Roger Lang’s wastebasket.
That was that!
He almost spoke it aloud to put the finality of it beyond question. He was finished with Kusitch; Ruth Meriden was expunged from his mind. He poured himself a drink to celebrate the liberation. After a second drink he crossed to the wastebasket and recovered the Coach Guide. He opened it at the marked page and stared at the cryptogram, but all he found in it was a resolute determination to be meaningless. He was sure it was something simple, possibly absurdly simple. The trouble was he had no knowledge of such things. They were a special study. They required an unusual aptitude, a sort of…
And then inspiration came.
Charley Botten!
He blinked. He looked up another telephone number and then realised that he could do nothing about it till after office hours. He paced Roger Lang’s carpet till darkness came. At the first feasible moment he dialled the number, and miraculously the receiver at the other end was lifted.
“Charley?” he demanded. “This is Andrew Maclaren; remember? I’ve just got back from Athens.”
Mr. Botten said: “How are things in Greece?” He didn’t sound as if he cared.
Andrew decided that the question was not one he need answer. He asked: “Are you still in M.I. five?” “Resigned years ago,” Charley answered. “I’m in business. Anyway it wasn’t M.I. five.”
“What I really mean is do you still go in for ciphers and puzzles and things?”
“Certainly. I’m a stockbroker. What can I do for you?”
“I want to see you urgently. May I call? I’ve got something I can’t make out.”
“So have I. I think it’s ulcers but it may be a delayed hangover. Come along at once.”
Face to face with his caller, Mr. Botten was more cordial. He listened to some account of Mr. Kusitch and then examined the enigma in the Coach Guide. He was an expert of experts; he had volumes of information in his head and quite a small library within reach, but he shook his head over that SS 729.
“You say this fellow Kusitch tracks down war loot?” he said. “If that’s true, this sequence may be merely the catalogue number of a museum piece.”
“I don’t know,” Andrew answered. “I think there’s more to it. I think it’s the thing he wanted to hide, though why he should write it down if it means anything dangerous, I can’t make out. He could have memorised it.”
“Probably no head for figures.” Mr. Botten laughed with the good-natured tolerance of those who have no heads for anything else. “Let’s look at it this way. He makes these notes in the Guide, thinking they’ll be safe enough in the normal course. Then he is forced off the normal course when he has to spend the night in Brussels. Suddenly, while you’re preparing to go out to dine, he remembers the Guide, gets a bit nervous about it, and shoves it under the carpet. It may not be all that important, but he doesn’t want to carry it on him or have anyone fool round with it while he’s absent. Didn’t he give you any hint about it in his talk?”
“Nothing that I can remember, except that he lives in Dubrovnik, or did.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“Probably nothing. Dubrovnik’s a port.” “I’m quite aware of that. Where’s the connection?”
“I did think at first that the SS might stand for steamship.”
“It might stand for Schutzstaffel. The figures could represent a unit or a regimental number. It ties up with the Nazis and their loot.”
Andrew objected. “I’ve an idea it has something to do with this country; that it ties up with the address and the timetable.”
Charley Botten wrote the symbols down on the back of an envelope and glared at them.
“I can’t get the idea of this search for loot out of my head,” he said. “The catalogue number is quite feasible. The SS could be a sign for sculptures. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” He had not said anything about Ruth Meriden or the review of her show, and he was reluctant to start on further explanations. “You’re probably right,” he said. “No doubt Kusitch had to deal with sculptures.”
“He also had to deal with thugs. If I were you, chum, I’d forget all about the business. If something has happened to your pal Kusitch you don’t want it happening to you.”
Andrew laughed. “You were too long with M.I. whatever-it-is. If you’re not careful, you’ll be seeing cloak-and-dagger men round every dark corner.”
“A few days ago you were seeing them in Brussels in broad daylight.”
“They gave up when I went to the police.”
“That’s what you think. I wouldn’t be too sure.”
“Anyway, that was Brussels.”
“And this is London. Splendid! If the prospect doesn’t appal you, let’s go out and sample some English cooking. Unless you’d prefer a moussaka? You’re dining with me.”
It was after eleven when the two parted and Mr. Botten’s hangover had been treated. Andrew took the Central Line to Holland Park, and came up in the lift with quite a crowd of passengers. He liked the underground. It was home, it was London. For the first time since his return he had the feeling of being absorbed by the throng. These people who pressed into the lift were Londoners. They couldn’t be anything else. They conveyed to him a friendliness from which he had been away too long. Charley Botten would say it was all imagination, or sentimentality. He would deny that London was any safer than Brussels, but Charley had become cynical. That war job of his had warped him, distorted his perspective. How could one not feel safe among these friendly people? Of course they might murder one another occasionally, but not in the underground, not in crowded lifts or busy streets. Not very often, anyway. This was London.