“It was the only first class compartment they had left,” he explained. “Would you have had me procure tickets for the second class carriages?” I ground my teeth and stood up.
“I’m going outside,” I said. Reading what looked like the dog track results, Pakeshi sniffed.
“There is a lavatory if you go left along the corridor,” he said. “The lights will soon be fully on, and I’m not sure if your facepaint would bear close inspection in the corridor.”
I sat on the toilet and struck a match. As I took the cigarette away from my mouth, I noticed how I’d got brown paint over the base of my forefinger. I held both hands in front of me and willed the shaking to subside. I might as easily have willed the loud and omnipresent hum of the motors to die away. I drew hard again on the cigarette and held in the smoke. That might eventually have worked. Worse luck, though, I could hear two women had already formed a queue on the other side of the door.
“It’s plain, if you ask me,” one of them was saying, “the papers can’t tell the half of what they must all have been doing together in that flat. Those nasty black hands, all over that poor German boy, and then shooting him afterwards—it fair makes the flesh creep.” There was an expression of agreement from the other woman. The picture of Buchbinder that had been supplied to the newspapers bore no resemblance to the grinning sadist who’d tried to murder me in my own sitting room. But there was no point shouting that through the door. I sucked hard on the cigarette and tried to blot out the conversation. I failed. “It’s that hot, foreign blood, of course,” she went on. “Perversions aside, it sends them fighting mad if you give them so much as a funny look.”
“Did you see that programme on the telly the other evening?” the other woman now broke in. “It was about a whole street of them in Nottingham. No? Well, every one of the houses is filled with them. All you can see in the street is the brown faces of their children. Once they’ve lived there a week, you know, you can’t get an English family to move back in—not without taking all the plaster off back to the brick. It’s their cooking, you see. The smell seeps into the plaster.”
“Oh, but he’s not pure Indian,” the first woman replied. “His father was English. And you must agree”—there was the rustle of newspaper—“that he’s not half bad looking. You can see he’s a bit less than white. But he’s got that pretty look about him you often find in half-castes. Shame about his tastes….”
“Well, I’m not one to judge,” the second woman jumped back in. “Down my street, there’s a woman who’s moved a Jamaican in with her. No one speaks to her, of course. Still”—she paused and drew breath—it’s not my business if she’s too ugly to get a white man. Live and let live is what I’ve always said. If they’re happy together, I’m not one to go judging.” She paused again. “Mind you,” she added at last, “it’s the children I feel sorry for. They just don’t know which side they’re on.”
I jammed my still glowing butt into the ashtray and shot the bolt. Not looking at either of the now silent women, I walked straight past and made for the end compartment. Even Pakeshi’s company was an improvement on this. As if hurrying to the toilet, there was a man coming towards me. I pushed myself against the window and waited for him to squeeze past. Instead of going past, though, he stopped in front and looked carefully at my face.
“In you come, Tony!” he said in the flat voice of the working classes. He put one arm about my shoulders and, with the other, jammed a gun against my chest. I opened my mouth to cry out, but thought better of it. The man glanced into the compartment just beside us, then pushed me back down towards where one of the women still waited with her back to us. The man got the door opened and shoved me so hard into an empty compartment that I went sprawling on the floor. It was as if I’d been grabbed by one of those trapdoor spiders you see on the nature documentaries. I lay a moment on the compartment floor, too confused even to feel scared.
“Right, Tony my lad,” the man said with a grin, “I don’t think we need no introductions. You don’t need to know who I am, or how I caught up with you. You just hand over that document you’ve got about your person, and I’ll leave you here in one piece. That’s a promise, sure as anything—none of us needs no friction.”
I looked up into the battered face. He was right that gunshots would suit neither of us. Though the motors were now so loud that he had to speak up to be heard over them, any gunshot would surely be heard in the next compartment.
“So, what do you want with it?” I asked with a better than fair appearance of self-possession. I swallowed and looked the man in the eye. “And I might ask who’s paying your bill. You don’t sound German, and you haven’t tried a Hitler salute yet. But I don’t suppose you’re working for anyone with an English accent.” Keeping my hands in front of me, I got up carefully and seated myself on one of the plush benches.
“Well, who isn’t the cool fucking cucumber?” the man answered. He pushed his hat back and laughed. “But German, Germans? You’re barking up the wrong tree there, mate.” He laughed again and waved his gun at me. “You see this?” With his free hand, he took a railway compartment key from his pocket and held it up. “You be a good shit-faced little queer and get that document out of your pocket. You give it here, and I’ll just lock you safely away till the next stop.”
I smiled and held up both hands. Behind him, on the other side of the glazed door, Pakeshi was looking in. I saw him reach up to put a hand on the sliding door and push it—ever so gently open. I’ve said the electrical hum was omnipresent. Door open or door closed, there’d be no change in its tone. It was a matter of keeping the man occupied.
“Then, if you aren’t working for the Germans,” I said loudly, “would I be wrong to guess that the Russians were paying your wages?” The man laughed again. “Might you even be a member of the Communist Party?” I hazarded. “Not everyone left there, I’m told, is an intellectual.” Another laugh. Pakeshi now had the door open wide enough for him to step noiselessly through the gap. I thought of another question—anything to keep the man from turning round. But Pakeshi now had both hands up behind the man. As if moving in some Indian dance, he brought the bony parts of each wrist hard together, until each smashed simultaneously against the man’s temples. The hat tipping forward, the man went straight down like some stricken beast in the slaughterhouse.
“I did tell you, Anthony dear, to be careful” Pakeshi said calmly, a hint of disapproval in his voice. He stepped fully into the compartment, and slid the door shut. He pulled down the blind and turned back round to kick the fallen man in the crotch. No movement. Pakeshi bent down and went quickly through the pockets. He took out a wallet and flipped it open. “Do have these,” he said, handing over a £5 note and some silver. “The £8.12s.9½d you owe me for clothes, syringe, lunch, makeup and railway incidentals, we can discuss another time. But you can at least pay when we visit the dining carriage.” He went back to his inspection of the other wallet contents. There was nothing to take his interest. He looked down at the fallen man.
“Is he dead?” I asked nervously. Pakeshi reached carefully down for a pulse and shook his head.
“Not dead—not dead yet, at least,” he said with a look back at the closed door. “But, if you’ll get that window open, that can be our next business.” I shrank back into the seat and fought to control the horror.
“I’ll be no party to murder!” I gasped. Pakeshi put his face close to mine. I held my breath to avoid the smell of whatever he’d eaten for breakfast.