These two complementary qualities had helped him to get out of a number of tight places. His wife and his daughter had helped him, too, not physically, for he never wanted them to run unnecessary risks; but by their mere presence, which gave him an air of respectability and solidity which deceived a good many people.
How far he valued them for themselves, and not just as adjuncts to his appearance and personality—his image—he himself would have found it hard to say. While they were with him it was a question he did not even ask himself: he took their presence, and what they did for him, and what he did for them, for granted. They were reciprocal services in a good cause. The cause of what? Freedom perhaps, though freedom is such an elastic term; and some of his co-adjutors wondered which side he was on. But business is business, and as someone has said, a lie in business is not a lie. Rudy had availed himself, cautiously of course, of this precept.
Now he had to explain himself. It wasn’t difficult to explain that his wife was tired of travelling, which was true, and was now living in Warsaw, which was not true. For his sake, as well as Trudi’s and Angela’s, he did not want their whereabouts to be known. He also explained, which was true, that Angela was married and expecting a baby—he did not say where, for who knew where, or where not, a baby might be born?
This freedom from family ties gave him as a man who was still attractive to women, a good many opportunities which he was not slow to take; not only from the amorous angle, whatever that might be, but from the information sometimes supplied. He knew that information was double-edged, but he relied on getting more than he gave.
But he was not heartless, and though not yet forty, he sometimes thought rather wistfully in the loneliness of his leaking tent, pitched between somewhere and somewhere, or between nowhere and nowhere, eating his viands, on which he relied so much, out of a tin, or tins, in his solitary confinement, of the domestic amenity and seeming security he had once enjoyed. Those softer moments! When he came back tired and hungry from some mission, and smelt from afar the smell of a delicious dish that was cooking for him on the little oil stove, and heard, from nearer to, the gentle muffled swish and a rustle, so different from a man’s direct and decisive movements—loudly proclaiming their object instead of trying to conceal it—of the participants who were preparing his evening meal! Mouth-watering prospect! And more than living up to its promise. While he was eating he didn’t talk much; just a word here and there escaped the otherwise inarticulate smacking of his lips. But afterwards, full-fed, finishing the bottle of wine or spirits, if they were in funds, for he could drink at a sitting a bottle of brandy or sligovitz, or vodka, or grappa, or calvados or whatever might be the spirituous tipple of the country; then he became expansive, and told them a little, but not (for their own sakes) too much of what he had been doing during the day—the contacts he had made, the possible development, and their probable next destination. To all this they listened eagerly, even avidly, and fondly watched his face as (unknown to him) its taut features slowly relaxed to reveal a husband and a father.
And afterwards, when the dividing curtain was drawn he could hear their lowered voices (whispers meant not to disturb him rather than to prevent him hearing what they said), after which he dropped off in a genial alcoholic haze, with a sense of protective influences round him, and replete in every sense, he slept like the proverbial log, till dawn, or until the clock in his subconscious mind (as reliable and less noisy than an alarum clock) told him it was time to get up. Even if he had possessed an alarum clock he would not have used it, for it would have disturbed the slumbers beyond the curtain (not the Iron Curtain) and sometimes he was off before day-break.
Comfort! Comfort! He might not have admitted it to himself, but it was comfort that he missed, and business, however much it may sharpen the other faculties, does not always warm the heart.
He had had many surprises in his life, his life as an international spy, but the greatest and the most unforeseen was when almost simultaneously his wife and his daughter decided to leave him. He had always been ready, as indeed he had to be, to accept facts—but he could hardly credit this one. Leave him, after twenty years of wifehood, and perhaps longer still of daughterhood? He couldn’t and didn’t blame them; blame didn’t come into his code of behaviour, in which success and failure were his only criteria. He knew he hadn’t been a good husband and father, but there were many worse; he might have treated them as camp-followers but they were willing to be so treated; he had shared his good times as well as his bad times with them, and set aside some money for them, which was no doubt one reason why they had left him. He had counted on their loyalty, not on their love; love was a thing he didn’t take into account, except in the crudest way, as leading to someone or something.
All the same, in those lonely nights in the tent, when he heard no whispering of women’s voices, and smelt no smell of the creature comforts they were preparing for him, he knew he was missing something. It never entered his mind that they might be missing something too.
He didn’t often sleep now, as aforetime he used to, in the comfort of a luxury hotel; but sometimes he did, and it was there that the unexpected happened. In the middle of dinner, with a bottle of wine half empty on the table, two men touched him on the shoulder and before he had time to pay his bill, or anyone had time to pay it for him, he was marched away and bundled into a waiting car, not his car, which was outside in the car-park. ‘Can’t I get my things?’ he asked in the language of the country. ‘No, we’ve got all your things that matter,’ was the reply, and no more was said until he found himself, handcuffed, in a small cell, seven feet by five with a grated window at the top, admitting the air, and a grated window in the door, admitting a dim light from the passage. An unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling showed him a straw mattress in the corner, and one or two pieces of furniture which might have been made out of the same substance as the cell.
Here they left him; but presently a warder came in with a small bundle of clothes which he recognized as his. ‘This is all you’ll want,’ he said, ‘we’ve got the rest. I’ll show you where the place is,’ and unlocking the door he indicated where Rudy could relieve himself. ‘But you’ll have to knock on the door—there’s always me or one of us in the passage. Lights out at ten o’clock. Breakfast at six. These handcuffs are a bit tight, I’ll give you some second-grade ones, and you can stretch your arms a bit. No fooling about, mind. Good-night.’
The new handcuffs did indeed give Rudy more freedom of movement. Instead of being clamped together, with only an interval of a few inches between, hardly enough, not enough, to enable him to satisfy the most rudimentary needs of Nature, his hands now stretched to his hips; he could feel parts of his body that before had been beyond their scope; he could have picked things up from the dirty stone floor, had there been anything worth picking up. He could even embrace himself, or part of himself, had he felt so inclined. This freedom! But compared with the earlier restriction it seemed like liberty. Now he could sleep again; he had always been a good sleeper, but with his hands tied so tight in front of or (according to the gaoler’s whim) behind him, he had been unable to sleep, and his breakfast of bread and water, or whatever insubstantial substance took its place, found him more tired than he had been at ten o’clock lights out.
But now, folding and unfolding his arms so as to give him as little discomfort, not to say pain, as might be, he awoke, not refreshed, but with the blessed sense of having slept.
Gradually he adjusted himself, as best he could, to his new life. Small reliefs, that in the old days he would have taken for granted or not noticed—the cleansing of his cell from certain noxious insects—seemed like a gift from Heaven. And what a blessing it was to go out into the light of common day and join the other prisoners in their half-hour’s exercise inside the high-walled courtyard. Here they were allowed to speak to each other, those who had the necessary gift of speech, for they were of many nations and languages. Some had known each other recently, some from long ago; but the majority, of whom Rudy was one, were too low-spirited to want to talk much. What was there to talk about, between those flat, encircling walls, outside which life went on, with its incentives and excitements, whereas inside all was static and uneventful, without hope, promise, or future? Only death; and for death he sometimes longed. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been executed before; ‘they’ had plenty against him, a whole dossier, and from time to time they made him stand up in his cell while they questioned him. Sometimes he was too weak to stand up, and asked permission to sit down on his straw bed. He answered, or parried the questions as well as he could, and as well as his tired mind would let him. He had to keep a constant watch on his tongue, for he didn’t want to involve other people more than he could help—it was an occupational obligation to keep his mouth, as far as might be, shut.