It was the morning of my hundredth birthday. I shaved the final mirror-disc of old tired face under the merciless glare of the bathroom lighting. It was all very well telling oneself that Humphrey Bogart had that sort of face; but he also had a hairpiece, half a million dollars a year and a stand-in for the rough bits. I dabbed a soda-stick at the razor nicks. In the magnifying mirror it looked like a white rocket landing on the uncharted side of the moon.
Outside was February and the first snow of the year. At first it was the sort of snow that a sharp PR man would make available to journalists. It sparkled and floated. It was soft yet crisp, like some new, sugar-coated breakfast cereal. Girls wore it in their hair and the
Telegraph
ran a picture of a statue wearing some. It was hard to reconcile this benign snow with the stuff that caused paranoia among British Railways officials. That Monday morning it was building up in crunchy
wedges under the heels of shoes and falling in dry white pyramids along the front hall of the Charlotte Street office where I worked. I said ‘Good morning’ to Alice, and she said, ‘Don’t tread it in’ to me, which summed up our relationship nicely.
The Charlotte Street building was an ancient creaking slum. The wallpaper had great boils full of loose plaster and there were small metal patches in the floor where the boards were too rotten to repair. On the first-floor landing was a painted sign that said ‘Acme Films. Cutting Rooms’, and under that a drawing of a globe that made Africa too thin. From behind the doors came the noise of a moviola and a strong smell of film cement. The next landing was painted with fresh green paint. On one door a dog-eared piece of headed notepaper said ‘B Isaacs Theatrical Tailor’, which at one time I had considered very funny. Behind me I heard Alice puffing up the stairs with a catering-size tin of Nescafé. Someone in the dispatch department put a brass-band record on the gramophone. Dawlish, my boss, was always complaining about that gramophone, but even Alice couldn’t really control the dispatch department.
My secretary said, ‘Good morning.’ Jean was a tall girl in her middle twenties. Her face was as calm as Nembutal and with her high cheekbones and tightly drawn-back hair she was beautiful without working at it. There were times when I
thought that I was in love with Jean and there were times when I thought that she was in love with me, but somehow these times never coincided.
‘Good party?’ I asked.
‘You seemed to enjoy it. When I left you were drinking a pint of bitter while standing on your head.’
‘You do exaggerate. Why did you go home alone?’
‘I have two hungry cats to support. Two thirty is definitely my bedtime.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Don’t be.’
‘Truly.’
‘Going with you to a party is to be there alone. You plant me down, go around chatting with everyone, then wonder why I haven’t met them all.’
‘Tonight,’ I said, ‘we’ll go to some quiet place for dinner. Just us.’
‘I’m taking no chances. Tonight I’m cooking you a birthday feast at the flat. I’ll give you all your favourite things.’
‘You will?’
‘To eat.’
‘I’ll be there,’ I said.
‘You’d better be.’ She gave me a perfunctory kiss—‘Happy birthday’—and leaned across and put a glass of water and two Alka Seltzer tablets on my blotter.
‘Why not put the tablets into the water?’ I asked.
‘I wasn’t sure if you could bear the noise.’
She unlocked my trays and began to work steadily through the great pile of paper-work. By midday we hadn’t made much impression upon it. I said, ‘We aren’t even keeping up with the incoming.’
‘We can start a “pending” tray.’
‘Don’t be so female,’ I said. ‘All that does is call some of it another name. Why can’t you go through it and handle some of it without me?’
‘I already did.’
‘Then sort out the “information onlys”, mark them for return to us and pass them on. That would give us a breathing space.’
‘Now who’s kidding himself?’
‘Can you think of something better?’
‘Yes. I think we should get a written directive from Organization to be sure we’re handling only files that we should handle. There may be things in this tray that are nothing to do with us.’
‘There are times, my love, when I think none of it is anything to do with us.’
Jean stared at me in an expressionless way that might have indicated disapproval. Maybe she was thinking about her hair.
‘Birthday lunch at the Trat,’ I said.
‘But I look awful.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I must do my hair. Give me five minutes.’
‘I’ll give you six,’ I said. She
had
been thinking about her hair.
We lunched at the Trattoria Terrazza: Tagliatelle alla carbonara, Osso buco, coffee. Pol Roger throughout. Mario complimented me on having a birthday and kissed Jean to celebrate it. He snapped his fingers and up came Strega. I snapped my fingers and up came more Pol Roger. We sat there, drinking champagne with Strega chasers, talking, snapping fingers and discovering ultimate truth and our own infinite wisdom. We got back to the office at three forty-five and I realized for the first time how dangerous that loose lino on the stairs can be.
As I entered my office the intercom was buzzing like a trapped bluebottle. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Right away,’ said Dawlish, my boss.
‘Right away, sir,’ I said, slowly and carefully.
Dawlish had the only room in the building with two windows. It was a comfortable room, although overcrowded with pieces of not very valuable antique furniture. There was a smell of wet overcoats. Dawlish was a meticulous man who looked like an Edwardian coroner. His hair was grey moving towards white and his hands long and thin. When he read he moved his fingertips across the page as though getting a finer understanding from the sense of touch. He looked up from his desk.
‘Was that you falling down the stairs?’
‘I stumbled,’ I said. ‘It’s the snow on my shoes.’
‘Of course it is, my boy,’ said Dawlish. We both stared out of the window; the snow was falling faster, and great white snakes of it were wriggling along the gutter, for it was still dry enough to be lifted by the wind.
‘I’m just sending another 378 file to the PM. I hate this clearance business. It’s so easy to slip up.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, and was pleased that I didn’t have to sign that file.
‘What do you think?’ asked Dawlish. ‘Do you think that that boy is a security risk?’
The 378 file was a periodic review of the loyalty of S.1s—important chemists, engineers etc.—but I knew that Dawlish just wanted to think aloud, so I grunted.
‘You know the one I’m worried about. You know him.’
‘I’ve never handled his file,’ and as long as choice was concerned I’d make damned certain I didn’t. I knew that Dawlish had another nasty little bomb called the 378 file sub-section 14, which was a file about trade-union officials. At the slightest show of intelligent interest I would find that file on my desk.
‘Personally: what do you feel about him personally?’ asked Dawlish.
‘Brilliant young student. Socialist. Pleased with himself for getting an honours degree. Wakes up one morning with a suede waistcoat, two kids, job in advertising and a ten-thousand-quid mortgage
in Hampstead. Sends for a subscription to the
Daily Worker
just so that he can read the
Statesman
with a clear conscience. Harmless.’ I hoped that reply carried the right blend of inefficient glibness.
‘Very good,’ said Dawlish, turning the pages of the file. ‘We should give you a job here.’
‘I’d never get on with the boss.’
Dawlish initialled a chit at the front of the file and tossed it into the out tray. ‘We have another problem,’ he said, ‘that won’t be solved as easily as that.’ Dawlish reached for a slim file, opened it and read a name. ‘Olaf Kaarna: you know him?’
‘No.’
‘Journalists who have well-placed, indiscreet friends call themselves political commentators. Kaarna is one of the more responsible ones. He’s Finnish. Comfortable.’ (Dawlish’s word for a private income.) ‘He spends a great deal of time and money collecting his information. Two days ago he spoke to one of our embassy people in Helsinki. Asked him to confirm a couple of small technical points before an article is published next month. He’s thinking of sending it to
Kansan Uutiset,
which is the left-wing newspaper. If it was something harmful to us, that would be a good place to set the fuses. Of course we don’t know what Kaarna has up his sleeve, but he says he can show that there is a vast British Military Intelligence operation covering northern Europe
and centred in Finland.’ Dawlish smiled as he said this and so did I. The thought of Ross at the War Office master-minding a global network was a little unreal.
‘And the clever answer is…?’
‘Heaven knows,’ said Dawlish, ‘but one must follow it up. Ross will no doubt send someone. The Foreign Office have been told; O’Brien can hardly ignore the situation.’
‘It’s like one of those parties where the first girl to leave will have everyone talking about her.’
‘Quite so,’ said Dawlish. ‘That’s why I want you to go tomorrow morning.’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. I knew there were all kinds of reasons why it was impossible, but the alcohol blurred my mind. ‘A passport. Whether we get a good one from the Foreign Office or a quick job from the War Office we will tip our hand and they will delay us if they want to.’
‘See our friend in Aldgate,’ said Dawlish.
‘But it’s four thirty now.’
‘Exactly,’ said Dawlish. ‘Your plane leaves at nine fifty A.M. That gives you well over sixteen hours to arrange it.’
‘I’m overworked already.’
‘Being overworked is just a state of mind. You do far more work than you need on some jobs, less than you need on others. You should be more impersonal.’
‘I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do if I go to Helsinki.’
‘See Kaarna. Ask him about this article he’s preparing. He’s been silly in the past; show him a couple of pages of his dossier. He’ll be sensible.’
‘You want me to threaten him?’
‘Good heavens no. Carrot first: stick last.
Buy
this article he’s written if necessary. He’ll be sensible.’
‘So you keep saying.’ I knew it was no good betraying even the slightest amount of excitement. Patiently I said, ‘There are at least six men in this building who could do this job, even if it’s not as simple as you describe. I speak no Finnish, I have no close friends there, I’m not familiar with the country nor have I been handling any file that might have a bearing on this job. Why do I have to go?’
‘You,’ said Dawlish removing his spectacles and ending the discussion, ‘are the one best protected against cold.’
Old Montagu Street is a grimy slice of Jack-the-Ripper real-estate in Whitechapel. Dark grocers’ shops, barrels of salt herring; a ruin; a kosher poultry shop; jewellers; more ruins. Here and there tiny groups of newly painted shops carry Arabic signs as a fresh wave of underprivileged immigrants probes into the ghetto. Three dark-skinned children on old bicycles pedalled away quickly, circled and stopped. Beyond the tenements the shops began again. One, a printer’s, had fly-specked business cards in the window. The printed lettering
had faded to pale pastel colours and the cards were writhing and twisting with bygone sunlight. The children made another sudden sortie on their bicycles, leaving arabesques in the thin skin of snow. The door was stiff and warped. Above my head a small bell jangled and shed dust. The children watched me enter the shop. Inside the small front office there was an ancient counter, topped with a slab of glass. Under the glass were examples of invoices and business cards: faded ghosts of failed businesses. On a shelf there were boxes of paper clips, office sundries, a notice that said ‘We take orders for rubber stamps’ and a greasy catalogue.
As the bell echoes faded a voice from the back room called, ‘You the one that phoned?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Go on up, luv.’ Then very loudly in a different sort of voice she screamed, ‘He’s here, Sonny.’ I opened the counter-flap and felt my way up the narrow stairs.
At the rear, grey windows looked down upon yards cluttered with broken bicycles and rusty hip-baths all painted with a thin film of snow. The scale of the place seemed too small for me. I’d wandered into a house built for gnomes.
Sonny Sontag worked at the top of the building. This room was cleaner than any of the others but the clutter was worse. A table with a white plastic surface occupied much of the room. On the table there were jam-jars crammed with punches, nee
dles and scrapers, graving tools with wooden mushroom heads that fit into the palm of the hand, and two shiny oilstones. Most of the wall space was filled with brown cardboard boxes.
‘Mr Jolly,’ said Sonny Sontag, extending a soft white hand that gripped like a Stillson wrench. The first time I ever met Sonny he forged a Ministry of Works pass for me in the name of Peter Jolly. Since that day, with a faith in his own handiwork that typified him, he always called me Mr Jolly.
Sonny Sontag was an untidy man of medium height. He wore a black suit, black tie and a black rolled-brim hat which he seldom removed. Under his open jacket there was a hand-knitted grey cardigan from which hung a loose thread. When he stood up he tugged at the cardigan and it came a little more unravelled.
‘Hello, Sonny,’ I said. ‘Sorry about this rush.’
‘No. A regular customer should expect special consideration.’
‘I need a passport,’ I said. ‘For Finland.’
Looking like a hamster dressed in a business suit, he lifted his chin and twitched his nose while saying ‘Finland’ two or three times. He said, ‘Mustn’t be Scandinavian, too easy to check the registration. Mustn’t be a country that needs a visa for Finland because I haven’t time to do a visa for you.’ He wiped his whiskers with a quick movement. ‘West Germany; no.’ He went humming and twitching around the shelves until he found a large cardboard box. He cleared a space with his
elbows, then just as I thought he was going to start nibbling at the box he tipped its contents across the table. There were a couple of dozen mixed passports. Some of them were torn or had corners cut and some were just bunches of loose pages held together with a rubber band. ‘These are for cannibalizing,’ explained Sonny. ‘I take out pages with visas I need and doctor them. For cheap jobs—the hoop game
*
—no good for you, but somewhere here I have a lovely little Republic of Ireland. I’d have it ready in a couple of hours if you fancy it.’ He scuffed through the mangled documents and produced an Irish passport. He gave it to me to look at and I gave him three blurred photos. Sonny studied the photos carefully and then brought a notebook from his pocket and read the microscopic writing at closer range.