Piece of Cake (24 page)

“Sounds jolly democratic,” the group captain said.

“Well, that's what we're fighting for, after all.”

“Is it?” Skull fumbled for a pen. “Are we? I ought to make a note of that. I thought it was something to do with Poland.”

“Correct,” the group captain said.

“Ah.” Skull held up the pen and frowned at the nib. “In that case, when shall we declare war on Russia?”

“Pay no attention to him, sir,” Fitzgerald said. “Old Skull's got an IQ of seven hundred and forty-three, so he overheats easily. We have to change his oil twice a week.”

“No, it's a simple question,” Skull said.

“What a fierce fellow you are; Skull,” Rex sighed. “One war isn't enough.”

“Well, Russia has invaded Poland, just as Germany did. Russia has annexed even more of Poland than Germany did. To be consistent, therefore, we should—”

“We should go in to lunch,” Rex said. “Nothing very grand; I'm afraid, sir: just Strasbourg
pâté
, a local fish, and some cheese, but I'll be interested to hear what you think of our Pinot Blanc. I reckon it's one of the most
symmetrical
wines available, but you know far more about these things than I do …”

They trooped off.

Mary Blandin walked over to where Fitz Fitzgerald was pushing a little girl on a swing. “Stay to supper,” she said.

“That's awfully nice of you.” Fitz stopped pushing. The little girl squealed and waved her feet. “The problem is, you see, Flash and I came here in the same car, so …”

“Don't worry. Flash will be looked after.”

“Really?” Fitz looked across the playground. Nicole Ligier was talking to a red-headed boy who was sitting on Flash Gordon's shoulders, gripping his hair in both fists. “Well, in that case,” Fitz said, “it would be churlish of me to refuse, wouldn't it?” The little girl squealed louder. “All right, you noisy monster!” he cried, and began pushing. “Will there be rolypoly pudding?” he asked Mary. “I'm a pushover for rolypoly pudding.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked mysterious. “We shall see,” she said.

Dicky Starr's handwriting was neat and simple. The important words were underlined in red ink, and there were green-ink lines drawn between the different sections. “Knowledge is power,” his father had once told him; and Starr had kept careful notes of everything the instructors told him at every stage of his flying
training. These notes filled ten thick exercise books. The page now open before him had his thumbprint in the top right-hand corner (leaky fountain-pen). He had framed it in red and green.

Dicky Starr kept these notes because he believed that everything in the world could be explained and understood. Disorder worried him. He felt bewildered by the pointlessness of the killings during yesterday's horseback outing and he was angered by the fact that nobody else seemed to care. Everyone agreed Moggy Cattermole was a chump, but nobody did anything. Not even Fanny Barton. Dicky Starr was very conscious of his own size—he was as short as Sticky Stickwell and a good bit lighter—and he hated having to get other people to fight his battles. So he said nothing. After lunch he went off to study his notes in a corner of the library where there was a turret-like room screened by a red velvet curtain.

The page with the framed thumbprint was all about cloud formations.

Very high cloud (above 20,000 ft). Cirrus: this means “curly,” e.g. cloud looks like lambs'tails. Stratus means “a layer” and resembles faint chalk-marks all going the same way. Cirrocumulus is-made of small blobs of cloud perhaps forming a pattern such as …

Enraged. That was the word. He hadn't been angry when they shot that fox; he'd been enraged. He'd been overtaken by a rushing fury that seemed to grab him by the guts. At that moment he'd wanted to kill them. Snatch up his gun and blast someone's head off. If the adj hadn't been standing there he might have done it, might have run wild, the taste had been in his throat, the raging hunger.

It was a new vision of himself and it shocked him: the Dicky Starr who made lots of model airplanes and brushed his teeth after meals and passed all his exams had somehow turned into a potential killer. Of course as soon as they'd let him go up in an eight-gun Hurricane he'd known that he was in that seat for the purpose of destroying enemy aircraft, but it was a technical task, knocking down planes. Now there was a part of him that wanted to kill, that actually relished the prospect of blowing someone to bits. That wasn't nice. People had always said what a nice chap Dicky Starr was, and he had believed them. Now it turned out
that he wasn't at all nice. He stared at his framed thumbprint and worried.

The curtain swished. “So there you are, little man,” Cattermole said. “Skulking in your tent. That won't help you. I want four hundred and thirty-seven francs and fifty centimes, and I want it now.” He strolled around the little room, sniffed at the view, ran his finger along a shelf of books. “Come on, come on,” he said.

“I'm not talking to you,” Starr muttered.

“I don't care a tiny toss whether you fiddle, fart or sing the old school song. Just pay up.”

Starr began reading his notes. Cattermole plucked the exercise book from his fingers and put it on a high shelf. Starr folded his arms and gripped his biceps until his thumbs hurt. “What a very clever thing to do,” he said. “That must have taken every brain in your body.”

“Cough up, little pygmy.” Cattermole clicked his fingers. “Get your purse out of your knickers.”

“I'd sooner be a little pygmy than a giant shit.”

“Don't bore me with your dreams, shrimp. Cash, cash, cash. Give.”

“There's only one thing I'd like to give you, and that's a red-hot bullet up the backside.”

Cattermole shook his head. “Pleasure later. Business first.”

“What's this, a lovers' tiff?” Patterson wandered in, bouncing a ping-pong ball.

“Ah, Pip. You're another. You owe me four hundred and thirty-seven francs and a bit,” Cattermole told him. “The stables charged us three-and-a-half thousand francs for that wretched horse, the one Starr went joyriding on. Eights into three-and-a-half thou go four thirty-seven point five, so that's your share of the damage.”

“For God's sake!” Patterson said. “That's nearly three pounds. I'm not paying that.”

“Lord Rex says you are.”

“It was all your fault,” Starr told Cattermole. “You made it happen, you ought to pay for everything.”

Cattermole perched on the windowsill and examined him. “You're in a proper little tizz because I shot your pet fox, aren't you?” he said.

“If you mean I was disgusted, yes I was. It was barbaric, just the sort of behavior you expect the Gestapo to—”

“Pip shot the animal too. Why not blame him?”

“I only shot it because everyone else was having a go,” Patterson said. “I mean, if it was going to be dead, I might as well make sure it was good and dead.”

“You nearly all missed,” Starr said.

“There you are then, it's just as well I shot straight, otherwise …” Patterson stopped as he realized where that argument led. “Anyway, it was only a fox,” he said. Starr clenched his teeth. “Damn good fox, of course,” Patterson added.

“I'll tell you your trouble, Dicky Dwarf,” Cattermole said. “You're squeamish. That's why you'll never be any good as a fighter pilot. You're completely covered with squeam, my lad. Squeam all over you. You ought to see a doctor about it. Tell him—”

“Oh, shut up, Moggy!” Patterson cried. “Dicky's a bloody good pilot, as good as anyone in this squadron. Christ, you're never happy unless you're kicking someone in the balls, are you?”

“I do it for their own good,” Cattermole said blandly. “It hurts me, I assure you. I suffer agonies.”

“Oh yes? What about Micky Marriott?” Starr demanded. “You treated him pretty badly, didn't you? That day when you came back early because your engine was overheating. You treated him like dirt.”

“Did I? Possibly. Ages ago. I scarcely remember.”

“I remember all right,” Patterson said. “You were bloody rude.”

Cattermole poked his little finger in his ear and studied the findings. “One must keep the peasants in their place,” he murmured.

Starr got up and looked out of the window. “I was duty officer that day,” he said. “I was in the tower when the CO told you to break off and go home. I heard it on the R/T. I logged the time. And I logged your landing. You were at least fifteen minutes late.”

“Hello, hello!” Patterson said.

Cattermole yawned. “What a nosey little boy you are.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Patterson said. “You stooged around for a quarter of an hour with a red-hot engine?”

“Certainly not. I investigated a certain bridge over the Moselle at Thionville. I examined it from all sides, including underneath.”

“Thionville,” Patterson said. “Thionville. Where did I see something about that?”

“Memo from Area HQ,” Starr said. “Dangerous flying. They blamed it on a French Morane.”

“Purblind fools,” Cattermole said.

“I remember. They didn't like it, did they?” Patterson said.

“Area HQ disapproves of flying,” Cattermole said. “It wears out the airplane.”

“Did you really go under that bridge, Moggy?” Patterson asked.

“Of course. That's what it's there for.”

“If you did,” Starr said thickly, “all I can say is it must be childsplay.”

“Well, there's one way to find out, sonny-boy.” Cattermole glanced at him, waited, and got off the windowsill. “As I thought,” he murmured.

“Listen, I could do it,” Starr said. “I just don't see the point, that's all.”

“Very well, I'll bet you. Double or quits. If you do it, I pay shares in the horse for both of us. If you don't do it you owe me double. That's … what … eight hundred and seventy-five francs.”

“Done,” Starr said, without thinking.

Cattermole looked at Patterson. “Feeling brave today?” he asked.

“Same stakes?” Patterson knew he was playing for time. Cattermole nodded. Time ran out. “Money for old rope,” Patterson said.

Cattermole ruffled Starr's hair in passing. “Thionville,” he said. “Dreary little dump.” He sauntered off. Starr smoothed his hair and watched him go. He felt tricked and trapped. He looked at Patterson, but Pip was bouncing his ping-pong ball. No help there.

Flash Gordon got halfway through unbuttoning his shirt when he remembered the widow Ligier, sitting beside the fire. He had been in the big farmhouse kitchen for so long—three hours, almost—and the meal and the wine and the conversation had been so pleasant, that he had forgotten Nicole's mother; she never spoke, never moved from her chair; just rested and smiled in the general
direction of the two young people. “Are you sure this is okay?” he muttered.

“She cannot hear us,” Nicole said. “Even if she could, she cannot understand. And she can see very little. To her eyes you are just a shadow.”

“Goodness. How sad.” He blinked doubtfully at the old lady as Nicole's fingers undid the last buttons and tugged the shirt over his head. He was wearing a singlet; that came off too. “Now raise your arms,” she said.

“I feel like a prisoner-of-war.”

“Do you? That's interesting.” She slipped her hands across his ribcage, and he inhaled sharply. “Your body is made to be a piece of armor, you see. It expects attack and it guards against that.”

“Jolly clever.”

“Your ribs protect your heart and lungs, for example.” She ran a finger along the bottom edge of his ribcage. His chest was very white and almost completely hairless. “Human biology is the most interesting subject in the world,” she said. “At university it fascinated me.”

“Yes? I've never thought about it very much.” She moved behind him and traced the muscles of his back. “You were saying something about arteries,” he said.

“Arteries are wonderful. They take your blood everywhere but they hide themselves behind your bones for safety.”

“I say, that's brilliant.”

“But sometimes they must approach the surface. These are places where the body is very vulnerable.” She searched with her fingertips until she found the throb of artery in his neck. “Here,” she said. Her fingers moved to the inside of his elbow, his upper arm, his armpit, the hollow of his collarbone. “There … and there … Up there … Down there …”

“Fancy that,” he said huskily.

“Next time,” she said, lightly probing his abdominal muscles, “I shall explain the liver and the kidneys. Also the spleen.”

“Holy smoke.” The firelight played on his torso. Madame Ligier blinked and smiled. Flash Gordon wasn't sure what the hell was happening to him, but he was more than happy to let it continue.

A quarter of a mile away, Fitz Fitzgerald knelt by the fire and 164
arranged chestnuts along the top of the grate. Mary Blandin came and sat beside him. “Brandy,” she said.

“I say, that's jolly decent of you.”

“Is it?” She gave him one of the glasses. “I'm not sure I want to be jolly decent. It sounds like going country dancing with three pairs of knickers on.”

Fitz knocked a chestnut into the fire. “Sorry,” he said. “Hotter than I thought.”

“Poor Fitz.” She tickled his stockinged feet and made him squirm. “Tell you what: I'll be jolly decent if you will too.”

“Ah.” He sucked his finger. “I'm not sure about that. You see, I've never worn three pairs of knickers.”

“There was a time,” she said thoughtfully, “when I refused to wear any knickers at all. Happy days, they were.”

Fitz sipped his brandy and studied her profile. It was golden in the firelight. “Tell me more. Tell me all, in fact.”