Jack Ludlow: The Burning Sky

‘As is the whole area, Cal. Working out of the red-light district seems to suit you. Still smuggling out the Yids?’

‘Don’t you mean the Jews?’

‘Same difference.’

‘No, Peter, one is a race, the other an insult.’

‘Odd, I thought it was halfway to being a language.’

‘Peter, I don’t have much time.’

‘Business is brisk, then?’

‘More truthful to say it is looming. So?’

‘Simple, Cal. Certain worthy people at home require a disreputable character to do an honourable thing, and I advised them you rather fit the bill, you being a multilinguist and something of an adventurer. It also has to be a chap with certain military skills, which you also possess.’

‘I no longer serve His Majesty’s Government. I sent in my papers, remember, several years ago.’

‘It’s not HMG, Cal, which makes you perfect for what we have in mind. I believe the word is “deniable”, which sounds like one of those dreadful new Americanisms to me. But you are still a soldier at heart.’

‘I left the army a while back, Peter.’

‘In a fit of pique I seem to recall.’

‘I prefer to see it as righteous anger.’

‘Do you think that wine is chilled yet?’

Jardine took a waiter’s friend from his pocket and cut through the seal with the small blade, before inserting the corkscrew and easing out the cork, which he sniffed at, then nodded. A drop was poured into the glass closest to him to be swirled and examined before his nose went into the top and took several sniffs. He tasted it with a sort of sucking sound before swallowing. Satisfied, he filled Lanchester’s glass, then his own.

‘Cheers,’ Lanchester said, lifting his glass high.

‘ Slange .’

‘Still the model Caledonian, Cal.’ Lanchester also sniffed the wine before swirling it once more to take a sip. ‘I say, old boy, this is rather fine.’

‘I have to tell you that, whatever you have come to see me about, I am very busy.’

‘Too busy, old boy — I’m afraid Herr Hitler’s minions are on to you.’

‘I’m not doing anything illegal.’

‘When did that ever matter in a fascist dictatorship? And, if my reading of these recently promulgated Nuremberg laws is correct, you are sailing very close to the wind.’

‘All I am doing is helping Jews to get out of Germany.’

‘With everything they possess, Callum, which will not please the Finance Ministry. They prefer that when the Yids … sorry, the Jews, decamp to safer climes, they leave behind most of their worldly goods. Also, the idea that you are making pots of money from it …’

‘Who told you I was making pots of money?’

‘Little birds twitter, old boy.’

Cal Jardine looked around the dingy club. ‘Then why am I operating out of this dump? If I had any money, Peter, I would have a cavernous office overlooking the Binnenalster.’

‘This wine was not cheap.’

‘This wine was a gift from a grateful client. There are some things even I decline to get out of the country unseen.’

‘So you’re Robin Hood?’

‘No, but neither am I the Sheriff of Nottingham. I do charge a fee out of principle, also because I have to live, and as well as that I have to make payments to certain people, like the fellow you saw me talking to when you came in.’

‘Shipping agent or ship’s captain?’

‘None of your business, Peter, and if you don’t mind me asking, what are you up to these days?’

‘This and that, Cal, but I was asked to do this little errand because we are friends.’

‘Never really friends, Peter.’

‘Soldiers together, then, and fighting the good fight. It was felt that, since you know me, you might listen to what I have to say; not, I am sure you will agree, something for which you have a sterling reputation.’

‘I always listen, Peter, it’s just that I so often disagree with what is being proposed, like dropping bombs on women and children in undefended Arab villages to pacify them.’

‘Let’s not get into that, Cal,’ Lanchester insisted wearily, as the phone behind the bar began to ring. ‘It is now so sterile. Britannia has departed Iraq, so they are now happily murdering each other instead of engaging us to do it for them.’

‘We left the Iraqis with a deep and justifiable bitterness.’

‘You see everything as black and white — Manichean, in fact.’

‘While you, Peter, and your like, don’t see human when you see black, brown or anyone who does not ascribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Anglican faith.’

‘Look, Cal, there are things about which you and I will never agree; let us just accept that, shall we? But I have come to tell you that you are in some danger, and also that I carry a proposal for a certain task, which given your well-known prejudices, or as you choose to call them, your principles, will be right up your street. Besides, your name and activities are so well known you are going to have to get out of Germany.’

The slob finally picked up the ringing phone.

‘You think they are planning to deport me?’

‘No, Cal, our information is that they are planning to arrest and incarcerate you.’

The phone was jammed down and the slob moved with surprising speed to whisper in Jardine’s ear. If he had a sense of urgency, the man he communicated with showed none.

‘That, Peter, was my contact at the local Nazi Party office.’ That got a high-raised eyebrow. ‘Money well spent.’

‘And there’s me thinking the Party members were pure and honest.’

‘Purity and poverty find it hard to coexist, especially for a widow with three children.’

‘An attractive widow, I suppose?’

‘Ravishing! Apparently there is a squad of Brownshirts on their way to pick me up, though not, it seems, to hand me in to the authorities.’

‘I have to say, old boy, I thought you had more time.’

‘It wasn’t you that put the Germans on to me, was it?’

‘Perish the thought.’

‘We have to leave, now.’

‘Correction, Cal, it is you who has to leave. I have done nothing.’

‘How little you know the country, Peter. There could be someone in this bar watching us, and since you were the last person to speak to the man who has now disappeared …’

‘Are you going to disappear?’

‘Without haste, yes. You coming, or are you going to wait to be interrogated?’

‘Probably best, pity to leave the wine, though.’

‘Let’s take the bottle,’ Jardine said, with that seductive, lopsided grin Lanchester remembered so well: the one, and he resented this, that seemed to weaken women’s knees more readily than his own biting wit.

Jardine stood up in a way that ensured the bottle was hidden behind his back. Peter Lanchester, taking his pace from his fellow countryman, rose slowly, hat and brolly in hand, and followed Jardine as he sauntered towards the back of the room. As soon as he was seen to move in that direction, a brutish-looking type, with a square head and a flattened nose under a narrow forehead, rose to cut across his path.

Cal approached him in a casual manner and, as soon as he was close enough, he swung hard, hitting the thug with the bottle, taking him across the upper cheek, where it broke and cut him; then, bottle dropped, he kicked him in the groin before, as he fell forward, swiping him with a haymaker on the side of the ear to fell him. Behind the two Britons, the rest of the clientele was getting out fast.

‘I say, old boy,’ said Lanchester, this while Jardine put the boot in until the fellow lay bleeding and comatose. ‘You have not lost your barbarian touch.’

‘It a rough old town, Hamburg,’ Callum said, as he stepped over the body, carrying on until they came to the foot of a set of steep stairs by a closed door.