Len Deighton - The Harry Palmer Quartet

Suddenly the motor cut out and there I hung bouncing in space like a budgerigar in a sprung cage. I slid the gate aside and stepped out on to the top platform. I could see right across the island. To the south the sharp runways of Lay Field contrasted strangely with the irregular patterns of nature all around. A B52 was taking off from the field. Its heavy fuel for the long transpacific journey challenging it to defy gravity. Other smaller, rockier islands played bob-apple in the ocean waves. Beneath my feet the complexities of machinery reached their most frenetic maze. I was standing atop the thing that all this was about, this atoll, this multi-million-dollar city, this apogee of twentieth-century achievement, this focus point of hemispherical animosity, this reason why a Leeds supermarket operator can’t afford a third car, and a farmer in Szechwan a third bowl of rice.

Because it was all these things the shot tower was generally called ‘the mountain’, and because it was called that I wasn’t surprised to find Barney waiting at the summit.

Barney was dressed in white, super-lightweight coveralls. On his arm were the stripes of a master-sergeant, in his hand a .32 pistol with silencer. It just happened to be pointing at me.

‘I’d just better be right about you, pale-face,’ he said.

‘You’d just better had, Sambo. Now ease down the drama and tell me what’s on your mind.’

‘You are.’

‘You’re nice.’

‘Don’t fool, because I’m sticking my neck right out, but I can rack it in, but very fast. We knew each other well once, but people change and I just need to look, to see. Have you changed?’

‘Probably I have.’

There was a long silence. I didn’t know what Barney was talking about, or what Barney was getting at. I was almost thinking out loud when I said, ‘One morning you wake up and find all your life-long friends changed. They had turned into the sort of people you mutually despised not so long ago. Then you start worrying about yourself.’

‘Yeah,’ said Barney. ‘And they’ve stopped being interested in doing anything about those same jerks.’

‘I’m interested.’

‘That’s ’cos you don’t know when you’re licked.’

‘Maybe it is. But I don’t lure people into the barrel of a police special to prove it.’ He didn’t smile. Maybe I hadn’t made a joke.

He said, ‘So I’ve changed, so I’m a nut. Listen, white man, do you know the hottest piece of merchandise on this island …’

‘Aren’t I standing on it?’ I said.

‘Not unless you’re standing on your own neck; the hottest thing on this island is you. You’re bugged, you’re strapped down, you’re pickled. “The friends” 1 have the word that you’ve walked away. Have you walked away, just a little way? Did you put a down payment on a dacha with some old stuff you knew they had anyway? Just tell me.’

‘Just tell you?’ I said. ‘Just tell you? So the friends fling me half-way around the world for you to finger me on a bomb platform. But before that happens I just tell you? Are you crazy?’

‘Am I crazy? Are you crazy? One of us probably is but there’s a wild little chance that we are both smarter than anyone else around here.’ Barney’s hot glistening face was three inches from mine. And time stopped in a frozen minute of suspended silence. My mind photographed a wave in mid splash; Danny Kaye far below me, helmet off, wiping his brow on a white handkerchief. ‘I’ll be DED if anyone knows I’ve even spoken to you. Why do you think that they have that creep fixed on Skip as firmly as a scar, and that blonde cow welded to me? I’m greasing the skids to the morgue just coming within loudhailer distance of you.’

‘So why aren’t you buying a subscription for my funeral?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know why. I suppose because after a little while in this business you start getting egoistic about judging character.’

‘Thanks.’ It seemed a pretty lame thing to say. We stood looking at each other and Barney went across to the lift and jammed a glove into the handle so that it couldn’t be controlled from the ground. Barney spoke quietly – ‘I’m the only character around here who’d give you half a whirl, the only one.’ He paused. ‘Even that girl is half-way convinced.’ He flapped a hand. ‘Never mind how I know; I know. But on the other hand I’ve seen a few coloured guys given the heave-ho. I’m difficult to convince when it comes to concerted action against a guy who maybe doesn’t know what it is tiptoeing up behind him. Afterwards it tends to be too late to find out if anyone made a mistake.’

I started to speak. I don’t know whether I was going to argue, thank him or apologize, but he waved his heavy pink palm across his chest.

‘Don’t thank me. Skip didn’t have the opportunity I had. It’s my sergeant you should be thanking. He’s out there on one of those generator trucks making like he’s me. We’re just relying on the fact that most tall niggers look alike to pale-faces.’ Barney opened his mouth in a symbol of a grin; there was no mirth in it whatsoever. ‘Anything he gets will really be for nothing.’

‘Wait a minute – let me fasten on to all this,’ I said.

‘You haven’t got the time, fella. Just forget you ever saw me and light out, especially both those things.’

My mind was dizzy trying to think. Maybe, I kept thinking, Barney had slid off his trolley. But I knew Barney was right. It made sense from too many puzzling things to be anything but true.

‘We daren’t be seen here, man. I must bend the shoes!’

‘Will you let me have the gun, Barney?’

‘The heater, man. You ain’t going to shoot your way out of this installation. If you want to do yourself a favour, start talking, and talk your way on to a fast plane OUT.’

‘The gun.’

‘Okay. Be a nut.’ Barney threw me the gun and a small metal reel all prepared for me. I raised the leg of my trousers and using the reel of sticking-plaster, stuck the gun to the outside of my right leg. When I covered it again, Barney passed me a dark-blue thin canvas belt. It was about five inches deep and similar to the ones used by gold smugglers. I undid my trousers and strapped the heavy, sweaty belt, full of automatic clips, under my shirt. Barney having retrieved his glove, climbed out over the rim of the platform. He swung down the narrow ladder and paused as his neck came level with my feet. I guess he was wondering whether I might not kick him into oblivion. He looked at the toe of my shoe reflectively, and hammered his fist softly against it in a gesture of farewell. As he looked up, I once more found my mind committing the details to memory. I remember his wide handsome face like we all remember the rivets on our dentist’s spectacles.

‘And don’t go sobbing to your new boss, paleface.’

‘Dalby’s convinced, too, huh?’ I paraded all Dalby’s words and attitudes over the last few days through my mind.

‘Him speak with knife -and-forked tongue, man.’

I put the sole of my shoe on Barney’s knitted hair. ‘Get out of here, you bum,’ I said.

‘You could do yourself just that favour,’ Barney said. ‘Try for vertically.’

The journey down seemed faster than the journey up. The white-haired little guy had put my case out of the sun. I picked it up and we walked back towards the gate. A truck had stopped at the gate and the driver was getting out so that a policeman could drive it up to the tower. In the jeep Danny Kaye was talking to the gunner earnestly. I suppose they were discussing whether to make anti-clockwise the next time round the tower. The white-haired one and me flipped them our security cards but they didn’t seem to know that the hottest piece of merchandise on the island was padding out of their vicinity. We had a new Chev parked outside the gate. We got in to drive back to the mess.