Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

I tried to shake him off. I’d had quite enough of being manhandled. But he clung on to me tightly.

‘Wait, you little fool,’ came the voice again, a harsh whisper at the back of my neck. ‘In here.’

He pulled me into an alleyway. He seemed terrifically strong and agile, though in the shadows I saw that he was shorter and thinner than I was. He looked me up and down as if trying to decide something.

‘Do you know who squealed on your friends?’ he asked me.

I shook my head.

‘Maybe they gave themselves away,’ he went on. ‘Bloody amateurs. You’d better come with me.’

‘Who are you?’ I asked him.

‘You can call me Nebula.’

We took a tram to a shabby district of warehouses and run-down tenements. I followed him into a boarding house that smelt of carbolic and boiled cabbage. We came to a door on the first floor and he rapped a swift tattoo on it with his knuckles. It opened an inch or two. I thought I spotted a pair of eyes surveying us from the gloom. Nebula murmured something and all at once the portal opened wide to swallow us up.

‘Who’s this?’ the man demanded as he slammed the door behind us.

‘One of the Circle,’ Nebula replied.

The blinds were drawn and it took me a while to adjust my vision to the half-darkness. The occupant of the room was thickset with a pudgy face. He made a derisive sniff in my direction, pouting his lips.

‘Christ, a schoolkid,’ he muttered.

‘This is Starshine,’ Nebula told me. ‘He’s a comrade.’

‘Are you part of the Circle?’

Starshine laughed.

‘No, kid, we’re with the band.’

‘The band?’

‘The Orchestra. That’s what Fatherland calls us. The Red Orchestra. Speaking of which, what’s in here?’ Starshine took my violin case from me. ‘Let me guess, you use this to carry messages, right?’

‘You work for the Soviets?’ I asked them.

‘Well, since Motherland made this cosy little pact with Fatherland we’ve been on short time,’ said Nebula.

‘Watch what you say in front of the kid,’ said Starshine.

He had put my case on the bed and taken the violin out of it. He pulled out the bow, checked the little compartment for the chin-pad and rosin.

‘Here.’ I took it from him and pressed the bottom lining until it came away, revealing a small space with the playing card in it.

‘Nice,’ said Nebula, taking out the card. ‘What’s this?’

‘Is that a message from the fortune-teller?’ Starshine asked me.

I nodded.

‘See?’ Nebula held it up for his comrade to squint at it in the gloom. Starshine studied the card for a moment.

‘They know the code word then,’ he said.

‘That’s proof that British Intelligence know about Directive 21.’

‘What are they telling us for?’

‘They’ve cracked Fatherland’s codes and want to pass on information to Motherland through our channels.’

‘Yeah, but why would they want to do that?’

‘So that Fatherland won’t know that the British have broken their cyphers. They’ll think that Motherland got this information from its own sources.’

‘Yeah, but maybe it’s not information at all. Maybe it’s disinformation.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake! Enough of this. Everybody knows what’s going to happen. There’s been one intelligence report after another, all with the same conclusions; now this, and still the bastard won’t believe it!’

‘Careful what you say, comrade.’

‘I bet even this little fucker knows.’ Nebula turned to me and held up the Emperor card. ‘You. What does this mean?’

I shrugged. ‘Er, Barbarossa?’

‘See? Even this amateur resistance cell knows.’

‘Yeah but they’re rife with bourgeois tendencies, they can’t be trusted.’

‘All hell is about to break lose in the East and Stalin does nothing.’

‘Whatever happens, the Red Army will hold.’

‘Hold what? Its bollocks? Its entire officer corps has been purged out of existence. And, not content with that, he’s dismantled what was left of our intelligence network. Just to keep Fatherland happy.’

‘I’m telling you, all this talk of invasion could be British counter-intelligence,’ Starshine insisted. ‘They want to drag us into their imperialist war. There was something else that was to come with this message, wasn’t there?’

He turned and grabbed hold of my collar.

‘What?’ I protested. I was having trouble keeping up with what they were saying. It seemed some strange game and yet I somehow knew that it was all concerned with something cataclysmic.

‘What else did the fortune-teller say?’ Starshine demanded, giving me a little shake.

‘I don’t know. Something about a contact in the Deputy Führer’s office.’

He pushed me away. ‘Well, we know what that means.’

‘Do we?’ asked Nebula.

‘Peace feelers. They’re everywhere. In Lisbon, in Madrid. In Switzerland. There are Abwehr reports that the British government is on the verge of collapse and is ready to make terms in secret.’

‘Well, that’s more likely to be the work of British counter-intelligence, isn’t it? To persuade Fatherland that the war in the West is nearly won and that it can turn its attention elsewhere.’

‘Perhaps.’ Starshine nodded. ‘Perhaps. But what if the British really do want to make peace?’

Nebula sighed.

‘Then we’re fucked.’

‘Well, we’re finished here,’ said Starshine. ‘Looks like this Circle is being wiped up. What do we do with this one?’

He made a terse nod in my direction.

‘I don’t know,’ Nebula mumbled, as if to himself.

‘We can’t leave him behind. He knows too much.’

The two men exchanged a glance of some shared and dark meaning. In the gloom I saw it as a combination of a grimace and a tilt of the head. Starshine touched his throat gently.

‘No,’ said Nebula.

‘It’s a security matter.’

‘Fuck that.’

‘Remember your training.’

‘My training?’ Nebula retorted scathingly. ‘Listen, comrade, I’ve been working underground for nearly twenty years. My school has been the life of a militant. Organising in Poland in the twenties. Fighting the colonialists in Palestine. Setting up fronts for the party all over Europe. That’s been my konspiratsia , chum. Experiences worth more than all of the espionage courses in the world. Solidarity: it’s what the struggle’s all about. I say we take this one with us.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. The Corridor can take one more. Who knows, he might come in useful.’

‘Then he’s your responsibility. You organise it.’

‘Fine.’

Starshine lit a cigarette and lay on the bed blowing smoke at the ceiling. Nebula explained to me that they were going to take me over the Swiss border with them.

‘How?’

‘Let me worry about that.’

He walked over to a dresser by the bed, pulled out a drawer, took something out and put it in his pocket.

‘I’ll go and see Schmidt,’ he told Starshine, who grunted in acknowledgement. ‘You stay here,’ he said to me.

I found a chair and sat down. Starshine stubbed out his cigarette and rolled over on to his side. All the light slowly bled out of the room. I took off my jacket and rolled it up for a pillow. Curling up on the floor I tried to sleep.

I was prodded awake by Nebula’s foot sometime around dawn. A pale light leaked around the edges of the blinds. Starshine was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking.

‘We’re moving this afternoon,’ said Nebula.

I yawned and rubbed my face.

‘What about…’

‘Your family?’ Nebula read the thought. ‘You can’t go back. Even to say goodbye. Your name might have come up by now.’