The German Numbers Woman Read online

  ‘No problem,’ Howard said. ‘I can get VHF. I’ll give it a go. We’ll have fat files on all the villains of the universe, or know things about people whether they do anything against the law or not.’

  He was too far ahead, so Richard pushed his advantage in another direction. ‘What I suggest is that when I write to you I don’t do it on paper, for obvious reasons. I’ll tap it onto a tape so that you can listen to it with no difficulty.’ In that way Laura wouldn’t know what was being communicated. ‘And you can tape record a morse letter to me whenever you come across something interesting. The post should get it to me overnight.’

  ‘I like that idea.’ Howard drew him more surely into the alliance. ‘We’ll have a perfect interception system.’

  ‘For economy’s sake,’ Richard tapped on, ‘we can use the same tape over and over again’ – rubbing out each text as soon as it’s read, which is good for security.

  Howard decided on a little mischief. ‘I might want to file your letters, I would if they were written. I’d keep them in a shoebox like an old lady,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t see why I should destroy them, because they’d be in the sort of sound bytes I like. In any case I might want to refer to them later on.’

  ‘Just as you wish.’ You can’t win ’em all. ‘I only thought it would save the expense of buying new tapes.’ Shouldn’t have said that, because he and Laura obviously lived on more than whatever pittance he got for a pension.

  ‘I’m not short of a bob or two,’ Howard told him.

  ‘What about space for storage?’

  ‘I can always put them in the loft.’

  Something else he thought of: ‘If you get a report that’s really interesting and amusing, and you want to share it with me, you can always get me on the phone.’

  ‘What if we’re listened to?’

  Not yet they wouldn’t be. ‘Hardly likely.’

  ‘You’ve done me quite a favour tonight. I can’t remember enjoying myself so much.’

  He was getting tired. Keep it short. ‘Nor me.’

  ‘We’ll close the wavelength down, if you like.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Funny how pastimes wear you out as much as real work,’ Howard commiserated.

  They exchanged the appropriate signals, switched off, disconnected, and pushed their chairs back. The atmosphere of the room died on them, colder in the silence. Surprising how working the fingers heated the body, with the effort of using your arm and the whole right side. Throat and mouth speech seemed strange after such intensity with ears and fingers, more shallow, less significant, more formal even.

  Laura was in the living room, a book on the table by her hand. Richard felt relieved at coming back into the real world. She stood up. ‘You look as if you’ve had a hard time at the tappers. I could hear it vaguely rattling away. I’ll make another pot of coffee before you go.’

  There was a too-saintly aspect about her face, and the blue peculiarly bruised eyes that went with it. Something had happened in her life that had harmed her crucially, and Howard didn’t know because he couldn’t see it, never had and never would. He had seen a similar look of blight in Amanda’s features on saying the unforgivable during a quarrel, but after making up it wasn’t there any more.

  ‘It’s a blustery night,’ she said, ‘so you must have a hot drink.’

  He saw no make-up in the bathroom when he went there, just utilitarian Kleenex, an electric shaver for Howard, and a razor. Amanda’s tubes and bottles spilled over the whole place, but he liked that untidy part of her. No proper shower here, but a rubber pipe attached by two leads to the taps.

  Laura met him by the kitchen door. ‘You must come again. I know he enjoyed it.’

  He followed her in. ‘I will.’

  ‘He’s a busy man,’ Howard called.

  ‘Not all the time,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll send you a tape. It’ll be good practice for me to fill one. Then I can look forward to yours.’

  Laura thought Howard would go to bed after Richard had gone, but he went straight back to the radio, thinking he might hear Judy talking to her lover.

  TEN

  When Richard finished listening he screwed up the papers written on and burned them in the stove. This time he hadn’t, in too much of a hurry to get into town and spend a couple of hours with that blind telegraphist. She wondered what they could possibly find to talk about for so long.

  He had left after supper and wouldn’t return till near twelve, a perfect alibi for seeing a girlfriend – if he needed an alibi. She had one as well, come to that, though there was no call at the moment, which made existence rather a bore – him being away so often.

  He was the love of her life, but it was no use telling him, could only let him know in her ecstasy while making love, when he assumed the words didn’t mean much, said the same back, as if he hadn’t thought of them till she put the notion into his mind by crying out. At such times the truth didn’t come into it. For him that was what you said while making love, and because she had done so already he had to make some response. A man must do what a woman had to tell him, but it was better than him not doing anything at all.

  She knew him to be one of those men who loved women, and knowing that women found it easy to love him back, made him a difficult man to deal with. The more women love men like that the more such men loved women, and if you were married to one you never knew where he might be when he said he was visiting so-and-so for the evening. Luckily she wasn’t jealous, only suspicious, knowing his secrets weren’t necessarily to do with other women – at least as far as she knew.

  She smoothed the papers over and over to get them flat. No love letters anywhere, not yet anyway, but what was on them must be important because he had taken care to make sure nobody got a look in. Much of it seemed gibberish, or in code, letters and figures in tidy groups, an orderliness not altogether characteristic, so confused and uncertain was he much of the time about his life, rarely knowing what to do with himself between mysterious jobs with boats he was called on to man.

  His handwriting for taking morse was more legible than on the occasional postcards he sent her, as if he was an altered person at the radio. She supposed handwriting varied according to what you did with it, and knew he could be quite a different man to the one she knew in their normal life.

  She was amused therefore to think that in his secret activity he wasn’t the person she knew him to be, that what he did was so confidential he must become someone else to do it. Unless that person was the greater part of him and all these years she had been knowing only an offshoot of his true personality. Such might be the case with some women’s husbands, and with many husbands’ women as well. Who knew anything about another until words or actions provided the evidence or proved them wrong?

  Her back ached, so she sat at his table. Some of his writing was in French, a simple officialese to do with weather, and no trouble to make out. Another sheet had a more puzzling content:

  ‘L’homme n’a que la mot “dieu” pour essayer de voir clair en ces vestiges, pour avoir la force d’aller au plus simple et au plus juste, mais ily a autre chose. Et c’est précisement l’homme qui sait à tout moment comment on s’inquiet et à quoi on aboutit. C’est précisement la lucidité …’

  And so on. Where did he get such stuff? It must have come over the radio because he couldn’t write French so exactly, unless he got it from a book, though none such were hanging around that she could see. She puzzled over the sheet, and could just about make sense of it, after her O Level in the language. Was it a code, containing hidden instructions for a coup d’état in some Third World country? It was hardly fair of him not to have written down where it came from.

  The paper underneath, in Italian, looked like press material, nothing strange about that, each paragraph headed Rome or Paris or Berlin. She picked Mrs Thatcher’s name out of the item from London, thinking what a strange world he must live in when not in her presence, though it wasn’t one she envied hi
m for, floating around from one boat to another when he wasn’t sitting at his silly radios or looking speechless out of the window at the horse in the field, or at a tractor going up the lane, or spying on the neighbour’s house at the junction where the farmer’s wife made jam.

  She couldn’t expect him to think about her at such times, but if he did he would surely say something about his work, hobby, interests, ambitions, the world situation, but above all his love and concern for her. It would be nice to assume he knew more about her than she could imagine, even more perhaps than she knew about herself, but if he wasn’t capable of talking on this level then he was fundamentally less than she wanted him to be. At the end of everything what did it matter? Mutual love was rarely based on knowledge but on deeper factors which neither were capable of putting into words.

  Perhaps it was better they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or didn’t, because then the spell would be broken, the mystery demystified, the relationship empty and over and out – which she didn’t want. They weren’t incompatible because nothing was revealed which if it were could only throw them apart. It was the unknown, the unspoken that kept you together; better they knew just sufficient about each other to stay enthralled.

  She couldn’t get rid of this eternal need to know, however, a perpetual knot of frustration inside her that, when it became intolerable, produced a sexual excitement only spun back to point zero after they had quarrelled and made love. Otherwise it was the desert in between.

  An intense erotic feeling came into her now, but she resisted it on picking up another clutch of papers, one of which gave the weather forecast in the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara: ‘A northeasterly wind, and visibility moderate in the latter, while in the former there would be poor visibility locally in the morning with a three to four wind. No significant change expected.’ How peculiar to be interested in such rubbish.

  A stair creaked, a foot on a broken nut shell, maybe a floorboard, which often made a noise in the house, even though Rentokil had done its stuff and they had a certificate to prove it. Such old houses had to be alive, but the place was empty except for her, at the moment, and she hadn’t heard his car coming down the lane, didn’t expect him anyway till much later.

  Maybe she would surprise him and have a meal cooked and laid out: lamb chops from the fridge, a couple of scrubbed new potatoes, a packet of broccoli, fruit yoghourt and sliced banana for dessert. Might be quite an adventure, to play nice little wifey. But he would be so late that maybe an omelette would be enough. She didn’t believe any meal ought to take more than half an hour to get onto the table. All in all it was best not to bother, because when she had last done so they’d ended up having a fight, her fault mainly, for she hadn’t considered his appreciation of her effort to be genuine, or calmly and sincerely enough expressed, when it certainly had been, coming from him.

  So and so was to be arrested on arrival at Amsterdam airport. Here was something more interesting. A woman would be with him, both carrying Samsonite suitcases with false bottoms. Cocaine was suspected. Then followed their dates and places of birth, as well as times, and details as to when they had previously broken the law. The man sounded very interesting: he’d been caught for pickpocketing, embezzlement, highway robbery, manslaughter and, of course, smuggling. At the bottom of the sheet came a series of numbers and letters, followed by a note in Richard’s hand saying: ‘Send through.’

  She supposed he had to pick up such items now and again, he spent so much time at it. Now she knew why he was so interested and amused. A message on the following sheet told of a yacht coming out of Salonika and heading for Izmir in Turkey. Among the crew was a woman called Judy, though the cargo was unspecified and merely to be watched.

  Page after page showed what clever Richard had his ears latched onto, so much turmoil for his own amusement. Now she knew why he was intent on listening, and could see it must be fascinating for a sailor to know so exactly what was going on in the criminal world. Another sheet listed the directors of The Puritan drug company, and gave the name of a boat which, luckily, wasn’t one she had heard that Richard had ever been on, though she couldn’t recall him mentioning any names.

  If he had known people high up in government she might have thought him a spy. He would have made a good one, though he had nothing, as far as she could tell, on which he could send morse out. On the other hand he could be getting instructions, at the risk of fourteen years if he was caught, unless he had been to Cambridge and knew the Queen, like that man Blunt, or unless he took a plane somewhere and never came back. Hard to imagine him betraying his country, though a man capable of cheating on his wife might not think twice – well, three times, say – before doing so.

  In the kitchen she stood a cup of coffee in the microwave, took it out at the ping, and sat on the stool to sip. What was he really up to? She also wondered about his puzzling phone calls, frequent enough to ask. ‘Put them down to business,’ he said. ‘I have to make a lot, fifty or so for every job I get.’ She had never seen him as a sailor yet could picture him in his jaunty and nautical mode, for he was always happy and loving before setting off for some seaport or other.

  ‘Want to come with me?’ he chaffed between kisses.

  She didn’t. ‘There are two places I wouldn’t be seen dead. One is in a tent, and the other is on a boat.’ She liked her comfort, as much as could be got from this draughty old place.

  Uneasiness told her that an obvious connection had to be made between what he took from the radio and his expectations. The coffee was scalding but her body was cold. He said he had saved a lot in the Merchant Navy, and was still living off it, plus what he had got in cash from the owners of the yachts, who paid well for his skill. ‘All on the black economy, you understand?’ he told her. But she must have been blind to think so much could be earned or saved. The way they lived, in spite of what she earned at Doris’s, needed far more than that.

  The temperature of embarrassment was never so high as when you had been deceived, except when you deceived yourself, when it hit the roof. He was so obviously up to his neck in the smuggling trade. To think so explained more than she was comfortable in believing, but having fixed on the fact – she spoke it out loud – so much of his behaviour fell into place: his unwillingness to let her know where he was going, and what exactly he had done when he got back. The few bits he let drop had obviously been lies, for her own good, he might have said.

  She would rather have found out that he was having an affair, a storm they had weathered before, on her part as well as his, because this threatened to end the only world that mattered. She had been brought up to assume, and experience hadn’t told her otherwise, that all criminals were caught sooner or later. A mistake would be made, luck would run out, and whoever was involved would be rounded up and sent down for twenty years. So far she had only anguished about an accident at sea, till his reassurances, and the number of times he had gone, dulled her worries. On that score she had to regard him as indestructible, if she wasn’t to practice walking along the ceiling to while away the time during the long absences.

  She wanted the plain evidence to mean something else, yet only by asking could her mind be settled – which she didn’t need at all, since the truth was already known. When the worst situations in life had to be lived with, those which were tolerable you hardly knew about. He didn’t trust her because he was afraid of her, not for her. If he brought her out of the dark she would make a fuss, which would not only shake his resolution but might erode his run of luck. He must suppose that Fate would take a turn against him if too many people knew what he was doing, or that he knew that the person closest to him disapproved. She couldn’t imagine him giving up his work (if that’s what he called it) so there would be little point in letting him know what she’d found.

  The discovery made her an accomplice, or accessory after the fact (as it was quaintly put, though it made the blood run cold) and from now on she would be equally responsible for his nefarious activities.
There was also the morality factor of bringing drugs into the country for the ruination of poor fools who craved them, which was horrible and inexcusable. The thought of living off such gains made her angry and ashamed. She wondered what he felt about it, if anything, though she supposed he’d long since reconciled himself with his conscience – if ever he’d had one. To tell him what she had found out, and what she surmised, would certainly test his ingenuity in evading the truth.

  Part Two

  Spinning the Web

  ELEVEN

  Madagascar came in loud and clear, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Laura had put herself to bed, the cat comfortably installed at her feet, until he joined her and it had to go. Meanwhile he picked up a rogue station on a wavelength where it had no right to be, an Albanian emitter with a kolkhoz bully boasting of the overfulfilment of the pigshit quota for the current five year plan.

  Sometimes he would alight on the pirate station of Chang the Hatchet Man, a warlord loose around the headwaters of the Yangtze River, shouting exhortations of liberation, his followers no doubt shouldering the latest heat-seeking missiles behind crags overlooking the gorge, waiting for a steamboat of tourists to feel its slow way along …

  He wanted to hear Judy and her Spanish friend, would wait as long as necessary, and in the meantime contemplate sending on his key the Old Testament scriptures, a task which, at twenty words a minute and for an hour at a stretch, would occupy about four hundred days, a heavenly task indeed if he saw it as a suitable penance for eavesdropping, perfect for a recently installed mediaeval monk wearing rough garb and sitting in his cell expiating previous misdemeanours – except he couldn’t believe in such a process, would only send the Bible as a gift to God but not for balancing the books of his ups and downs. Nor would he bother to tap out the New Testament, for to credit that a man could be a God seemed the worst insult to God – who in any case Howard wasn’t altogether sure he believed in, though he had called his name a few times during trips over Germany.