Players at the Game of People Page 9

  "Yes, of course-during the Blitz!"

  "I don't believe it," Bill said with finality, surrendering the paper again.

  "Nobody's asking you to!" Godwin snapped, returning it to his pocket. But a sour taste was gathering in his mouth, and he forced himself to add the crucial question: "Why?"

  "Weren't no George Medals then, nor George Cross neither. Didn't get introduced until September the twenty-third." Bill gave a crooked smile. "I don't waste all me time watchin' football on the telly. Always bin interested in the war. An' that I remember clear as daylight. September the twenty-third just 'appens to be me birthday . . . Lord, there she goes again! 'Ave that door down in a minute! Better scarper -- see yer!"

  A moment later Godwin was back in the dingy street under a dismal sky. People seemed to be looking at him more than even they had at Bill in his out-of-date finery. Their faces were cold and pinched with hunger. Some of the children playing in the gutter wore only ragged vests or outgrown dresses and were mechanically masturbating as they gazed at him with dull eyes.

  Godwin shivered and hurried on by, pulling up the collar of his jacket against those stony, chilly stares.

  But at least he could now look back on a job complete, and before claiming his reward he could afford to relax and unwind for a while. Starting today? Starting tomorrow?

  There was no hurry. Sometimes there was, as though pressure were being applied, but not at present. He had time to think over what he wanted next.

  And needed it. What Bill had said had disturbed him. He felt as though the foundation of his existence had been shaken, as by earthquakes.

  There was only one tenable explanation. Birthday or no birthday, Bill must have made a mistake.

  It was inconceivable that the owners should.

  Abruptly, as he was heading away from Bill's place, it dawned on Godwin that he was within easy walking distance of Harry Fenton's. On the spur of the moment he decided to go there and pick up a passport; he had used his present one twice.

  But when he arrived at Harry's basement flat, in a narrow street of sleazy gray-brick houses beset -- like the whole of London -- with abandoned cars, there was no reply to his ring . . . this being one of the few doors which did not automatically open even to his touch.

  The most likely explanation was that Harry had been called, and for that there was no help. There was never any help.

  Perhaps it didn't matter. Harry's forgeries were -- naturally -- the finest in the world, and Godwin had not actually been warned that he shouldn't use a passport too often; it just seemed like a reasonable precaution, because there were so many countries where the police were forever demanding "Vos papiers!" and "Ihr Ausweis!" -- or whatever -- and the presence of a visitor unrecorded at any port or airport might entrain problems . . .

  But what the hell? Shrugging, though unable to repress a scowl of annoyance, Godwin resigned himself to using the old one. He badly needed clean air and an absence of people, so there was no alternative.

  As he trudged toward the nearest street where a cruising taxi could logically be intersecting with him, because it was impolitic to work even minor miracles except in carefully chosen company, his attention was caught by a little girl on the other side of the road, shaking back her fair hair. He checked in mid-stride, staring . . . and realized she could not possibly be anybody other than herself.

  Thinking he might catch the last of the skiing, he made for André Bankowski's hotel at Les Hôpitaux Neufs, but even though the spring was dismal over Western Europe, the snow was already melting except on the very highest pistes, and the only good run he achieved was spoiled because he spotted a blond girl riding up in the téléférique with André while he was on the last stretch, and didn't realize until he had wandered off the line into soft crustless snow that she was too round-faced and had too large a mouth.

  Compared with whose?

  He sat through one boring evening in the bar and watched people getting drunk and amorous, and went to New Orleans instead, where English-born Wilfred Burgess was fulfilling his ambitions by leading a band of half-legendary jazzmen, one of whom claimed to have recorded with King Oliver. But on the corner of Bourbon and Therville in the Vieux Carré he saw a fair-haired girl making a grand performance, for the benefit of a boyfriend, out of her attempts to eat an enormous oyster po'boy one-handed with a full but open can of beer in the other, and found himself on the point of going to her assistance before he realized she was not in fact the person he imagined.

  And who was that?

  Dispirited, he went to Maud McConley's in Nassau for some skin-diving, and while darting around coral reefs and enjoying his isolation and his suspension in time as well as space noticed a head of long, pale hair spread out in the water and his heart nearly stopped before he worked out that the change of color due to being under water meant that this was not the shade he had in mind.

  What shade?

  Alone in his magnificent hotel suite, masturbating with desultory lack of interest, he thought the matter through and felt cheated, deceived, betrayed.

  That little girl whose life he so vividly remembered saving (and to hell with Bill Harvey!): she was the key and clue. Blasé, he had grown immune to most erotic stimuli; it was the readiest form of reward someone in his position could request. But her brief kiss, so public and so shameless . . .

  Merely recalling it made him climax, and the pang of that was promptly followed by disgust. He kept thinking of a single word: pervert .

  And went back to England to find a cloudy, hesitant summer as ill-defined as his own state of mind. He half wished he might be called again, but he had not yet claimed his reward for the last time, and so far he had not thought of anything fresh he wanted to experience.

  Besides, the occasions for being called were apparently growing fewer. Maybe people were going out of style.

  Or whatever.

  Needing to kill time, he thought about reclaiming the Urraco from the Park Lane underground car-park and revisiting some places he had liked in the old days -- out in Kent, for example, where around Canterbury there were country pubs he recalled with vague nostalgia. Maybe that was worth doing; maybe it wasn't. He found himself half envying Irma for her pride at being constantly involved with the jet set, and even Bill, whose obsession with winning meant that he could get as excited over a videotape of the Cup Final as over the match itself in real time. But he himself had chosen to be a man of leisure. As the saying went, it had seemed like a good idea at the time . . .

  Well, as the other saying went, having made his bed he had to lie in it.

  But it would certainly help if he learned to lie more convincingly. Especially to himself.

  The city, though, seemed even less endurable than usual, with its hordes of child-beggars that he had to scatter with handfuls of change flung as far out into the roadway as he could manage. The technique always worked, because as soon as a fight broke out over who was to have the pound pieces, their attention magically switched, but it was still a damnable nuisance, and he was glad to see that the police were now patrolling in threes, one being a radio operator, so that trouble could be nipped in the bud. Moreover, there seemed to be a lot more of them than in the past.

  But it was a shame there was so little traffic now. It might have run some of the greedy devils over.

  After only a short while, therefore, he decided to collect the car and give himself a pleasanter impression of his homeland.

  Part of Knightsbridge was closed; a neglected building had slumped into the road and enforced a detour, and the police had put up anti-looter barricades. Growing angrier by the minute, Godwin found himself constrained to walk to Marble Arch and approach by the northern end of Park Lane, where there had recently been a couple of bombings. The car-park, reportedly, was intact, but while of course even if it had not been he could have obtained another car without trouble, it would have been a nuisance, and nuisances were what he was least in the mood for.

  The Global Hotel
, at any rate, had escaped the bombers, and the commissionaire, Jackson, to whom he had been so generous in the recent past was on duty and chatting with a woman of about fifty, slender, wearing a bulky but lightweight black coat and black corduroy pants. Spotting Godwin just as he was about to cross the road and enter the car-park, he offered a salute and the woman beside him glanced around and time stopped.

  It's impossible!

  It's insane!

  But if that little one whom I recall as Greer had lived to --

  The thought snapped off like a dry branch. It was not palatable to think about the passage of time. He and his kind were outside it. When they needed repairs they were serviced more efficiently than a car could be. Time was not of their essence.

  What we register is change. In the first flush of enthusiasm he had actually said that to somebody (who?) and known it was right and in consequence dismissed the matter for good and all.

  No. More logical: in the course of a life any -- even an ordinary -- person sees so many other faces it must happen eventually that one recalls another.

  Therefore he disregarded the commissionaire's attempt at signaling and, feigning not to have noticed, hastened toward the car-park, only to find that the entrance he meant to go down by was closed thanks to a bomb outrage, so he had to use another, further away.

  More nuisance; more annoyance. He felt fuming.

  But even worse: he felt scared. And that was not meant to be a possibility in his world. It was among the exclusions. Hastily he produced the car key from his pocket and showed it to the guards on duty at the barrier, noticing that they were armed with pistols; he registered change. Grumpy, they allowed him to proceed but warned that since he had left his car here for so long its tank might be empty, thanks to thieves.

  Peasants!

  It was, naturally, full. The familiar roar of the engine resounded comfortingly under the low concrete ceiling as he headed for the exit . . . from which, as he suddenly realized, he was compelled to turn north only. Hence he must again pass the front of the Global Hotel.

  The charge plate he proffered when he drove out provoked satisfactorily raised eyebrows, but that was a minor consolation. The same had happened often enough already to glut his capacity for being amused by it.

  What dismayed him was that Jackson was still talking to the woman, and as soon as the Urraco appeared he pointed in its direction, and coincidentally there was an almost impossible event: a delay at the Oxford Street junction. It took two taxis and a bus and a collision between two vegetable-laden handcarts to create it . . . but it had long been a precept by which he abided that nothing in his world happened without there being a reason.

  And there was no way he could avoid the woman's lingering stare, nor awareness of the change in her expression.

  We register change

  By now he had half made up his mind that the simple erotic content of his latest memories accounted for his borderline obsession with fair-haired women; there had been other similar cases in the past, which wore away. But there was no mistake this time. She looked at him, and he recognized on her face an expression impossible to misinterpret.

  I know you.

  The jam had broken; a posse of police had arrived with braying sirens and overturned the interlocked carts, dumping their wares in the gutter, so that an instant flock of beggars and scavengers materialized and, for once tolerated, cleared the way. The taxis first, then his own car, then the bus, were waved past with urgent gestures implying that it would not matter in the slightest were a little animal matter mingled with the vegetables.

  Godwin agreed, and accelerated eastward.

  Oxford Street having been for a long while closed to all traffic but buses and taxis, and in any case being beset by homeless hawkers, peddlers, and prostitutes, Godwin detoured via Wigmore Street and made his eventual way to Holborn and the slums of the City, where squatters swarmed like ants in the abandoned office blocks -- some bombed, some burned for the insurance, some simply left to rot when the owning company collapsed. Hordes of ragged and filthy children rushed out to celebrate this rare event, the passage of a car, and when he halted more from force of habit than necessity at a blind junction, they converged on him screaming for money and displaying stump wrists and carefully cultivated sores.

  He scared them off with a roar of his engine and thereafter crossed intersections without slowing, blasting his horn.

  Thinking of Sittingbourne, he turned south to A2. In Greenwich an armed fascist patrol had set up a roadblock guarded by stern-faced boys with stolen army guns wearing Union Jack armbands on their black leather motorcycling jackets. Luckily a trio of policemen had paused to pass the time of day with them and someone had cracked a good joke which made them all chuckle. Barely glancing at him except to ensure he was white, they waved him by.

  As darkness fell he arrived at his destination, a half-timbered rambling building which had been a coaching-inn and which the twentieth century had evolved into a roadhouse. It boasted a fabulous wine list, report said; Godwin dared not sample it, but he knew about its cuisine, and progressed through Whitstable native oysters via saddle of mutton with onion sauce and braised asparagus to steamed suet pudding and treacle, deferentially served by black-jacketed waiters to the accompaniment of quiet but unobtrusive music and the cheerful chatter of the other diners. The place was as crowded as he had ever seen it, but it was keeping up its standards. He overheard more than one person exclaiming over the superb quality of the red Bordeaux.

  But even as Godwin was preparing to relax after his meal with a cigar and a cup of coffee, a familiar pressure started to build at the back of his mind. Annoyed, he attempted to dismiss it from consciousness; it was, of course, impossible. Somewhere, patience had come to an end.

  And there was only one safe place to be when that happened. Home.

  At least, he suspected that to be the case. He had never previously thought much about the question. But then, he had never before been other than eager for the reward it was his just entitlement to claim after a successfully completed assignment. The very idea of stalling would have puzzled him in the past -- indeed, it was puzzling to him now, though he was all too hideously aware of the reason for his unprecedented reaction.

  Damn Bill Harvey and his wartime recollections! Damn the blond woman in Park Lane!

  He scribbled an illegible signature on the bill, having forgotten by what pseudonym they knew him here -- not that it mattered, for none of his bills was ever presented for payment -- and hastened back to the car, and back to London.

  As though he were abruptly to be haunted by an earlier version of himself, so deeply buried in the past as to have been virtually forgotten, he realized as he approached his home that he was worrying about finding a parking space in his street. Never before had he left the Urraco at his own door. Without thinking much about the necessity to do otherwise, he had simply accepted it as risky, perhaps because of what had happened to other vehicles, the ruined Mark X Jaguar being only the latest of dozens. But the pressure in his head was increasing, and now it was peaking occasionally into pain and sending little bright shooting lights across his field of vision. He was going to have no time to do anything else.

  Miraculously the very Jaguar he had been thinking about was gone when he drove cautiously around the corner, leaving a handy vacancy immediately in front of the house. He reversed into it thankfully and scrambled out without bothering to lock up.

  Nobody would really touch his car, would they? Nobody ever had done. Not even during all that time in the Park Lane car-park when there were bomb scares and police investigations.

  Anyway, what the hell? There could always be another!

  Half blind with pain by now, he rushed upstairs and, not sparing time to turn the room on nor even to empty his bladder, he spent the last few moments of individual awareness trying desperately to reach a decision about his reward.

  Then a dazzling inspiration struck him. Maybe he didn't have to choose. M
aybe what had happened to undermine his last reward was a way of indicating that there were other possibilities he, with his limited imagination, had never thought of. Had Irma requested her Sirian plants? Had Hermann known in advance about Arikapanotulandaba's amazing powers? When had Hugo & Diana experienced free fall?

  Thankful, convinced, he surrendered.

  It was dark. It was oppressively hot, but the air was dry. There was a stink of excrement. He ached in all his limbs, he was parched with thirst, his belly was acid with hunger, and there were sores around his wrists and ankles due to thick leather straps, first sewn and then riveted into place with copper rivets. Those on his legs hobbled him; those on his arms prevented him even reaching behind to cleanse himself after a motion. Also his scalp itched terribly.

  He squatted on the floor of a room -- no, a cell -- too low for him to stand up, too narrow for him to lie down at full stretch. The posture in itself was not uncomfortable; all his life he had been accustomed to sitting on the ground. But he wished he could walk more than two strides.