‘Ask Stanley to put the flak-jacket on him,’ he called, and the tall dark pansy who had let us into the flat came back with a trolley laden with long thin blocks of metal. A coat was spread over the handles and I was told to put it on. William helped me. It had long thin pockets inside, which I supposed were to receive the metal on the trolley. These were said, by running commentary from the man in the iron lung, to weigh a pound each, and one by one fifty of them were put away there, while my shoes were getting so glued to the floor that I looked down to see if I were making a hole in it. My shoulders took the weight, but I also felt it at my ribs, as if they were about to be pulled apart.
‘Feeling all right?’ he grinned from behind his perspex.
‘Fine,’ I smiled, at the fortieth bar and ready to swing over on to his floor. I pretended my life was at stake, as if I’d be shot if I weren’t able to put up with it. To take my mind off the weight (which, you must admit, wouldn’t make that much difference) I began to think of all the things I’d done since reaching London. Flight into London it had been, indeed and by God, and the one bright star was Bridgitte Appledore, whom it looked like I wouldn’t see till I got out of this madman’s den. I wanted to see her alone, and make loose so that I got through to her warm sweet nut and full white breasts and lovely astonished face that frowned but enjoyed it all by the time it was nearly finished. But maybe she’d be hotter after her months with Dr Anderson, because husbands were often good for warming up whorish wives for their lovers to get the cream of — though my wife would never be like that, for I’d settle her myself. Be that as it may, I now had sixty bars in my thick gabardine mac and it was considered enough — seeing as they didn’t want to break my back first go.
A smile made his face even paler. I felt one on my own, without having put it there. It was the smile of illumination that comes before death. I was lit up inside, ready and light in weight for what came next. ‘Go to the other end of the room and back,’ the man said from the safety of his iron lung. I was prepared to fly, but for my sixty shackles. Maybe my convict ancestors had been laden like this when due for Botany Bay.
I knew before I started that the best trick would be not to walk too slow. That would bring me down. So I went with reasonable speed though not too quickly, one leg taking the weight of the other in an even balance, and the rhythm carried me along, though I don’t suppose I looked too happy about it. But while I was going from them they couldn’t see my face, and by the time I turned and started to stride manfully back the mouth was screwed shut and my gills, though in no way twisted, couldn’t have been anything but purple.
Back at Lungville he said to me: ‘Now write your name and address on that sheet of paper.’ I bent stiffly to get at the pen and do as I was told, then stood straight again. I heard a murmur of ‘Good, good,’ as if Lungy had said it to himself and not into the inside mike. ‘Now do your stuff,’ he told William, who took the paper I had written on and pushed it into a tube contraption normally used in department stores for sending change from cash desk to counter. The next second it was inside the iron lung and being studied by Pasty-face through a magnifying glass. ‘While I’m doing this, you can walk up and down a few times.’
‘And take your briefcase,’ said William. ‘Just to show what you can do,’ he added with a wink, dropping something in front of me that looked like a passport: ‘Pick that up while you’re at it, my old flower!’
‘Get it your bloody self,’ I said, with a look of murder.
‘It’s part of the job,’ he told me, as if I’d hurt and insulted him.
‘I haven’t clocked-on yet.’
William patted me on the back: ‘But you will soon, and this is one of the things you might have to do. So don’t let me down. Just imagine you are carrying fifty thousand quid’s worth of gold, and now that you’ve come to the customs bloke you’ve dropped your passport. You’d have to pick it up as if you’d got nothing in your pockets, wouldn’t you?’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I get the idea.’ I went out at a right angle and let my hand drop, coming up again so quickly with the passport in my hand that I astonished myself at having done it with such ease.
‘He’s passed,’ ‘I heard the voice say from inside the lung. ‘His writing shows it, anyway. Strength, caution, speed, confidence. It’s all here. Put him on that job to Zurich at the end of next week.’
‘What about money?’ I asked politely.
He coughed. ‘When you come back you’ll get three hundred. Stanley will give you twenty pounds now on account, if you need it.’
‘I do,’ I said, still having more than two hundred from my Moggerhanger days, but knowing that you could never have too much in hand.
The time until my first trip was spent in more training. I worked up the weights till I went into the streets with a full load of over fifty pounds, plus the briefcase, walking to a specified point, getting on a bus for a few miles, then sitting down in a stipulated café to a cup of coffee. I’d finally take a bus back to Knightsbridge, and drag a few hundred yards to the flat where I’d be divested of my straitjacket. When it came off I felt weightless and naked, and I’m sure I looked shiftier when I went out in normal gear than I ever had when loaded.
The night before the trip I phoned Bridgitte to wish her goodbye. A man picked up the phone and snappily demanded who it was, so I put on an imitation Dutch accent and said I was Bridgitte’s brother. When I heard her call out that she had no brother, I raved that I had meant cousin — she must have at least one cousin. ‘Who is it?’ she asked. I told her I was going to Rome in the morning for a few days, but that I’d try to see her as soon as I got back. I heard a blow, a cry, a sound of quarrelling. The line went dead.
*Michael Cullen’s mistake. As everyone knows, this novel was written by Tobias Smollett — though Cullen is by no means the first to make such an error. Author.
Part Five
They loaded me up at the flat and William drove me to the airport. He had only got back from a diamond trip the night before, but wanted to be the one to see me off. ‘You’ll do marvels. You’re a bloody wonder-boy. I’ve never seen anybody carry so much with such a cold look in his eye. I mean it. You’ll be perfect.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Stop the cackle. I can’t stand it so early in the morning. I still need fifteen more cups of coffee, so I hope there’ll be time at the buffet.’
I’d been to the airport the day before, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a cap as if going to wait for somebody, so I knew my way through. I said goodbye to William, then got out of the car so that he could drive home and get some sleep. I felt utterly cool and unconcerned about carrying gold out of the country, because it seemed such a harmless and easy thing to do. It wasn’t stealing, and that made it all right. I was only a highly paid pack-mule.
I booked in, got on the escalator, and made straight for the departure lounge, feeling it would be better not to delay in case this feeling of righteousness deserted me. Bustling in the crowd around the newspaper and souvenir kiosk at the other end, I saw the bluff familiar head of Moggerhanger. What he was doing at the airport I didn’t know, and had no wish to find out, but it made just one more good reason for getting through the formalities quickly. My ticket was checked, and then I walked towards the passport man, a real old Twitchbollock standing behind a pulpit. Nearby was a customs officer who glanced at everybody as they went by. I looked ahead, through the door, as if anxious to get at one of the coffee urns beyond, and this disinterested craving for another dose of breakfast put a normal look on my face at a point when I was about to get nervous. There was a beautiful dark-haired girl in front of me, and after my passport was seen to I took a view of her legs when I should have been giving the customs man a dirty look. I heard no voice asking what I was taking out, felt no hand on my shoulder, and then I was through, and in, and out, and at the counter, and sweating so much under my armour-plated coat that black spots flitted in front of my eyes. I deliberately lingered by the part of the counter that was still in sight of the customs man, not out of crackpot bravado, but only to emphasize to him, if he ever had any suspicions, that I felt no reason to vanish into the crowd.