He had a memory somewhere of her telling him that was vulgar, but he sidestepped it.
“Paid to get you out of yer trousers, into bed, do what I do till Boris gets here.”
“What you do?”
“You know, love… the other.”
“You mean sex?”
“If it gets that far. He was a bit early tonight.”
A light shone in George’s mind. The knot slackened off, and the life began to crawl back into his startled groin.
“You’ve been paid to… fuck me?”
“Language, love. But yeah.”
“Would you mind awfully if we… er… finished the job?”
She thought for a moment.
“Why not? Least I can do. Besides, I like you. And old Boris is hardly going to bugger off after fifteen minutes. He needs you. He’ll wait till dawn if he has to.”
Walking to Berwick Street, along the whore’s paradise of Meard Street, apprehension mingled with bliss. It was like that moment in Tobruk when Johnny Arab had stuck a pipe of super-strength hashish in front of him and he had looked askance at it but inhaled all the same. The headiness never quite offset and overwhelmed the sheer oddness of the situation.
In the caff a few late-night ‘beatniks” (scruffbags, Sylvia would have called them) spun out cups of frothy coffee as long as they could and put the world to rights-while Boris, if that really was his name, sat alone at a table next to the lavatory door.
George was at least half an hour late. Boris glanced at his watch but said nothing about it. Silently he slid the finished Polaroid-congealed as George thought of it-across the table, his finger never quite letting go of it.
“This type of camera only takes these shots. No negative. Hard to copy, and I won’t even try unless you make me. Do what we ask, Mr. Horsfield, and you will not find us unreasonable people. Give us what we want, and when we have it, you can have this. Frame it, burn it, I don’t care-but if we get what we want, you can be assured this will be the only copy and your wife need never know.”
George didn’t even look at the photo. It might ruin a precious memory.
“What is it you want?”
Boris all but whispered, “Everything you’re sending east of Suez.”
“I see,” said George, utterly baffled by this.
“Be here one week tonight. Nine o’clock. You bring evidence of something you’ve shipped out-show willing as you people say-and we’ll brief you on what to look for next. In fact, we’ll give you a shopping list.”
Boris stood up. A bigger bugger in a black suit came over and stood next to him. George hadn’t even noticed this one was in the room.
“Well?” he said in Russian.
“A pushover,” Boris replied.
The other man picked up the photo, glimmed it, and said, “When did he shave off the moustache?”
“Who cares?” Boris replied.
Then he switched to English, said, “Next week,” to George, and they left.
George sat there. He’d learned two things. They didn’t know he spoke Russian, and they had the wrong Horsfield. George felt like laughing. It really was very funny-but it didn’t let him off the hook… Whatever they called him, Henry George Horsfield RAOC or Hugh George Horsfield RA… they still had a photograph of him in bed with a whore. It might end up in the hands of the right wife or the wrong wife, but he had no doubts it would all end up on a desk at the War Office if he screwed up now.
He got bugger all work done the next day. He had sneaked into home very late, left a note for Sylvia saying he would be out early, caught the 7.01 train, and sneaked into the office very early. He could not face her across the breakfast table. He couldn’t face anyone. He closed his office door, but after ten minutes decided that that was a dead giveaway and opened it again. He hoped Ted did not want to chat. He hoped Daft Elsie had no gossip as she brought round the tea.
At five-thirty in the evening he took his briefcase and sought out a caff in Soho. He sat in Old Compton Street staring into his deflating frothy coffee much as he had stared into his pink gin the night before. Oddly, most oddly, the same thing happened. He looked up from his cup and there she was. Right opposite him. A vision of beauty and betrayal.
“I was just passin’. Honest. And I saw you sittin’ in the window.”
“You’re wasting your time. I haven’t got the money, and after last night…”
“I’m not on the pull. It’s six o’clock and broad bleedin’ daylight. I… I… I thought you looked lonely.”
“I’m always lonely,” he replied, surprised at his own honesty. “But what you see now is misery of your own making.”
“You’ll be fine. Just give old Boris what he wants.”
“Has it occurred to you that that might be treason?”
“Nah… it’s not as if you’re John Profumo or I’m Christine Keeler. We’re small fry, we are.”
Oh God, if only she knew.
“I can’t give him what he wants. He wants secrets.”
“Don’t you know any?”
“Of course I do… everything’s a sodding secret. But… but… I’m RAOC. Do you know what that stands for?”
“Nah. Rags And Old Clothes?”
“Close. Our nickname is the Rag And Oil Company. Royal Army Ordnance Corps. I keep the British Army in saucepans and socks!”
“Ah.”
“You begin to see? Boris will want secrets about weapons.”
“O’course he will. How long have you got?”
“I really ought to be on a train by nine.”
“Well… you come home with me. We’ll have a bit of a think.”
“I’m not sure I could face that room again.”
“You silly bugger. I don’t work from home, do I? Nah. I got a place in Henrietta Street. Let’s nip along and put the kettle on. It’s cozy. Really it is. Ever so.”
How Sylvia would have despised the “ever so.” It would be “common.”
Over tea and ginger biscuits she heard him out-the confusion of two Horsfields and how he really had nothing that Boris would ever want.
She said, “You gotta laugh, ain’t yer?”
And they did.
She thought while they fucked-he could see in her eyes that she wasn’t quite with him, but he didn’t much mind.
Afterward, she said, “You gotta do what I have to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Fake it.”
George took this on board with a certain solemnity and doubt.
She shook him by the arm vigorously.
“Leave it out, captain. I’d never fake one with you.”
The best part of a week passed. He was due to meet Boris that evening and sat at his desk in the day trying to do what the nameless whore had suggested. Fake it.
He had in front of him a shipping docket for frying pans.
FPI Titanium Range 12 inch. Maximum heat dispersal.
116 units.
It was typical army-speak that the docket didn’t actually say they were frying pans. The docket was an FPI, and that was only used for frying pans, so the bloke on the receiving end in Singapore would just look at the code and know what was in the crate. There was a certain logic to it. Fewer things got stolen this way. He’d once shipped thirty-two kettles to Cyprus, and somehow the word kettle had ended up on the docket and only ten ever arrived at their destination.
He could see possibilities in this. All he needed was a jar of that newfangled American stuff, Liquid Paper, which he bought out of his own money from an import shop in the Charing Cross Road, a bit of jiggery-pokery, and access to the equally newfangled, equally American Xerox machine. Uncle Sam had finally given the world something useful. It almost made up for popcorn and rock ‘n’ roll.
Caution stepped in. He practiced first on an interoffice memo. Just as well-he made a hash of it. “Staff Canteen Menu, Changes to: Subsection Potato, Mashed: WD414” would never be the same again. No matter, if one of these yards of bumf dropped onto his desk in the course of a day, then so did a dozen more. He’d even seen one headed “War Office Gravy, Lumps in.”