Eye of the Needle(88)
“It can’t go on much longer.”
“What do the Scottish meteorologists say?”
“Another day of it, at least. But remember, all the time we’re grounded he’s bottled up too.”
“If he’s there.”
“Yes.”
“All right,” Godliman said. “We’ll have a corvette, the Coastguard, some fighters and an amphibian. You’d better get on your way. Call me from Rosyth. Take care.”
“Will do.”
Godliman hung up. His cigarette, neglected in the ashtray, had burned down to a tiny stub.
29
LYING ON ITS SIDE, THE JEEP LOOKED POWERFUL BUT helpless, like a wounded elephant. The engine had stalled. Faber gave it a hefty push and it toppled majestically onto all four wheels. It had survived the fight relatively undamaged. The canvas roof was destroyed, of course; the rip Faber’s knife had made had become a long tear running from one side to the other. The offside front fender, which had ploughed into the earth and stopped the vehicle, was crumpled. The headlight on that side had smashed. The window on the same side had been broken by the shot from the gun. The windshield was miraculously intact.
Faber climbed into the driver’s seat, put the gearshift into neutral and tried the starter. It kicked over and died. He tried again, and the engine fired. He was grateful for that, he could not have faced a long walk.
He sat in the car for a while, inventorying his wounds. He gingerly touched his right ankle; it was swelling massively. Perhaps he had cracked a bone. It was as well that the jeep was designed to be driven by a man with no legs, Faber could not have pressed a brake pedal. The lump on the back of his head felt huge, at least the size of a golf ball; when he touched it his hand came away sticky with blood. He examined his face in the rear-view mirror. It was a mass of small cuts and big bruises, like the face of the loser at the end of a boxing match.
He had abandoned his oilskin back at the cottage, so his jacket and overalls were soggy with rain and smeared with mud. He needed to get warm and dry very soon.
He gripped the steering wheel—a burning pain shot through his hand; he had forgotten the torn fingernail. He looked at it. It was the nastiest of his injuries. He would have to drive with one hand.
He pulled away slowly and found what he guessed was the road. There was no danger of getting lost on this island—all he had to do was follow the cliff edge until he came to Lucy’s cottage.
He needed to invent a lie to explain to Lucy what had become of her husband. She wouldn’t have heard the shotgun so far away, he knew. He might, of course, tell her the truth; there was nothing she could do about it. However, if she became difficult he might have to kill her, and he had an aversion to that. Driving slowly along the cliff top through the pouring rain and howling wind, he marveled at this new thing inside him, this scruple. It was the first time he had ever felt reluctance to kill. It was not that he was amoral—to the contrary. He had made up his mind that the killing he did was on the same moral level as death on the battlefield, and his emotions followed his intellect. He always had the physical reaction, the vomiting, after he killed, but that was something incomprehensible that he ignored.
So why did he not want to kill Lucy?
The feeling was on a par, he decided, with the affection that drove him to send the Luftwaffe erroneous directions to St. Paul’s Cathedral: a compulsion to protect a thing of beauty. She was a remarkable creation, as full of loveliness and subtlety as any work of art. Faber could live with himself as a killer, but not as an iconoclast. It was, he recognized as soon as the thought occurred to him, a peculiar way to be. But then, spies were peculiar people.
He thought of some of the spies who had been recruited by the Abwehr at the same time he had been: Otto, the Nordic giant who made delicate paper sculptures in the Japanese fashion and hated women; Friedrich, the sly little mathematical genius who jumped at shadows and went into a five-day depression if he lost a game of chess; Helmut, who liked to read books about slavery in America and had soon joined the SS…all different, all peculiar. If they had anything more specific in common, he did not know what it was.
He seemed to be driving more and more slowly, and the rain and mist became more impenetrable. He began to worry about the cliff edge on his left-hand side. He felt very hot, but suffered spasms of shivering. He realized he had been speaking aloud about Otto and Friedrich and Helmut, and he recognized the signs of delirium. He made an effort to think of nothing but the problem of keeping the jeep on a straight course. The noise of the wind took on some kind of rhythm, becoming hypnotic. Once he found himself stationary, staring out over the sea, and had no idea how long ago he had stopped.
It seemed hours later that Lucy’s cottage came into view. He steered toward it, thinking, I must remember to put the brake on before I hit the wall. There was a figure standing in the doorway, looking out at him through the rain. He had to stay in control of himself long enough to tell her the lie. He had to remember, had to remember…
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON by the time the jeep came back. Lucy was worried about what had happened to the men, and at the same time angry with them for not coming home for the lunch she had prepared. As the day waned she had spent more and more time at the windows, looking out for them.
When the jeep came down the slight slope to the cottage it was clear something was wrong. It was moving terribly slowly, on a zigzag course, and there was only one person in it. It came closer, and she saw that the front was dented and the headlight smashed.