I had the camionette going at its top speed. The needles were still and the loud noise of the motor held a constant note. Everything was unchanging except a brief fusillade of loose gravel or the sudden smell of tar or the beep of a faster car.
‘We are near to Ypres,’ said Kuang.
‘This was the Ypres salient,’ I said. Hudson asked for a cigarette. He must have been awake for some time. ‘Ypres,’ said Hudson as he lit the cigarette, ‘was that the site of a World War One battle?’
‘One of the biggest,’ I said. ‘There’s scarcely an Englishman that didn’t have a relative die here. Perhaps a piece of Britain died here too.’
Hudson looked out of the rear windows of the van. ‘It’s quite a place to die,’ he said.
32
Across the Ypres salient the dawn sky was black and getting lower and blacker like a Bulldog Drummond ceiling. It’s a grim region, like a vast ill-lit military depot that goes on for miles. Across country go the roads: narrow slabs of concrete not much wider than a garden path, and you have the feeling that to go off the edge is to go into bottomless mud. It’s easy to go around in circles and even easier to imagine that you are. Every few yards there are the beady-eyed green-and-white notices that point the way to military cemeteries where regiments of Blanco-white headstones parade. Death pervades the topsoil but untidy little farms go on operating, planting their cabbages right up to ‘Private of the West Riding – Known only to God’. The living cows and dead soldiers share the land and there are no quarrels. Now in the hedges evergreen plants were laden with tiny red berries as though the ground was sweating blood. I stopped the car. Ahead was Passchendaele, a gentle upward slope.
‘Which way were your soldiers facing?’ Kuang said.
‘Up the slope,’ I said. ‘They advanced up the slope, sixty pounds on their backs and machine guns down their throats.’
Kuang opened the window and threw his cigarette butt on to the road. There was an icy gust of wind.
‘It’s cold,’ said Kuang. ‘When the wind drops it will rain.’
Hudson leaned close to the window again. ‘Oh boy,’ he said, ‘trench warfare here,’ and shook his head when no word came. ‘For them it must have seemed like for ever.’
‘For a lot of them it was for ever,’ I said. ‘They are still here.’
‘In Hiroshima even more died,’ said Kuang.
‘I don’t measure death by numbers,’ I said.
‘Then it’s a pity you were so careful not to use your atom bomb on the Germans or Italians,’ said Kuang.
I started the motor again to get some heat in the car, but Kuang got out and stamped around on the concrete roadway. He did not seem to mind the cold wind and rain. He picked up a chunk of the shiny, clay-heavy soil peculiar to this region, studied it and then broke it up and threw it aimlessly across the field of cabbages.
‘Are we expecting to rendezvous with another car?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You must have been very confident that I would come with you.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was. It was logical.’
Kuang nodded. ‘Can I have another cigarette?’ I gave him one.
‘We’re early,’ complained Hudson. ‘That’s a sure way to attract attention.’
‘Hudson fancies his chances as a secret agent,’ I said to Kuang.
‘I don’t take to your sarcasm,’ said Hudson.
‘Well that’s real old-fashioned bad luck, Hudson,’ I said, ‘because you are stuck with it.’
Grey clouds rushed across the salient. Here and there old windmills – static in spite of the wind – stood across the skyline, like crosses waiting for someone to be nailed upon them. Over the hill came a car with its headlights on.
They were thirty minutes late. Two men in a Renault 16, a man and his son. They didn’t introduce themselves, in fact they didn’t seem keen to show their faces at all. The older man got out of the car and came across to me. He spat upon the road and cleared his throat.
‘You two get into the other car. The American stays in this one. Don’t speak to the boy.’ He smiled and gave a short, croaky, mirthless laugh. ‘In fact don’t speak to me even. There’s a large-scale map in the dashboard. Make sure that’s what you want.’ He gripped my arm as he said it. ‘The boy will take the camionette and dump it somewhere near the Dutch border. The American stays in this car. Someone will meet them at the other end. It’s all arranged.’
Hudson said to me, ‘Going with you is one thing, but taking off into the blue with this kid is another. I think I can find my own way …’
‘Don’t think about it,’ I told him. ‘We just follow the directions on the label. Hold your nose and swallow.’ Hudson nodded.
We got out of the car and the boy came across, slowly detouring around us as though his father had told him to keep his face averted. The Renault was nice and warm inside. I felt in the glove compartment and found not only a map but a pistol.
‘No prints,’ I called to the Fleming. ‘Make sure there’s nothing else, no sweet wrappers or handkerchiefs.’
‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘And none of those special cigarettes that are made specially for me in one of those exclusive shops in Jermyn Street.’ He smiled sarcastically. ‘He knows all that.’ His accent was so thick as to be almost unintelligible. I guessed that normally he spoke Flemish and the French was not natural to him. The man spat again in the roadway before climbing into the driver’s seat alongside us. ‘He’s a good boy,’ the man said. ‘He knows what to do.’ By the time he got the Renault started the camionette was out of sight.
I’d reached the worrying stage of the journey. ‘Did you take notes?’ I asked Kuang suddenly. He looked at me without answering. ‘Be sensible,’ I said. ‘I must know if you are carrying anything that would need to be destroyed. I know there’s the box of stuff Hudson gave you.’ I drummed upon it. ‘Is there anything else?’
‘A small notebook taped to my leg. It’s a thin book. I could be searched and they would not find it.’
I nodded. It was something more to worry about.
The car moved at high speed over the narrow concrete lanes. Soon we turned on to the wider main road that led north to Ostend. We had left the over-fertilized salient behind us. The fearful names: Tyne Cot, St Julien, Poelcapelle, Westerhoek and Pilckem faded behind us as they had faded from memory, for fifty years had passed and the women who had wept for the countless dead were also dead. Time and TV, frozen food and transistor radios had healed the wounds and filled the places that once seemed unfillable.
‘What’s happening?’ I said to the driver. He was the sort of man who had to be questioned or else he would offer no information.
‘His people,’ he jerked his head towards Kuang, ‘want him in Ostend. Twenty-three hundred hours tonight at the harbour. I’ll show you on the city plan.’
‘Harbour? What’s happening? Is he going aboard a boat tonight?’
‘They don’t tell me things like that,’ said the man. ‘I’m just conducting you to my place to see your case officer, then on to Ostend to see his case officer. It’s all so bloody boring. My wife thinks I get paid because it’s dangerous but I’m always telling her: I get paid because it’s so bloody boring. Tired?’ I nodded. ‘We’ll make good time, that’s one advantage, there’s not much traffic about at this time of morning. There’s not much commercial traffic if you avoid the inter-city