The Fire Fighter Page 8

  ‘What do you fancy?’

  ‘Anything,’ Finlay said. ‘Really, anything at all.’

  ‘If we ever become friends, I’ll tell you about my schooldays,’ Finlay said.

  ‘I thought we were friends.’

  ‘What do you do at Absalom House?’

  ‘Voluntary work. Translation, basically. I’m afraid I can’t really tell you any more than that.’

  ‘It must be very important.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said. She stood and went over to the tall curtain shrouding her sitting-room from the night. She ran a hand across its ruched fabric. ‘Please let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘All right,’ Finlay said. ‘Why are you so reluctant to hood your atrium?’

  ‘My father’s atrium,’ Rebecca said. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Light. From reflected fires, from detonations, from searchlights, tracer rounds, flak, flares, muzzle flashes, even from burning aircraft on the odd, fluke occasion that we manage to hit one. Glass covering darkness reflects light. And you have an entire dome of the stuff. The Germans would rather bomb what they can see. Anyone would. The roof of your atrium will glitter with reflected fire and their spotters will see it and they will target it and bomb it to oblivion.’

  ‘I see,’ Rebecca said, nodding. ‘You want to put out my father’s light.’

  ‘Absalom House might survive the bombing if you do as I say. If you don’t, your father’s legacy to London architecture will be brick dust and rubble.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘What do you know about my father?’

  ‘Only what Grey told me.’

  ‘Who the hell is Grey?’ Rebecca said.

  Five

  ‘You were supposed to apologize to her,’ Grey said. ‘Not fuck her.’

  Grey was seated where White usually sat. The Immaculate Major was seated to his right. Before Grey, a collection of their vile biscuits occupied a thin green plate. Finlay looked up at the windows behind the two men. More tape had been applied to their panes. Mesh had been nailed across the exterior of the windows. There were fresher cracks in the glass than the cracks that had been fresh when last he had sat here. One of the big panes was so intricately fissured by blast damage that it looked more like a mosaic than a window. He could see enough through the others to observe that the errant barrage balloon had been retethered and supplemented in the air by others. They wore their camouflage clumsily against a sky that was unseasonably blue.

  ‘I had an inkling that I was being followed,’ Finlay said.

  ‘An inkling,’ the Major said. ‘Chap had an inkling. And when precisely did this inkling occur?’

  ‘After the first time I met White. Again when I left a gymnasium off the Strand. A third time when you dropped me off at Aldwych and I walked back from there in the rain to Liverpool Street. Footsteps following your own make a distinctive sound on wet pavements.’

  Grey leaned forward and turned to the Major. ‘We find our boy in unusually loquacious mood.’

  ‘Sexual intercourse,’ the Major said.

  Grey seemed to consider this. He nodded and sat back in his chair.

  ‘I did not sleep with her. Despite the chronic shortage of accommodation I keep reading about in what passes now for newspapers, Rebecca Lange lives in a large flat with plenty of space. It got very late and at her invitation I slept in her spare bedroom.’

  ‘You are not being followed,’ Grey said. ‘Even if we had a very good reason for doing it, we simply do not have the resources. Babcock knocked to check on you, that’s all. And when his knock went unacknowledged and he found the door to be locked, he took the relevant key from his keychain and discovered your absence.’

  ‘Much as a gaoler might that of an absconded convict.’

  ‘Dereliction of duty is a serious offence, Finlay.’

  ‘I’m a civilian, Major. And I would have heard the air-raid warning from the fourth floor of a residential block in Coptic Street. I would have heard the siren even in the event of sexual intercourse. Does Babcock never sleep?’

  Grey shifted in his chair.

  ‘Babcock’s wife has not dealt well with the death of their boy. Babcock will pretend that life goes on, that they queue just as they always did for the latest feature at the cinema. The reality is that Mrs Babcock resides in a sanatorium in Kent in what the doctors describe as a state of catatonia.’

  ‘So Babcock has time on his hands.’

  ‘He does,’ the Major said. ‘But not enough to go following firemen about.’

  ‘Tell us your impression of Rebecca Lange,’ Grey said. ‘Leave nothing out.’

  Knowing now why he had been summoned, Finlay felt able to relax. He lifted the cup from the saucer cradled in his lap and sipped his tea.

  ‘There isn’t much to tell,’ he said.

  Frederick Lange had headed his own prosperous architectural practice in Munich. His style, which his daughter described as modern eclectic, made him very popular. His buildings flattered his clients into thinking they embraced a set of aesthetic values symbolic of a profitable future, soon to be handsomely realized in a smoked glass and smooth stone edifice strengthened by shoulders of steel. His work did not threaten those who commissioned it with the prospect of public ridicule. It did not invite the risk of structural collapse. A building by Lange was typically an elegant and watertight construction delivered on schedule and within its allotted budget. Nobody would have said so, but he was successful, more than anything, because he was safe.

  Richard Frentz had been a contemporary of Lange at the School of Architecture in Berlin. They had both studied as postgraduate students for a year in London, sharing a flat off Tottenham Court Road. Frentz was a brilliant student, a precocious talent intoxicated with ideas for grandiose public-building projects fashioned from new materials which he would also develop for the purpose, heading a handpicked team of scientists and structural engineers. Eight years after their graduation, Lange was flourishing. And that was when Frentz, scraping a living drawing anonymous plans for any practice that would pay him piece rate for the work, knocked on the office door of his old student comrade and asked Frederick Lange for a job.

  ‘He even had a job title dreamed up for his new position,’ Rebecca told Finlay. ‘He was to be called Chief Design Associate. When my father threw him out, he was crushed. But my father believed nobody could have taken him on after what happened in Düsseldorf. Between Düsseldorf and his turning up in Munich he must have lost a portion of his sanity, my father said. Because Düsseldorf guaranteed that Richard Frentz would never work as an architect again.’

  His Düsseldorf project was the first over which Frentz had been given total control. It was an accommodation block for the city’s police cadets. Frentz was briefed to make it as comfortable and enduring as possible. He decided that the best way to make the building strong was to cement the bonds between each rigid element of construction with a new type of adhesive he had developed himself. The building was six months old and considered a great success when a discarded cigarette set fire to a wastepaper bin in a basement lavatory. The fire spread. And the adhesive Frentz had developed did not just burn with a tenacity the fire crews of Düsseldorf had never encountered before. Its toxic fumes killed one hundred and forty sleeping residents before a party of cadet revellers stumbled back there from a Bierkeller and finally raised the alarm.

  ‘Frentz must have come to believe my father responsible in some way for his predicament,’ Rebecca told Finlay. ‘Probably it had something to do with their having been students together. Certainly it had something to do with my father refusing so adamantly to give him a job. I believe my father’s success began to eat away at the man. An architect enjoys very public success. Frentz had been responsible for a very public tragedy.’

  Early in nineteen-thirty-seven, a pamphlet appeared deriding the ideas that inspired the designs of Albert Speer, the architect picked personally by Hitler to give his Third Reich physic
al substance of suitable scale and majesty. The pamphlet, though published in France, was printed in German and widely distributed in Germany. It made nonsense of Nazi claims to an Aryan cultural heritage. It described Speer’s blueprints for the Thousand Year Reich as an attempt to build a Babylonian Atlantis. In poking fun at his pet architect, the pamphlet derided the Fuhrer himself. Rebecca Lange first heard the rumour that her father was the author of the pamphlet at a Berlin cocktail party in the autumn of ’thirty-seven. By then it had been banned. Her father was visited, by appointment, by an SS deputation in October. In December, he was requested to attend a further private interview. Shaken, he told his daughter later that both Goebbels and Speer had been present. He had been told that an old student colleague had identified him as the author of the pamphlet. Then he had been confronted with a manuscript copy, written word by painstaking word in his own hand.

  ‘Like I said, Frentz was a precocious talent,’ Rebecca told Finlay. ‘A quite astonishing draftsman. I have no doubt he was the erstwhile colleague who informed on my father. Just as I have no doubt he was the architect of the forgery with which my father was confronted.’

  Frederick Lange boarded a train in Munich in January of 1938. It was the last time anybody ever admitted to having seen him alive.

  ‘My father was talented enough to know that he was not of the first rank,’ Rebecca said. ‘But he was a good man and a wonderful father. He was enormously proud of his London building because it fulfilled a dream born during the time he spent here. The Absalom dome is both a conceit and a tribute. He was honoured to be offered a building so close to Wren’s great cathedral. The summit of Absalom was designed and built in homage to Wren’s surpassing dome.’

  Finlay said nothing. Then he said, ‘Do you know what became of Frentz?’

  ‘I believe he works in the offices of Albert Speer,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘What about Düsseldorf?’

  ‘Düsseldorf was nineteen-twenty-eight. It was Weimar Germany. Apparently what happened then is of no importance. There is a new order in Germany now. Had nobody told you?’

  ‘What do you make of her, Finlay?’ This from the Major.

  Finlay shrugged. ‘You’ll have to be more specific’

  ‘Do you think, for example, that she represents a security risk?’

  ‘I don’t know why you would think me qualified to answer that question. She was evasive about her work. She keeps pretty bedraggled company. She seems to have a good reason for hating the people who run her country.’

  ‘What would you do with her?’

  ‘She’s a German, when all’s said and done,’ Finlay said. ‘I’d lock her up for the duration. Intern her. We didn’t get bombed in London last night, but I’ll bet somebody copped it, somewhere. There’ll be grief and destruction somewhere in England this morning.’

  ‘Chatham,’ Grey said.

  ‘Well, then,’ Finlay said.

  ‘So you’d lock her up,’ Grey said.

  ‘I would.’

  ‘But then, if you had your way, we’d be lynching captured air crew,’ Grey said. At this the Major, who had been studying his gloves, glanced up sharply.

  ‘I didn’t say I’d string them from lampposts. I just said I’m surprised it hasn’t been done.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Grey said. ‘The British are a tolerant people. Fair play and all that. And crippled aircraft usually attempt to crash-land in rural areas, where lampposts are in understandably short supply.’

  Finlay didn’t say anything. Then he said, ‘I know you people think I’m some kind of lout, but I’m not. I just don’t think that fair play will beat this enemy. That’s all.’

  The Major said, ‘Do you find Rebecca Lange repulsive?’

  ‘Not at all. I said that I didn’t sleep with her. I didn’t say I wouldn’t like to.’

  Grey and the Major looked at each other. The Major coughed. It was Grey who spoke.

  ‘You’re quite sure, Finlay, that we can’t change your mind about a biscuit?’

  Finlay had taken, when he had the time, to eating his midday meal at the Moorgate canteen. He missed the comradeship of the desert and the pals he had made there. In skirmishing with the Italians in the first year of the war he had struck up new friendships and lost none of his new friends to combat. The Italians had been lightly armoured, unambitious territorially. They had practised for the war with their invasion of Abyssinia and their routing of a hopelessly ill-equipped Abyssinian army. Colonel Baxter, even in command of antique guns, was a different order of opponent. For one thing, he was a Scot. He engaged his enemy with an intensity so ferocious it seemed to Finlay sometimes to border on glee. But he was a professional soldier too, as punctilious in the care of his men as he was in the cosseting of his ancient ordnance.

  Finlay did not find easy friendships at the Moorgate station, as he had in Egypt. His rank and his reputation prevented it. He would never again in the fire service be merely one of the boys and had long accepted that. But he did find company there. If the men were a bit deferential, at least they were men in the same profession who faced similar dangers and spoke, as Finlay did, the language of fire, and who shared his understanding of the always fraught and sometimes lethal struggle to contain and defeat it. And there was Nevin. They did not share rank, but this was Nevin’s ground and they were pragmatic and isolated enough as service veterans to ignore that fact when in one another’s company. Finlay liked Nevin. He liked him for the quiet, obdurate way in which he marshalled his men and nightly fought the huge, anarchic, capering flames brought to his ground by the bombs. There had been nothing like it. In history, let alone in the history of their proud and defiant service, there had been nothing like it. But the men coped and Finlay admired the manner in which Richard Nevin led them.

  ‘I don’t remember food being this colour before the war,’ Nevin said. ‘Do you?’

  Finlay looked at the object impaled on the end of Nevin’s fork. It was fishy, fibrous, covered in a substance the colour and consistency of wallpaper paste. Or sperm, Finlay thought. It could easily be jism. Nevin popped the object into his mouth and began to chew, thoughtfully, the heavy stubble blue on his masticating jaw in the electric cafeteria light.

  Finlay knew that Nevin didn’t like him much. But then he didn’t care all that much for himself. Company was company and beggars could not be choosers.

  ‘How are things shaping?’

  Nevin swallowed and winced.

  ‘Minke,’ he said. ‘Mange, more like. If whales had been meant to be eaten, they’d have come in tins with keys on the top. Like corned beef. Or sardines.’

  ‘It doesn’t look too appetizing.’

  ‘It tastes like what my wife has been saying no to ever since I uttered those two fatal words at the altar,’ Nevin said.

  ‘How do you know what that tastes like?’

  ‘If I remember rightly, you told me,’ Nevin said, with a grin. His teeth were pearly and viscous with the sauce. Finlay thought him entitled to the dig. Nevin had lost friends at Pimlico Rubber.

  ‘You were right to gamble on the sausage and mash,’ Nevin said.

  Finlay looked at his plate. The potatoes formed a blighted pile that slopped over the blackened breadcrumb and fat of his lone sausage. He picked up the pepper pot and heaved pepper over the mess on his plate in a patina of gunmetal dust.

  ‘Things are bad,’ Nevin said, shifting his plate away and resting his elbows on the table, the blue dimple of his chin swelled by its two supporting thumbs. ‘We were heroes at the outset, Finlay. Evacuation, gas masks, predictions of mass bombing. The fire service were heroes then, our crews lauded wherever they went. Jerry was very clever, holding off the way he did. In the autumn of ’thirty-nine we were brave boys. By summer just gone, we were shirkers and conchies and fit only for public abuse. Which, by the way, is largely what we still come in for. And all because nothing happened.’

  ‘Tell that to the Navy,’ Finlay said.

  Nevin belched an
d looked at him. The pressure of his thumbs did something cherubic to Nevin’s chin. Finlay could see soot sunk beneath the surface of the skin around his eyes and felt sorry for the carelessness of his last remark.

  ‘Why did you join up?’

  ‘To do my bit.’

  Nevin nodded. ‘Lost that bit of dash you had, didn’t you, after Pimlico.’

  ‘No,’ Finlay said. ‘I didn’t. I wanted to fight the enemy. It was a war. I volunteered. Is there something wrong with that?’

  Nevin sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

  Finlay realized how little it was he actually knew about the Moorgate watch commander. How old was Richard Nevin? Had Nevin fought in what they were now calling the ’fourteen–eighteen?

  ‘I’ve lost twenty men in the past fortnight, Finlay,’ he whispered; they did not have the canteen to themselves. ‘Close to fifty in the last six weeks. I’m talking here about regular men. Blokes I trained myself. Men you’d walk through hell with. Men who’d follow you there.’

  Finlay said nothing. His food congealed under its coating of ash. He could feel the heat of Nevin’s indignation.

  ‘The auxiliaries are good men, don’t mistake me. They have the right idea and an abundance of heart and some of them are quick learners. But I’m losing men I can’t replace. And the bombing is getting worse. And in the end, I haven’t a fucking clue what it is I’m supposed to do.’

  Finlay said nothing. He did not know what to say.

  ‘You are a fly-boy, Finlay, always have been,’ Nevin said. ‘I’ve seen more common sense come out of my arsehole than I saw the other day when Jerry draped that bit of underwear in Mitre Street. Asking for the telescopic rig! I’ve heard about your talent on a ladder.’

  Finlay said nothing.

  ‘Going to sort it out yourself. Who are you? The cavalry? Errol fucking Flynn?’

  Finlay said nothing. Nevin breathed what smelled like angry sperm across their table.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Finlay said, rising.