Fellow Passenger (14 page)

‘I don’t know any,’ he said.

He was really being difficult. But fortunately I had not got to explain the capitalist world from the beginning. After all, he had lived most of his life in it. At last I convinced him that an M.V.D lieutenant had only to sign whatever the newspapermen put in front of him, and correct the grosser errors. So long as he did not bite the public, it would never let him starve.

That finished our Sunday night conversation, and I went to sleep at last, feeling sure that I had persuaded him.

But on Monday morning he was back in dejection again. He moaned that he could not be a traitor, that an honourable worker like himself should take his punishment rather than run away. I didn’t believe a word of this. Nor did he, at bottom. His scruples, however, were quite genuine enough to make him hesitate until it was too late for action. Time was running short. We should be off the Nore before dawn on Tuesday.

When he had left me alone, I tried hard to make some sort of mental plan of his character - a far harder task than planning action. Character does not lend itself to attack by pencil and paper. One can only close one’s eyes, and let the personality of the opponent spread itself all through one’s imagination.

The trouble was, I felt, that I had been too flippant, had displayed too freely - in order to gain his confidence - the sardonic bitterness of a man with little hope. It had worked up to a point. I had persuaded Karlis that my own motives were straightforward and purely selfish; but for him self-interest was not good enough. There was sufficient Russian in him to make him unhappy unless he could persuade himself that he was serving an ideal rather than avoiding punishment.

The only bromide I could prescribe was weak. It may be that I lack the common idealisms myself, and therefore do not readily sympathize with those who need them. After lunch, however, I did my best. I told him that he represented the Plain Citizen, not anti- and not pro- but patriotic. How valuable he could be, how helpful to peace and goodwill, if he could convince the enemies of his country that nine-tenths of the Soviet Union thought as he did! How pleasant if they could see with their own eyes that a lieutenant of the M.V.D was not essentially different from a friendly security officer anywhere else!

He seized my hand.

‘I will do it,’ he said. ‘You and I together!’

It was too emotional a reaction to be trustworthy, but I had no time to waste. I took him straightaway into a committee of ways and means, and began to explain to him what his story must be: that Howard-Wolferstan had escaped from the ship in spite of him, and that he knew he would be severely punished.

He objected to that. The official story was that I was a stowaway. How then could he say that he had been on board looking after me?

‘You were on board for normal security duties,’ I told him. ‘After the stowaway was discovered, you were naturally put in charge of him.’

He would have none of that either. It wouldn’t stand up for a moment under interrogation, he said. Where had I hidden? How had I come on board? He could never answer those questions satisfactorily in front of a skilled interrogator; and he could not say he had been unable to find out the answers.

‘All right, then. Tell the truth,’ I suggested.

No, he would not. The disloyalty was too rank. To escape to the West was legitimate; but to say that I had been deliberately smuggled on board was treachery.

‘Comrade, it is all too big for us,’ he sighed. ‘We can only suffer.’

He picked up my tray and turned to go. He was not even dramatic. There was finality in his drooping shoulders. The practical difficulties, from his policeman’s point of view, had overwhelmed him.

Only then did I have a flash of real inspiration. It should have occurred to me long before; but I had been so content with the immediate effects of my intelligent suggestions to the Kremlin that I had not bothered to follow them through to their logical conclusion.

‘Have you realized, Karlis, that the captain has orders to put you under arrest and hand me over to the British police himself?’

‘How can you know?’ he protested angrily.

‘Experience, just experience. Only you can show the police where I was hidden. Only you know that the government story is a lie. Only you know what really happened and the messages which went back and forth. And only you have anything to gain by giving it all away. You will not be allowed any opportunity to talk to the British police. In fact, I don’t think you will be allowed to talk to anyone again.’

He turned pale as the certain truth of this hit him. He stared at me as if I had been a fortune-teller of sinister accuracy who had prophesied his death within a week.

‘
You
know as much as I do,’ he said.

‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter. I am a spy, disowned and returned for trial. That act of good faith covers any amount of sins. What I say may or may not be believed, but it can’t be proved. And when the ship enters an English port again, there will be no trace of this cabin. The danger, Karlis, is you, not me.’

He put down that damned tray he was balancing.

‘And I did my best for them!’ he exclaimed. ‘Didn’t I? Do you not think so?’

Indefinite punishment was one thing; certain death, another. The Slav dropped off him and he stood up, as it were, a naked and very indignant Scandinavian. I told him to go and collect all possible information on our movements and time of arrival. He seemed to be angry because the task was so easy. I had the impression that he would rather have gone straight out of the cabin and scuttled the ship.

During the afternoon hours when he usually slept, we shut ourselves up in my cabin. He told me that I was to be put ashore at Tilbury, to save the long and unnecessary voyage up river. We should pick up a Thames pilot soon after midnight and anchor off Tilbury at dawn. We were not going alongside. Those of the passengers who had accepted the offer of a free air passage would go ashore by the customs launch, if it would take them, or by tender.

There was nothing for it but to slip overboard at night. Karlis, a strong swimmer, was unafraid of this, for it did not matter if he were all dripping from the sea when he hurled himself into the arms of the nearest startled policeman; but for me it was essential to arrive dry and respectable, ready for any opportunity which would enable me to disappear among my fellow countrymen. We had to have a raft or a boat and something to paddle it with.

I read him a lecture on the tides of the Thames Estuary. He knew even less about them than I did, so it was easy to convince him that a swimmer was more likely to fetch up on the Maplins than on dry land. I also suggested that it might be as well to let the ship sail before he gave himself up, and that he, too, had every interest in reaching the shore secretly and dry.

He agreed with me, and at once lost heart. He insisted that he had no chance of laying his hands on anything larger than a lifebelt - no rubber dinghy, no float, nothing. And on second thoughts he doubted if we could even get clear by swimming. The watch, in territorial waters, was alert. Members of the crew had been known to jump overboard, but had always been picked up.

‘How?’ I asked.

‘With the launch, of course.’

I pointed out that at least the launch would then be in the water and not on its davits. He seemed to think that I proposed to take it by force - a one-man cutting-out expedition straight out of the sea stories. Even if I had a gun, he said, Russian sailors would die rather than surrender the launch. He grew quite heated on the subject until I convinced him that there was nothing I disliked more than physical violence. The simpler classes of humanity can be disconcerted so much more quickly by thought than hands.

‘Suppose,’ I suggested, ‘that there
was
a man in the water, but not us.’

‘And when he says I pushed him in?’ Karlis asked.

A valid objection. But he was becoming far too full of objections. I told him to pipe down for a minute while I worked out the first movement.

‘Any of the launch crew speak English?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Who would command it?’

He calculated the watches.

‘After midnight, the third officer.’

‘Does he speak English?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll push a passenger overboard. He can’t explain what happened to him till he gets back on deck.’

Karlis almost shouted that I was irresponsible, that it was no good at all thinking along those lines. He pictured for me the return of the launch, and the English-speaking captain, who would at once have been called, leaning over the flying bridge and asking questions. The mere existence of the captain seemed to appal him. It was understandable. The dual control got on his nerves. The captain was the only person who could put him under arrest, and the only person whom Karlis could neither bluff nor frighten.

‘If the captain wasn’t easily available,’ I asked, ‘would the third officer take your orders - just for a moment?’

‘Yes - if it looks like something political.’

‘And the first officer, who will be on the bridge?’

Yes, he would too. What I had in mind was beginning to take solid shape, though as yet it could hardly be called a plan. Too much depended on the timing.

‘You know Elias Thomas Conger?’

He let himself go on the subject of Elias Thomas, who was pest enough to make one sorry for any security officer having the care of him. He had been carrying his loud and jolly voice into the crew’s quarters and everywhere else, and seemed to think he had a special mission to report on the conditions of Russian ships. He couldn’t speak a word of Russian or any foreign language, but that did not deter him.

‘Are any of the passengers about after midnight?’ I asked.

‘Not normally,’ he replied. ‘They are very serious.’

I took pencil and paper, and drafted out his orders. After a lot of alteration they ran, if I remember, something like this:

1. Lieutenant Karlis will make an appointment with Elias Thomas Conger to attend a meeting of the ship’s political committee. At 0015 hrs Mr Conger will trip and fall overboard.
   

1. Karlis will immediately give the alarm, and see that the launch is ordered away.
   

1. At 0016 hrs Karlis will report to the captain’s cabin. He will state that he fears Howard-Wolferstan has escaped and dived overboard. He will desire the captain to come at once and examine Howard-Wolferstan’s cabin.
   

1. At 0020 hrs the captain is shut in Howard-Wolferstan’s cabin. Karlis will immediately return to the deck. Howard-Wolferstan will proceed to deck independently.
   

1. Gangway will be already outboard for pilot. Presumably it will be lowered to receive rescued man. If not, Karlis will order it to be lowered. Karlis is to show marked anxiety over fate of Conger. Though a lousy Menshevik, Conger is an important personage.
   

1. When launch is alongside and Conger has been carried up gangway, Karlis will order the third officer out of the boat and as many of the crew as he can. Orders should be agitated and mysterious. The objective is to leave one man only on board the launch, who will presumably be hanging on with boat-hook.
   

1. Karlis and Howard-Wolferstan will descend gangway. Howard-Wolferstan stumbles against hand with boat-hook. Karlis takes wheel and opens throttle.
   

The tone and to some extent the matter of my scribbling appeared to bring out the best in Karlis. The Scandinavian in him was glad to raise his head for a moment above the limitations of bureaucracy. All the same, he found difficulties.

‘The first,’ he said, ‘is that Conger, Elias Thomas, may be drowned.’

I couldn’t see at once that it mattered. I pointed out that politicians had at least one thing in common with the proletariat. They replaced themselves.

‘But if he is drowned,’ Karlis objected, ‘the launch may not return for half an hour. It may then be hoisted straight on board. The pilot may arrive. Nothing will go according to plan.’

‘Then you’d better prepare a couple of lifebelts and have them ready to throw after Conger. Where will you do it?’

‘Right aft on the main deck. The deck-house will cover us and he will fall clear of the propellers. But the rest is harder than you think.’

‘Beyond your powers?’

Karlis had no doubt that his orders, in anything which concerned Conger, would be accepted so long as the captain was out of the way. He had special instructions to humour the man, and everyone knew it. His chief objection was that it would be very difficult for me to hide within reach of the gangway, and perhaps impossible for me to get on deck at all. Where I lived was not exactly known to crew and officers, but they were all on the look-out for a mysterious prisoner who must not on any account be allowed free.

‘The stewardesses,’ I suggested at last. ’If it were a question of searching a cabin, would they take your orders?’

‘Of course.’

I reminded him of the tall American and her easily recognizable cloak.

‘Can you get that out of her cabin before she turns in?’

He bothered over the cloak more than anything else. The humanities of policemen are most curious. He was so attracted by the grace of its owner that he felt the deliciously gallant cloak was sacred.