Operation Pax
Operation Pax
(The Paper Thuderbolt)
First published in 1951
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1951-2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755121104 EAN: 9780755121106
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio’s
translation of
Montaigne’s Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President’s Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
Within the navil of this hideous Wood,
Immur’d in cypress shades a Sorcerer dwels…
And here to every thirsty Wanderer,
By sly enticement gives his baneful cup.
COMUS
It is proper to inform the reader that the internal economy of the Bodleian Library in the University of Oxford, as described with some particularity in the ensuing romance, is entirely the fruit of fancy. And, more particularly, those subterranean regions in which the climax is set, although frequently vouched for by reliable persons as bearing a general correspondence with what is here imagined, have never come within the purview of the author, whose common occasions have familiarized him only with that which lies above ground level. He is very conscious of being seldom charged with any large adherence to the actual, and he begs acceptance of the postulate that, if there be (as assuredly there must be) a real Bodleian Library laid up in Heaven, its foundations unquestionably rest upon such immensities as are rudely figured in this insubstantial tale. And be it added that the author, contemplating his finished and fugitive performance and realizing one odd consequence of the Copyright Act of 1709, is constrained to murmur with a wholesome awe certain lines of old Samuel Daniel, similarly circumstanced three hundred and fifty years ago:
Heere in this goodly Magazine of witte,
This Storehouse of the choicest furniture
The world doth yeelde, here in this exquisite
And most rare monument, that doth immure
The glorious reliques of the best of men,
Thou, part imperfect work, vouchsafed art
A little roome.
Routh in an Infernal Region
…involv’d
In this perfidious fraud.
– PARADISE LOST
There was a wait in the bank. Routh’s inside felt empty, flabby. His own patter nagged in his head.
No need whatever for a deposit to secure delivery. Our senior sales manager knows your standing in the community, madam.
Routh shifted his weight furtively from one foot to the other. He glanced over his shoulder and through the gilded letters:
at the quiet street. The old Douglas two-stroke was just round the corner. He had to be careful that nobody following him out of the bank rounded the same corner and saw him mount it. Provided he worked each town quickly and left this one fault on his trail it was alright. You should say
All right
. Remember your education.
But just at present able to offer a few influential customers twenty per cent reduction for cash with order
. Again his own glib phrases were spilling aimlessly over his mind. Perhaps that was what he would have to do in Hell: go on repeating these things through all eternity.
The man in front was paying in cheques and a lot of cash. The teller ticked off the amounts that were already filled in on a long slip.
Making only three pounds ten precisely, madam
. If only you had the guts for a hold-up. Smash and grab. Smash the teller’s silly face and grab all that. Routh’s right hand in his trouser pocket – the one where the lining was only a big ragged hole – trembled as it touched the woman’s mean, creased cheque… And all this for three pounds ten.
Uncrossed and made payable to bearer, madam, if you don’t mind.
It was here once more, the bad moment. The chap in front had closed his shabby leather bag, was having some fool joke, was going. Routh took the cheque from his pocket. The very paper was hot and clammy. He hated banks so, surely banks must hate him. At least they hated these small open cheques presented by strangers. Yet they would never really try a check-up – not then and there. Customers – the small sort that Routh chose for
his
customers – didn’t like it. So it’s all right, I tell you. Push it over. Remember you’re a gentleman. Push it at him. Quietly, pleasantly. Good morning.
Routh saw his own hand tremble. He would remember afterwards – he always did – that it had been with anger, not fear. It was with anger at the pettiness of the thing, at all this for three pounds ten. He knew that, really, Routh was on a big scale, was a being cast in a large mould, would rise to the grand occasion when it came. And it would come. He would carry out a big thing as cool as ice, as cool as Raffles. And his heart then would not thrust against his ribs as it did now… The teller was looking at him.
But it was all right. The man’s pen was poised over the signature to scribble. In a second he would say indifferently ‘Notes?’ and flick the petty amount off the orderly piles in his drawer. Don’t say anything more. Wait. A normal commercial transaction. Routh repeated the phrase to himself. He found himself repeating it again and again. A normal commercial transaction. A normal… The teller had gone.
A big clock ticked on the wall. Its ticking queerly struck in at Routh’s pounding heart, fought with it rhythm against rhythm. His knees went wrong, so that he had to lock them, to press them against each other. The bank swayed. All right…
all right
. It’s happened before. Nothing to do with
you
. The woman has a shaky account, a tiny balance and no arrangement for overdrawing. She’s been a nuisance for a long time, and now they won’t even honour her cheque for three ten – not if the credit isn’t there. That’s what he’s gone to see. Only hold on.
But what if it’s something else? He tried to think about the woman and her cheque. It was the woman with the hare lip, with the window curtains that had seemed more morbidly secretive than anybody else’s in the drearily respectable little road. She had been one of those that open the door on the chain. With that sort, to get in is to triumph.
Our senior sales manager knows your standing
. In a quarter of an hour he had sold the non-existent contraption.
Making only three pounds ten precisely, madam
. Not, he had thought, the bank-account sort. Watching her write the cheque in her gimcrack parlour with its paranoid curtains he had been surprised.
Edges us round the quotas. Thank you
.