Hopscotch

The next window was latched shut; the one beyond was the ban-the-bomb hippies; the seventh yielded up a pair of dungarees with only two and a half quid in the wallet. He didn’t touch the cash but he lifted half the loose change from the front pocket and he liberated a Barclay Bank plastic credit card from among three cards in the wallet pocket. He replaced the dungarees on the floor whence he’d hooked them and moved on down the row.

There were twenty houses in all; he hit seven of them with his fishing rod and stole not more than one or two small items from each—never enough to induce the victim to report the theft. When he was finished he had a threadbare topcoat, a trilby hat, an umbrella and a pocketful of mismatched identification, credit cards and money. He hadn’t lifted any wallets because that would be noticed; but a wallet was easy enough to buy.

After a counter breakfast in Highgate he bought a shave and a short haircut in a barbershop. In a drugstore he bought essential kit—toothbrush, paste, razor and a cosmetic tinting kit for people who wanted to cover grey hair. He rode a bus into the King’s Cross district, bought a few items of clothing and chose a small unpretentious commercial-travelers’ hotel and walked straight in across the lobby as though he had business there. No one challenged him; he went upstairs and searched the corridor until he found the bathroom for use by those whose rooms did not have private bath. It was past rush hour and the chamber was not in use. He locked himself in and took his time bathing, darkening his hair and getting into the new clothes—underwear, socks, dark blue slacks that fit well enough, an ordinary round-collar white shirt, a Navy four-in-hand, an imitation-suede sport jacket for which he’d laid out five pounds twenty. He brushed off the topcoat and trilby and put them on; wrapped his old clothes in the parcel from which he’d taken the new ones; and sat down to examine the night’s haul of credit cards and money.

He’d taken three driver’s licenses and now he chose the one that came closest to his own age and decription; he tore the others into pieces and flushed them away. He had a bit over fourteen pounds remaining in notes and coin. It would do for the moment.

He carried the parcel of old clothes out with him and deposited it in a dustbin two blocks from the hotel; went down the King’s Cross station and rode the tubes to Covent Garden. He had the hat down around his ears—he’d stuffed the bands with newspaper and it was still a fraction too large but that was all right. With the umbrella in hand he knew he was well camouflaged; nevertheless every stranger’s face might be an enemy’s and as he threaded the crowds he felt sweat break out like needles, prickling his scalp.

In a passage off Drury Lane there was a philatelists’ shop run by a man who dealt not only in rare postage stamps but also in stolen documents and passports. The shop was on the Agency’s list of sources but Kendig had never been inside it. There was a chance they’d be watching it; there was a chance they wouldn’t be.

He stopped at the corner and went into a leather and luggage shop; bought a cheap wallet and a large cheap briefcase of the sort college students sometimes used to carry school books. It was a small valise, really; the manuscript would fit easily.

He carried the empty case up to Drury Lane and went down as far as the passage; he hadn’t known the philatelist’s exact address but the passage was only a hundred feet long and he saw the place as soon as he’d turned the corner. He stopped there to survey it.

The cardboard sign in the door said CLOSED. A few pedestrians moved through the passage but none of them was a stakeout; there was nobody sitting in a parked car, nobody holding up a lamppost. A uniformed traffic warden walked across the far end of the passage but didn’t even glance down its length. Kendig crossed to the opposite curb and made another search from that angle but nothing showed up.

Then the philatelist’s door opened and a squat man emerged, reaching behind him to flip the sign over. Now it read OPEN. The squat man went down the passage away from Kendig and turned the far corner.

Kendig put his back to the place and walked away. His steps were leisurely but his pulse raced.

It had taken only a glance to know what the squat man was. Kendig hadn’t seen him before but the serge, the Slavic scowl and the clumsy shoes had been dead giveaways.

They’d set something up for him there; it was in readiness now and the shop had reopened. Ten minutes later and he’d have walked right into it.

It meant Yaskov had his people out in force. There were at least three other passport dealers in London but if Yaskov had set a trap in this one it meant he’d set traps in all four. It meant, further, that Yaskov had been briefed by the British or had found out on his own hook through some English contact that they’d flushed Kendig and had him on the run without papers.

Coolly and relentlessly they were inscribing the pattern of his a

It began to rain again in the early afternoon. Discreetly he checked out an Avis car-hire office; there was a man in a doorway opposite it trying not to look like a policeman. He didn’t need to know any more than that. He went into an oak-dark restaurant and sat at a small table over a mixed grill watching through the window beside him while cars moved by, their tires hissing on the wet paving.

Jaws and mind ruminated. They were handling it properly—the way it had to be done. Once they’d taken the decision to treat him as a security crisis they’d had no alternative. He’d given them an advantage by issuing the big challenge here in London: he was isolating himself on an island. It was a big island with an enormous population but it was finite and had a limited number of routes of escape; knowing that fact made it possible for them to commit great forces to the job. He’d chosen England for that reason—he wanted to make it as costly as he could, that was part of the game, and by giving them the opportunity here he’d made it possible for them to concentrate far more effort and manpower than they’d have been willing to spare on him if he’d picked a porous playing field like the Continent or South America.

The Soviets were in it in strength as he’d hoped they’d be. That fellow watching the Avis office had all the earmarks of copper; so Chartermain had brought the Yard into it and Kendig’s likeness would be folded into every bobby’s pocket south of Inverness. Cutter and Follett would be spreading the word about Kendig’s supposed French passport and they’d be covering the intervals between Chartermain’s suave troops and the Yard’s stubborn flat-feet. No doubt the delegations of half a dozen smaller powers in London had got the word through one source or another and had alerted their perso

The longer he kept them at bay the more desperate they’d become. It wouldn’t be long—if it hadn’t happened already—before the orders would come down to take off the last of the kid gloves; probably the orders would be to make it look like an accident. They wouldn’t shoot him in a public place.

They were governed by no code except expedience. There were no Commandments except Thou Shalt Succeed. Some of them had consciences of one kind or another but they all were caught in the gears of their great machinery. They believed in using any necessary means to preserve what they thought of as the greater good. It was a curious sinister idealism that motivated the best of them; the rest didn’t count, they were merely Good Germans, they’d do as they were told—lost souls who’d settled years ago for the usual hypocrisies and specious rationalizations.

He’d always recognized the weakness in himself and that was why he saw it in the rest of them. In his own case it had never been put to the test. He had never been ordered to kill anyone. Lurid fictions to the contrary it was not part of the usual plays of espionage to commit murder; there had been assassinations, politically motivated, of which he had knowledge afterward and of which he had written with feelings of genuine outrage in his book. But he had never participated in any effort to take out a person, whether an ally or an enemy agent. It simply wasn’t done. The objective nearly always was to obtain information or to plant false information. In either case it had to be done without the other side’s realizing it had been done. Ideally the operative worked in such a way that nobody found out he’d been there at all. That sort of ideal couldn’t be achieved if he left the landscape littered behind him with dead bodies.