The Second Midnight. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ him, Farrar heard a click as the tall man locked the door.

      The man on the bed stopped chuckling. Farrar’s stomach lurched as he recognized the Bavarian he had met last night.

      The Bavarian raised his heavy black eyebrows. ‘And how is our lovely Gretl this evening?’

      Farrar groped for his glasses, which had slid to the foot of the bed. Camelhair brushed his cheek. A large brown shoe stamped on the glasses and twisted them into the carpet.

      The tall man sucked in his breath. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘I am so clumsy.’

      ‘What a pity,’ said the man on the bed. ‘Still, accidents happen.’

      Farrar got slowly to his feet; his muscles tightened, ready to receive a blow from the tall man. He moved more slowly than he needed, pretending the fall had winded him. His own stupidity angered him: last night he had assumed that the man on the bed was nothing more than a tourist who had had too much to drink; he should have known better. He remembered the manager’s behaviour and realized that his visitors must be police of some sort: German, not Austrian. He was a fool to have run any unnecessary risks before he had seen William McQueen.

      ‘Gretl,’ the man on the bed said conversationally, ‘won’t be lovely for much longer.’ Without any change of tone he added, ‘This room is a pigsty. Tidy it up, Farrar.’

       Did they know? Had they found it?

      Farrar had the answer to the second question as soon as he picked up the suitcase: it was appreciably lighter than it should have been. He scooped up a pile of shirts and threw them into the case.

       Sweet Jesus, he thought. Please not the Gestapo.

      ‘Neatly, Farrar. You get so much more in if you pack neatly, don’t you?’

      ‘Look, I’m sorry about last night,’ Farrar said quickly. His German was fast and fluent, and he had a salesman’s confidence in the power of his own voice. ‘I’d had a bit to drink and the girl—’

      The tall man slapped him. ‘Silence, please,’ he said politely.

      Farrar picked himself up again. Some clothes went in the suitcase, others in the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. Meanwhile, the man on the bed leafed through Farrar’s order book. Farrar noticed that the thieving bastards had even been at his brandy: the bottle, nearly empty, was on the bedside table; beside it was a tumbler with a couple of inches of brandy still in it.

      The man on the bed looked up. ‘Business has not been good lately?’

      Farrar nodded. There wasn’t much demand for boxed sets of British Grenadiers in the Third Reich. That was one reason why he had taken the other job when they offered it to him.

      ‘I expect you find it hard to make ends meet.’

      Again, Farrar nodded. It seemed safer to agree. Besides, the man on the bed was quite right. He wondered whether they were going to beat him up before they arrested him, or wait until they had him in custody.

      Escape was out of the question. His captors’ combined weight was three or four times his own; and both men would be armed. The door was locked. Even if he could open the window and dive through, he doubted if he would survive the drop of fifty or sixty feet to the street below. Shouting for help would be useless, for it was obvious that they had the cooperation of the manager.

      But they wouldn’t kill him – he was sure of that. A murdered British citizen would lead to awkward questions, even in Vienna. They would interrogate him, of course, and if he was dead he couldn’t tell them anything. But the worst he had to fear was a jail sentence and perhaps a little preliminary suffering. They might not realize the significance of what they had found.

      The man on the bed tore a blank page from the order book and wrote something on it with a silver pencil.

      Farrar bundled a pair of shoes into the bottom of the wardrobe. At last the room was clear.

      The man in the camelhair coat patted his shoulder. ‘Gut,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Sehr gut.’

      ‘Have a drink,’ said the man on the bed. He beckoned Farrar closer and jerked his head towards the tumbler. ‘Go on, drink,’ he said irritably. ‘It may be your last chance for some time.’

      Farrar picked up the glass. The probable consequences of throwing its contents into the Bavarian’s face chased through his mind.

      The Bavarian shook his head. ‘Don’t be silly, Farrar. There are two of us.’

      ‘Hurry, please,’ the man in the camelhair coat said. He looked ostentatiously at his watch.

      Farrar shrugged. He picked up the glass and had his last drink.

      George Farrar died on Wednesday 15 February 1939.

      The fact that he had died was more important than how and why, at least to Michael. But, much later, Michael became curious about all aspects of the little man’s death. This was because he came to see the murder of Farrar as the starting point for what came afterwards. He realized that this was an arbitrary choice – equally logically, he might have chosen Farrar’s birth, or the Anschluss, or even (to stretch a point) the Great War.

      But, being an artist of sorts, he considered that human beings had a fundamental need to create patterns from the chaos of history and from their own messy lives. A pattern had to start somewhere: even the author of Genesis had had to face up to this problem: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

      So Michael’s pattern began with Farrar’s death. If Farrar had reached London the following weekend, a World War might have taken a slightly different course; his death sent ripples even further into the future; it touched, perhaps marginally, on the rise and fall of empires.

      In the final analysis, however, Michael was more concerned with the effects of Farrar’s death on himself and on people he was later to know. That was where it mattered. Michael took things personally, which was why he was never particularly successful at his job. Uncle Claude never made that mistake.

      Despite the fact that Michael had never met Farrar, he came to feel an almost proprietorial interest in him. In the years to come, he collected information about him.

      At the time of his death, Farrar was thirty-five. He was five feet two and reputed to be hot-tempered. He had a widowed mother who lived in Worthing. Some time afterwards, Michael checked to see if His Majesty’s Government had seen fit to grant Mrs Farrar a pension. He was not surprised to find that it hadn’t. HMG, probably in the person of Uncle Claude, had used a Gestapo lie to avoid spending a few hundred pounds on an old lady who could give nothing in return. That was typical.

      Farrar had worked as a travelling salesman on the Continent since 1936. He was employed by a struggling British toy firm which had built its reputation on the manufacture of toy soldiers. Z Organization had recruited him as a courier in Zurich on 8 December 1938.

      Those were the salient facts about Farrar’s life. The facts about the manner of his death were more difficult to establish. Michael had access to Z Organization’s files; but these were sketchy at the best of times and they were particularly bad for Vienna after the Nazis took over. Later he was able to use the SIS Registry, but here the facts were even СКАЧАТЬ