George who had left England never to return was back! I suppose he’d been trying to head off my visitor, for he showed little surprise to find him there. George was nearly forty years old, his wavy hair greying at the temples. He took off his glasses. ‘I came by cab, Bernard. A car will arrive any minute and I’ll take this fellow off your hands.’ He said it as casually as if he were the owner of a limousine service. Then he took out a handkerchief and began rubbing the condensation from his thick-rimmed glasses.
‘He loses consciousness and then comes back to life,’ I said. ‘He urgently needs attention. He’s lost a lot of blood; he could die any time.’
‘And you don’t want him to die here,’ said George, putting his glasses on and looking at the comatose man in the bathtub. His eyes were tightly closed and his breathing slow, and with the sort of snoring noise that sometimes denotes impending death. George looked at me and said: ‘I’m taking him to a Polish doctor in Kensington. He’s expected there. He’ll relax and trust someone who can talk his language.’ George moved into the drawing-room, as if he didn’t want to think about the man expiring in my bathtub.
‘It’s internal bleeding, George. I think he’s dying.’
This prognosis showed no effect on George. He went to the window and looked down at the street as if hoping to see the car arrive. I think it was done to reassure me rather than because he really thought he’d see the promised car. George was Polish by extraction and a Londoner by birth. He was not handsome or charming but he was direct in manner and unstinting in his generosity. Like most self-made men he was intuitive, and like most rich ones, cynical. Many of the men he did deals with, and the ones who sat alongside him on his charity committees, were Poles, or considered themselves as such. George went out of his way to be sociable with Poles, but he was a man of many moods. Where his supporters found a cheerful self-confidence others encountered a stubborn ego. And when his mask slipped a little, his energetic impatience could become raging bad temper.
Now I watched him marching backwards and forwards and around the room, flapping the long vicuna overcoat, or cracking the bones of his knuckles, and displaying that kind of restless energy that some claim is part of the process of reasoning. His face was clenched in anger. You wouldn’t have recognized him as a man grieving for his desperately loved wife. Neither would you have thought that this apartment had been until recently his own home, for he blundered against the chairs, kicked his polished brogues at the carpets and fumed like a teetotaller held on a drunk-driving charge.
‘He had nowhere to go,’ said George.
‘You’re wrong,’ I said, waving the key at him. ‘He had a key to this apartment. He tried the doorbell only to discover if it was clear.’
George scowled. ‘I thought I’d called in all the keys. But perhaps you’d better have the locks changed, just to be on the safe side.’ He lifted his eyes quickly, caught the full force of the annoyance on my face and added: ‘They can’t just walk the streets, Bernard.’
‘Why not? Because they’re illegals? Because they don’t have papers or passports or visas? Is that what you mean?’ I put the key in my pocket and resolved to change the locks just as soon as I could get someone along here to do it. ‘Damn you, George, don’t you have any consideration for me or Fiona? She’ll be furious if she hears about this.’
‘Must you tell her?’
‘She’ll see the blood on the mat in the hall.’
‘I’ll send someone round to clean up.’
‘I’m the world’s foremost expert on cleaning blood marks off the floor,’ I said.
‘Then get a new mat,’ he said with exasperation, as if I was capriciously making problems for him.
‘I can’t think of anything more likely to excite Fiona’s suspicions than me going out to buy a new mat.’
‘So confide in her. Ask her to keep it to herself.’
‘It wouldn’t be fair to ask her. Fiona is big brass in the Department nowadays. And anyway she wouldn’t agree. She’d report it. She prefers doing things by the book, that’s how she got to the top.’
George stopped pacing and went to take a brief look at the man in the bath, who was even paler than before, although his breathing was marginally easier. ‘Don’t make problems for me, Bernard,’ he said in an offhand manner that angered me.
‘My employers…’ I stopped, counted to ten and started again. More calmly I said: ‘The sort of people who run the Secret Service have old-fashioned ideas about East European escapers having the doorkey to their employees’ homes.’
George put on his conciliatory hat. ‘I can see that. It was a terrible mistake. I’m truly sorry, Bernard.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘That means you will have to report it, eh?’
‘You’re playing with fire, George.’ I wondered if perhaps the death of his wife, Tessa, had turned his brain.
‘It’s simply that I’m not supposed to be in this jurisdiction: tax-wise. I’m in the process of losing residence. Just putting it around that I’ve been in England could cause me a lot of trouble, Bernard.’
I noted the words – jurisdiction, tax-wise. Only men like George had a call on words like that. ‘I know what you’re doing, George. You’re asking some of these roughnecks to investigate the death of your wife. That could lead to trouble.’
‘They are Poles – my people. I have to do what I can for them.’ His claim sounded hollow when pitched in that unmistakable East London accent.
‘These people can’t bring her back, George. No one can.’
‘Stop preaching at me, Bernard, please.’
‘Listen, George,’ I said, ‘your friend next door isn’t just a run-of-the-mill victim of a street mugging or a fracas in a pub. He was attacked by a professional killer. Whoever came after him was aiming his blade for an artery and knew exactly where to find the place he wanted. Only the canvas moneybelt saved him, and that was probably because it was twisted across his body at the time. I think he’s dying. He should be in an intensive-care ward, not on his way to a cosy old family doctor in Kensington. Believe me, these are rough playmates. Next time it could be you.’
I had rather hoped that this revelation might bring George to his senses, but he seemed quite unperturbed. ‘Many of these poor wretches are on the run, Bernard,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Nothing in the belt, was there? And yes, you’re right. It’s inevitable that the regime infiltrates their own spies. Black-market gangsters and other violent riffraff use our escape line. We screen them all but it takes time. This one was doubly unlucky; a really nice youngster, he wanted to help. If you could see some of the deserving cases. The youngsters… It’s heart-breaking.’
‘I can’t tell you how to run your life, George. I know you’ve always contributed generously to Polish funds and good causes for these dissidents and political refugees. But the communist government in Warsaw sees such overseas organizations as subversive. You must know that. And there is a big chance that you are being exploited by political elements without understanding what you’re doing.’
George rubbed his face. ‘He’s hurt bad, you think?’ He stroked the telephone.
‘Yes, George, bad.’
His face stiffened and he picked up the phone and called some unknown person, presumably to hurry things along. When there was no answer to his call he looked at me and said: ‘This won’t happen again, Bernard. I promise you that.’ He waited only a few minutes before trying his number again and got the busy signal. He crashed the phone down with such force that it broke. I had been crashing phones down into their cradles for years but I’d never broken one. Was it a measure of his anger, his grief, his embarrassment, or something else? He held up his hands in supplication, looked at me and smiled.
I sighed. No man chooses his brother-in-law. They are strangers society thrusts upon us to test the limits of our compassion