Second Wind Read online

  He had a ghostwriter for me, he said straightforwardly, and I agreed to meet the ghost between broadcasts in the morning.

  Later, with my grandmother as always only fitfully asleep in her airy room, Jett and I took a couple of cushions and sat, well wrapped in Edwardian-type fur-lined car rugs, on a stone seat for two in a small glass-windowed entrance porch built to keep nineteen-o-eight ladies dry from carriage to gentlemen’s beds.

  The night air felt fresh and smelled of low-tide mud. We sat close to each other for warmth and didn’t talk much. If the whole of life were simple like this. I thought, there would be peace among seagulls and no wind to speak of. I kissed Jett van Els without heeding my grandmother’s fears. and got kissed cheerfully back, and many things became understood between us in an oasis of tranquillity.

  But there’s a calm spell at the center of every hurricane. The fury of the second wind was as always round the corner.

  In the very early morning I shed my grandmother’s comfortable sofa in time to appear on her screen at breakfast, and did my best to soften the rainy news for the nation. The celebration night of the brave traitor and his low-grade explosive was going to pass as unsatisfactorily as the first, whatever I said.

  During the morning, between rueful appearances steering short of apology, I made a quick trip by bus to Kensington and rode the elevator to the seventh floor to discuss a book on depression with a ghost.

  I accepted a so-so chair and coffee with ginger snaps, listening to John Rupert’s rational plans for a book not about depressions, but about storms, which he said would sell better.

  Was he serious about a book? I asked, and he said civilly why not? Books had been written about shark’s teeth before now.

  “And incidentally,” he murmured, eating the ginger cookie set out for me, “it was ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.’ ”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Robert Browning,” he added.

  The door quietly opened, admitting an unmistakable ghost, a feeble-looking grandfather with thin white hair and strong sinews for shaking hands.

  They introduced him to me without melodrama by name as “Ghost,” no Mr.... no first name, just Ghost, and John Rupert calmly asked me to repeat what I’d told him the day before.

  “Say it all again?” I protested.

  “Say it again, but different, so while Ghost understands it for the first time, I see things more clearly.”

  I sighed. “Well then ... Say that by mistake a folder of papers has been left on a Caribbean island, and the island has no radio, no telephone, no mail service and no people ... but it does have a usable airstrip.”

  I continued with breaks for thought, and for Ghost’s assimilation of what had happened.

  “Say it is essential to retrieve the folder.”

  A break ...

  “Say there is a suitable aircraft available, but no discreet pilot, as yours has been killed in a car crash.”

  Another break ...

  “Then at a lunch party in England a pilot appears who longs to fly through the eye of a hurricane. He’s a meteorologist, and there’s a hurricane in the offing in the Caribbean—Nicky—and it is hurricane season in general. A flight through a hurricane is offered in return for a simple side trip to collect the folder of papers.”

  “Reasonable,” Ghost said.

  “Mm. The pilot took along another meteorologist friend as a navigator and general helper...”

  “And the friend was you?” John Rupert said.

  I nodded. “Our flight through the hurricane ended in the sea. The pilot was saved by helicopter, and I was thrown back onto the island by the currents. I came across the folder of letters, but I didn’t know they were important, or at least not to begin with ... They were written in many different scripts and languages.”

  “And you have them?” The ghost showed great excitement, a matter of twitches and shivers very like Oliver Quigley.

  “No.” I disappointed him. “I did read everything as best I could, but I didn’t speak any of the languages ...” I picked absentmindedly at my fingers, but I was certain about what I said: “One of the languages was Russian.”

  John Rupert, sitting on a corner of the desk and swinging a leg, interestedly asked, “So why was it Russian? And how did you know?”

  I explained. “There’s a letter and a number combination that jumps off the page at anyone with the slightest bit of scientific knowledge, and it is U-235. On one of those foreign language pages, that combination was written Y-235. and that symbol Y is Russian for uranium.”

  I drew Y-235 to show them and said. “That sort of uranium has been enriched and condensed from U-238 by a process called sieving or gas diffusion. Pu-239 is enriched plutonium Pu-240. They are the materials for nuclear weapons.”

  They asked with frowns for more.

  “Starting from U-235 as a fact”—I smiled faintly—“either that same letter and numbers combination, or that of Pu-239, reappeared somewhere in different scripts on every page in the folder. If I could guess at understanding, I’d say that what I’ve thought of as correspondence were definitely also lists. Lists in Greek and German and Arabic and Russian, and probably Hebrew. As for the others ... I didn’t know enough, but some of the other numbers had different appearances and might have been dates or prices.”

  “Lists ... Lists of what, exactly?”

  “Lists of ingredients of nuclear explosive devices. They are, aren’t they, the ultrasensitive package you were talking about?”

  They were unready to commit themselves.

  I said, “As far as I could understand those pages, I could see they were a sort of shopping list. Some of them stated what fissile material was available, and where. And some of them stated what was wanted. If those pages are lists of goods wanted and goods for sale. it means the Unified Trading Company are in essence middlemen.”

  There was a short silence. Neither Ghost nor John Rupert ridiculed the notion, so I went on. “There’s a world shortage of many types of fissile material—that is, the wherewithal of making nuclear bombs. And there’s a world glut of legitimate sovereign states and general brutish terrorists who know how to make them. They’re not extraordinarily difficult to construct. Only there’s—thank God—not enough enriched uranium and plutonium to go round. There’s a world shortage, as I said.

  “Those letters in that package, I’m as sure as one can be, are notes of what’s now out on the market. A high proportion of the world’s bomb-making capacity has been locked up in Russia since the end of the Cold War. The old Soviet bloc don’t want the dangerous makings scattered about any more than we do, and they guard them carefully, but there are thieves and schemers everywhere. I’d guess if anyone like you managed to put the Unified Trading Company out of business there would soon be someone else taking their place.”

  “One less is always significant,” Ghost said primly.

  He had pale gray eyes reflecting gray threatening cloud from the skylight. He hadn’t the vigor. I reckoned, to write a bounce-you-out-of-your-seat book about storms.

  “Are you saying,” John Rupert inquired, “that you believe there will be uncountable outfits similar to the Unified Trading Company, acting as middlemen, and I suppose raking off a huge commission?”

  “I’ve no idea how many,” I said. “I forecast the weather. I got involved in the uranium business by accident, and I want out.”

  My protest fell on stony ground and was ignored.

  “All those letters in the folder will soon he out of date:” I pointed out. ”If they were inventories. if they were putting people who had access to U-235 in touch with people who could afford it ... well. things will change in six months’ time.”

  Ghost thinly smiled. “We are satisfied you saw the prime up-to-date collection of—shall we say—goods available. I think, although we usually operate on the need to know principle, we sometimes don’t tell people things it turns out they vitally did need to know, so what
I am going to ask you. and perhaps tell you, may or may not be of help to you. Am I clear?”

  As mud, I thought. I looked at my watch. Buses were erratic anyway on busy shopping mornings, and it was raining. I would just run, I thought. Poor old feet.

  “Don’t worry about the time,” John Rupert said. “I’ll send you back to the BBC in a car.”

  Ghost said, “Think. Please concentrate. What we quite urgently need most from that package are the names of those who want and those who have. Can you remember any of them?”

  I was afraid I could remember only a part of one.

  Anything, it seemed, would be better than nothing.

  “Then,” I said, “one of the headings contained the word Hippostat.” I spelled it for them. “It might mean racecourse, and it might not.”

  “It might,” Ghost nodded. “Have you any idea where that whole package is now?”

  Clear and bright in my memory was an image of Michael Ford walking back from the second thick-walled hut carrying the Geiger counter in one hand and the folder in the other. He had taken them into the aircraft, and there they stayed.

  Equally sharp was the awareness of the care Michael Ford had taken not to put an early end to my days. Or maybe it had been Amy, who’d kept me alive with the bandages. Or maybe even Robin, the round one with brains.

  I was behaving ambivalently when I answered Ghost truthfully, and felt guilty for it.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “where the package is now.”

  I had some sort of fumbling idea of persuading the group members to give up their habit—a bit like smoking—just more deadly. I hadn’t thought everything through beyond my own salvation.

  John Rupert, vaguely disappointed with what he rightly judged, I saw, to be a last-minute withdrawal of wholeheartedness, kept his own promise and beckoned up a car and driver to return me to Wood Lane.

  In between afternoon forecasts I got through to him on the phone and found him polite but minus his earlier zeal.

  He said, “Ghost believes you changed sides in midstream. I’d like to know why.”

  “Some of the Traders could easily have put me in a coffin. I remembered that they didn’t.”

  “It’s an old dilemma,” he said in a tired voice. “If you believe in a cause, do you kill your friend who doesn’t?”

  I said slowly, “No.”

  “Remember our man from Mexico. Remember the alligators. He got no mercy. When you’re ready, call me again ... and don’t leave it too late.”

  “I’ll tell you now ...” I began, stopped. began again, “If you’re interested yet ... about the radioactivity. The alpha particles on Trox Island.”

  His voice came to life a bit. He said, “I did ask my children about that yesterday evening, and of course you were right, they had studied radioactivity in school.”

  “Mm.” I said. “But the thirty or so people who lived on Trox Island didn’t know you can safely make a Geiger counter sound as if it’s busting its guts. They heard the frantically fast clicks and they were told the appropriate story ... panic, everyone, those fancy mushrooms are radioactive and there’s radon gas pouring out of the ground beneath the houses, but we, your benefactors, the Unified Trading Company, will guarantee you won’t be contaminated yourselves by radiation, only the actual buildings and the mushrooms, and we will send an excellent boat to take you all to safety.”

  “Do you mean the Trading Company deliberately persuaded everyone into leaving the island?”

  I smiled. “They couldn’t leave fast enough. Radioactivity is scary because you can’t see it or feel it. That’s why people tend to think it’s more dangerous than it really is. But they all in the end will be reassured, as none of them will show any signs of radiation sickness.”

  John Rupert thanked me, but still coolly, for the Geiger-Müller road show. “And I suppose you know,” he said, “the big question it still leaves unanswered?”

  I nodded over the phone. “Why,” I inquired, “did the Traders want the island to themselves?”

  8

  The tiring evening ended at last in clearing skies, and devoted enduring fireworks fanatics let off rainbow-colored pop-pop sparkling starbursts in soggily dripping back gardens.

  I knew my grandmother and Jett would both be asleep when I finally left work. I couldn’t ask refuge for a second night on the sofa, anyway. One night was succor; a second, indulgence. My grandmother had never believed in lengthy bouts of bleeding heart.

  I walked the half mile from the BBC towards my home, towards attic, telescope, chronometer and futon, deeply breathing the damp night air and promising myself an absence of November fifth on future calendars.

  When I neared my doorstep, midnight or not, there was agitation on my pager, which buzzed in the waist pocket of my pants; a tremor rather than a noise, owing to my frequent presence in silence-demanding places. Late hour regardless, Belladonna answered my call-back with relief and my “Where are you?” inquiry with a giggle.

  “In George Loricroft’s bedroom. Don’t tell Kris.”

  “Is there a Mrs. Loricroft there, perhaps?”

  “You’re such a spoilsport, Perry,” Bell grumbled. “Her name is Glenda and she wants to talk to you.”

  Glenda Loricroft. dimly remembered from that fateful Sunday lunch as a shiny blonde in a pale blue sweater that stretched across the front, had a voice that Lancashire lasses would have felt at home with. Her George, she told me, had gone off to Baden-Baden, or so he said, and she wanted to know what the weather was like there, please luv.

  “Give me Bell,” I asked, and wanted to know why I should go back into the Weather Center on such a hunt on such a night.

  “Perry, be your age!” Bell said. “Glenda thinks George is having it off with an undeclared fräulein. If I give you date and time and place, could you tell her whether the actual meshed with what her lover-boy declared?”

  “No, Bell, it’s a nonstarter. Impossible. All he has to say is that he doesn’t remember or was fast asleep.”

  “Glenda says he’s never where he says he will be. Tonight he’s supposed to be in Baden-Baden for the races, but tomorrow he won’t know it’s been snowing.”

  I said, “Stop it, Bell. Get Kris to do it. I’m asleep on my feet.”

  “Kris won’t do a thing. He just talks about trains.”

  In alarm I said, “Where is he? Why is he talking about trains?”

  “Something about fuel switches,” Bell said lightly. “I don’t understand him. You’re the only one who follows his mind.”

  “Well ... find him.”

  The urgency in my voice got through to her suddenly.

  “He’s not lost!” she exclaimed.

  “Then where is he?”

  “He said he was up on your roof.”

  I went through the house in dismay and out into the cold little patch of wintry grass at the back and looked up, and there he was, sitting astride the vaulted roof of slates and leaning against a dead chimney of crumbling brick.

  “Climb down,” I called. “I can’t catch you.”

  “You can see fireworks all over London from up here,” he yelled. “Come up.”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “George Loricroft isn’t in Baden-Baden,” Kris intoned, “and Oliver Quigley didn’t turn up in Berlin or Hamburg, and I bet my future father-in-law chickened out of Cologne.”

  “What are you talking about’?” I shouted up.

  “Robin Darcy is in Newmarket.”

  I could still hear Bell’s voice distantly on the telephone, so I put the receiver to my mouth and asked her if she’d heard what Kris said.

  “He said Robin Darcy is here in Newmarket, and yes, he is, he’s staying at the Bedford Arms. What of it? When he’s in England on business he often comes here to see Dad. They’ll be going to Doncaster races tomorrow. It’s the last meeting of the main Flat season. Half Newmarket will be going. My boss George has a runner for my father in the November Handicap, the big ra
ce of the day, and there aren’t any races tomorrow at Baden-Baden, the whole thing’s rubbish.”

  “He’ll be home for breakfast,” I said soothingly, which raised a wail from Glenda and an accusation of heartlessness from Bell.

  Enough, I thought. I said, “Bell and Glenda, please get off my phone and Kris, please get off my roof, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.”

  Incredibly, there was silence. I went indoors and up to my attic for hours of solid sleep and woke early to find Kris yawning in my kitchen alcove and pouring Thai curry sauce onto tofu, his latest disgusting obsession.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “How did you get in?”

  He looked pained. “You gave me a key last Christmas.”

  I thought back. “That was for waiting for the refrigerator repair man.”

  “Do you want it back?” Kris read labels on bottles of chili oil he took from a paper carrier. He’d been Thai-food shopping yesterday for that and lemon grass and dried spices, he said.

  I said I supposed he could keep the key. Also he could use my shower (he had done so: my towels were wet) and watch my TV (now on. but mute). Making the usual dash to the door on the way to put together the Saturday morning program—including a summing up of the weather prospects for Saturday sport (dry, cold and sunny for racing at Doncaster. blustery showers for a soccer match at Wembley)—I caught a glimpse of Kris marking his choices on my newspaper’s racing pages and starting to fill in my crossword.

  I shrugged into my warm padded jacket and with temporary benevolence, as I opened my front door to depart, I asked him with restraint merely to lock up when he left.

  “By the way,” he said, “I looked up your schedule. You’re free today after the sports forecast. I’m flying to Doncaster races. There’s an airfield next to the racecourse. Will you come?”

  I closed my door on his question mark and started down the stairs. If I didn’t go he would believe it was because of wheels up and an empty fuel tank and, given his seesaw psyche, that imagined adverse judgment would convince him I despised him and that he had no friends. The answer to “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was yes, unfortunately, all too often.