Operation Pax Read online

  Copyright & Information

  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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  About the Author

  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.

  Citation

  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

  Note

  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.

  Part 1

  Routh in an Infernal Region

  …involv’d

  In this perfidious fraud.

  – PARADISE LOST

  1

  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, n
ot 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.

  Of course she had swallowed it. Staggering, but they nearly all did.

  Or had she?

  Routh’s breathing quickened. After all, one day you’d be caught out. One day you’d meet a trap. More often now you met a woman who knew, who tumbled. It was because of articles in the pocket mags, because of Scotland Yard programmes on the Woman’s Hour. Then you had to smile yourself quickly out, make for another town, change for a time the thing you pretended to sell. And one day you’d meet some dim little woman who’d do better, who’d give you a cheque and then call straight round on the police. It might be the wife of a policeman. Come to think of it, there must be plenty. It might be the wife of a local detective sergeant. And perhaps the woman with the hare lip was that.

  There was a sudden cold sweat on Routh. He wrenched his eyes up from the counter. The teller had become the baldish back of a head, and blue serge trousers shiny in the beam of the bleak October sun. He was whispering into a sort of box or pen behind him. Routh heard the undistinguishable whispering and heard the tick of the big clock and heard still his heart that now had something slack and impotent in its throb like the sea idly pulsing in a cave… He knew with a quick rush of lucidity that he had lost his head. There was a sharp relief in knowing, in knowing that now he could only act out the logical consequences of panic. He knew that it was probably still true that the teller was debating whether to pay out three ten when there was only fifteen bob in the account. But he knew it was no use knowing that… And then he saw himself.

  It sometimes happened with Routh. As if a great mirror were let down from heaven he would see himself as he there and then stood. It happened to him at bad moments, mostly. Backing off a doorstep with his mouth twisted in malice, beaten by a woman that wouldn’t buy. Pawing a drab who disgusted him. Cringing in a pub before some drunken bully. And now.

  The other Routh was standing beside him, sweat on his brow and with one cheek twitching, his eyes fixed in terror on a blue serge jacket shiny at the seams. The other Routh’s left hand had gone to his mouth and furtively he was gnawing at a ragged cuticle. The boy from the good grammar school hiding behind the second rate public-school tie. The Army deserter with the Air Force moustache. The outlaw, the bandit, the lone wolf sweating into his soiled vest, having to battle with his knees, his breathing, his sphincter control in order to bring off a seventy shilling swindle.

  Rage and humiliation and naked fear swept over Routh. There was nobody on this side of the counter. He turned and ran from the bank, ran for the two-stroke round the corner.

  2

  Pulsing sturdily between his calves the worn old engine thrust the miles behind at a steady thirty-five. Suppose the bank rang up the police and told the story. That would be five minutes. The woman hadn’t been on the telephone – he had noticed that – and it would be another ten minutes before they had one of their CID men on her doorstep. Another five and he’d have the type of fraud taped and his report back at headquarters…

  But the familiar recital of dangers and chances that should have crossed and recrossed Routh’s mind like a stage army, tedious and inescapable as a chain of cigarettes, was today reluctant to march. Riding blindly across country, he had to keep coaxing it from the wings. The raddled old thoughts that ought to have cut their routine capers effortlessly before his fatigued attention had gone shy like kids being smacked and cajoled through their first turn in panto.

  Routh was frightened at this inertness of his fears. He knew that when his own arguing and reassuring voice left him other voices came at him instead – voices out of the past. Daddy’s. Mummy’s. Darling, darling Mummy… The throttle was full open already, so if they came he couldn’t get away from them that way. Suppose the bank rang up the police…

  Around Routh, this morning of an autumn that had come early held shafts of sunlight through vapour, held dark rich ploughland backed by a dozen greens turning to russet and gold. Already there was a litter and soon there would be a mush of chestnut leaves on the macadam. A leaf caught in the spokes and flipped at the mudguard like the whirr of a flushed bird. Routh rode blind, deaf. What stretched before him was not a high road but a plank, slimy and supple, across a little weir. Come on, old chap, have a go. Routh felt Mummy’s too quickly apprehensive hand tighten on his own. She could see how difficult the plank was, whereas Daddy’s eyes behind their queer pebble glasses saw only the idea of it. Again Daddy was urging him. And he was hanging back. He was hanging back because already, secretly, he had attempted the crossing and had failed. Half-way he had turned giddy and fallen. In a second he had been down in the pool – down, down, suffocating and with a roaring in his ears, as if someone had pulled the plug on him, or let him out with the bath water. An old man pottering with a fishing rod had given him a hand to the side. Probably he had been in some real danger of drowning.

  Come on, old chap. Over you go. We’ll come round by the bridge and join you. His fear was irrational. He could only get bruised and wet a second time, could do no more than make himself ridiculous. But the thought of the first time – of the moment that was like a plug pulled – was too bad. He remembered the covert and dripping slipping home, round by the canal with street boys guffawing and in through the back garden… He took a great breath, and did it. He crossed the plank as his parents watched; and turned, exalted. He expected them to wave, to move upstream to the bridge. But Daddy had laid his hand on Mummy’s shoulder to stop her. Now then back again, old chap. Daddy shouted it as if Niagara were between them. It made him sound mad. Mummy had gone pale. She was wringing her hands, mute like a silent film. And a glint from Daddy’s glasses, caught by the boy as he tried to brace himself, was like instantaneous intelligence flashed across a battlefield on a mirror. It wasn’t the burden of his own funk he must carry over the plank again. It was Daddy’s. And he knew that if he broke under it once he always would.

  There had been a man in the next field, turning a machine that chopped up turnips. He had been looking over the hedge wonderingly when Mummy came and pulled him blubbering from the grass. Routh knew now that it would have been no
good successfully making that second crossing. For there would always have been another one. That was Daddy’s madness. But on the silent walk home, as he peeped snivelling from behind Mummy’s skirts, he saw only Daddy’s cheeks held two bright red spots. And that one of the cheeks was twitching.

  3

  It was a memory that Routh had come to fear as the entrance to a long tunnel of fantasy, worn mercilessly smooth by the constant cramped transpassage of his straightened mind. The injustices, the deprivations, the slights, the cruelties leered at him from their niches. Routh cheated, scorned, mocked, ignored – he hungered after the endless images, but feared them more than he hungered.

  Always this engulfing fantasy threatened to hurl him from his safety, from his rational mind’s chosen vocation as a petty crook into some unguessable madness. To live by robbing obscure households of half a week’s pay: it was the life of measure, of dangerous pride eschewed, of due and wary regard for the gods. Routh of the indomitable will, Routh the planning animal: the danger came when these were thrust aside by the long review of Routh the victim of circumstances, Routh doomed by Daddy, Routh spitefully beaten, Routh unjustly sacked, Routh demeaned and degraded in seedy travelling companies and troops of pierrots on the sands. And as Routh recreated in himself the sense of a whole society with cruel hand outstretched and eager to pull the plug, terrifying hints of hidden and dangerous volitions rose up through his weak anger. His whole body shook like a trumpery room given over to some obscure and vicious brawl.