'48

My own exhaustion smothered the impulse no sooner than it was roused (besides, I hadn't forgotten Stern and why I wanted him here) and I kept going, heading towards the staircase beside the elevator.

It was a sluggish climb and by the time we reached the third floor our line was strung out. Without waiting for the others I left the stairway to walk down a long gloomy corridor, coming to a halt and waiting for the others to catch up only when I reached the sharp left turn at its end.

The German was the last one to reach me and briefly I wondered why. He was much stronger than the others, so had he taken time out to explore possible escape routes while trailing behind, investigating rooms close to the stairway on the landings we passed, looking for doors to the fire escape? What the hell - he had a right. None of it would help him, though, not when the moment came.

I turned my back on them and unlocked the door to Suite 318-319.

8

TO THEM IT MUST have looked like an Aladdin's Cave - an Aladdin's Cave of junk, canned food, cardboard boxes, and weapons, all kinds of stuff that came in handy when you lived in a city where shopping was free but nobody produced any more; and where blood-bandits roamed the empty streets, so that shopping was sometimes a risky business.

My suite in the Savoy had lost some of its elegance because of the clutter, no doubt about that, and there was a whole lot less room than when I'd first moved in. We were crowded inside a tiny vestibule between the bedroom and sitting room, the jumble spilling into both, and to our right was a marble bathroom with a stirrup pump that fed from the half-filled tub standing in the doorway in case of sudden fire (what good the pump would do in a real emergency was debatable, but it might at least buy me time to escape into the hallway). The pastel-coloured walls of both rooms were easily overwhelmed by the flashy labels of canned foods and mixed jars, and only the king-size bed was free of clutter in the maze that was my refuge; the mess was everywhere, things piled high on easy chairs and mirrored dressing table, a selection of handguns and cartons of ammo on the lounger, a shotgun leaning against the writing desk. Boxes full of items I couldn't even remember poked out of the half-open closet. A radio that would never broadcast again stood on a small occasional table by an armchair heaped with magazines and books, and on the fancy Louis-Seize escritoire was my wind-up gramophone, a stack of dusty records next to it, Bing Crosby still on the turntable.

The two girls had already wandered into the sitting room and were gawking about - ration-book kids in an overstocked candy store. I didn't know what they'd been living on the past three years, but from the wonder in their eyes I guessed their cuisine had been pretty dull. Muriel glanced back at me, gave me a smile, then went to a cabinet set against the near wall where a mountain of canned stuff was piled high.

She picked one can out and the mountain threatened to topple; it steadied itself, though, and she read the can's label.

'Creamola Custard Pudding,' she said in awe.

Cissie giggled and put a finger against another label. 'Fancy Quality Fish Roll,' she read aloud, and her interest instantly moved on. 'Mrs Peek's Puddings. Batchelors Peas. Oh wow, peaches...'

'Ostermilk for Babies?' Muriel said questioningfy from another stack.

'Look.' Cissie again. 'He's got coffee. Three whole bottles of Camp Coffee.'

'Handy eggs.' Muriel. 'Ugh, dried whole egg.'

'All I can get hold of,' I put in, beginning to enjoy their enjoyment

'Spam. Oh dear, lots of Spam.' Muriel sounded disappointed, but I could tell she was joshing.

'And Weetabix,' said Cissie, a grin spread all over her face as she scanned the rest of the room. 'Bovril, Ovaltine, Peek Frean biscuits, marmalade. My oh my, you're determined not to go hungry, Yank.' She drew in a sharp breath. 'Are those fresh vegetables over there?' she asked, pointing.

'A week or so old,' I assured her. 'Grew 'em myself on one of my allotments. It wasn't easy after last winter.'

She was already picking up potatoes and examining each one individually. 'After everyone had gone or died at the sanatorium we tried to grow our own, but somehow it never worked out. I suppose we'd both have been useless as land girls, but that's the problem when one of you has been brought up in a London pub and the other's the daughter of a lord.' She indicated her friend, and it was easy to figure which one was the lord's daughter.

'Didn't you get supplies from the nearest town?' I asked, surprised.

'We were too scared to go far,' replied Muriel, her interest still on the gold mine of food around her.

'The nearest houses were the furthest we strayed. Mostly we ate from the centre's own stores. We were afraid we'd catch some disease off the dead, or even be infected with the Blood Death itself. Nobody knew anything, you see, not even the scientists in charge of research. Are those cabbages I see?'

She hurried to another box on the floor. 'Oh, and Brussels sprouts, and onions. You must have worked hard to have achieved all this, Mr Hoke.'

'Just Hoke,' I told her, then shook my head. 'All I've done is kept a few things going. It isn't much, considering.'

'May I?' Stern had followed us through to the sitting room and had lifted a single pack of Camels from a carton on a straight-backed chair.

I nodded and he quickly broke open the pack. He put the cigarette between his lips, then searched around for matches.

'Over there,' I pointed to the mantelpiece above an extinct electric fire.

As he took a box of Swan Vestas from my stockpile of matches, he studied himself in the dust-dulled mirror over the mantelpiece and frowned. He was filthy, but it must have come as a slight shock. Maybe he'd always thought his kind didn't pick up the dirt like the rest of us.

'I need to wash,' he said, more to his own reflection than to me. 'You say there is plenty of water in this hotel?' Now he was looking at me, but only through the mirror.

'The Savoy has its own artesian wells, but the pumps are out of action. The tanks are still pretty full, though.'

'Me first,' Cissie insisted quickly. 'I can't go another minute stinking like this.'

I guessed stinking wasn't a word Muriel used a lot, especially when it applied to her own body, but she was nodding in agreement 'Yes, I'd like to get cleaned up too. Then perhaps we can enjoy some of this lovely food; I'm beginning to feel quite faint and it's not just from fatigue.'

I addressed them all: 'You're in a building full of bathrooms, so you won't have to take turns. But stick to this floor, don't go wandering oft'

I noticed the German, now puffing away at his cigarette, had strolled over to the Ml carbine leaning against the writing desk and my hand went inside my jacket when I thought he was going to pick it up.

Instead he passed by the rifle and went to the tall window overlooking the park and River Thames below. The drapes were open, but a lace curtain covered the glass.

When he raised a hand to draw the lace aside, I said, 'Leave it alone. I close the curtains at night if I'm using light-' I indicated the candles and lamps set around the room '- and in the daytime the netting is always kept in place.'

'In case someone looks up and wonders?' he mused, and although I couldn't see his face, I knew there was a half-smile there. 'Quite unlikely, wouldn't you say?'

'Unlikely or not, I don't take chances.'

'I could do with a stiffener.' Potter had sat himself down on the edge of the sofa and was eyeing the array of bottles crowding the low coffee table in front of him. Gin, vodka, and several brands of whisky -

Famous Grouse, Haig, Johnnie Walker, and even good ol' Jack Daniel's, as well as bourbon and rye - all of them severely rationed during the war, but not nowadays. Hell, there was even the Savoy's own special blend to drink, a Scotch as fine as any I'd tasted, and I'd tasted a lot during my lonely nights in this city. Then there were the wines - hocks, moselles (yeah, German, old stock, I guess), clarets and burgundies, even some vintage stuff -sharing space on the edge and underneath the table with cartons of cigarettes - Lucky Strike, Camel, Wills Capstan, Churchmans No 1, and some I hadn't even taken note of. Genocide had turned me into a heavy smoker as well as an inebriate.

'Help yourself,' I said to Potter as his roving gaze took in all that was on offer. 'I'll get you a clean glass.'

'No need, son, no need.' He gave a satisfied grunt and reached for the Grouse. 'Plannin to drink an'

smoke yerself to death, was yer?'

He didn't wait for a reply, nor did I bother with one. His plump fist closed over the neck of the bottle and he gave the top a twist

'Yer know, I was always scared to come inta the Savoy after those last V2s dropped.' He paused to hold the bottle up and examined the golden liquid before he drank, the toose cap in the palm of his other hand. 'Even though I'd seen you comin and goin a few times, I was still frightened of what I might find in

'ere. I coulda raided the American Bar easy enough if I'd had the spunk to come inside, but nah, somehow it wasn't in me.'

He took his first swallow, the whisky glugging into his throat

'You weren't afraid of entering the Civil Defence shelter,' I reminded him.

'That was different. I knew most of them people. I wasn't as funny about it. But this lot in here - toffs, rich people, even some of our own leaders, members of the War Office an' that - well, I didn't feel it was my place to intrude.' He took another, longer, swig from the bottle, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and eyed me again. 'If yer know what I mean.'

I didn't think I did, but I was in no mood to think about it. I faced the others. 'You can have your own separate rooms along this hallway, but don't go any further. All the suites on this side of the third floor interconnect, though the doors are locked right now.'

'You are a cautious man, Hoke.' Stern had remained by the window and the light shining through the nets revealed how spoilt his tweed jacket and pants, so neat and clean when we'd first met, had become. A sleeve and a pocket were torn, his shirt collar crumpled; yet as he drew on the cigarette, his arm across his chest, hand holding his other raised elbow, he still had that air of superiority about him, that icy arrogance we'd come to expect from the Master Race. Movies and propaganda had told us this was how they were, how it was part of their Aryan nature, and I'd never doubted it for one moment

'A cautious man.. .' he went on, and I wondered if it was mockery I saw again in those colourless eyes

'... yet today you were almost caught by those Blackshirts, as you call them.'

'Sometimes it happens,' I said by way of explanation. Going to the coffee table, I picked up a Johnnie Walker, one-quarter full, its cap missing. 'But it won't happen again,' I added before taking a long, long drink.

That evening, using two of my three portable gas cookers, I made them all a meal. It was only Spam, tinned peas and boiled potatoes, followed by peaches and custard, but they made ecstatic sounds as they wolfed it down.

Earlier I'd shown them other rooms they could use as their own sleeping quarters, the two girls moving in to a suite next door to mine, Potter and Stern in separate rooms further down the corridor, the old warden at the end of the line. I kept all the interconnecting doors locked. They were surprised to find that these rooms were used as store rooms as well, although none of them was as cluttered as my own suite, but there were no complaints. Not that I cared one way or the other. I left them to settle in and went back to my rooms where I threw off my filthy, ripped clothes and showered - the reduced water pressure still allowed a Niagara Falls soaking under those big Savoy shower heads. Although goosebump cold, the water freshened me up a whole lot. A fast shave was followed by some attention to my injuries.

The wound where the bullet had passed through the shoulder of my leather jacket was only skin deep and iodine (Christ, that hurt) with padding held in place by sticky plaster took care of it. My ankle was puffy and soft, but I knew no bones were broken, so the swelling would go down within a day or so if I bandaged it tight. The bruising on the same leg was just beginning to show through and was already looking ugly; it stretched from calf to mid-thigh and the muscles underneath were stiff and painful. For a while walking would be a problem, but no big deal. Cuts and grazes were soon dealt with and the rest of the bruises could take care of themselves. My hair was singed - the front looked like scorched corn -

and the skin on my face and the backs of my hands was puckered and flaky; likewise, though, no serious damage. Oh yeah, and the knuckles of my right hand were scraped raw. All things considered, I'd been lucky that day - more lucky than I deserved - and I'd also been taught a lesson. Lately I'd become complacent, figured myself too smart to be nailed by the crazies. Well, I'd been wrong. Stupid and wrong. And the booze was taking over. Like I'd told the German, it wouldn't happen again.

Before I pulled on chinos and T-type shirt (Lord knows why, but I'd stuck with military underwear, and this undershirt with short sleeves had been washed a hundred or more times) I checked all the guns in the room, making sure they were oiled and loaded, even though they were always kept that way. Still shaky after nearly being caught out that morning, I guess.

Taking the .45 from its jacket holster and tucking it into my waistband, I left the suite and limped barefoot through the third-floor corridors and hallways, checking stairwells and windows all round the building. Because the Savoy was really in two parts, I couldn't look over the main drag outside, the Strand, without going down and up again, but that didn't bother me. I was certain the hotel was secure, otherwise there'd have been a reception committee waiting for us when we returned. I scouted the place pretty well though, and didn't go back to my rooms until I was satisfied there was no hostile incursion.

Ankle throbbing like hell along with other parts of me - the bruise over my chest felt like a thick sheet of lead had been bolted there - I poured myself a whisky, using a glass this time, but still taking it raw. It did me fine.

Still tired, but feeling a little better, I washed some glasses and the accumulation of plates and dishes I'd collected over time in the bathroom sink, then began to prepare chow for myself and my unwelcome guests. I think I would have slept twenty-four hours solid if I'd closed my eyes, so I didn't allow it. I kept going because that was the only thing to do, and besides, I was so hungry a horse would've only made first course.

The German showed up first, politely rapping on the door and waiting for me to open it. He'd found fresh duds from somewhere - white shirt, dark slacks, but the same brogues he'd been wearing that morning - and if they looked a little snug on him, it didn't matter, he still wore them well. He'd shaved too, and his hair was slicked back with water so that it looked shiny, kind of sleek. Although he looked nothing like the German actor Conrad Veidt, the image kept coming back to me; maybe it was his manner, stiff, watchful, arrogant, and yeah, even charming in a snake-like way. I wasn't gonna admit it to myself then, but all that propaganda had worked on me as it had on most people on our side of the conflict, and I didn't want to be persuaded otherwise. Hatred has its own fodder, and I was a pig for it.

Inviting him in, I told him to help himself to a drink. He opened a bottle of wine.

We hardly spoke a word to each other, but I felt his eyes on me as I got on with cooking and he sipped the wine. Albert Potter appeared next, shuffling in without announcement, still in his blue overalls, helmet tucked under his arm. Making straight for the coffee table, he poured himself the same brand of hooch as before. The conversation didn't exactly flow even then, mainly because of the tension between myself and the German.

The girls arrived ten minutes later, both of them looking a whole lot prettier than when they'd emerged from the tunnels. The wife of whoever had once occupied the suite next door had great taste in fashion, and it looked like the husband hadn't been mean with her dress allowance. The girls' outfits were simple but classy.

Muriel wore a light green knee-length skirt, cream square-shouldered blouse tucked into the waist, the ensemble a little looser than Cissie's who was, well, a little more upholstered. Don't get me wrong - both girls were slim, but Cissie had been given more curves. Her pleated skirt fell just below the knees and she wore a matching jacket, despite the heat (I think she wanted to make the most of what she'd found in the closets), with a white blouse underneath. Neither one wore stockings, though I was willing to bet the previous tenant had plenty - that was their one concession to the climate, I assumed - and both balanced on high heels that did a lot for the shape of their legs. I had to admit it was swell to see the female form looking so goddamn good again, although it went no further than that for me. Not at that time, anyway.

Their hair gleamed from fresh grooming, Muriel's light-brown locks curling round one cheek, Cissie's darkly vibrant curls resting over her shoulders. The thin scar line across her face was barely noticeable as she smiled at us three men.

The German, who'd cleared an easy chair for himself when he'd entered the room, stood to attention. 'It is wonderful to know that such beauty still exists,' he said to them with oily sincerity.

Cissie ignored him, following the warden's example by heading straight for the cocktail bar - the booze-laden coffee table where Potter was holding fort. He tipped his glass at her in greeting.

'Give me something strong, long and life-preserving,' she begged. 'Something I can regret tomorrow.'

'Well there's gin, but I can't see no tonic,' said Potter, lifting bottles and scouring the collection in front of him.

She looked at me accusingly and I said lamely, 'There's no call for it'

'All right,' she said. 'Open a tin of peaches and use the juice. I'm a girl who's used to roughing it'

For the first time that day I grinned. I quickly found the right can and punched a hole in its top with the opener, then handed it to Potter, who'd already worked on the gin.

'Ice would have been perfect,' Cissie complained jokingly, 'but I suppose the Savoy isn't what it used to be. Mu, I expect it's champagne for you?'

It was as if a shadow had darkened her friend's face. 'A glass of wine will do,' she responded quietly, and I remembered she and her father had toasted her mother's memory with champagne in this very hotel.

'Vino it is,' piped Potter, picking up the bottle already opened by Stern. 'And a very sensible choice, if I may say so. Leave the hard stuff to reprobates like me.'

'And me,' piped Cissie.

They drank and watched me cooking over the small stoves on the floor, no one saying anything for a while. I think that initial coolness between us all was due to something more than just unfamiliarity: I think it was because there was no trust between us yet, despite what we'd been through together that morning.

Even though we were the survivors of a scourged world, we weren't sure of each other, we weren't comfortable in each other's presence. It was different between the two girls - they were already friends -

but the rest of us were strangers. Heck, one was even an alien, a Kraut at that. Just sharing the same blood type wasn't enough, not by a long chalk. Part of the problem, for the girls I mean, was that in a depleted society, our gender roles took on a whole new significance, and they weren't quite ready for that just yet. None of us were. And to add to the girls' discomfort, they couldn't be sure if any of the men they were with were quite sane.

The ice only began to break when I started serving up the food.

9

THE INFORMATION didn't come out like this; it was in no sense as concise and dispassionate. The evening developed in its own easy way, you see, after a while people just gabbing when they felt like it, their bellies a little fuller, their heads a little mellowed by the booze; a person could be maudlin one minute, cold-blooded the next, emotional after that, a real mixture of sentiment and hard fact. Regret figured a lot, nostalgia for the good things now gone even more; but grief, having had three years to settle, was pretty much subdued. Here's what most of that evening's parley amounted to.

First Cissie, her whole name Cicely Rebecca Briley. Like me, she was of mixed parentage, her father English, mother Jewish. Her folks had run a public house in Islington and she had helped out behind the bar (illegally, of course) until old enough to find herself proper employment, one that might help the war effort. That was back in '41 and she was sixteen at the time. With most of the able menfolk off fighting the war, the country was crying out for women to fill the men's jobs, so Cissie began her working life on a lathe in an engineering company.

On the same day the factory was bombed and a flying piece of metal scythed across her face, her parents' pub was demolished by another pilotless plane - these were the doodlebugs, the flying bombs, the first German V1s to be used on England and Belgium in June '44. Henry Briley was dead when the Heavy Rescue squad dug him out of the rubble, but his wife, Rachel, Cissie's mother, survived almost another three days with both legs and pelvis crushed, and one arm missing. Cissie's stay in hospital was only overnight - beds were needed for the seriously ill or injured - and when she left there was no home to go to. It took her two days to locate the hospital they'd taken her mother to, and by that time Rachel was dead. Home gone, parents gone, job gone, there wasn't much left for Cissie. She moved in with relatives and joined the ambulance service, channelling all her anger and grief into the work and quickly realizing hers was not the only tragedy of this devastating war. Within a year and with Hitler losing, the V2s replaced the V1s; and then everything changed.

Naturally she couldn't figure out why everybody around her was dropping dead even though the rocket bombs were falling in other parts of the city; but then, nobody could at first, not even the military or the government itself. All hell had broken loose, but the panic was short-lived, as short-lived as the people themselves. It was horrific, a hideous nightmare, the deaths so sudden and so gruesome to watch; and not knowing if they were going to be next added to everyone's terror. Soon, because Cissie remained healthy while everyone else was dead or dying, she was taken into hospital and blood-tested. Before she knew what was happening she was in the back of a truck with a bunch of other ABneg blood types being driven down to the special sanatorium in Dorset, and it was in the truck that she made friends with Muriel Drake, a fellow passenger and blood kind.

All manner of tests were carried out on the ABnegs at the sanatorium, but still no scientist or medical officer could figure out why they were immune from whatever it was that had been released by the V2

rockets. To make progress towards a solution even more difficult, those very same investigators were falling dead themselves, and it was only when a couple of medics with the immune blood type were found that any sustained research was achieved. Another problem was that it was only in the last decade that truly extensive research was being carried out on blood groupings, so very little was already known.

Now they were learning fast, but it was too late.

It seemed the disease, gas, poison, virus - the military still didn't know what had been inside those last V2s - worked on the blood system, stimulating the chemical reaction that caused coagulation so that, within minutes in most cases, the blood hardened inside the large veins of the bigger muscles, this leading to - and it was Muriel who remembered the term - thromboembolism. The veins in the heart, lungs, brain, as well as other less life-threatening areas, were completely blocked, while minor veins became engorged. It meant that because of the blockages, the excessive free-flowing blood had nowhere to go and nowhere to return to - Venous occlusions', Muriel called that effect - so massive swellings and leakages occurred all over the body. The cramping pains victims suffered because of this were excruciating, rendering many unconscious before death itself claimed them.

So, they realized anti-coagulant therapy would be ineffective, because it would only promote further haemorrhaging, and clotting drugs would only intensify the thrombosis. And they still hadn't discovered why AB negative blood refused to react to the Blood Death, why they themselves, and their human guinea pigs, were immune. You have to remember that all the advanced nations of the world were desperately working on a solution, an antidote, any kind of cure, the Allied countries keeping in close contact with one another, but none so far had come up with an answer. Time had run out swiftly, and eventually the remaining doctors in the sanatorium ran out too. One day they just walked, leaving no note, no explanations, no excuses. They'd realized it was hopeless.

For the guinea pigs left behind it was almost a relief. No more tests, no more blood drained from their bodies to be taken away in glass tubes, no more tissue samples cut out, no more needle jabs - and no more vanishing into the sanatorium's special, restricted wing where, it was believed but never confirmed, because no patient ever came back, operations were performed on the ABnegs (the rest suspected that experimental blood transfusions were being carried out). When those principal doctors fled, all order went with them. First the soldiers guarding the 'inmates' - no ABnegs had stayed on voluntarily after the first week - had absconded, soon followed by all the remaining staff and researchers. These people knew by then that death was hanging over every one of them, and they could think of better places to be when it happened.

Soon after, the guinea pigs, about a hundred in all, went their separate ways. Cissie and Muriel decided to stick together.

Muriel Drake was from a higher branch of society than Cissie, although even as a daughter of a lord she had been treated no differently from anybody else at the sanatorium (panic is classless, I guess). For whatever reasons, the two girls got along and did a lot to keep up each other's morale in those terrible days. Like everybody else, they'd lost family and friends, and at the sanatorium they never knew when an amiable nurse or guard was going to cash in their chips right in front of them. Now that the place was emptying fast, they made their plans together.

Muriel's mother, Lady Daphne Drake, had been struck down in the first year of the war, but not by anything the mad Fuhrer had sent over. A No 14 bus had knocked down Lady Daphne as she'd tried to cross Piccadilly Circus during the Blackout, after she'd enjoyed Jack Hulbert singing for the conga and outwitting Nazi spies in Under Your Hat, the bus killing her instantly and leaving Muriel pretty much alone with her father, Lord Montague Drake - Muriel's two older brothers, who had joined the Forces as soon as war was declared and much against their father's wishes, were in other parts fighting the Germans, one with the navy, the other with an RAF squadron based on Malta. Muriel had not heard from either of her brothers since the Blood Death outbreak and, not knowing if they shared the same blood type as her, assumed they were both dead. Although the family home was in Hampshire, most of the time she had lived in their Kensington apartment; at seventeen she had joined the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and was soon serving as a subaltern. Nothing heroic in that, she'd assured us: it was a natural role for any patriot. And hadn't Princess Elizabeth herself joined the ATS just before her nineteenth birthday?

On the day the first Blood Death V2s had rained down, Muriel had been having lunch with her father at Simpson's-in-the-Strand when the waiter, who had just served them with mulligatawny soup, which was to be followed by cold roast gosling and salad - strange, she had told us, how she had never forgotten that day's menu despite the horror that had accompanied the lunch - had keeled over onto their table, his skin turning blue, the veins in his hands and temples protruding as if about to burst His eyes had started to bleed.

Muriel, not unreasonably, had proceeded to scream the place down, while her father, who was attempting to help the distraught waiter by opening his shirt collar so that he could breathe more easily, suddenly clutched at his own heart. Her attention now solely on her father, Muriel hadn't noticed that virtually everyone else in the restaurant was going through the same paroxysms, and when Lord Drake's skin began turning blue, his hands and cheeks ulcerating at an unbelievable rate, his veins swelling like the waiter's, she fainted. When she had eventually come round again, eveiy person who had not fled the restaurant, including her father, was dead. She had run out into the street, out into a dying city, and only later did it occur to her that she hadn't even heard the bombs drop.

Like Cissie, she was rounded up within days, blood-tested, then taken down to the Dorset sanatorium.

Even while this secret medical establishment was slowly being abandoned, she, Cissie and a few others had been reluctant to leave the security it offered, afraid of what they might find in the strange new world outside. But three years was a long time to be cooped up anywhere; also, rations were finally running low. Neither desperation nor bravery took them back to the capital though: it was homesickness that had done that. And as they'd driven one of the few vehicles left behind at the sanatorium through the country lanes they had come upon Wilhelm Stern.

As we listened to the German tell his story, the sun sinking low over the Thames outside, flushing the walls of the suite a soft red and deepening the shadows, it seemed to me he was a little light on detail.

Sure, he told it convincingly, but there was something about the guy that made me unwilling to trust him.

The fact that I still regarded him as the enemy had a lot to do with it, right? Yeah, no doubt about that.

But he'd said something back there in the tunnel that firmed up my suspicions.

That evening Stern said he was a navigator on one of the Luftwaffe's medium-sized bombers, a Heinkel He 111, which had been dropping mines along the east coast of England in April 1940, when the plane had been hit by ack-ack. With his clothes on fire he'd parachuted from the blazing bomber, and the rush of air had extinguished the flames, although not before his back and neck had been severely burned. The He 111 had crashed at Clacton, a few miles away, killing (he'd learned later) two civilians and injuring a hundred and fifty others, and he and the rest of the crew were captured and shipped off to Island Farm POW Camp down in Wales. That, he told us with an almost apologetic smile, was the extent of his personal war on Britain, although in March '45, a week or so before the fatal V2s were launched, he and sixty-five other German POWs had escaped from the camp (I vaguely remembered reading something about the breakout in the British newspapers at the time). It was while Stern, who had become separated from his Kameraden, was trying to make it to the Welsh coastline, where he hoped to steal a boat that would take him across to neutral Ireland, that the world about him changed.

The dead were everywhere and he couldn't comprehend why. Deciding to keep away from the towns -

now for two reasons: as far as he knew his country was still at war with Britain and America, and he was still a prisoner on the run; and he thought the plague that had killed everyone, including most animals he'd come upon, must be contagious - he scavenged from farmhouses and empty cottages. He survived almost a year that way until the harsh winter of '46 forced him to venture into a town.

He told us he must have gone into shock because of what he found there, since he'd lost all memory of those first weeks. When reason eventually returned he left the town, heading east, travelling in cars and abandoning each one when it ran out of gas, finding another to continue the journey in, determined to make it to the opposite coast, there to find a boat and cross the English Channel to mainland Europe.

From there he would return to his homeland, perhaps to die, for at that time he did not know how widespread the plague was, whether the Continent itself had been devastated. On his journey he had come upon an army base and had steeled himself to enter it. With nothing more than a scarf covering his mouth and nose, Stern had located a battery-operated radio transmitter and, using fresh batteries, had tried to contact his own base in Germany. There had been no response. All night he sent messages, praying for some reply, from anyone, from anywhere, but still there was no contact.

Giving up all hope, he'd sunk into deep despair, unable to understand what had caused the disease and why he had survived it. The whole of the next day he had contemplated ending his own life - not only did there seem nothing to live for, but his personal guilt at having lived while everyone else appeared to have perished was crushing. That thought evaporated with the next dawn when he realized it was his duty to live on, he owed it to his people and to his Fuhrer. He made no mention of the Master Race, but it was in my mind. I figured Stern thought the fittest had survived, so affirming Hitler's attitudes on breeding and the natural order. Stern was living proof of his leader's theories and to die now, especially by his own hand, would refute all that.

So, he wandered on, looting grocery stores for food and sleeping in empty houses. And then he had chanced upon other survivors, a kind of community living in a tiny village. They'd treated him with suspicion and, on hearing his accent and learning he was German, they'd driven him off, almost killing him in the process. It seemed they blamed him in full and personally for what they called the Blood Death, and he was lucky to get away with his life. For a long time after that he had lived on a remote farm near the New Forest, first clearing it of its corpses, then cultivating a few crops as best he could. The winter of

'47, even worse than the previous year's, had put an end to that.

His food had to come from village stores and shops, and so he lived on the fringes of these places, alone and, he admitted to us, 'somewhat insane in the head'. With the summer of '48 the desire to return to the

'Fatherland' returned and his journey began again.

The vehicle he was travelling in soon broke down - lack of maintenance rather than shortage of gasoline

- and it was while he was trudging down a country lane looking for another means of transport that the two girls came upon him in their Ford.

Their greeting was different from the kind he'd received two years before, and he was grateful for that.

As far as Cissie and Muriel were concerned, well, they were just overjoyed to find another live and healthy human being. His nationality meant nothing to them, not after all this time, and he certainly felt no enmity towards British civilians. He agreed to accompany them to the capital, although he told them that from there he would continue eastwards, possibly using the River Thames to reach the estuary and the English Channel. Stopping only once to refill the Ford's tank from a garage handpump along the way, they soon reached London. And hit trouble. Namely, me.

I put the question to the two girls, not the German. 'Like Cissie said before, for all you knew, I could've been the bad guy, and the Blackshirts the only law and order left. So why help me?'

'It was Cissie's decision,' Muriel replied, indicating her friend. I stared at the dark-haired girl.

She shrugged. 'I didn't like their uniform. I had bad memories of Mosley's Blackshirts before the war and that lot this morning didn't look any different.' Another sip of gin and peach juice. 'I told you my mother was Jewish. Besides, you looked desperate and I like desperate types.' She grinned at me.

It wasn't enough, but I didn't push it. Before Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and Jew-hater, had been interned at the beginning of the war and his vicious party of bigots broken up, he'd led marches into the very heart of Jewish ghettos in London's East End just to provoke the people into riots. He was one bad man and later, as the Allies were taking back Europe, grim stories of the Nazis' attempted extermination of the Jewish race reached the rest of the world and the British public finally understood the full horror of the ideals Mosley - along with his more discreet ally, Sir Max Hubble

- had aligned himself with. Those ragbag black outfits had meant only one thing to Cissie and, as she'd been driving the car at the time, her companions could only go along with her. She was a gutsy lady.

A little juiced by now, they had begun to ask questions about me, but I ducked them. We still hadn't heard the warden's story.

Albert Potter, his nose a deeper shade of red by this time, was only too pleased to gab, three years of loneliness and a good few measures of Grouse loosening his tongue some. Too old to join the British army, he'd volunteered as an ARP on the very day Neville Chamberlain had mournfully declared war on Germany, and he had dutifully served through both Blitzes on London, twice being buried beneath rubble himself. His home was in an LCC block of flats in the Covent Garden area and when this, itself, was eventually demolished by the Luftwaffe, he and his family had moved into the basement of a school that was being used as a Civil Defence HQ. (It was here that he first learned of the secret bunker beneath Kingsway, where he later became 'door watcher'.)

He had won three commendations for heroic action during the war years, we were proudly told, once for single-handedly clearing an entire building of office workers when a DA (delayed action bomb) was discovered on the rooftop, the second time for reviving an unconscious woman who had choked on a stale (she later claimed) piece of Battenburg cake in the Lyon's Comer House on the Strand, and thirdly for preventing a bus carrying several passengers from toppling into a bomb crater during the Blackout by dashing in front of it waving his flashlight at great risk to life and limb. He'd served King and Country as well as any man could, despite the taunts and jibes from the public, who tended to regard all ARPs as jumped-up little Hitlers, mad with the tiny powers given them. Well, that had never bothered him. Like Stern, Potter knew his duty, knew it then, knew it now. And when his wife died of the blood disease,

'Gawd bless 'er', and his daughter, Katie, thirty years of age, still single, and serving as a gun site operator near Cheltenham, had never got in touch so was presumed dead too, he had only one purpose left, and that was to continue with the job he'd been given. Only when the war was finally over would he hang up his helmet collect his medals, and retire to the countryside.

We'd looked at each other uncomfortably, but none of us felt like breaking the news. At least believing the war was still raging had given Potter a reason for carrying on, misguided though it was. Besides, the war never had been officially declared over. Sure, it had ended when those last V2s fell, but there had been no one in high office left to say, 'Okay, enough is enough, let's call it a day.' Or if there was, they were off somewhere, either living away from the cities or deep down in some secret Blood Death-free bunker. That got us onto other topics, like what had happened to the governments of the world, why hadn't the scientists or medical profession been able to contain the disease, and what the hell was in Adolf Hitler's mind when he released such destruction (assuming he still had some kind of rational mind left after his dreams of world domination were shattered)? Had the Vergeltungswaffen been one cataclysmic mistake? All big questions, to which we had no answers.

Perhaps the biggest question though, because all the others meant nothing as far as the future was concerned, was this: How many of us were left? Just how many ABnegs were there in the world? Muriel said someone at the sanatorium had told her that AB negative blood types amounted to only approximately three per cent of the global population, and it might be that their Rhesus Factor (whatever that was) was hostile or non-submissive to the virus or gas released from the rockets. The problem, this person had gone on to say, was that not enough was known about different blood types and time itself was running out too fast for new research to be mounted, intensive though that research might be. The truth was, doctors and scientists were a swift-dying breed, along with the rest of mankind, and no matter how concentrated their minds, oncoming death brought about certain disabilities.

There was a silence for a while after that all of us lost in our own thoughts. Cissie collected the dirty plates and dumped them in the bathroom sink; then she was back in the doorway, yet another question in her eyes. She voiced it: 'Does anybody know what happened to the Royal Family?'

Potter made a sound, a kind of heavy rumbling sigh, as he poured the last of the Grouse into his glass.

His rheumy eyes watched the liquid, but I don't think he saw it; his mind was on other things. We waited for him to speak, aware he was preparing to tell us something that we wouldn't like. Well to me one tragedy was as bad as another, and they were all part of the grand catastrophe; all except my own, that is. The German was of the same mind, because there was only interest in his cold expression and none of the fearful apprehension revealed in the eyes of Cissie and Muriel.

It was Muriel who prompted the warden. 'Did they die of the disease, Mr Potter?' she said.

'I suppose so,' he replied, 'but not in the way yer might think.' He took a long swallow of whisky and wiped his shiny lips with the back of his hand. 'Yer know, Queen Elizabeth, Gawd bless her poor soul, was never more pleased than when the bombs fell on Buckingham Palace durin the Blitz. She could look them poor people who lived down by the docks in the eye and say, "We're takin it too, we know what it's like."'

He let the empty whisky bottle slip to the floor as he drained the glass. Shaking his head as if in both admiration and regret he continued, 'Do y'know, them little girls, them little princesses, used to knit socks for the Red Cross in the evenings. Princess Elizabeth - Lilibet she was called by the family - she joined the ATS, like this lady said.' He gave a nod towards Muriel. 'Worked as an engineer, got her hands dirty on engines and suchlike. And King George, he spent evenings makin parts for RAF aeroplanes, just like a common man. The King and Queen never left us, not even when the Blitz was at its worst, never even thought of sendin their youngest, Margaret Rose, out of the country to some safe place. They stayed together and stuck it out, an example to us all.'

I studied the faces around me, curious to see their reactions. Muriel's expression was rapt a mixture of emotions like the warden's; both pride and sorrow shone in those grey-blue eyes as she waited to hear the tragedy that was about to unfold. Cissie's eyes were a little unfocused, as if tears were about to roll.

'The public didn't know for sure,' Potter went on, 'but the rumours spread almost as fast as the plague itself. Some said the Royal Family was dead within the first hour of those rockets landin. Others said the whole lot of 'em, includin old Queen Mary, was given cyanide pills by the King's Physician when reports came in of how horrible the Blood Death was and how fast it was spreadin. But I'd got into the Kingsway shelter when I found out what was happenin out there, and I heard the true story first-hand, because even though the Civil Defence personnel were droppin like flies all round us, reports were still comin through on the wires.'

'You really know?' Muriel was leaning forward, hands clasped over her knees.

'Yes, miss, I think I do. On that terrible day the Royals was rushed down to Windsor and as soon as the authorities knew what was goin on, a single-engine aeroplane was sent to take 'em out of harm's way.

There's a wide and very long road that runs through the park up to Windsor Castle itself; the public was never aware, but it was there as an emergency runway in case the country was ever invaded.

'They got on the plane all right and, so we heard, they even took the Crown Jewels wrapped up in newspaper with 'em. But the plane had barely took off when it came crashin down again, explodin into houses outside the town.'

There was a tiny, shocked gasp from Muriel and I saw that Cissie had closed her eyes.

'Radio contact broke off just as the pilot was reportin a safe takeoff, and the authorities reckoned he'd been struck down by the disease right at that moment No other explanation, y'see. 'Course they was all killed, bodies burned in the wreckage, but there was no public announcement Hell's bells, there was enough occurrin without demoralizin the people completely.'

I could've smiled, I could've wept, at the absurdity of his last remark. But it was Stern who broke the silence that followed.

'Do you know what happened to your Winston Churchill?' he said, and I could see the ' V inston'

annoyed Potter as much as it did me. He glowered at the German.

Then he raised his empty glass in salute and said, 'Old Winnie.' He shook his head, looking down at the floor. 'They say he topped hisself, shot hisself dead. All too much for him in the end, y'see. He'd put everything into winnin the war for us, and he'd finally done it, it was almost finished. Then Hitler sent his secret weapon over and had hisself the last laugh. It would've been too much for any man.'

And that quietened us a whole lot more. Tears were running down Cissie's cheeks and Muriel had her head bowed. Potter rummaged among the bottles on the coffee table for fresh whisky and Stern sat stiff-backed, his face a mask. Me, I just poured another Jack Daniel's.

Grief is only finite, you know? Sure, over the past years I'd thought a lot about death and those I'd lost, about the major players, the little guys too, friends, acquaintances, kids I'd gone to High School with, good pilots I'd fought battles with. You don't forget, but you hold down the memory; or at least, the emotion that goes with the memory. After a while it fades, the emotion, because the soul can only take so much. The numbness eventually sets in, although, if you're really lucky, that can happen right away.

Generally though, it'll take months, maybe years, before you begin -and only begin - to pull through and start to think straight again. In my case I only had two people to really grieve over, because my folks were dead before the war even started, Ma in '38 of cancer, Dad soon after in '39, of heart disease. I had no brothers or sisters, and other relations were too distant to cause much concern. Those two people closest to me, wiped out by the Blood Death, took up most, if not all, of my mourning.

As I looked at the strained faces around me, I realized my new and unwanted companions were still in a state of shock. The girls had been cloistered from the worst excesses of the disease for some time, and the warden had taken his own mental route for dealing with the situation. Now Cissie and Muriel had ventured beyond the confines of the sanatorium and local villages to witness the full horror of the V2s'

legacy for themselves, and Albert Potter had finally come into contact with other survivors, and their sanity, such as it was, had to be nagging at his own delusions. As for the German, well, even he had to have had family, people to weep for, so he had to be suffering too. Maybe guilt - it was his countrymen who had unleashed the final holocaust -figured in his emotional state also; race responsibility for such annihilation would have to lay heavy on any man. Unless, of course, the only person he really mourned over was his Fuhrer, whose actions he considered to be both appropriate and heroic.

I watched Stern and tried to guess what was going on behind that mask; he remained inscrutable though, despite hitting the juice and chain-smoking along with the rest of us. Funny thing is, he never got soused, nor maudlin, no matter how much he drank. But then, neither did I that evening.

10

DIVING, DIVING, DIVING . . .

The two Fw 190s had chased me to thirty-eight thousand feet, and the air was thin up there. I'd had no choice, there was only one way to get away from them, because they were like angry hornets on my tail, relentless, dogged, and out for revenge. They'd watched me shoot down one of their buddies at twelve thousand feet, and that'd made them pretty sore, because their buddy, in his superior plane, should've finished me. I'd been in his sights, sure enough, but had flipped over just before he'd fired and gotten behind him, winging him with my own guns. I'd followed him down, giving him another burst, and the Fw 190 had gone into a spiral, an entrail of white smoke marking his descent. He didn't bail out and I'd hoped he was already dead.

His two friends came steaming in, angry - hell, they were insulted - because I was on my own, one against three, and they'd thought they'd have some fun with me.

They'd assumed they had me when I levelled out. A Spitfire might have gotten away from the Focke-Wulfs, but my Hurricane, with its eight Browning machine guns in its wings, was a clumsier animal and I knew I'd have to take desperate measures. There was only one way to outfly the Germans, but they'd have to follow me. I headed upwards, into the blue, taking the Hurricane to the limits. And the Focke-Wulfs came after me.

Thirty-eight thousand, cockpit rattling around me, and I levelled, took her into a dive.

Thirty-seven thousand feet, thirty-six, -five, and my belly's pressing against my spine. Picking up speed, though, control column vibrating in my hand. Can't hear them, but I feel the bullets tearing into my left wing. Diving faster. No more gunfire - the Krauts are beginning to have problems controlling their aircraft as all three of us pick up speed.

Thirty thousand feet and my speed's up to four hundred miles an hour, considerably more than the Hurricane's limit. Diving, faster, faster, everything shaking around me, engine's screaming, my goggles are fogging up, sweat's beginning to blind me.

Twenty-five thousand.

Twenty.

I manage to twist my head, look behind me. Can only see one pursuer, and he's pulling out of the dive, giving up the chase. Where's his pal? Can't see the other Focke-Wulf. Have to assume it's still on my tail.

Nineteen, then eighteen.

Too fast. Christ, much too fast I tear off the goggles. Can't believe it when I look at the instrument panel. Everything's quivering, but still I can see the speedo's needle. Not possible. I'm approaching six hundred miles per hour. Nobody's gonna believe this. If I ever live to tell the tale.

And now it happens, the thing I'd dreaded. They call it compressibility. It's when everything gets dampened, nothing works as it should. The plane is out of control, the stick's all over the place.

Jesus H, I'm down to twelve thousand.

I grip the control column, try to pull the Hurricane out of its dive, but it won't listen, it won't obey. Pulling harder, both hands clamped around the stick. The plane won't haul up. Oh dear Lord ...

Eight thousand feet.

Seven.

Six.

That's it. I'm done. I'm locked into that seat by pressure, no way can I get out of the cockpit. Not giving up though. Too much to live for. I pull harder.

Five.

I begin to pray.

But forget the prayer and start to scream.

Everything becomes white, like the centre of an explosion...

And I woke up. Thank God, I woke up. And as I sat there, bolt upright in the bed, body wringing wet, limbs trembling, I realized it wasn't the imminent dream-death that had awakened me. The light knocking on the door came again.

Moonlight flooded the room so that the walls, the furniture, the rumpled bedsheet, were bathed ghostly white. I stayed where I was, still in shock, my mind completing the dream that was, in fact, a memory: Coming out of the dive at the last moment, skimming over the treetops, the Fw 190 which had remained in pursuit not so lucky; it'd hit those same trees and exploded into one huge fireball. The German pilot's screaming face, imagined by me as I sat there in the moonlight, resembled Wilhelm Stern's. Fortunately for me on that day almost seven years ago, the rest of my squadron hadn't been far away, and the wing commander himself had hurtled towards me along with two other Hurricanes and chased off the surviving Focke-Wulf, giving me hell over the radio for wandering away from the main battle as he did so. It wasn't the first time I'd had that dream, but it was no worse than any of the others that disturbed my sleep almost every night, drunk or sober.

The rapping on the door came again, still light, but more urgent this time, as though the person outside were becoming impatient. Or desperate. The doorhandle turned, but with no effect - I always kept the door locked at night.

Tossing back the sheet, I snatched my chinos from the foot of the bed and pulled them on. Before going to the door, I picked up the .45 from the bedside cabinet and cocked it. Index finger outside the trigger guard, barrel pointed at the ceiling, I padded barefoot over to the bedroom door.

As if sensing me on the other side, a muffled female voice called softly: 'Hoke, please let me in.'

Quickly turning the key, I opened the door a few inches. I could see only a shadow outside in the hall.

'Please,' she repeated, and I could tell she was close to tears.

I stood aside, pulling the door open a little wider, and Muriel slipped through the gap. The moment the door was shut tight again and I'd turned to face her, she was in my arms, her slender body shivering despite the night's warmth.

I resisted at first, remained stiff, unyielding, gun hand still raised towards the ceiling, the palm of my other hand wavering inches from her back. Then I smelt her sweet perfume and I remembered what a woman's embrace was like. My hand closed against her back, pulling her towards me, and I lowered the gun to my side. I breathed in the aroma of her freshly washed hair, then the scent she'd used on her skin, on her neck, her breasts. I even enjoyed the faint taint of wine still on her lips. A pressure inside me was released, the tightness in my chest loosened. I held on to her for a moment, maybe a few moments, and closed my eyes. My mind reeled in her presence.

It had been so long, so very long...

But the numbness within returned, the rejection of true feelings that was my only defence against the terrible thing that had happened to the world and to me overrode those stirring emotions: I stepped away from her. In the silvery light from the window, I saw the glistening of tears on her cheeks and I saw the confusion in her eyes.

'Hold me,' she asked in a hushed voice.

I couldn't. I didn't want to. I knew if I took her back into my arms I'd lose something that had kept me together these past three years, the detachment I'd come to wear like a suit of armour. I did not want to become vulnerable again.

Her bare shoulders were trembling still and the moonlight shimmered off the silk slip she wore. She watched, her tears catching that same light so that crystals seemed to shine from their trails, then slowly lowered her head.

'I'm so afraid,' she said.

And I gave in, so easily, so goddamn willingly.

Her weeping dampened my naked chest and I felt tiny spasms jerk her whole body with each sob she uttered.

Take it easy,' I said to her quietly, at a loss for any other words of comfort 'We're safe here.'

Her hair was sensuous against my skin. 'I saw them, Hoke,' I heard her say. 'There were so many.'

'Who? Who did you see?'

She lifted her head to gaze up at me. 'I saw their spirits. The people who died in this hotel -I saw their spirits wandering the hallways and corridors. I saw them on the stairways, lost souls, just' drifting, with nowhere to go. It was so sad, Hoke, so pitiful - and so frightening.'

'I told you all not to leave your rooms tonight.' My anger was false, a diversion from what she was telling me, because I didn't want to hear such things. Memories were enough to cope with.

'I had to get out. I needed to see more of this place, perhaps only to revisit better days. Can't you understand that?'

I shook my head. 'It was a stupid thing to do.'

She wasn't listening. 'I went as far as the main stairway, the one by the lift. They were just shadows at first, a shifting in the dark, until they began to emerge, slowly at first, as if my own concentration was helping them take form. Then they were all around me, drifting, floating, and oblivious to each other. Even for those who were together, elegant women in long, flowing dresses on the arms of men in dinner jackets and winged collars, there appeared to be no contact between them. But the anguish in their eyes, the misery in their features.. .' Her head rested against my chest once more. 'Was it only my imagination, Hoke? Or were they real...?'

'A dream, that's all,' I told her as I held her tight, my arms pressed against her back, the gun now awkward in my hand.

'But I wasn't sleeping,' I heard her murmur.

'Illusions, then. Don't you get it? The shock of seeing all those corpses earlier today is still messing with your head. Believe me, I know about it, Muriel, I've been there myself. You, me, Cissie, old Albert Potter, and the German - we're the only living, breathing things in this hotel.'

'I didn't say they were living-'

'There are no ghosts.' She jumped at the anger in my voice. 'The dead are dead. Anything else is fantasy.

You understand, Muriel, you understand?'

My free hand was gripping her upper arm and she flinched at its sudden pressure. She tried to pull away.

'Okay, okay, I'm sorry,' I soothed, annoyed at myself for letting her wild talk get to me. 'Just relax now and try to put those thoughts out of your mind. They'll fade away eventually, I promise you. They'll fade away for good.'

Her body seemed to sag and she leaned back into me, her hands down by her sides, her weight against my chest I let her weep, my hand stroking her hair, and soon I became aware of the hardened tips of her small breasts through the thin silky slip, nudging my skin, arousing feelings I'd long since subdued. I fought against it, against yearnings that had been denied for so many years, aware that it was wrong, the wrong time, the wrong circumstances. And afraid she would be repelled.

Her weeping had stopped and she suddenly became taut once more, as though aware of what was happening. But instead of pulling away, she relaxed into me and the contact between us took on a new intensity. The very air around us seemed charged, as though an electric storm was gathering inside that cluttered bedroom. Impossible, but it seemed so real, and I soon realized that energy was building inside our own bodies and not in the atmosphere outside them. For me it became a kind of agony, an ecstatic craving that battled against other emotions, feelings and memories that would not be cast aside, not just for this, not just for - the image appeared stark and horrifying in my mind, her body lying there on stone steps, her belly torn open ... I tried to block the thought, but still the horror of it lingered.

'Hoke?'

Now I was the one who trembled, the one who fought back tears and turned away.

Muriel held my arms and shook me gently. 'What is it? What's wrong?' she said.

'Ifs okay,' I lied, suppressing the dread inside. 'It's nothing.'

'For a moment I thought you'd seen the ghosts too.'

'I told you, there are no ghosts.'

'Then why were you afraid just now?'

'It wasn't fear.'

'No?'

'No.'

'So why are you shivering?'

There was only one way to stop her questions. I kissed her. Hard. Angrily.

And she responded, pressing her lips just as hard against mine, as if there was a fury in her longings also, a fierce aching that had been there for a long time. We fought against each other in a battle that was for fulfilment, not conquest, each of us clinging so that flesh touched flesh and desire met with desire. It was a struggle that required an outcome and we both knew it.

She drew her head away and whispered something. I became still and looked at her questioningly.

'I need more,' she said, her voice barely audible over our gasps for breath. 'I need to lie next to you.'

I hardly hesitated, because any resistance was gone, lost in those first few moments. After wiping away the rivulets of tears from her cheeks with the thumb of one hand I led her to the bed and lowered her onto the wrinkled sheet. She kept her arms around my neck as I left the gun on the bedside cabinet and I took in her scent, not the perfume she'd found in her suite, nor the soap she'd used on her hair, but the aroma of her womanhood, of her arousal. The sheet beneath us was an unblemished white in the moonlight and her skin was of that same whiteness; the slip she wore was a shade darker, its reflections soft and silvery. Only by closing my mind to the past could I release myself to the present, and the vision of Muriel lying there, her arms outstretched to receive me, her legs slightly parted, one knee raised, helped me banish that other time. We needed each other badly and any reservation was swiftly put aside.

I sank down onto her, taking most of my own weight on my elbow so that I could gaze into her moon-bleached face and into those eyes that sought more than just passion. There was an urgency there, but also - or so I told myself at the time - a need for some kind of security, maybe a commitment.

My fingers, still trembling, slipped beneath the strap on her pale shoulder to ease it aside. Resting my hand there, curled around her shoulder, I lowered my face so that our lips brushed against each other.

The touch was deliberately delicate, unlike the bruising kiss of moments before, and it excited us both; still we kept the encounter tentative, moistening each other's mouths with tiny stabs of our tongues, resisting the impulse to crush, to give ourselves completely, the restraint soon becoming unbearable, the years of abstinence heightening the tension, increasing the pleasure.

It could only last a matter of seconds and when finally we pressed into each other, teeth clashing, our lips hurting, I felt a roaring inside my head, a rush of charges surging through each limb, each part of my body. My hand left her shoulder to find her small, firm breast, and my fingers tightened on its solid core. I heard her gasp at the sudden pain, but the sound became a moan, and this was of pleasure.

Her hands slid round my neck, kneading its flesh and the hard ridge of my spine, her fingertips retreating so that they could come between us to work themselves against my chest, digging into the muscles there, smoothing over the ridges. It was my turn to gasp when her fingers probed the bruising. She quickly took her hand away, afraid she'd hurt me too much, and I felt those fingers flatten against my stomach, causing the muscles there to shudder involuntarily.

Our kisses were equally wild, our breaths equally as desperate, and when her tongue entered my mouth and pressed against my own tongue, I became even more aroused. One of my hands tugged at the slip, pulling it down, away from her breasts, and I took time to drink them in with my eyes, because they were so naked, so bare, so sensual, like delicate spheres carved in marble; and then I drank them in with my mouth, taking each nipple in turn between my lips and drawing them in so that they stood wet and proud as Muriel squirmed beneath me. I heard the quiet rustle of the sheet as her legs parted and when I rose from her again, I saw that the smooth material of her slip had ruffled up over her thighs, leaving a deep, alluring shadow between them. It was another flawless sight, an image that set my mind reeling as all control, all reason, slipped away from me.

Muriel's chest was rising and falling with her own breathlessness and her hair framed her sweet face on the pillow. Her hands suddenly busied themselves with the waistband of my pants, and then I was free, her fingers closing around me and drawing me towards her so that I cried out with the wonderful shock of it. Her thighs opened wider as she guided me down between them and her cry was louder than mine when I entered her body, the resistance only slight, the hesitation only minimal. Again her cry turned to a moan of pleasure as I travelled further, the journey now smooth and easy, like gliding through warm butter, and her narrow hips rose up to meet me, her hands, her arms, pulling at me fiercely, urging me on, never, it seemed, wanting that journey to end. But quickly I reached the furthest point, and we clung to each other, her tears dampening my chest and shoulders once again.

Only then did we pause, and my own tears fell into her hair. She felt the wetness and held me tightly, but now with a tenderness that had nothing to do with passion. It couldn't last though, that moment of caring and compassion - our physical demands were too great, our sexual needs too critical. We began to move against each other again, each thrust becoming wilder, our senses rushing towards that point in our bodies where our juices could fuse and our energies meld. When my flow finally streamed from me I buried my face against her shoulder and groaned, and I stayed that way until the fluttering spasms grew less in intensity, ebbed away, left me exhausted.

Slowly my body and my mind relaxed. And for the first time in three years I found a temporary peace.

I lit another cigarette with the one I'd just finished and settled back against the bed's cushioned headboard. The shadows in the room had altered as the moon beyond the high windows had drifted upriver, and it was hard to make out Muriel's form as she lay beside me beneath the single sheet, her hand resting lightly on my thigh. The scent of spent passion lingered between us, a sweet-sour musk that was both calming and sensual at the same time, and I remembered how Sally had called it love-fragrance', believing it was some kind of invisible shroud that enveloped lovers after the act, bonding them for a little longer. Yeah, I'd laughed at the time, laughed like a hyena, making her mad at first, until she'd joined in the laughter, but punched my arm all the same. I'd liked the idea though, despite my teasing. At least, I'd liked it with Sally in the picture. Now the thought only stoked up my guilt

'Hoke?' There was a quiet huskiness to her voice. 'Are you all right?'

I could just see the outline of her hair and her arm in the darkness, the vague glint of her eyes. As I drew on the cigarette she was briefly bathed in its warm glow.

'Sure, I'm okay,' I replied.

'You were telling me about your parents.'

Lighting the fresh cigarette had interrupted the flow; the aroma of our lovemaking had rekindled a memory.

'Like I said,' I went on, 'Ma was English, with a touch of Irish thrown in. Peggy. "Peg o' my Heart" Dad liked to call her, naturally enough. They first met when he was over from Wisconsin for an agricultural fair

- he dealt in farm equipment, bought 'n' sold anything from machinery to fertilizers. Had a fair little business going just after the Great War and he was kind of anxious to get a head start with all the new technology for farming.'

'That's where you're from - Wisconsin?'

I nodded in the dark, and added a 'yes' for Muriel's benefit

'Peg was a maid in one of your small, country hotels Dad was staying in, and when I was growed up enough to be interested he told me it was her "sparklin eyes" he first fell in love with, the rest of her 'bout two days later.'

'And your mother - did she fall for him so quickly?'

'Guess she must have, because when he left eight days later she went with him. Just took off, the pair of

'em, bill paid, notice given, but no explanation to anyone. Back to Winona, Wisconsin, USA They got hitched right away and a year later I arrived.'

'Wasn't she afraid? A new country thousands of miles away from her own family?'

'Ma had none to speak of. Her old man had been an Irish immigrant, who hadn't treated Grandma too well. Peggy was his only daughter. When his wife died, he returned to Ireland where he probably killed himself with booze, according to Ma. Oh, he'd found his kid a job in a wash-house before he'd left, so I guess he figured he'd done his duty. And that was fine by Ma - at fourteen years of age she figured she was better off without him. When she married Dad, she didn't know if her old man was dead or alive, and she told me years later she hadn't cared.'

Muriel's fingers moved to my arm and she stroked it, elbow to wrist.

'She was never bitter about it though. Hell no, she was too thankful for her new life with Joseph, my dad.

But y'know, although she never had a family to miss, she had something else to hanker after. Ma never got tired of telling me about her home country and I never got tired of listening.'

Muriel couldn't see me, but I was smiling at the memory. It felt good to talk about my folks after all this time and, for a while at least, it was holding down thoughts of Sally.

'She regretted leaving England?'

'No, I didn't say that She'd found her happiness in Wisconsin, but that didn't mean she didn't get homesick now and again. She read me books by English authors all the time, and when I was old enough, got me to read 'em myself. Got me interested in the country's history, too. Maybe the only regret she had was that I wasn't getting an English education and I wasn't being brought up the British way. She took a lot of pride in the traditions and manners of this country of yours, even though she was only from working stock, and sometimes I wondered if those funny wire-framed spectacles she wore later on in life weren't just a little rose-tinted. Her dream was to bring me over here for a short while, show me all those things she'd told me about, but the cancer put a hold on that.'

My smile was gone and I took time to inhale smoke. Muriel's hand was still on my arm.

'She passed away in '38, and Dad followed her eight months later. His ticker, the doc said, disease had worn it out. I always believed it was heartbreak that did it, though; or at least, hurried it along. I think he just didn't want to go on without his Peg any more.'

My smile had come back. It gave me some comfort, the thought of Dad going after his Peg, darned if he was gonna let her explore the great unknown on her own. 'Your ma's got no sense of direction,' he'd always joked with me. 'Lose herself in the parlour if she didn't have me around to call her.' Well, wherever she'd gone, I hoped he'd caught up with her. And I was kind of glad they'd both missed the horror that was to come.

'You were left alone?' Muriel's hand tightened around my arm.

'Alone ain't so bad,' I lied. Alone was hell on wheels. Alone was a slow trip to insanity. Alone was the worst thing any man, woman or child could live with. My smile was gone again, wilted away in the shadows.

'By that time I was living away from home anyway,' I went on before self-pity set me blubbing again. 'I was in Madison, attending the University of Wisconsin, studying engineering. Dad's company was in bad shape by the time he died, and his brother, a wiseacre even Dad didn't like, offered to take it off my hands, lock, stock and barrel, for no money at all. Well, that suited me just fine - what did I want with a pile of debts and a head full of problems when I was barely scraping eighteen? My uncle was welcome to

'em. Besides, I was supporting myself well enough by bike racing and some barnstorming at weekends.'

'What's barnstorming? I've never heard of that one before.'

'Air acrobatics, I guess you'd call it'

'You were flying at eighteen?'

'Sure. When I was ten years old, Dad took me over to a barnstorming show in a field just outside town.

Gave me a dollar to spend while he looked over a couple of crates he had in mind for crop-dusting, something that was becoming pretty popular about that time. I wandered off towards an old airplane I'd spied soon as we drove in, a beat-up Fairchild, as I recall, and when I handed its pilot the dollar and asked for a ride, well, he sized me up, bit the dollar, and lifted me aboard. 'Course, I told him Dad said it was okay, and that was good enough for this flyer, whether he believed me or not. And once I was up there in the clear blue air, high over the whole goddamn world, everything below shrunk into insignificance, well, I never wanted to come down again. I knew flying was the thing I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

'But Ma-'specially Ma - and Dad didn't agree with my ambition, though when I kept ducking school so's I could wander around our local airfield we came to an arrangement. They'd pay for me to take flying lessons if I promised to stay in school and study hard. Anyway, I think Dad had an idea floating around in the back of his mind even then, because by the time I was sixteen I was crop-dusting for his farmer friends and acquaintances in our own second-hand plane.'

I leaned forward in the bed, wrists resting over my raised knees, cigarette butt warm between my fingers. I kept perfectly still, ears keen, eyes straining at the reflected moonlight on the opposite wall

'What's wrong?' Muriel sat up next to me, the sheet falling around her waist.

I shushed her, listening still. I felt her body go tense beside me.

'Thought I heard something,' I said eventually. 'Must've been wrong.'

Relaxing against the headboard again, I reached for the cigarette pack on the bedside cabinet. This time I remembered to offer one to Muriel, but she shook her head, a movement I barely caught in the darkness. Lighting one for myself, I stubbed out the old cigarette in the full ashtray by the bed, and dropped the pack into my lap. Smoke drifted across the room, thin spectres that caught the light by the windows. Muriel rested her head on my shoulder, her hair tickling my flesh.

Tell me more,' she urged, as if my story reminded her of a different reality, a better time than the present

'There's not much more to it.' A second lie, but there was only so much I was willing to tell. 'When war broke out in Europe, I knew immediately what I wanted to do. All those tales Ma told me, about her life in England, the places she'd worked and lived in, about the kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, all those books she'd read to me and the ones I'd read myself when I was older - hell, I even knew the rules of cricket. Dad had always kidded me I was more British than American, and I kind of liked that, made me feel different, something special. I guess that was because I thought Ma was so special. Huh, sometimes when I was little I even copied her accent' I gave a shake of my head. 'Y'know, she never did lose that accent in all those years she was married to Dad.'

I exhaled smoke, enjoying its taste, its smell. It'd been a long time since I'd felt so relaxed and I figured it was due to the talking as much as the lovemaking. The booze at dinner had loosened me too and I was almost - only almost - beginning to feel glad of the company. I should have known it was dangerous to let others into my life once more.

'You've stopped talking again.' There was no impatience in Muriel's voice, only amusement

'Yeah. Just thinking.'

'You said when war broke out you knew what you wanted to do.'

I blew smoke away from her face. 'I wanted to help the Brits fight their war with Germany any way I could. So I began flying aircraft, bombers mainly, up to the Canadian border. Because of the Neutrality Act, America couldn't export planes direct to the UK, not even over to Canada, so we used to fly 'em as close to the Canadian border as possible, then tow 'em across the line by rope and truck. It was a crazy way of getting planes to you, but it worked. No rules broken.'

She laughed, a soft fluttery sound that did us both some good.

'It wasn't long before I got another bright idea. I hitched a ride on a bomber out of RCAF Training Station Trenton to the 1st American Eagle Squadron over here and they let me sign up as a pilot officer. I had the flying hours and they needed the men, it was as simple as that. So I became part of your war, long before my own country decided to get involved.'

I closed my eyes, feeling some relief. But that was it, I was done, I didn't want to tell her any more.

Anything else would dredge up memories I'd fought too long to keep down. Fortunately, Muriel didn't press me further. She must have sensed my change in mood, realized that more questions might arouse too much pain in me, release the bitterness I was holding in check. I liked her for that Yeah, at that moment I almost loved her for it.

Opening my eyes, I leaned over and dogged the cigarette, then turned towards her. Her hand moved across my chest, her touch as sensuous as before, though less demanding, both of us at ease with one another. She shifted her body, offering her lips to me in the dark, and I accepted, my own mouth brushing against hers, the kiss tentative at first, but soon becoming firmer as fresh desire began to climb.

Our tongues probed, we tasted each other's juices. Her hand slid down my chest, over my stomach, dipping beneath the rumpled sheet, finding my hardness and causing me to gasp as her fingers encircled and gripped me tight. I pulled her to me, one hand cradling her hip, and she turned her face towards the ceiling as my lips pressed against the softness of her neck.

Now she was gasping, and she squirmed her body so that she was beneath me, her legs parting once again as she murmured words I couldn't hear. Her breasts rose into me as her breathing became more uneven and her grip went to my waist, her hands pulling at me, her murmuring taking on a new urgency, her passion revived, her hunger just as desperate as before. I felt the familiar rush inside me, the incredible surging of senses, blood pounding in my chest so that I could hear its sound ... could hear...

She cried out as I abruptly turned away from her, wheeling round in the bed to stare at the big windows.

The pounding ... somewhere in the distance out there. Lighting up the night sky. And drawing closer by the second.

'Oh my God,' said Muriel, panic rising in her voice. 'What is it, Hoke?'

'Bombs,' I told her flatly.

'But-'

'Well be okay. Don't worry about it.'

My back was to her and she slid closer, her hands reaching for my shoulders. I winced as her fingers touched the covered graze the bullet had left along my right shoulder earlier that day.

'Who is it, Hoke?' she pleaded. 'Who would be bombing London now? Is it those people who chased us?'

'listen,' I said, my eyes still watching the windows.

The deep drone of engines came to us between the sounds of bombs exploding.

'An aeroplane?' she asked incredulously.

'You got it'

The windows suddenly lit up and rattled in their frames as a bomb fell somewhere across the river.

'I don't understand. Why would any-'

I cut her off curtly. 'They're German. Possibly just one man, still fighting his own personal war. He's insane, d'you understand that?' I didn't know why I was angry at her; maybe it was because suddenly I had to explain things that I'd gotten used to.

She flinched as another bomb hit the other riverbank, the blast shaking the hotel's windows, this time with more force.

'He comes over every once in a while, usually when you think things have quietened down again and he's given up. Given up or dead.'

'It's madness.'

'Like I said.'

Another explosion, this one on our side of the Thames and fierce enough to make the whole building tremble. Muriel pulled me round so that she could squeeze between my arms, and I was about to suggest we take cover on the other side or beneath the bed when another noise came to us, a harsh, demented rattling from the corridor outside our room. She tried to burrow into me and I wasn't sure which was scaring her most. The rattling grew louder, a terrible cacophony that resembled a stick running along iron railings, only a thousand times more piercing.

Then we heard the old warden's voice. 'Air raid warning, everyone under cover, please go to your nearest shelter!'

The door burst open and Potter's bright flashlight lit us up on the bed. We shielded our eyes and the light dropped. I blinked away the dazzle and when I looked back at the doorway I saw there were two figures standing there.

Another blast outside - this one mercifully further off, the German bomber moving onwards - diverted my attention for a moment or two, and when I turned towards the doorway again, only Albert Potter was standing there, flashlight in one hand, his air raid warning rattle in the other. The second figure, Cissie, had gone.

11

I BROUGHT THE FLATBED truck round, a hard left from the Embankment into the gentle rise that ran between the park and the Savoy's rear entrance, and was surprised to see Cissie sitting on the kerbside opposite the hotel. I grinned when I saw who was keeping her company and I wondered at it too.

They both looked up when they heard the chug of the truck's diesel engine and the girl's concerned frown switched to a guarded smile of welcome when she realized I was the driver. Cagney quickly rose from his haunches and gave a pleased yap, then chased after me when I drove on by. I headed towards the end of the narrow street where there was room to turn the long vehicle round so it faced the right direction, easy to get away in a hurry should the need arise. Another road ran beneath the buildings at the end of the street, but it was blocked by other vehicles, its first few clear yards only good for manoeuvring. A few hundred yards away one of the buildings of London's law courts was still smouldering from last night's bomb damage, but I couldn't see any other wreckage. The crazy German bomber pilot was unpredictable, but I hoped he'd had his fill of laying waste for a while: sometimes he came over several nights in a row, sometimes he wouldn't appear for a few months; I guess it all depended on his disposition. I hoped some day a bomb would jam in its bay and blow him and his Dornier to smithereens. After completing the laborious parking procedure, the truck's left wheels cracking pavement stones, I jumped down from the cab and made a fuss of Cagney, who'd been waiting for me.

I ruffled his ears, something he didn't like, never had, and he growled low and menacing, so I did it some more. Before he got too riled I hugged him to me and got a face full of tongue for my kindness. The taste of dust didn't seem to bother him and he would have slobbered me to death if I hadn't stood and pushed him down when he reared up with me. Taking the hint at the second shove, Cagney trotted off back along the street, making, to my surprise, straight for Cissie, who was still sitting on the kerb observing us.

Cissie averted her gaze before I reached her, studying some point in the distance, her neck and shoulders kind of stiff-like. I sat next to her, laying my leather jacket with its added weight of Colt .45 on the ground between us.

'Hyah,' I ventured.

'Hello,' she responded without much interest.

Cagney settled in the middle of the road, facing us, head resting on his paws. He yawned as he watched us.

'Hot day again,' I said, making conversation.

The back of Cissie's head bobbed in agreement. Today she was wearing a dark-brown dress that matched her hair, puffed at the shoulders, slim at the waist No stockings and, when she finally turned my way, I saw she wore no make-up. She eyed the dust in my hair, on my hands, on my face, but ignored it for the moment.

'Is that your dog?'

'He's nobody's dog.'

'He was waiting outside when I came down for a breath of fresh air. I thought he was a stray.'

'He didn't run away?'

'He was wary at first, so I just sat there and talked to him and after a while he came over and sort of slouched down next to me. Wouldn't let me pat him though, moved away every time I tried.'

'Cagney doesn't like people very much. Seems to think they're to blame for everything that's happened.'

'Did you say Cagney? His name's Cagney?' At last her face cracked into a smile. 'After James Cagney?'

'Well his real name's probably Rex or Red, but he wasn't saying when we met up. I decided on Cagney and the mutt didn't seem to mind.'

'Has he been with you for long?'

'Coupla years, maybe.'

The sun beat down on the dusty roadway and pretty soon Cagney's eyes drooped shut. I took a rumpled rag from my pants pocket and wiped sweat from the back of my neck and underneath my chin.

'D'you have any idea what time it is?' Cissie asked, a coolness still there in her tone.

I looked over my shoulder and squinted up at the sun. "Bout four, I'd guess. Busted my watch way back, had no use for it anyhow. Hell, I got no appointments to keep.'

'So where have you been all day?' She was looking directly at me now and I wondered at the suspicion in her eyes. 'You left before any of us were awake. Even before Muriel was awake, apparently,' she added meaningfully.

This time I looked away, staring up at the hotel's taped windows. The thought that so much death lay beyond them was depressing. 'I had things to do,' I replied eventually.

She must've understood that was all I had to say on the subject, because she didn't push it any further. I liked her for that

'How've you survived, Hoke? How have you lived on your own like this for three years?' Curiosity, and maybe some concern, was edging aside her coolness.

'It's easier to get by when you've only got yourself to take care of. You can move faster and make your own decisions. It's a lot simpler this way.'

'You sound bitter.'

I gave a small, dry chuckle. 'Really? Well now.' I left it at that

'The aeroplane that came over last night...'

'A Cornier Do 217. German medium bomber, the Flying Pencil they used to call it. Whoever's flying it doesn't realize the war's over, or doesn't care. And there's no way we can communicate.' I tucked the rag back into my pocket 'Maybe one night I'll be waiting for him in a Spitfire or Hurricane and finish it once and for all.'

'No. No more killing, Hoke. Hasn't there been enough?'

Try telling it to that guy.' I indicated the sky with my thumb and I could have meant the mad German pilot or the Creator Himself. It didn't matter which.

'What's the point of continuing the hatred? Look what it's already done to us.' She lowered her head and I could see the beginnings of tears glittering in her eyelashes.

I could stand my own self-pity, but not somebody else's. I pushed myself to my feet and reached down for my battered and torn leather jacket 'I'm gonna clean up, then get a bite t'eat,' I said.

She joined me, brushing dust from her seat, and suddenly I was the one who was curious.

'How d'you get out of the hotel? Past all those dead people, I mean. Weren't you afraid?'

'Of what? Empty shells? You think I'm scared of ghosts too?' From the glint behind those unshed tears in her eyes I guessed Muriel had offered some kind of explanation, maybe even some excuse, for last night.

'No, I'm more afraid of maniacs still dropping bombs or lunatics trying to steal my blood.'

'I can ease your mind as far as one of those threats is concerned. Let me show you the safest place to be in the hotel when the bomber comes over again.'

I led her across the street and through the brick, zigzag barrier protecting the Savoy's River Room windows and back entrance, Cagney immediately rousing from his doze to follow us. Inside the gloomy entrance hall I picked up the flashlight I always left in a corner by the stairway in case of emergencies or my own late-night arrivals, then took her downstairs to the hotel's vast basement area. We entered a long room on the left of the hallway and I played the flashlight over pink-curtained bunk-beds, all of them numbered.

'Sleeping quarters for the rich and famous,' I explained. 'At the first sound of an air-raid siren, Savoy guests were ushered down here for their own safety.'

I moved the light on, showing Cissie the discreet alcoves, heavy drapes across them turning their interiors into small but private chambers. 'For your royalty, big shots, even princes and princesses. If they were gonna shelter from the bombs, they were gonna do it in comfort.'

I picked out a bust resting on a pedestal at the far end of the room. 'Abe Lincoln,' I told her. 'This place is dedicated to him. The Yanks who came here looked on it as another tiny state of the Union wedged between the Strand and the Thames. A lot of work for the US was carried out down here, and a lot of bridges built between your country and mine.' I shone the light up at the ceiling and around the pillars. 'It's reinforced with thousands of feet of steel tubing and timber beams, all strengthened by concrete. The place is bomb-proof, Cissie, so if you get scared next time that damn crazy starts blitzing us again, just get yourself down here. Safest place in town.'

I felt her shiver beside me.

'Thanks for the tour,' she said, 'but can we leave now? There's something horrible about this room.'

I turned the flashlight on her and saw her eyes were wide and constantly moving, as if she expected something to jump out at her from the dark at any moment

'I thought you weren't afraid of ghosts.'

She was already backing away. 'I'm not, but it's like the Underground station down here, it feels like a mausoleum. Hoke, have you looked behind those curtains?'

She had a point. It was one thing to be surrounded by the dead, but another to be enclosed with them, especially in the dark. I began to feel uneasy myself.

I followed her from the Abraham Lincoln Room and we climbed back to ground level. She became calmer standing in the light from the entrance doors, but I could tell she was still agitated. Could be I'd made a mistake taking her down there, because it had only underlined the fact that we were holed up in one huge tomb, and whether Cissie believed in spirits or not, the idea had to be a mite unnerving. Ysee, I'd forgotten how accustomed I'd become to living with the dead all around me. These people, save for Potter, weren't used to the new cities yet.

'How long have we got to stay here?' Cissie demanded to know.

I'd been trying to make things easier for her, so I guess I got a little irritated by her tone. 'Lady, you can leave whenever you like.'

'But.. .' she started to say, 'but surely.. .'

I was stone-faced.

'Surely well stay together.' Her hands were held towards me, palms facing, more in exasperation than pleading. 'We need each other, Hoke, can't you understand that? Could you really go on living by yourself, with only ... only a dog for company?'

Cagney, who'd stayed in a sunny spot by the entrance, cocked his head. He looked from Cissie to me, as if waiting for the reply.

'Cagney's been enough so far,' I shot back. 'He doesn't gripe and he doesn't need nurse-maiding. Yeah, I'll stick with the mutt.'

She left me then, stomping up the stairs, head and shoulders stiff with suppressed - outrage, resentment, good old-fashioned pique? I didn't know which - and I had to resist the urge to call her back. Cagney made a noise deep in his throat, a kind of drawn-out groan, and rolled his eyes at me. 'Quit it,' I snapped, and went back out into the sunshine.

Muriel was waiting for me when I eventually got back to the suite. She was standing by the window, a hand parting the net curtain so she could watch feeble strands of smoke rising from somewhere across the river, another piece of real estate damaged in last night's explosions. She dropped the curtain and hurried towards me as I closed the door.

'I've been so anxious,' she said and stopped a few steps away when she saw the dust in my hair and clothes. 'My goodness, what have you been up to? You look so ... dirty.'

I'd left Cagney outside where he could guard the corridor, a position he was well used to by now, so I didn't have to contend with his growling suspicion of this stranger in the room. Again I wondered at his swift acceptance of Cissie, particularly as I hadn't been there to make the introductions in the first place. I remembered I was still rankled with the girl, so any credit I gave her was limited. Tossing my jacket onto the bed and ignoring Muriel's question, I headed straight for the bathroom. She followed me in.

Muriel started the shower for me as I tugged off my undershirt and I heard her gasp when she saw the massive bruising on my chest and the inflamed edges of the gunshot nick showing around the dressing.

She took in some of the other cuts and bruises on my arms and body, shaking her head in sympathy as she did so.

'Does it hurt badly?' It was a dumb question and she knew it 'Do you have any pain-killers that I can get for you?' she added quickly.

I shook my head and took her by the elbow. 'I'm gonna take my shower alone,' I told her.

'Let me help. You must be sore all over.'

Yeah, I was sore, and I ached too, some of that from the day's work I'd just done, but I didn't need anybody's help to wash myself. 'I'd like some privacy, Muriel.'

Disappointment, hurt - I guess both were in those grey-blue eyes of hers. 'Can't I stay and talk to you?

Last night-'

I cut her off. 'Last night was last night. You needed me, and I wanted you - last night. Today's another day, kid.' Bogart couldn't have put it better.

Now she looked stunned. 'I don't understand,' was all she could think of to say.

'Look, you came to me for one thing last night, and you got it.' I'd never spoken to a girl like that before and I think I was almost as shocked as Muriel, although my anger covered it. Not only had the world changed, but I had too. I didn't back off though, and the English Rose before me wilted under the blast.

'You think you fooled me with all that stuff about seeing ghosts? Christ, I knew what you wanted soon as I opened the door. You and your friend, you just want a man around to look out for you, keep you out of danger, keep you fed. Well you picked the wrong guy, y'hear me? Maybe you better start cosying up to your friend Vilhelm. Sure, hell take care of you. Didn't you know he's the new Master Race?'

'Why are you so angry?' she pleaded. 'What have I done?'

Why? The heck of it was that I didn't know myself. Maybe I was scared of getting involved with other people after I'd spent so long looking out for myself. Was I angry at their intrusion, the sudden burden of having all these people around me? Or in truth, was I plain ashamed of myself for taking this girl to the same bed Sally and I had first made love in? I felt my face redden and it wasn't through rage. Yeah, that was it, or at least a big part of it Maybe it was foolish, but I felt I'd betrayed the one love of my life, someone I'd sworn eternal love for, no matter what. Stupid kid's stuff?

No, not really. Despite the war going on, and both of us knowing that we could die the next day or even that night, we'd made promises to each other that we vowed to keep. Not only had I broken my part of the deal, but I'd done it in the very bedroom Sally and I had honeymooned in. Although I'd had pangs of guilt at the time - all of them easily overwhelmed by the moment itself - the real sense of what I'd done had hit me with its full force when I'd opened the door to Suite 318-319 and found Muriel standing there.

Sure I was mad, madder than hell, but not at Muriel, not at Cissie, not at any of them ('cept Stern, but that was different). I was mad at myself. And I was ashamed. The combination was bad.

But I couldn't say all this to Muriel. No, instead I spun away from her and smashed the heel of my hand into the mirror over the washbasin, cracking the glass and fragmenting my image. I heard her give out a small scream and when I glared at her over my raised arm, my palm still pressed against the splintered glass, blood beginning to drip into the sink below it, she seemed about ready to run. I felt stupid, but I must have appeared insane.

I was ready to make some comment - it could've been an apology or a cuss - when Cagney started barking up a storm outside in the corridor. We heard shouting, more barking; something thumped against the bedroom door.

I moved fast, pushing Muriel aside and taking time to snatch the Colt from its holster inside my jacket.

Then I was at the door, yanking it open. I stopped dead, gun hand extended.

Cagney was upset. He was damn-near rabid. Crouched low, snout wrinkled over yellow teeth, haunches quivering, the dog was getting ready to launch itself at something or someone standing beside the door I'd just thrown open.

'It is wild.' Shit - vild.

I took a step forward into the corridor so that I could see him. The German had his back pressed against the wall and there was real fear in those pallid eyes of his. Like mine, one of his arms was outstretched, at the end of it the muzzle of a small automatic. He was pointing it at Cagney.

My reaction was almost instinctive, the thought and the movement instantaneous: I smashed my own weapon down hard on Stern's exposed wrist. Spittle shot from the German's open mouth with the shock and his gun clattered to the floor. He bent forward, clutching at his arm, and I brought my gun hand up again, catching him on the forehead so that he straightened and his head slammed against the wall behind.

He slid to the floor and I went with him, grabbing the lapel of his jacket and jabbing the Colt's muzzle into his scarred neck.

'Please stop.'

His jaw must've been numbed, because the two words weren't that coherent I understood them though.

'The animal...' he managed to blurt. 'It was ... it was going to attack me ... when I tried to enter your room.' That's what he tried to say, but it didn't come out quite that well. I couldn't have cared less anyway -I was ready to blow his brains out.

'Hoke!'

Female's voice, but I wasn't taking enough notice to decide whose. It was time to settle the score with the German and I was just mad enough to do it right then and there. Blood oozing from my cut hand made the gun's grip slippery, but still I pressed it into the flesh of his neck. A scream then and I glanced round to see Muriel standing in the doorway. It was Cissie who attacked me though.

Her knee connected with the side of my head, knocking me aside. Then her fingers tangled themselves in my hair and she pulled me backwards, so that I sprawled onto my back. She followed through by kneeling on my chest and grabbing at my gun hand, while Cagney leapt around us, yapping and too excited to figure out which one of us to attack. With a quick swipe of my other hand, I knocked Cissie away and raised my shoulders off the carpeted floor, the Colt finding its target once more.

'Don't shoot him!'

Now it was Muriel who was getting in the way. She positioned herself between me and the stunned German and screamed down at me.

'Stop it, stop it now! We can't go on killing one another, don't you understand?'

To complete the picture, Albert Potter came lumbering along the corridor from his suite. For some reason he still had the warning rattle he'd used last night in his hand and for one bad moment I thought he was gonna blast our ears with it again. Instead he shouted: ' What the bleedin 'ell's goin on? Can't a fellah get a decent kip around 'ere?' Mercifully, he tucked the rattle back into one of the large pockets in his overalls.

Cissie, a leg still across my chest, finally got both hands around my wrist and pulled the gun away from its mark.

'Please, Hoke, give it up,' she pleaded and there was a sob at the end of her words.

I glanced at her, saw the tears beginning to roll, and I guess it was that that took the wind out of me. I was still full of rage, but some of its energy had left me. I let my head slump back onto the carpet, and as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, I relaxed my grip on the gun, let my arm go limp. Still Cissie clung to my wrist, not trusting me.

'Okay. I'm done,' I assured her. 'Just get him outta my sight for a while.' They knew I meant Stern and not the dog who, now that the commotion was over, was trying to lick my face.

I heard someone helping the German to his feet, and then he was standing over me, looking down. There was no wariness in his eyes, no fear, only a simmering anger.

'You are a fool,' he hissed. 'There was no need for this. I am not your enemy.'

I ignored him, then suddenly remembered the gun he'd been aiming at Cagney. I sat up, fast, Cissie's grip instantly tightening on my wrist. With relief I saw that Potter had picked up the German's weapon.

'What's this then?' the warden mused, as if he'd never seen a gun before.

'It's a US military issue Colt 380,' I informed him, and he nodded his head like he knew all along. 'Don't let Stern have it,' I warned.

'Do you really think I would shoot you?' Stern sounded almost regretful. 'After all that has happened.. .'

He waved his hands around as if indicating the world outside. 'I found this weapon in my room and kept it for my own protection. I believe I was wise to do so. But do you honestly believe I have the desire to kill again? If you do, then you really are insane, Hoke. The Blood Death has made you so.'

With that he walked away from us, one hand held to his injured forehead. He disappeared inside his room and we heard the door close quietly behind him.

Supper that evening was a miserable affair. No one felt much like talking and Stern didn't even join us.

Let him sulk, I thought, it didn't bother me none. Potter did his best to get things going by reminiscing, relating stories of the Blitz, some of them funny, some of them not so. He told us how one night when he was on his rounds, he'd found Ed Murrow, the famous American war correspondent, lying in the gutter outside the Savoy, not rolling drunk, as Potter had first assumed, but picking up the sounds of wailing sirens and enemy bombs hitting their targets with his microphone, these authentic noises of war to be broadcast across the Atlantic. He told us about the authorities' grand idea of turning gas masks into Mickey Mouse faces so the kids wouldn't be afraid to wear them; how once he'd chased a couple of looters through Covent Garden only to see them both blown to pieces before his eyes by a land mine, one of the looter's legs landing on his shoulder as he'd stood there surprised; how on a cold, frosty dawn he'd come upon an elderly, white-haired lady sitting up in bed, totally bewildered as to why she was in the open, one floor up, two walls of her house completely demolished. He told us about the fireman he'd witnessed breaking down a warehouse door across the street, the poor man sucked inside by the firestorm when the door collapsed, to be burned to nothing, not even his bones left in the ashes; the warning whistle Potter always carried but which got stuck in his throat when a nearby explosion caused him to suck instead of blow, only a hefty blow on the back by a Heavy Rescue worker, who wondered why Potter was turning blue, saving his life when the whistle popped back into his mouth; the effigy of Adolf Hitler, wearing baggy grey bloomers, hanging by the neck from a crooked bus stop sign in Whitehall; the milk-cart horse painted with white stripes so that it wouldn't get knocked down on dark winter mornings.

Potter rambled on, amused and saddened in turn by his own stories, while across the room Muriel gave me an occasional long meaningful look, which I ignored, and Cissie, who'd taken over the cooking, shot me an angry glance from time to time, which I also ignored. We ate mostly in silence, Potter finally giving up the chatter, and both girls left the suite as soon as pans and plates were washed. Muriel's 'good night'

was kind of stiff, and Cissie didn't bother. So the warden and me, we cracked open another Jack Daniel's and finished it between us.

He was a mite unsteady when he left me that night, and he said a funny thing. He swayed in the doorway and laid a stubby finger against that beetroot nose of his, giving me a wink at the same time.

'I know what yer business is, son. And it's okay by me. Bloke's got to do what he thinks is best, even if it is 'opeless.

I won't tell another bleedin soul, seein as 'ow yer keepin it secret yerself.'

He shook his head, his eyes bleary with the booze.

'But it can't be done, boy. It can't bloody well be done. There's too...'

He just shook his head again and walked away.

Too bloody many...' I heard him say as he tottered down the corridor.

12

I'D CLEARED THE STREET. This was the last carcass. Any others were out of sight, inside the buildings. Like they say - said: Out of sight, out of mind. Only they weren't; I could still see them in my mind's eye, slumped in chairs, sprawled across tables, curled up on floors - dried-out, feather-light shucks, dusty, brittle refuse. My mind could always see them inside shops, restaurants, offices, dwellings, factories, stations, vehicles ... Christ, the list went on forever. But I couldn't take them all. As Potter had remarked: 'There were too bloody many...'

I lifted the bag of bones onto the back of the truck, oblivious to its shrivelled eyes, like black raisins above its yawning, meatless mouth, and it slithered down at me from the pile, a reluctant evacuee. Its bony fingers snagged against my sweatshirt as I pushed it back and I was too tired and too seasoned to feel any revulsion. When the desiccated corpse was settled, I picked up my jacket lying on the kerbside and the rifle leaning against the truck's rear wheel, then climbed into the cab.

Once this had been an ordinary city street, its houses untouched by Hitler's worst, the corner pub still open for business; but weeds now grew between the cracks in the pavements and vehicles rusted away in the road. But it was the silence that got to me. After three long and lonely years, I still hadn't become used to that eerie hush, not in undamaged streets like this where everything seemed so normal. It was as if the place was ... well, haunted. I thought of Muriel's ghosts back at the Savoy and got angry with myself.

Slamming the truck's door after me, I tossed my jacket onto the passenger seat and settled the rifle in the footwell on that side, its muzzle leaning against the open window opposite, pointed away from me but within easy reach. The girl had been wrong, she was haunted by memories, not by spectres. Even I'd imagined the sound of voices, laughter -music, too - drifting up to me as I'd lain awake nights in that grand rotting mausoleum. Couple of times I'd even gone to the door and listened, opening it when I was sure there really was something going on downstairs, the noises always vanishing the moment I stepped out into the corridor. Just night-notions, that's all they were. Dreams when I hadn't even realized I'd been asleep. Muriel would soon get to realize that imagination had a way of playing tricks on you when you were in a low frame of mind. They weren't just dreams either, they were wishful dreams, dreams you hoped would be true, cravings for life to return to normal, to the way it had once been. Daybreak always put things right again; as right as they were ever gonna be.

I turned on the engine, took one last look at the deserted street out the side window, and drove off.

Although weary from my labours and a little hungover from the night before, I kept alert, constantly on the lookout for the unexpected. One time about a year and some months ago, a crazy had jumped out at the truck I was using, an Austin 5-ton, as I recall, its flap sides and back easy for loading. He was waving a butcher's meat axe over his head and hollering gibberish at me. Maybe I should have stopped, but it was the middle of winter and this guy was stark naked. And oh yeah, around his neck under a long greasy beard he wore a ragged necklace of severed, blackened hands. When he realized I wasn't gonna stop, he threw the axe at me. Luckily, his aim was poor and it broke through the windshield on the passenger side, so I kept going, heading straight for him, figuring he wasn't in the mood to discuss his complaint. Well, he didn't even try to dodge me, just kept coming forward, screaming and shaking his fists; and I didn't try to avoid him either. I ran right over him, and when I stopped further down the road and looked back, I saw his naked body was still twitching. By the time I'd climbed out and walked back to him, he was trying to crawl along the gutter, his back broken, both legs crushed. It wasn't out of mercy that I put the gun to his head and fired, nor was it out of spite: those feelings didn't come into it. No, I was just carrying on as usual; I was just tidying up.

When his body finally lay at rest, I added his corpse to the rest of my cargo and took him with me.

There were other creatures I had to keep a lookout for, mainly cats and wild dogs who'd lost any road sense, but mostly I kept my eyes open for Blackshirts, who had a nasty habit of appearing when I least expected it. Although it was a big city, it was inevitable that our paths should cross from time to time. Our battles were usually short and sharp, and I always had the advantage that their sickness had slowed them down considerably.

Today was a good day though, the summer making up for winter's severity, when there were twelve-foot high snowdrifts along the streets. The sky was clear again, but a slight breeze coming in from the east was keeping things a little cooler. With my full load, I avoided craters, debris and any other wreckage along the route, heading north, the way well known to me by now. Within twenty minutes I'd reached my destination.

I drove straight up the ramp into the stadium whose stands had once held over a hundred thousand people at a time. I passed through the tunnel and emerged inside the vast arena itself. Driving past stacked gasoline cans and boxes of explosives, I headed into the centre aisle whose banks were formed by piled-high rotted corpses, turning at its centre into a narrower lane, the stink hardly bothering me these days. Occasionally I spotted movement among the heaps, the vermin disturbed but not intimidated by my presence. I used to waste time taking potshots at them, at the scavenging dogs too, but nowadays I didn't bother: when the time came, they'd burn along with the corrupted things they feasted on.

Soon I reached a clearing, the grass there long and unhealthy-looking, and I brought the diesel flatbed to a halt I stood on the running board for a while, just listening, checking around me. As I gazed over those great mounds of human debris I wondered how much more I could accomplish. Almost three long years I'd been filling this huge arena with the dead, always aware it could be no more than a token gesture.

Lime pits and thousands of cardboard coffins had been made ready in the early days of the war in case they were needed, but nobody had predicted the Blood Death. Most of the population had remained where they'd dropped. 'Cept for these people. At least they were gonna receive some kind of burial.

It didn't take long to unload this, my last haul of the day, and soon I was on my way back across London, leaving the grimy walls of Wembley Stadium behind, a place where once crowds had gathered to roar their excitement, but which was now just one huge and silent burial vault.

One day, when I was satisfied I'd done all I could, it would be their crematorium.

13

I'D CLEANED MYSELF UP and was sprawled half-naked on the bed, a glass of Scotch held on my bruised chest, cigarette in my other hand, when there was a knock on the door.

'Hoke? It's me, Muriel. Can I come in?'

I inhaled, exhaled, lifted my head and took another sip of the Scotch.

'Hoke.'

She sounded impatient. The doorhandle rattled.

With a groan, I rolled off the bed, placed the glass on the cabinet, and grabbed my pants. Cigarette drooping from the corner of my mouth, I unlocked the door and opened it a few inches. Smoke curled out into the corridor.

Muriel was wearing a different outfit, a cream blouse and loose, brown slacks, her hair drawn back on one side with a slide. She looked good - even grubby she'd looked good -but I didn't let that affect me.

'You've been gone most of the day again,' she said, and there seemed little sense in replying to the obvious. After a pause: 'Can I come in for a minute?'

Leaving the door open so that the option was hers, I picked up a shirt lying across the back of an easy chair and shrugged it on. I didn't bother with the buttons, hoping her stay would be short; I sat on the edge of the bed, close to the Scotch.

Muriel closed the door behind her and stood in front of me.

'No point in asking where you went to, I suppose?' Her neat, pencilled eyebrows were raised.

'Had things to do,' was my response.

'Why so surly, Hoke? The other night...' She left it there, waving a hand in exasperation.

What could I tell her? That guilt was busting my head, making me feel Sally's presence all around me in that room? It was stupid; I knew it then, I know it now. Three years dead and I was still grieving for her, mourning for the life together we'd been denied. The whole fucking world gone to damnation and I was still focused on my own loss. And now I not only suffered the guilt of survival, but of betrayal also. It was morbid and it was irrational; but when I closed my eyes I still saw my young bride in this room with me, breathed in her perfume, heard her whispers. And I had closed my eyes.

I opened them quickly.

'We ... I... made a mistake,' was all I could think of to say, and in truth, I wasn't sure if I was addressing Muriel, or someone long since dead.

'A mistake? My God, man, don't you realize we're living in a whole new world with a different morality?

I wasn't asking for love, just comfort, compassion. I was frightened, don't you understand?'

Or staking a claim? I wondered, then hated myself for the cynicism. I dragged on the cigarette, confused, maybe even disgusted with myself. Anger was burning me.

'All right,' she said in a resigned, kind of stiff-backed voice. She was tired of reasoning with me and I couldn't blame her for that. 'I only wanted to let you know that Cissie and I have arranged a dinner party for us all downstairs in the Pinafore Room.'

I stared up at her as if she were the wacky one here.

'Hoke, we've got to put the past behind us. It's unreasonable of you to carry on despising Wilhelm Stern just because he's a German. Gracious, not only did he not personally start the war against us, but he actually played very little part in it. He was shot down and captured in 1940, for God's sake!' Her tone changed and she looked at me appealingly. 'We've got to forgive and forget, don't you see? How else can we build a new life for ourselves? Some order has to come out of all this and that can only be if we cast past grudges aside.'

She strode to the writing desk and leaned back against it, arms folded, eyes intense. 'It's time for those of us who are left to come to our senses, to introduce some kind of order to our lives. What else is there otherwise? Lawlessness? Chaos?'

Calmer now, I swung my legs up onto the bed and rested my back against the headboard so that I could watch her across the room. She was serious. The planet had gone to blazes and she was talking law and order. Resting my cigarette hand on my raised knee, I cocked my head at her.

'You don't see it's all finished?' I was genuinely surprised. 'You don't see that our so-called civilization has gone AWOL? Jesus Christ, Muriel, there's nothing left for any of us.'

'We're alive, blast you, and there are many more like us, waiting to make a fresh start, waiting for the survivors to come together again, perhaps even hoping for a new leader. It can be better than before, we can avoid the same age-old mistakes.'

Maybe she was right. That's what I thought as I smoked the cigarette, my gaze never leaving hers.

Someone had to start things rolling again and probably - no doubt - it was already happening in other parts of the globe. So why not here, in what used to be one of the world's greatest cities? I studied Muriel in a way I hadn't before. She was a slight, almost fragile, kind of girl, but I could see the resolve in her, a steeliness that I guess came with her breeding. Lord knows, as a kid my head had been filled with literature depicting England's upper classes as people of fine character and great purpose (although Ma had warned me it wasn't all true), and at that moment I was beginning to glimpse those qualities in Muriel.

I'd witnessed the good old British stiff-upper-lip style in plenty of the RAF types I'd flown with, so I shouldn't have been surprised to see the same trait in a lord's daughter. Okay, a romantic view of the English - at least, of their gentry - but I'd had plenty of evidence to back it up since coming to these shores, and looking at Muriel across the room, that intensity still in her eyes, her jawline delicate but determined, I suddenly thought she might just have the backbone to see it through. Another thing I realized, though, was that my kind of cynicism could play no part in her vision of a bright new future. But that didn't mean I'd discourage her. Truth was, I didn't care one way or the other.

'Will you join us this evening, Hoke?' Her tone softened, her arms had unfolded. 'Stern and Potter cleared some of the rooms downstairs and even raided the hotel's foodstores. We've set up a makeshift kitchen in the private dining room next door to the Pinafore, and Wilhelm even went out and found us two portable oil cookers bigger and a touch more sophisticated than the ones you've been using.'

'He left the Savoy?' I didn't like the idea.

'We've all been out today. What did you expect us to do - remain cooped up all day in this place waiting for your return? For myself, I travelled across town to Daddy's Kensington apartment.'

'By yourself? Christ, woman, why?'

'Are you really that dense, Hoke? I wanted to visit our old home, is that so unreasonable? After all, it was why we returned to London. I have certain things of sentimental value there, photographs, diaries and, yes, even jewellery. Things I want to keep to remind me of better times. And clothes, my own clothes. Yes, I know I could choose from any fashionable Knightsbridge shop, but I wanted certain items I already possessed, is that so difficult to understand? Cissie would have done exactly the same if she'd still had a home to go to. Instead she stayed behind and helped get everything ready.'

'But-' I started again, then let it go. 'Okay. How did you get there?'

For the first time since she'd entered the suite she smiled, 'I was going to use any motorcar I could find still working. Instead I found a bicycle that wasn't rusted completely - it was inside a shop - so I used that. It squeaked a lot and the tyres need pumping up, but it got me through all the parked traffic in the streets.'

'D'you have any idea where Stern went to?'

'I told you, he found us some better cookers, so obviously he got those from one of those big camping stores nearby. Potter went off on his own too, probably patrolling the streets looking for UXBs and incendiaries. He's quite dotty, you know.' She moved from the writing desk and stood at the end of the bed. 'Why so pensive, Hoke? What's troubling you now?'

Dogging the cigarette, I replied, 'The city's a dangerous place.'

'The Blackshirts, you mean? I didn't catch a glimpse of one. But then, it is a huge city. Anyway, I'm sure they assumed they'd killed us all when they set fire to the Underground station.'

I wondered. Would Hubble and his Looney-Tunes army think we were dead by now? The notion that he'd lost four valuable blood donors would have sent Hubble into a frenzy and I pitied the fool who'd broken the news to him that they'd fire-bombed the station. If only that were the case, if only Hubble believed we were gone for good ... On my own travels that day I'd seen neither hide nor hair of any Blackshirts, although that wasn't unusual; as Muriel said, it was a big city. Besides, I always kept off the beaten track, taking side streets rather than main thoroughfares. But heck, it was a pleasant enough thought on an otherwise grim day. Muriel took advantage of my sudden smile.

'You'll come, then?'

I blinked.

'Our little celebratory dinner,' she persisted. 'You'll join us downstairs?'

'What're you celebrating?'

'Just being alive. Isn't that enough?'

Sometimes I thought it was too much, but I didn't say that. 'Okay, I'll be there. But don't get the idea I'll be making any new friends.'

'All I ask is that you be civil to Wilhelm.' She left it at that They'd found hundreds more candles from somewhere and had filled every nook and cranny with them so that the Pinafore Room resembled some holy shrine. They were supplemented by two or three oil lamps in strategic positions around the room, and the heat and waxy smell took some getting used to at first. Behind the thick, rich drapes daylight was fading and, despite the candleglow, there were dark shadows in the room, especially in its corners. Warm scintillas of light reflected off tall glasses and cutlery set around the long table, and cedar panelling, studded with silver buttons, on the walls and central square column lent a soft ambience to the proceedings. It was a ritzy setting for a dinner party, an evocation of more pleasant times.

I paused in the open doorway, Cagney at my side, his nose in the air, sniffing out food.

Muriel was chatting to Wilhelm Stern before a tall mirror over an empty fireplace at the far end of the room, and an elegant couple they made, she in a slim floor-length gown that shimmered silver, cut high from shoulder to shoulder, with long tight sleeves, her hair once again held to one side but this time by a decorative comb, while he wore a dark evening suit, white handkerchief, probably silk, peeping from his breast pocket, his tie a deep grey worn against a white shirt. They'd made an effort for this evening's soiree (clinging to the wreckage?) and I was relieved to see that Potter, who'd suddenly appeared at a double door on my left, hadn't bothered to fancy himself up at all: he still wore his warden's all-in-one outfit, although he'd brushed it down and his helmet was nowhere in evidence.

Spotting me, he called, 'Grub's up soon, son,' and pointed a stubby thumb over his shoulder at the room behind. He gave me a broad, yellow-toothed grin. 'There's time for a pair o' teeth first, though. What can I get yer?'

I frowned.

Muriel wised me up. 'Albert means an aperitif. As I'm sure he knows,' she added, looking meaningfully at the warden and smiling. She turned her smile on me, but it had an uneasy edge to it, as though she was a little nervous.

As I walked the length of the table towards them Cagney trotted before me, his excuse for a tail wagging in anticipation of the food he could smell. He disappeared through the opening behind Potter and I heard Cissie's muted cry of welcome. The mutt was getting used to people again too fast and that concerned me: I didn't want him to lose his usual caution in case eventually it proved dangerous for both of us.

'We're using the Princess Ida Room as a makeshift kitchen,' Muriel told me, and I remembered that all the names of the private dining rooms along this floor had something to do with Gilbert and Sullivan operas. 'Cissie's in there playing chef and I must get back to help before she starts getting cross.' She eyed me up and down as she sipped her drink. 'Thank you at least for putting on a fresh shirt.'

I checked her eyes for sarcasm, but she quickly looked away. My pants were a little wrinkled, my boots none too clean, and my torn leather jacket was thrown over one arm, pistol tucked inside. The shirt was fresh though, one of a bunch I'd picked out of a Regent Street menswear shop's smashed window, none of which I'd gotten round to wearing until now. I guess it would've looked better with a tie, but ties never had been one of my things, even in peacetime. Muriel moved closer to me, away from the German.

'What would you like to drink?' she asked, but again she averted her gaze when I looked directly into her eyes. 'Gin and tonic, a Martini, sherry... ? We're well stocked, as you can see.'

'Scotch'll do.'

'Good boy,' approved Potter. 'Think I'll join yer.' He bustled over to a small, round dining table that was loaded with the hard stuff. Rubbing his fleshy hands together he cast his eye over the wide selection. He spied the Scotch, another bottle of his favourite Grouse. 'Lovely,' we heard him mutter.

'Hoke.. .'

It was the German and there was a wariness in his approach. I laid my jacket over the back of a chair at the head of the long table, folded so that the concealed holster would be easy to reach, before facing him.

'It is extremely foolish for us to regard each other as enemies,' Stern said, his manner relaxed, but still that apprehensive cautiousness in his eyes. 'In the war I was merely a navigator doing my job, as were you as a fighter pilot I mean you no harm now and would' - v ould - 'hope you no longer wish me any harm. We were airmen loyal to our own countries, but all that is in the past. We can no longer live that way. We should endeavour to live in peace and, as the British themselves say, let bygones be bygones.'

Speech finished, he offered me a hand to shake.

Unfortunately, I didn't take to the idea of shaking the hand of someone I would eventually kill, so I ignored the offer. His pale eyes momentarily hardened, and then he smiled as he let his hand fall away.

'So be it,' he said coldly. 'I have made an effort to be civil - or indeed, civilized - and I shall continue to do so. You will make up your own mind about how you regard me, but I must warn you, I shall always defend myself.'

' Please, Wilhelm.' Muriel looked anxiously from me to Stern. 'This isn't necessary.'

'Have I not just tried to make that very point?' He never took his eyes off me. 'I will behave honourably, but Mr Hoke must decide for himself. I have offered the hand of friendship and he has rejected it, but still I will not be the one to make trouble.'

Potter arrived between us with two tumblers of Scotch in his hands, one of them held out to me.

'Bottoms up,' he said cheerfully, as if he hadn't noticed the exchange between myself and the German.

'Yeah,' I responded, taking the tumbler and tipping it against my lips, my gaze still not breaking from Stern's. We all turned when another voice called from the far end of the room.

'Dinner's coming along nicely.' Cissie was in the doorway to the Princess Ida Room, wiping her hands with a cloth. 'So I'm going to socialize for a bit. I think a large g-and-t would go down very nicely right now.' She tossed the cloth onto something behind her and headed our way.

'You've earned it.' Muriel quickly busied herself at the drinks table, glad to turn her back on the tension between Stern and me, I guess. 'I think I'll have another one, myself.'

Fumes from the portable oil cookers kept drifting through from next door to mix with the smell of melting wax, but they didn't spoil our feast any. We kicked off with oatmeal soup and dumplings, followed by

'brisket of beef, as Cissie announced, and while tinned beans and peas may have been a poor substitute for turnips and parsnips, they didn't spoil the taste of this particular meat pie. Together with potatoes and carrots (fresh, from my own home-grown stock), it made one of the finest meals - no, the finest meal - I'd had in three years, and by the time we'd finished pudding - semolina and Prince Roly - we were all fit to bust.

I was at the head of the table for no other reason than that I'd left my jacket over the chair there, and on my right was Cissie, who wore a coffee-coloured, below knee-length evening dress, which was a mite too tight for her. Muriel was on my left and our conversation throughout the meal had been minimal - she was still edgy, probably afraid trouble might flare up between myself and Stern at any moment. Stern sat next to her, old Potter opposite him. Cagney was under the table by my feet, well fed and snoozing, content to be among friendly people again (although he'd given a small warning growl every time the German got too close), and at the far end of the table, facing me, was a strange, almost exotic creature, silent, unmoving, and black, with a pink napkin tied around its neck. Muriel had introduced me to it when we'd first sat down to eat.

'Meet Kaspar,' she'd said. 'He's our guest this evening because the Pinafore Room used to be used by members of what was known as The Other Club, a collection of, well, rather eminent people, and politicians - Winston Churchill was one of them. The politicians dined here whenever parliament was in session, industrialists and other powerful men joining them. You'll see there's seating for fourteen around this table, but whenever there was an empty chair and the number of people present was an unlucky thirteen, they brought out Kaspar the cat. They tied a napkin around his neck and served him every course.'

There was something I didn't like about the three-foot-high black animal. Maybe it was its down-turned head and pointed ears, or its sinuous, snake-like tail that looped round in an almost full circle, or its arched spine etched with scrawls that looked like esoteric writings. I couldn't figure out why, but as the evening wore on, I realized it was just the creature's dark, brooding presence that made me feel uncomfortable; there was something ominous about it, as if it were a portent of doom rather than a good-luck charm. Now, over coffee and brandy, and some fine cigars Potter had scrounged from somewhere, the seal of the box they came in unbroken, the conversation returned to Kaspar.

'We found it on a shelf at the back of the room,' Cissie was explaining. 'We thought it would add some dignity to the proceedings.' She giggled at Muriel, hand to her mouth like a schoolkid. She'd joined the menfolk in the brandies. 'D'you think it'll bring us luck?'

I reserved judgement and it was Stern who answered.

'I have never understood if the black cat means good or bad fortune to the English. Are you saying it is good?'

Potter piped up. 'Always said meself if a black mog crosses yer path, yer in for a spot of bad luck.'

'No, no, that's wrong,' argued Cissie. My grandad always told me a black cat was good luck.'

'Wasn't that only on one's wedding day?' put in Muriel.

'No!' Cissie and Potter cried together.

'There are only five of us around this table anyway,' I pointed out, stabbing the air with my cigar. Blue smoke drifted towards the ceiling.

'Well spotted.'

I shrugged at Cissie's sarcasm.

'We were just making up the numbers.' Muriel gave her friend a worried glance. 'I mean to say, we're hardly a crowd, are we? What kind of discussions do you suppose they had in this room? With all those important club members -ambassadors, dignitaries, newspaper owners and editors, as well as the politicians themselves - some very momentous decisions must have been made. No church people were allowed in, by the way. But the Prime Minister himself-'

'Don't matter, neither way.' It was out of character for Potter to interrupt Muriel; it'd been plain throughout the evening that he regarded her upper-class credentials with some respect, if not awe. It seemed too much whisky, wine and brandy had blurred the class division for him, and I, for one, was glad to see it. 'Don't matter how grand they was, how much power was in their hands, they come down with the plague jus like everybody else. 'Cept us. We didn't. Money couldn't buy it off, an nor could fame. Neville Chamberlain - the gerk, I mean berk - to Jessie Matthews, Ivor Novello to Herbert Morrison, Martin bloody Bormann -'scuse me, my dears - to Groucho Marx, all dead, see? Unless.. .'

He waved his finger around the table. 'Unless they was like us, our blood thingy. We're special, see? All the others ... werl, all the others.. .' He seemed at a loss. 'Werl, they're gone. Finished.'

"Then why do you still patrol the streets, Mr Potter?' The German was leaning forward, a cigar between his fingers. 'If almost everybody else is gone, why do you continue with your work?'

The logic didn't please the old boy. 'I should give up me duty jus 'cos things've changed? Without orders to stand down? With the Luftwaffe still knockin ten bells out of London? You Germans never did understand us English, did yer?'

'And you English never quite understood we did not want war with your country. The Fuhrer had a great.. .' he considered the right word '... affinity with many of your people.'

'Oh no, not very many.' Cissie looked about ready to toss her wine at Stern. 'What you really mean is he had an affinity with a certain type of Englishman. Some of our so-called ruling class didn't think Adolf Hitler was such a bad chap.'

'That is not quite correct,' Stern replied, as smooth as Conrad Veidt. 'A good number of the English common people understood the Jewish problem, for instance. And I think all classes accepted our right to play a major role in the governance of Europe.'

'Only other Fascists believed that.'

'Please let's not argue among ourselves.' Muriel obviously didn't like this turn in the conversation.

The German was quick to respond to her plea. 'I did not mean to cause disagreement between us, but you must understand that I, too, loved my country, and I have suffered as much as anybody in this room.'

I placed my empty brandy glass on the table and dropped the butt of my cigar into it. My hands remained on the tabletop, about a foot apart, fingers clenched. 'Oh yeah, we understand, Vilhelm. After all, you were a good German, weren't you? A good, fighting Nazi.'

He regarded me warily, trusting me not one little bit. 'All Germans are - were - not Nazis.'

'Hoke.. .' Muriel warned.

'Of course not.' I leaned forward. 'And you, personally, never really had the chance to fight us, did you?

You got yourself shot down right at the beginning of the war, so we can't hate you, can we? You hardly had time to cause much damage, and besides, you were only a navigator anyway, so didn't personally pull any triggers or push any buttons.'

'That is certainly the case. I told you -'

'Yeah, you told us you were captured and interned in April 1940, isn't that right? So why should we bear you any grudge? Hell, you practically played no part at all in the war.'

I felt Cagney stirring under the table, his weight shifting against my foot I thought he must have sensed the rising tension in the room.

'But you were lying, weren't you, Vilhelm? You didn't want us to think bad of you, not while you could use us. At least, while you could use the girls here.'

The colour - what scant colour she had - was draining from Muriel's face. She was beginning to realize the party wasn't going to turn out the way she'd planned.

'What' - vot- 'are you suggesting, Hoke?' Stern had placed his own brandy glass before him, although his cigar remained between his fingers. Was there a sneer on those thin, humourless lips, was there hatred behind those passionless eyes of his?

Keeping my hands on the table, I rested back in my chair. My tight grin lacked any pleasure.

'I'm suggesting you're a lying son-of-a-bitch,' I informed him quietly.

'Stop this now!' Muriel was on her feet 'It's time you grew up, Hoke. This bitterness against Wilhelm -

and yes, against us - is utterly pointless. Even though we saved your life you still resent us, you still look on us as some kind of burden, a nuisance you could well do without. Do you honestly think -'

'Let him have his say, Mu.' Cissie's anger was suppressed, her interest centred on me. A low, rumbling growl came from beneath the table.

Stern's smile was like my own: no warmth to it 'Why do you bait me like this, Hoke? Is it because you are a rather absurd and intolerant man who will not accept the idea that Germany did not lose the war after all? That in the jaws of defeat the German Reich snatched victory with a weapon so brilliantly lethal it irrevocably altered mankind's destiny? That the Americans, with all their sophisticated weaponry and manpower, and the British who, if we are to be honest, were merely a spent force hanging on the coattails of their overseas masters, could suddenly lose to an army they thought defeated? Is that why you hate me so and imply that I am a liar? And isn't this what you expect me to say, Hoke? Isn't this the kind of Fascist language you want to hear from me? Isn't this just your own idea of how a German thinks, talks?'

Muriel and Cissie were staring at Wilhelm Stern, shocked by his words. Potter, bleary-eyed and heavy-lidded, opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

My smile had frosted and my thumbs were twitching against my fingers. 'No, Stern,' I said finally, 'that isn't why I'm calling you a liar. Y'see, you made a slip while we were down there in the tram tunnel. You told us you'd witnessed starving dogs roaming the bomb-blitzed ruins of Berlin.'

His expression changed when he understood his mistake - his very stupid mistake.

'Because, Vilhelm,' I went on, enjoying his discomfort, 'the RAF didn't begin their raids on Berlin until August 1940, four months after you told us you were captured and interned over here.'

I leaned forward on the table again, a fury inside me that was intense but as cold as his pale eyes stiffening every muscle. 'What did you do in the war, Vilhelm? I'm betting it was something pretty nasty if you had to keep it from us three years after the event. Yeah, there were plenty of your kind over here in England, pretending to be Polish, Dutch, Czech, Belgian, all kinds of runaways and asylum seekers, but in reality spies and saboteurs. Which were you, Vilhelm? Did you get to blow up any munitions factories?

Maybe that's how you got those scars on your neck, not escaping fast enough once you'd set the explosives. How about that, Vilhelm? Saboteur or spy - which was it?'

I don't know where it came from, but the gun was in his hand in the blink of an eye, and it was pointed at me. I realized he'd deliberately kept one hand - the one holding the cigar - in view on the table while I'd been talking, the other one sneaking into a pocket for the weapon he must have picked up - from a police station, from the corpse of a serviceman, or even from somewhere in the hotel itself -during his hunt around earlier in the day, because I hadn't returned the one I'd taken from him yesterday. There was more movement by my feet, Cagney rousing himself. We all heard his bad-tempered growl.

"The gun is merely for self-protection,' Stern informed me. 'I have no wish to fight with you, Hoke, but neither do I intend to be harmed by you.'

More commotion under the table, the mutt pushing his way through legs and chairs. Cagney suddenly appeared about halfway down, his teeth bared, a deep snarling-growl coming from his throat. He wasn't watching the German though; he was facing the door at the end of the room.

While Stern was distracted, I leapt from my chair, twisting so that I was at the back of it, and reached into my jacket pocket. My fingers were curling around the pistol butt as the door Cagney was facing burst open.

14

MY FIRST THOUGHT was to shoot the German; my second -and it was only a split second after the first - was to duck the gunfire that came my way.

Fortunately, the Blackshirts weren't aiming to kill, only to frighten us all into immobility, but it didn't work that way with me, because I took a dive as the mirror behind me shattered and the room erupted with the sounds of machine-gun fire and the girls' screams. I kept rolling 'til I was behind the thick central column as candles split in two, a lamp in one corner exploded as if hit by a cannon, and splinters from the wood panelling spat across the table. I came up on one knee in time to see Cagney scooting into the room next door. Good move, I thought as I peeked around the column, hoping to get a clear shot at the Blackshirt who was causing most of the damage. But he was waiting for me to show myself again and he peppered the column and the space next to it with a hail of bullets so that I had to fall back to avoid a faceful of lead. The drapes over the windows were shredded, the glass behind them smashed, as I cowered out of sight, biding my time. The gunfire abruptly ceased - out of ammo, I assumed - and then so did the shouts and screams. I acted fast, whipping round the square-shaped pillar, gun hand extended, searching out my target. Smoke wafted across the room, with it the smell of cordite and candlewax. And something more.

The familiar stink of the intruders themselves, a kind of cankerous odour that they carried with them like some unclean aura.

Cissie was huddled over the dining table, Potter on his knees beside her, while Muriel had backed up against the wall, shocked rigid. Stern held his hands high in surrender, his pistol lying on the tabletop.

Blackshirts crowded the doorway, their ragged midnight garb and the array of weapons aimed around the room a dispiriting sight. The only person still moving was the goon who'd done the most damage -he was clumsily trying to fit a new magazine into a Sterling submachine gun. Again I acted fast, realising there was no point in trying to take them all on with one small sidearm; there was one chance for us and a slim one at that I was over the table, scattering glasses and coffee cups, before they could make their next move, their disease-induced slowness my only advantage. I came up behind Stern and locked an arm around his neck, my .45 pressed hard against his temple.

'Hold it right there!' I yelled at them, trying to keep the shakes from my voice as well as my gun hand. I pulled the German against me, using him as a human shield.

Five or six Blackshirts had managed to squeeze through that doorway and now every one of their guns was focused on me. The goon with the Sterling finished reloading and lifted the weapon chest-high, his hands as unsteady as mine.

'The German's dead if any one of you so much as scratches an itch,' I warned.

Stern could hardly breathe, let alone speak, but damned if he wasn't gonna make the effort

'Shut up, Kraut!' I hissed into his ear. 'I guess it didn't take much searching to find your Fascist pals today when you left the hotel.'

He tried to squirm free, but I held him firm, digging the gun barrel even harder against his head just to cause him more discomfort. The temptation to shoot him right there and then was almost overwhelming, but I needed him - we needed him - as a hostage.

'Back off!' I shouted as more Blackshirts pushed their way further forward. I was the one who backed away, bringing my protection with me. I didn't like the craziness in their dark-smudged eyes, but then maybe they didn't like the craziness they saw in mine, because they became still sure enough. We had a stand-off - or so I thought - and that was a slight improvement in the situation.

'One bad move,' I warned them, 'and your Kraut friend's brains'll be dripping from the ceiling.'

I'd made up my mind to drop the one with the submachine gun first, then the two mugs on either side of him, each of them packing two pistols. When the rest scattered for cover I'd deal with Stern. All else was in the lap of the gods, but I was damn sure I'd never let them take me alive. I got ready to change my aim and the German stiffened even more, as though aware of my intentions.

'By all means, Mr Hoke, shoot our alleged Kraut friend if it makes you happy.'

The voice drifted through the hallway outside the Pinafore Room and I knew whose it was, although I'd never heard the man speak before 'cept once on a BBC radio broadcast early on in the war. I hadn't realized he knew my name either and then it dawned on me that he'd obviously learned it just that day, and the informant was right here in my arms. The Blackshirts at the door stirred again, stepping aside to let their leader through. Sir Max Hubble appeared, propped up by McGruder on one side and his thick walking stick on the other. What was left of the candlelight did nothing to soften his appearance and I heard one of the girls -Cissie, I think - utter a small, fearful cry. Hubble came to a shambling halt a few feet inside the room.

'Well, Mr Hoke, aren't you going to shoot this man?' His sharp, wheezy voice was mocking as if he were taking pleasure from the situation. Maybe he enjoyed bluffing.

Well I had nothing to lose, so was prepared to call it 'Unless you all move out so we can leave, I'll do that.'

Stern tried to tear my arm away, squawking something into my shirtsleeve that I couldn't catch. I held him fast, half-choking him with my grip.

'I'll tell you what,' Hubble said, his bluish lips beneath the thin moustache managing to form a smile. 'Well do it for you.' He nodded at one of his men, who raised his pistol and pointed it at Stern's head.

Yeah, sure, go ahead, I thought, and then I saw the man's finger tightening on the trigger. 'Jesus,' I breathed.

' No!'

It was Muriel who cried out and ran forward to stand between us and the Blackshirts. 'You said nobody would be harmed. You promised me.'

She was staring straight at Hubble.

I couldn't believe my ears or my eyes. The gun wavered in my hand as I gaped at her back. I caught movement in the corner of my eye and saw that Cissie was pushing herself from the table, watching her friend open-mouthed.

'It's up to the American,' I heard Hubble say. 'He has the choice of either laying down his weapon and surrendering to us, or forcing us to shoot the person he's holding, and after that, him. We have other blood now.'

Cissie's fist crashed down on the tabletop, nearly causing more than one gun to go off. 'You brought them here!' she shouted at Muriel. 'You betrayed us. My God, how could you?'

Even in the flickering light I could see Muriel's face whiten as she faced her accuser.

'Miss Drake's father and I were great friends,' said Hubble as, like Muriel, he turned towards Cissie, using his whole upper body to do so, as if his neck had lost that small function. 'Our principles, our ideals, were the same, so is it surprising that Lord Drake's daughter should share those same values?'

I have to admit I'd never gone much on small-talk and after three years of none at all, save for the last couple of days, I wasn't surprised to learn I still didn't. And anyway, why gab? I knew all I needed to know.

Shoving Stern aside, I shot a hole through pistol-man's throat - he'd had to be first because his trigger finger was already halfway to squeezing. I would've taken Hubble next, but Muriel was in the way and, as much as I despised her, good old-fashioned propriety wouldn't allow me to shoot her in the back; so I settled for the goon with the Sterling, who was about to open fire again. I only winged him, but it was still enough to make him screech like a barn owl and collapse into three Blackshirts behind him, spoiling their aim and creating enough disorder for me to slide back across the table towards Cissie. I nudged her aside so I could get off a few clear shots at the enemy.

She screamed a warning as more Blackshirts came pouring through the double doors of the Princess Ida Room, and that was when I realized we didn't have a hope in hell. The only thing in my favour was the gun in my hand and my speed, but I couldn't shoot them all and I had nowhere to run.

Something - Lord knows what - struck me hard on the forehead and I went down, poleaxed. The next thing I knew, boots were stomping me and rifle butts were jabbing at arms and ribs. The Colt was wrenched from my grasp, bright flares were bursting inside my head, and somewheres a long way off someone was screaming.

All I could do - and there was no choice to it - was retreat into my own private sanctum, those lights fading fast, giving way to total darkness. I liked that darkness, I liked it a lot 15

A DULL BUT SUDDEN PAIN semi-roused me; the sting of the second - it might really have been the third or fourth -had my eyes opening. I wasn't happy at what was before me, so I closed them again and another slap, this one on the other side of my face, convinced me to keep them open. I had to blink them several times though, partly because the light hurt and partly because they couldn't believe what they saw.

The light was everywhere, shining from the massive chandeliers in the ceiling and the low lamps set around the great lounge area. Yet more brightness flooded through the glass doors and windows of the riverside restaurant at the end of the lounge, as well as from the direction of the foyer and main entrance.

For a moment I thought I must be dreaming, that the grand old hotel had returned to its former glory only in my unconscious mind; and then I took in the rotted corpses, many of them still seated or slumped in elegant but dusty chairs, while others lay on the carpeted floor, pushed aside with the furniture so that there was a clear space near the vast room's centre. Blackshirts were still busy creating more space, pushing back low tables and easy chairs, upsetting chinaware and cake-stands, throwing more corpses into heaps near the mirrored walls, shifting those already on the floor with their boots, not caring if skulls crumbled and skeletal hands broke loose.

I looked up at the person who'd struck me and groaned when I saw his death's eyes, the dried blood around their darkened lids, caked like biscuit crumbs in the lashes, the ulcerations and cyanotic discoloration of the man's cheeks and jaw. He grinned down at me, exposing bleeding gums, and when I tried to strike out at him I found my wrists were tied to the cushioned arms of a high-backed seat, the kind of formally comfortable armchair in which patrons of the Savoy had once taken afternoon tea or pre-dinner drinks.

My senses started to come together more rapidly and when I saw that my shirt had been ripped away to expose my left arm and shoulder, I began to suspect what I was in for. Panic hit me and I struggled to break free, the goon just leering over me, tickled by my efforts. I stopped when I noticed Stern, Cissie and Potter on their knees not far away, a bunch of Blackshirts covering them with an array of dissuaders

- clubs and knives, as well as guns. And there came Hubble, just arriving, being helped down the carpeted stairway from the foyer by McGruder and another man, his decrepit body about ready to fail him. His smile when he saw me was no more than a tight grimace.

'Aren't the lights wonderful?' he remarked as he approached, his red-flecked eyes gazing up at the ceiling. 'It's been so long since we've witnessed such splendour, so very long.' He paused briefly to regard the kneeling prisoners, and he nodded as if counting their heads one by one before continuing his shambling journey towards me. Behind him, descending the stairs, was Muriel and there was a phoney kind of proudness to her, as though it took some effort to hold her head high and avoid the accusing eyes of her friend, Cissie. She passed by the kneeling prisoners without giving them a glance, even though Cissie called out to her.

Hubble came to a stop before me, both hands resting on his cane, fingers like blackened claws wrapped around its grip, the two aides standing close by in case he should falter. He had an old man's tremble -

and an old cadaver's stench.

Still he peered around him, his bent torso twisting with each turn of his head, admiring the chandeliers before gazing across the huge lounge itself, his eyes half-closed as if to shut out the more gruesome elements.

'If one didn't look too closely it would seem the grand old days had returned to the Savoy,' he mused.

His speech had a high-pitched sibilance to it that was as thin and frail as his bones, and standing there in his loose black uniform, bent over his stick, flesh hanging from his scrawny neck like an empty sack, and with 'carrion' strewn all around him, he reminded me of an ancient buzzard. He went on, delighting himself rather than me: 'The hotel's own oil-fuelled generator was so easy to get running again - it took my men, the ones who know about these things, less than twenty minutes, even after all these years of disuse. I'm surprised you didn't attempt to start it yourself, Mr Hoke; but then, I suppose the last thing you wanted to do was draw attention to yourself.'

Some of his words were hard to catch; it was almost as if he were speaking from another room. He deserved a reply and I gave him one.

'You crazy bastard -'

He raised a shaky hand to shush me and, I have to admit, it did. What the hell could I tell him that deep down he didn't already know?

Now he turned to me, his head leaning close, the odour making me want to gag. 'It's odd, isn't it?' he said between laboured breaths. 'All this time chasing you and never once a moment for conversation between us.'

'I didn't think we had much to talk about,' I replied, trying to avoid the foul air he was exhaling.

Muriel had joined us by now.

'You happy, Muriel?' I enquired, looking past Hubble.

'Betraying your friends to these third-rate Nazis give you some kind of thrill? like father, like daughter, I guess.'

'My father would have gladly sacrificed his life for his country,' she snapped back, her remoteness giving over to anger. 'But he recognized the poison that was slowly crippling our land.'

'Ah yeah, the Jewish poison, right?' My head was beginning to clear, but that only made me more conscious of the throbbing pain in various parts of my body, results of the beating I'd received. Shit, I'd hardly got over the lumps and bruises from my last run-in with these people.

Hubble hadn't liked my sneering tone. 'Even England's abdicated king was aware of the Jewish threat, as were many others of influence. If our own government had not been in the pocket of Jew creditors and extortionists, and so fearful of the proletariat itself, which was forever whining, forever demanding, malcontents who despised the natural social order, then perhaps the world would have had a very different and glorious future.'

'Oh Christ.. .' I began to say.

"The Jews murdered Christ, Mr Hoke.'

Some life had returned to those dead eyes of Hubbe's: they shone with a zealot's passion.

'The Duke of Windsor and others of nobility would gladly have aligned themselves with Adolf Hitler's wondrous vision for mankind,' he went on, warming to the sermon, his voice even notching up half a gear.

'And they would not have been alone. Many leaders and eminent people - academics, industrialists, militarists, too -would have joined the crusade to purge our civilization of its insidious corruption and degenerative breeding, and indeed, discreet negotiations between ourselves and Hitler's emissaries that would have benefited both Germany and the United Kingdom were well underway before that fool Chamberlain was tricked into declaring war on a nation that should have been our greatest ally.'

Something had occurred to me while he was ranting and once more I stared past him at Muriel.

'Didn't you tell us your own brothers fought against Fascism, one in the navy, the other in the airforce?' I said to her.

'It was their duty to defend their country.' Some colour had returned to her pallid skin, brought there by her own anger. 'It didn't mean they agreed with our government's misguided hostility towards Germany.'

There was probably some kind of screwed-up logic to her argument, but I wasn't in the mood to figure it out 'Just tell me why you turned us in to this bunch of madmen? I thought they, at least' -I nodded towards the kneeling group - 'were your friends.'

'Isn't it obvious?' she replied, her rage controlled again, her coolness back. 'Sir Max has to be saved.

The irony is that I recognized him on the steps of the National Gallery when we helped you three days ago, but there was nothing I could do, everything was happening so fast'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw an emaciated-looking man approaching, one of his cronies helping him remove his black shirt. His eyes were huge and kind of haunted-looking, as if the dark-smudged lids had shrunk around them.

'The world, or what's left of it, has to find a system again,' Muriel was blabbering, 'and we can only find the right kind through leaders like him, don't you see that? Our lives are not as important as his.'

'So offer him your blood,' I suggested.

'There's no need when I can take yours,' Hubble pointed out.

He shuffled aside to let the thin man through and I winced when I saw the ulcerations and bruises that covered the newcomer's naked arms and upper body. His companions placed a small black case like a doctor's bag (maybe it was a doctor's bag) on the carpet by my feet and opened it. As another Blackshirt spread a dingy tablecloth across the floor by the chair I was tied to, the one with the bag drew out a thin length of rubber tubing with what appeared to be flanged steel needles at either end, and some metal clips.

'Don't you understand?' I appealed to Hubble. 'It's crazy. It won't work. You have to be matched with the same blood type for it to do any good. You'll just kill us both this way.'

Hubble turned back to me, that mad shine still there in his dark eyes. 'But I have nothing to lose, Mr Hoke. If the transfusion fails, it only means a different sort of death.' He might have chuckled then, or a small expulsion of blood might have gurgled in his throat, I couldn't tell. 'Besides,' he went on, pointing his stick, 'we will try the procedure on this noble volunteer first.'

The half-naked man, who was settling onto the tablecloth on the floor, gazed up at him like an acolyte at a god.

'Hell die,' I promised.

'He's prepared to do so. But really, Mr Hoke, aren't you aware that even centuries ago the South American Incas regularly carried out blood transfusions with far more primitive instruments than we have, and, so history informs us, most occasions proved successful. All we need to do is make two small punctures in the correct veins and allow gravitation to do the rest.'

Wilhelm Stern was close enough to be easily heard. 'But it was also outlawed in Europe in the seventeenth century because of the many deaths transfusions caused.'

I was glad of his intervention, but wondered if it was for my sake, or because he didn't like the idea of being the next guinea pig.

'Nobody knew about blood types in those days. To them, blood was blood and there were no differences,' he reasoned. Transfusions were successful only between people who, by chance, belonged to the same grouping. Mein Gott, they even used the blood from pigs and sheep at that time. Muriel

- Miss Drake - you must make this man understand, you must explain that what he is about to try is impossible.'

'But I'm not a doctor. How can I tell him what I don't even know?'

Cissie's eyes were wide and pleading. 'You saw for yourself what happened at the sanatorium, you know how their experiments failed each time.'

'We didn't know anything at all! They wouldn't even discuss individual cases with us, they kept us in the dark about everything.'

'If different blood types could be mixed, then the doctors would have saved themselves!' Cissie reasoned.

Hubble, irritated by the squabbling, smacked the side of my chair with his cane. He got our attention.

'There is one thing I'm sure they didn't try,' he said in that creepy faraway voice of his. 'They did not take all of the donor's blood and transfer it into the recipient's empty system.'

It was breathtaking in its flawed logic and now I knew he was completely insane. I wondered if his mental state had always been shaky, or if the disease itself was rotting his brain.

'That's ridiculous, you fucking lunatic!' Couldn't help it, had to make him aware of my considered opinion.

This time his cane bounced off the side of my skull. The blow was too weak to hurt much, and I had the satisfaction of seeing him stagger, only McGruder at his side preventing him going down all the way. A chair was quickly brought over, and when they'd settled him into it, facing me, about two yards away, I noticed that every part of him - his hands, his legs, shoulders, head - was trembling. His chest was heaving as he tried to regain his breath.

'No, it is not ridiculous,' he insisted between gasps, as if I were the lunatic. 'The recipient's blood will be slowly drained as blood from the donor will be slowly used to fill the veins.'

I laughed. Maybe it was hysteria, but I honestly appreciated the humour of his twisted reasoning. It was so outrageously and brilliantly simple.

'You will kill both persons.'

For once I didn't mind the ' v ill'. After all, Stern was speaking up for my benefit as well as his own.

They'd kill me anyway, whether they carried out the transfusion or not, but I preferred a fast bullet to a leisurely bleeding.

'Your man will have died from blood loss before his body will accept the new blood.' Stern spoke quietly, authoritatively, a teacher explaining a difficult problem to a child. 'Conflicting blood types will not even be the cause: you will kill this unfortunate man just as surely as if you had slit his throat with a knife.'

'His blood will be replaced as quickly as it is lost!'

The shout set Hubble wheezing again and McGruder watched over him anxiously. The Blackshirt leader held a handkerchief to his mouth, his body doubled-up in the chair, his shoulders jerking as spasms ran through him. When he straightened and took the handkerchief away I could see it was specked with blood. He took in a long, deep breath and I heard a peculiar faint whistling sound from inside his chest.

His eyes were blurred with dampness now, the lustre in them dimmed.

'We're wasting time,' he said weakly. 'Let's get on with it'

Someone grabbed my shoulders from behind and the goon who'd been rummaging around in the bag on the floor held up both ends of the rubber tubing, a stupid grin on his face.

'Wait, wait a minute.' I was out of laughter and getting more desperate by the moment. 'Listen. There are only four of us with the right kind of blood to resist the disease, five counting the fink here.' I nodded towards Muriel, but she wouldn't even look at me. 'Don't you get it? Even if the transfusions did work, you could only save a handful of your people. The rest are gonna die.'

'Ah, then you admit the transfusions could be successful?' The notion seemed to please Hubble.

I shook my head violently. 'Not a chance in hell. I'm just applying common sense.'

He smiled at me. Bared his yellowed teeth and smiled. 'This first transfusion will be our test, and it will be successful. By our second or third attempt, the procedure will be perfected.'

I understood now why Hubble was prepared to wait: let any mistakes be made on the first couple of mugs, so that any problems would be ironed out by the time it got round to his turn. Maybe he wasn't so crazy after all.

'After that we will move out of the city into the suburbs and surrounding countryside where we will find others like you. Eventually every one of us will be saved.' He barked the order, eager to proceed.

'Attach the tube to him! Miss Drake, will you be so kind as to assist - I'm sure you must have learned something about transfusions during your stay at the sanatorium.'

I wasn't sure of the expression I caught in her downcast eyes as she leaned over me. Was it fear, or plain old-fashioned misery? Was she beginning to regret double-crossing her friends already?

'Listen to me,' I whispered as she turned my wrist beneath the rope, exposing the veins of my forearm.

Our heads were close. Tell them it isn't gonna work. Think of us, Muriel, think of Cissie. D'you want her to be killed?'

Her voice was low too. 'She's a Jew, isn't she?' she said.

My head straightened, knocking against the high back of the armchair. I don't know why, I should've expected it, but I was shocked. Under that sweet veil of English genteelness beat the heart of a viper.

And in the three days I'd known her, telling her of my folks, the reason I'd joined in the bloody war long before my own country had been forced to come off the fence, making love to her,-sleeping with her, I'd never once suspected the hatred she nurtured for her fellow man, the prejudices that had twisted her soul so that she believed her allegiance lay with a Fascist bigot who had been prepared to betray his own country. And I realized she hadn't concealed a thing. The plain truth was that none of our conversations had ever drawn close to the darker side of her nature. I hadn't asked - and presumably neither had Cissie in all the time she'd known Muriel - her opinion of Jews, niggers, gypsies, of Adolf Hitler and his Master Race ideology, Fascism, Nazism, hadn't even mentioned it. And nobody had asked her if she'd be prepared to turn in her friends to the people who meant to steal their blood. You see, she hadn't lied. She just hadn't been honest.

And then I wondered again about the look I'd caught in her eyes. It was fear, not regret, I was sure of that now. So what did she have to fear? I suddenly had the answer.

'You realize it's gonna be your turn sooner or later, don't you?'

I'd kept my voice low, and I took pleasure in seeing her hesitate for a split second. I watched her push the unacceptable truth away, her expression hardly changing, just that remoteness returning to her eyes, and I knew there was nothing more I could do. I raged inside as she stretched the skin of my lower left arm, pushing the muscles aside so she could locate a particular vein.

Tin buckets were being brought in by other Blackshirts; they placed them close to the man lying by my chair, while the bag-man drew out a scalpel.

'One more question, Muriel,' I said to delay the inevitable. 'How did you find these people? How did you know where to look? All the years playing cat-and-mouse with these creeps and I've never known where they came from. If I'd had any idea where their HQ was I might have taken the battle to them.'

It was Hubbe who answered for her and, despite his poor condition, he did it with some delight. 'One man against a fortress? I hardly think so, my bumptious American friend.

You see, while you had your palace, I had my castle.' He wiped moisture from his lips with his blood-flecked handkerchief. 'But Miss Drake merely used her common sense and returned to the place where she had first set eyes on us. The National Gallery is one of our control centres, you see - at least, it was in our efforts to capture you. Didn't you realize that some of my men had followed your mongrel dog to the palace? How do you suppose we finally located you? Fully aware of just how elusive you could be, we had vehicles waiting at as many main road junctions as possible, all controlled from the great gallery at Trafalgar Square. Miss Drake found several of my soldiers still at that control point just ten minutes after leaving this hotel. After that it was only a matter of waiting for the right moment, when you were relaxed with a good meal and perhaps a little the worse for alcohol. The plan worked very well, wouldn't you agree?'

I felt a sharp pain as Muriel drove the hollow needle into a vein. She put a metal clip over the rubber tubing as blood began to flow. The man on the floor suddenly shrieked as the bag-man cut into his wrist and held it over one of the buckets. Muriel released the clip and blood quickly filled the tubing to emerge in a thin stream from the point of the needle at the opposite end; confident no air bubbles would be carried into the recipient's veins, she pushed the needle into his arm.

'You're murdering me, Muriel,' I said quietly, but she just turned away.

"You can't do this to him!' Cissie had struggled to her feet, but one of the guards caught her by the hair and pushed her down again. Old Albeit Potter was outraged by that and lumbered up to defend her, shoving the Blackshirt away. Wilhelm Stern also decided it was time to do something about the situation and grabbed the nearest guard's rifle, using it to lever himself off the floor. Another goon quickly stepped in, smashing his club hard against the back of Stern's head; the German went down on one knee, his arms raised to ward off the next blow. Cissie wheeled round, despite the hold on her hair, and jammed her knee into her attacker's groin. He yowled with pain as he let her go.

But it was over in seconds. The Blackshirts swarmed over them, clubbing them with sticks and guns, knocking them down and kicking them as they lay sprawled on the floor. And there was nothing I could do to help my friends. As much as I struggled, I couldn't break free from the ropes that bound my wrists.

But I could use my feet.

Muriel swiftly stepped aside as I kicked out and the man behind me, who had held my shoulders all this time, fought hard to pin me down. I dug my heels into the carpet, rocking the chair, more Blackshirts rushing towards me, pushing past Muriel, the big guy, McGruder, among them. My right hand gripped the end of the chair's arm and, as I jammed my heels into the carpet, I lifted, pushing backwards, the guard behind desperately trying to stop me. The armchair tilted, overbalanced, began to topple.

The guard did his best to hold it, but my legs were straightening, calves and thigh muscles straining. The first Blackshirt stumbled into me and his added weight sent the chair completely over, so that it fell backwards, tilting to one side because of the obstruction behind. We went down with a crash, landing on the half-naked man lying on the floor, and I felt something loosen with the jolt.

We lay there in an untidy heap, the man beneath the pile feebly trying to push us off. For a short while there was silence, as if everyone had been taken by surprise. My head was against bare flesh, my wrists still bound to the chair. I could see the tubing lying a few inches away, the steel needle missing, blood oozing from the open end. The Blackshirt on top of me was trying to disentangle himself, the reek of him and the one underneath me filling my nostrils.

I was almost ready to quit. Sick as these clowns were, their numbers were overwhelming. My body sagged, giving in to pain, giving in to despair. This time we really were sunk. Then I heard a familiar noise.

A kind of distant rumbling.

16

IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for the German bomber pilot to find his target for the night - hell, he must have seen those hotel lights from twenty miles away. I lifted my head to see everyone staring up at the high ceiling as though the noise was coming from the rooms above. The chandeliers began to vibrate.

Then there was a deafening blast as the windows of the next-door restaurant blew in, glass and stone shrapnel roaring through to the room we were in, bringing with it more glass from the dividing wall. The whole building seemed to rock to its very foundations, the chandeliers waving in the wind the explosion caused, the walls and pillars around us trembling, shaking off dust. The tall mirrors cracked and furniture was swept forward as if carried by some invisible tidal wave. Brittle cadavers disintegrated, their various parts tossed into the air, and saucers and cups, cake tiers and lamps, withered plants and rotting napkins all flew towards us, carried by the storm, pulverized by the broiling gust.

Some Blackshirts dropped to the floor, hands over their heads for protection, others cowered where they stood: they were the unlucky ones, the force of the blast knocking them off their feet, sending them crashing into the furniture or pillars, their screams faint under the thunderous row. I was fortunate: I was shielded by the back of the chair I was tied to and the goon on top of me. Even so, chair, Blackshirt and I were pushed across the floor, pellets of glass and masonry tearing into the soft cushioning of material and flesh. The Blackshirt howled and rolled away from me, writhing as he tried to reach a glass shard embedded in the back of his neck.

One of my wrists was loose - it was the chair's arm I'd felt give a little when we took the tumble - and it didn't take much to tug it from its bindings. I was twisting round to work on the other one when another earth-shaking boom set the world spinning once more. The second bomb must've landed on the Savoy's roof, because the crashing, tearing noise continued as it dropped through the upper floors. The final explosion threatened to demolish the whole building. Great drifts of dust cascaded from the ceiling and lights, enveloping the lounge in a powdery mist.

Although dazed, the pain in my ears threatening to split my skull, I worked on the rope, blinking grit from my eyes and spitting more from my mouth. Frustrated, I got a foot against the chair's arm, then pushed against it, at the same time pulling the rope with both hands. The cushioned arm came away from the rest of the chair just as the third bomb hit another part of the building, this one falling on the other side, somewhere near the main foyer. The avenging angel of the night skies was making the most of this dazzling target and I knew he'd be banking already, turning sharply to get back over us again. I yanked my arm free as a section of ornate ceiling right above me began to crack. A chandelier crashed to the floor, followed by another, this second one demolishing a macabre tableau of mouldered corpses that had taken silent tea for the last three years in a discreet corner of the room. Two brown marble pillars in the same corner collapsed, bringing down a large section of ceiling with them, fire from the room above falling with the debris. There were shouts and screams from all around as Blackshirts tried to flee and I saw two disappear beneath a shower of rubble as another part of the ceiling broke away. A kneeling woman, her hair white with dust, her black uniform in tatters, was trying to pull a piece of glass, shaped like a long, curved scimitar, from her chest, and when it finally came free it released a cascade of blood that splattered onto the carpet She fell backwards, her dark-fingered hands clawing the wound, and was drenched by her own blood.

A deep whooshing alerted me to more trouble to my right and as I turned my head a huge tidal wave of flame billowed through from the main entrance foyer, swallowing up everything in its path, burning carpet, walls and furniture. I fell back, drawing my legs up, head tucked in, arms folded over my hair, fearing the fire would not stop until it had swept through to the other side of the building. But I felt the heat instantly recede and when I looked up the flames were being sucked back into the foyer. I guessed incendiaries had been sent with the bomb, all exploding together, causing the firestorm. The fire still filled the top of the short stairway to the foyer, and it had left smaller blazes behind in its retreat Shapes moved before it, figures rushing to and fro in panic, not knowing which way to go, which way to get out. As dark rolling clouds of smoke curled through, poisoning the air, stinging eyes and scorching throats, the lights began to flicker.

Only a few feet away from me Hubble lay on his side, his chair on top of him, and just for a moment, one brief wink of time, and in all that confusion, our eyes met. Now tiny needles of fire glittered in those dark eyes of his and I felt as if I were looking into the burning hatred that lived inside his soul. His mouth opened as he shouted something, but I couldn't hear what it was over the storm of screams, crashing masonry, and the crackle of fire.

I pushed myself to my feet and stood there, unsteady, half-crouched, my joints stiff and my head reeling, dust and smoke filling my eyes, a bedlam of sound filling my ears. As I raised my hands to wipe dirt and tears from my eyes I noticed the flanged needle was still sticking from my arm. I pulled it out and tossed it away, globules of blood oozing from the wound. There was no time to stem the flow -I had to make a break for it before the Blackshirts got over their panic and before the goddamn room collapsed in on itself. Instead I tore off the rest of my shirt and quickly dabbed at the blood before dropping the bloody rag to the floor. McGruder and another goon were on their feet and leaning over their leader, pulling away the chair that pinned him to the floor; Muriel was closer to me, on her knees, body crouched over, her silver dress torn, a flap hanging loose to expose her shoulder. I quickly searched the immediate area for a fallen weapon, figuring I'd kill all four before I took my leave, but suddenly an arm wrapped itself around my neck from behind.

In a reflex action, I fisted my left hand in the palm of my right, and shot my elbow back, as swift and hard as I could. Spittle dampened my cheek as my attacker huffed and doubled up. I spun round and kicked his legs from under him; he went down like a sack of bricks. Wasting no more time on him and forgetting about dealing with Hubble and his goons - but having to resist the urge to snap Muriel's neck as I rushed past her - I joined Cissie and Stern, who were struggling with their guards. The German was held by one Blackshirt, while another was beating him with his fists; Cissie was tussling with a black-garbed, crop-haired woman, who gripped both her wrists and was trying to force her back down onto the floor. First punching the Blackshirt in front of Stern in the kidney area so that his hands dropped to protect himself, I then belted him hard in the side of the jaw. His head snapped away from me and his knees buckled. Without waiting to see if he was out for the count, I wrenched the second goon away from Stern and drove my fist into his stomach, following through with a punch to the bridge of his nose (the best place if you mean business). His eyes crossed and Stern helped by chopping the underside of his hand against the man's neck, so that he fell without protest. I swiped the first man, who hadn't quite gone down yet, with the sharp point of my elbow and felt bone in his nose disintegrate. He might have screamed as he tottered back - his mouth opened and his neck stretched - but another explosion from a room somewhere close by drowned out all other sounds. The floor seemed to heave and more cracks appeared in the mirrors and walls as they shuddered. It was like being in an earthquake as other parts of the ceiling collapsed and pillars shifted their positions.

Cissie and the woman fell to the floor, the Blackshirt on top and still clinging to Cissie's wrists. It took two steps to reach them and I dragged the woman off Cissie, throwing her aside. She lay there screeching, but the fight had left her.

As I turned to help Cissie to her feet I noticed Stern stoop to pick up a discarded Sten gun, then aim it at someone rushing at him from out of the smoke. Just as the Blackshirt reached him, Stern jerked the weapon forward into his belly and pulled the trigger. The man did a little jog, his arms flapping, boots stamping carpet, as the bullets disassembled his innards.

A wave of heat engulfed me once more as the fire bloomed out from the broad staircase to the foyer and lobby area, gusts of air sucked in from the blitzed entrance exciting the flames. The grand old hotel was finished: it had survived the worst London air raids, wounded but always unbent, but now there was nobody to quench those flames and repair the damage; fires in other parts of the building would join with this one, making one huge conflagration that would only be extinguished when there was nothing left to burn. There was no more time to waste; we had to leave, and we had to leave now.

'Look out, Hoke!'

Cissie had screamed the warning almost into my face as a tall Blackshirt loomed up over my shoulder.

When I wheeled round, his rifle was raised to smash down into my head. I started to duck, even in that split second aware there was no way I could avoid the blow, but gunfire rattled through the smoky air and the butt-end of the weapon wavered above me, only inches from my skull. Then it just dropped away, the goon holding the rifle falling with it. Stern joined us, a wisp of smoke curling from the Sten gun's muzzle.

He leaned close to my ear and shouted, 'We must get out!' and I was dumb enough to nod my head at the obvious.

'Through that way!' I pointed towards an opening at the side of the big room which led past the cloakrooms and into the corridor where all the private dining rooms, including the Pinafore, were located.

Although I'd been unconscious at the time, I knew Hubble must have brought us along that way into the lounge.

We started off in that direction, moving as one, Cissie clinging to my bare arm as if afraid to let go, Stern on the other side, Sten gun held hip-high, covering the ground before us. Once again, survival instinct had kicked in, helping me to operate despite a groggy head and some stiffness from the beating, and we dodged around figures who seemed oblivious to us as they rushed around in the swirling smoke, afraid the whole building was gonna tumble down on them. But if we had the idea that all of Hubble's Blackshirts had forgotten about us we were soon corrected: a whole bunch of them were suddenly standing between us and our intended escape route, pistols and rifles raised towards us, staves and short axes brandished by the few women amongst them. They wouldn't want to kill us, I knew that - we were useless to them dead - but they could incapacitate us easily enough; besides, they had another reason for negotiation, a hostage.

In all the commotion and anxiety to get out of there fast, I'd forgotten about Albert Potter. He was on hands and knees, one of the Blackshirts crouched over him, holding a blade to his plump throat.

The three of us came to a halt, Cissie calling out the old warden's name, her fingers digging into the flesh of my arm. Stern brought the Sten gun up to his chest and aimed it at the group. I could only spit more dust from my mouth.

It was a stand-off, smoke swirling between us, the flames from the stairway and other parts of the room licking every-thing orange. The electric lights flickered again, dulled, came back, the generator in the hotel's basement beginning to run slow, then picking up; either the bombardment had caused problems, or three years of lying idle had upset the machinery. I didn't care which, I just prayed for a total blackout.

Sure, the fires would still provide some kind of light, but it would be unsteady as well as poor, and any edge was better than none at all.

Hubble was among the group holding us up, his ever-faithful goon, McGruder, by his side, supporting him. Hubble took an unsteady step forward, McGruder careful to go with him, making sure his leader didn't stumble.

'Don't make another move!' Hubble shouted in that weak, high-pitched way of his. 'If you do, this man will be killed instantly.' He pointed a shaky, dark-stained finger at Potter. The blade at the warden's throat pressed into the soft flesh, not enough to draw blood, but enough to make a furrow. 'His is old blood anyway and we'd prefer the younger, more healthy kind,' Hubble said, as if we'd appreciate his reasoning. 'Your kind, Mr Hoke. And your companions'. Good, vibrant blood.'

How long was it gonna take the mad bomber to make his turn and get back over target? He wouldn't let an opportunity like this go by without dropping every last bomb and incendiary on board. No, he'd douse those glowing lights with fires of his own making, and then he'd spit on the wreckage as he headed home to the Fatherland. C'mon, Fritz, knock this place out, gimme a chance.

I pulled Cissie behind me and scanned the immediate area for fallen weapons. Okay, the Blackshirts would go for non-fatal wounds, tricky for any marksmen. And they'd have to try for the kind that didn't bleed too much; off hand, I couldn't think of any. So: Dive for the nearest gun before they cut the legs from under you. Already tense, I tensed some more.

'Kill Hubble first,' I told Stern.

' No!' Cissie tugged at my arm. 'You can't do that, Hoke, they'll kill Albert.'

'They'll kill us all anyway,' I replied, still searching the floor. 'Do it, Stern, do it now.'

The German turned his head towards me, then looked back at Hubble. Something crashed in the foyer, beyond the wall of flame.

'Hoke, I cannot-'

'None of it matters!' I snapped, at last finding what I was searching for, a pistol lying close to an upturned chair on the littered floor. 'Shoot him now and let's finish it'

'You're insane,' said Cissie over my shoulder.

I felt myself grin. 'Yeah,' I agreed as I judged the distance between myself and the fallen weapon.

Stern levelled the Sten at the Blackshirt leader, who suddenly looked less sure of himself. But the German lowered the submachine gun, then dropped it onto the carpet

'It is senseless,' he whispered, as if to himself. It was as if not just his energy, but his spirit too, had drained from him. Then, to me: 'There has been too much killing. We must reason with these -'

A number of things happened before he'd completed the sentence: Hubble nodded at the goon with the long knife, who neatly slit Potter's throat; the lights surged, then fell almost to nothing; I went down, rolled forward and came up with the German's discarded Sten gun, finger already tightening on the trigger.

17

I'D FIRED TOO WILD and too soon, because McGruder pulled Hubble to the floor before I could take proper aim at him. The bullets caught a couple of Blackshirts who weren't quick enough to duck, while others in the group blocking our way scattered, some diving for the floor, others just scooting off, heading for cover. A mirror shattered on the far wall and splinters flew from a marble column. The lights brightened again as the generator below ground revived and I had the chance to pick out Hubble with the Sten gun. He was crouched on the floor, his loyal henchman's beefy arm thrown over his shoulder for protection, and he was watching me like a paralysed rabbit. His time was up sooner than he'd figured, and I was the gun-packing Reaper, both counts pretty hard for him to take.

I pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

Tried again, but it was useless. The gun was jammed or empty, God knows which, but it was all the same to me. I threw it away and went for the pistol I'd spotted earlier.

But even as I hit the deck it seemed to rise up beneath me, slamming into my body so that I turned over from the shock. The blast - heavy, thunderous, like nothing I'd heard before - overwhelmed all other noise, and the shell of the building juddered so violently I thought it must come tumbling down on us all.

The Bomber King had completed his turn and was back over target I guessed he'd dropped his whole bomb-load in his determination to blot out the beacon below. A great wind from the foyer swept through the lounge, carrying with it lethal shrapnel and fireballs, and I hugged carpet, pressing my body into its softness, riding the reverberations, sparks and burning cinders scorching my naked back and arms, pellets of masonry and splinters of wood raining down on me. My hands were over my head, but I heard more crashing sounds, then screams, shouts, and the floor beneath me continued to tremble. Although there were more close-set explosions, I decided it was time to be up and running again.

The broad stairway leading to the foyer and main entrance was totally engulfed in flames by now, and I knew everything beyond it - the reception area, reading lounge, and the staircase to Harry's Bar - would have been completely destroyed. Powdered glass and dust filled the air with thick smoke as other chandeliers broke loose from their fittings and hurtled to the floor, while whole ornamental mirrors fell from the walls and more pillars fissured as they shifted under the strain of the collapsing ceiling. But I was on my feet, looking round for Cissie and the German, swiping at the smoke with my hands as though it were concealing veils.

I soon found them both behind me. Stern was pulling bright red cinders from Cissie's smouldering hair, his face covered in blood. Cissie's nose was bleeding and I saw her lips were moving; she was shouting at me and pointing, but I couldn't hear a thing - my ears, and probably theirs too, had been deafened by the explosions. As Stern flicked away the last cinder, smothering the smouldering strands with his other hand, Cissie touched my face. Her fingers came away stained with blood and she showed them to me. I wiped my face with my own hands and felt no wounds or embedded glass and shrapnel, so was sure all I was suffering was a nose-bleed from the blasts and, from the look of her, that was Cissie's only problem too. Stern, though, had a deep cut over his brow and blood was streaming down into his eyes; he kept clearing it with his sleeve so that he could see, but still it poured out, blinding him each time. His clothes were ripped and I wondered if he'd shielded Cissie from the worst of the blasts, because her dress was relatively untouched.

Taking them both by the arms, aware they couldn't hear a word even if I screamed at them, I pulled them towards the opening we'd been heading for. I took time out to kick over a Blackshirt who was lumbering to his feet in our path and, although he went down fast enough, there were others all around, dark shapes looming up in the smoke mists like spectres in a graveyard. Something brushed my cheek, a sharp arrow of air, and even though I hadn't heard the gunshot, I knew someone had recovered enough to take shots at us. Pushing the girl and Stern on ahead, I paused only long enough to lift an upturned coffee table from the floor and hurl it at the murky forms closing in on us. Then I was running again, quickly catching up to the other two, who had almost reached the passageway, and it was weird, unreal, rushing through that silent chaos, slow-moving figures around us, the fires bathing everything orange, even the smoke, old corpses beginning to smoulder with the advancing heat. Then my ears suddenly popped and the full horror hit me with its sounds. Shots were being fired, people were yelling and screaming, and a terrifying low rumbling-grinding was coming from the building itself.

I couldn't see Hubble anywhere, but then I wasn't bothering to look for him. I only had one thought and that was to get through that archway into the passage before one of the bullets found a target. A hail of bullets ripped through a group of tables and chairs close by, shredding the husked corpses seated there, and sending fountains of splinters and broken crockery into the air. I ducked and swerved, managing to grab at Cissie as I went, bringing her down with me when I fell. I heard Stern cry out, saw him stagger as another wild volley was sent our way. He seemed to recover, stumbling on, and as he disappeared through the archway I was already pulling Cissie to her feet and pushing her after him.