This Time, Tomorrow

The Fog was in its third day. It was thickest close to the pavement, where automobile exhaust weighed it down. Benstead lighted a match and looked at his watch. Three-twenty in the afternoon, and black as midnight. From the light pattern he judged he must be near Trafalgar Square. He had been nearly an hour and a half walking from St. Thomas' Hospital, just across the Thames.

He had waited in the hospital courtyard, walled around by the blackened bricks of the old buildings, listening. There were sounds—engines, for the most part—nearby, and, away, the soft roaring that is the song of every big city; but there were no voices. No one laughed, shouted for a cab, cried newspaper headlines. No one had the breath. He waited for a bit, reviewing the lay of the streets, then walked over the wet stones to the gate and turned left. He moved straight up until he had walked into the wire fence; he moved along that to the gate on the right, turned hard left through it and walked across the bridge. He held to the center of the walk; on the left, he could barely see the guardrail; on the right, vague bus and lorry shapes grunted along, their single fog lights, mounted 12 inches off the ground, burning bright and impotent. Once over the bridge, the rest was a matter of being careful and moving slowly and not making the one wrong turn that could disorient him.

Now, looking up, he could just see the Nelson column in the yellow light. The station would be to the east, to the right. He moved to the curb and peered into the fog. The ones to watch for were the bastards running on side lamps. Sometimes they couldn't be seen farther than ten feet, and, being either idiotic or arrogant, they drove faster than the others. He made a run for the island, waited, ran again and made the street on the other side. Some freak of curling wind cleared the Charing Cross station courtyard for a moment; he could see the hotel front, the cab rank, even the clock on the wall. He remembered Pepys: "This morning to Charing Cross to see Major Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered, he looking as cheerful as a man might be expected to do in that situation."

Half past three. Inside, the station was gray with haze. He looked toward number-five platform. There was no one he knew. He walked once around the newsstand. He looked down the platform: red lights, dark hurrying men, the mist. An old terminal, built for steam locomotives, covered with a vaulting spidery glass-and-steelwork roof, open to the winds at the far end. He turned away. The Left Luggage room, he reminded himself, was on the right. A tall, bearded West Indian pulled down his bag and slid it gently across the brass-covered counter. "I thank you, sir," he said. "Thank you very much." He coughed dismally. Benstead smiled at him.

"Man might die in this stuff," the luggage man said. "Old people will die tonight."

"Yes," Benstead said. "I'm afraid some will."

He walked along the train to the rearmost first-class carriage. The corridor side faced the platform. He opened the first door and went aboard. Lamson was alone in one of the compartments in the middle of the car.

"There you are," Benstead said.

"Here I am," Lamson said.

The reading lamp over his shoulder was on, and the ceiling light. Benstead put his bag up and his coat beside it. He pulled out the middle seat opposite Lamson. He was comfortable and at ease. He could taste the fog, but it was possible, here, to breathe without wrapping a muffler around one's mouth, and he could see. He hadn't been on this train for some months, but it was familiar, he felt at home, as in a well-remembered house: the green cloth of the seats, the armrests, the hooded lamps, the wide baggage rack and the narrow one under it, the reddish glow of the woodwork. He could see the small white sign on the wall. He couldn't read it, but he didn't need to, he remembered it well enough: Rose Zebrano, West Africa, the wood of the walls.

They didn't speak until, at 3:40, the train moved out.

"What'd you do today?" Lamson said.

"Slept until noon," Benstead said, "then I went to St. Thomas', a cousin of mine had his appendix out there."

"How is he?"

"He'll be all right."

They rattled across the bridge. They couldn't see the Houses of Parliament, or even the clock tower. They couldn't see the river. The train slid through the Waterloo platform.

"This time, tomorrow," Lamson said. "Ah, this time, tomorrow!"

Benstead looked across the shadowy little space at the fat white face.

"Rich or dead?" he said, introspectively nearly, as if to himself.

"Either, dear boy," Lamson said. "That's the beauty of it, that the one is as good as the other. That is the source of the serenity that sustains me. Unimaginable wealth, or total oblivion. How utterly lovely, either one!"

Benstead moved over to the window seat. Sensing his mood, in the weird, reaching way he had, Lamson turned off his reading lamp, to make it easier to see out. Benstead stared into the rolling mist; he saw here a gabled roof, there a bit of pink light, the square corner of a warehouse as the train ran blindly into the darkness—and blindly was the word for it: the trains carried no headlights of any kind; even in clear weather it was frightening to stand in a field, as he had often done, and see one of them ripping blackly across the moonless land.

Lamson. That was the only name he had for the man. They had met by no chance. Lamson had sought him out, although Benstead was a long time knowing it. Out of the Army, Benstead had found a flat over an antique shop in Beauchamp Place, off Brompton Road, and since he wasn't working, he spent a good deal of time on the street. He liked walking, he had missed London during the two mean years in West Germany, and he had a lot of catching up to do. He began to notice that he saw this short, thick, white-faced man more often than any other; he saw him in Beauchamp Place, and in Chelsea, and once as far away as Curzon Street. Benstead lived three minutes from the Victoria and Albert Museum; once a week or so he would go in to look at medieval locks and ironwork, or watches, or the jewel collection, and twice he had found Lamson there before him. He drank in a pub called The Bunch of Grapes in Brompton Road, and Lamson was almost always there when he went in. One day Benstead had to ask him for the water pitcher. They talked until closing time and left together.

Lamson seemed incurious. He asked few questions and when Benstead told him something of himself, of his passion for locks, or that he had been divorced, Lamson did not react. He was interested, but he seemed to be hearing something he had heard before. Of himself, he gave his one name and no more, the rest was frank deception.

"Were you born in the north country? Sometimes you sound it," Benstead said to him.

"No," Lamson said. "I was born in Greece."

Another time, he said, "My mother was the youngest married woman in Alice Springs when I was born, and until I was ten I thought Australia was the world."

Or, "If I hadn't been born in Ireland, I'd never say the word, I dislike the place that much."

He had some money. If he worked, Benstead didn't know where, or when, or where he lived. He looked to be 38 or 39 or so, which gave him enough of an edge on Benstead so that he could be patronizing and paternal now and then.

A cold night in November they sat in a corner of the pub.

"Did you know," Lamson said softly, "did you know that in the 1930s, in the States, a man bought up a lot of platinum, 99.4 fine, and coined it? Did you know that?"

"No," Benstead said. "What for?"

"For hoarders," Lamson said. "It was in the Depression, you know, and Roosevelt was in and the real rich thought he was a Red. Actually he was saving their bacon for them, but they wouldn't know that. They could see barricades in the streets, and mobs sacking their houses and raping their wives, and they wanted hard goods. Gold was illegal, so this smart fellow coined platinum and sold it to millionaires and the like at a premium."

"What kind of coins did he make?"

"The Russians once coined the stuff, you know," Lamson said. "Three, six and twelve rubles. One time, on Madison Avenue in the States, in a jeweler's shopwindow I saw one of those twelveruble pieces; it had been cut out and a Cartier watch set in. I wanted it, my, how I wanted it, but when I asked the man how much he'd like to have for it he said 1250 dollars, say 410 guineas, and I hadn't it on me, as it happened; and I'd noticed that the door had clicked behind me when I came in, an electric lock, and that dissuaded me from buying it without paying for it, so to speak."

He looked into Benstead's face for a long time. He was searching for a reaction, (continued on page 172)Tomorrow(continued from page 64) Benstead knew, and he tried to show him nothing.

"They were big, those coins," Lamson said, "the size of the American silver dollar, say a five-shilling piece, a crown, milled on the edges and all. He wouldn't sell under a hundred at a time."

"How much were they?" Benstead said.

"Whatever they were worth then," Lamson said, "you can think what they'd be worth now, with silver and platinum where they are. You can't have electronics without platinum, just to mention one thing, and with every little tuppence-ha'penny country in the world whimpering for electric plant, not to say nuclear plant ... and none of it coming from Russia, you may be bloody sure."

Benstead drank his gin, and waited.

"I know a man," Lamson said, "who bought, hear me, now, a million pounds sterling worth of those platinum discs."

"What became of them?" Benstead said.

"He still has them," Lamson said.

"What would they be worth now?" Benstead said.

"Five," Lamson said flatly. "Five, at the worst of it. And a seller's market, and no questions asked. Germany. Switzerland. The States. Here. Anywhere. My God, Katanga, if you like."

"In a bank vault, I suppose?"

"No. In his house."

"In the U.K.?"

"In Sussex. A country house. A hundred years ago, with the house over a hundred years old then, they built a vault into it. Steel walls, concrete around them, a safe door. It's a big vault, a walk-in vault; matter of fact, it was at one time used as a wine cellar. The steel was good steel in its day, and the locks the best locks, in their day. Twenty minutes' work now, I should think, with a cutting torch, would see you inside."

"That sounds as if anybody could do it, anybody at all."

"Ah. But there is always the chance of a nasty little surprise, isn't there. Things that look easy often aren't. I know the man. He's in his seventies. He's crafty. You might call him mad, too, and not be far off the mark. He's the kind of man might know about mantraps and deadfalls and that sort of nastiness."

Benstead went to the bar and brought back drinks.

"Now, then," he said. "It's time to talk. You've come looking for me, haven't you?"

"Yes," Lamson said.

"Right. I want to know how you picked me out. I want to know now, and I will know, or it's out the door."

Lamson looked into his eyes and the fat face smiled. "The modern Army, as you must know," he said, "wants more than strong backs and weak brains. They ask you about yourself, and you tell them, and it all goes down on punch cards for the great iron thinking machine. If the Army wants to know who is thirty-three, a locksmith, an explosives expert, without a police record and due for early mustering out, the great iron machine will tell. If one has access to the machine, good. Or, if, as in my case, one has access to someone who has access to the machine ..."

Benstead said nothing.

"I, too, have no police record," Lamson said. "It is essential in the sort of enterprise I have in mind."

"How do you happen to know about the platinum, the vault and all that?" Benstead said.

"I was butler in that house for a couple of years," Lamson said.

"Recently?"

"No, no indeed. I left, quietly and of my own accord, I may say, in 1957."

"The platinum may not be there still."

"It is, though."

Benstead said nothing. Five millions sterling. If you could get that to the States it would be $14,000,000. Seven and a half million dollars each. Fourteen million dollars that a madman had, and clearly didn't even need, since he hadn't touched it for three decades. There it lay, for the taking. But, thinking about it was one thing, and to put foot on the road for Sussex, irretrievably, irrevocably committed, was something else ...

Lamson touched his arm. "You see that little blonde over under the lamp?" he said, "the one the boy with her has all the hair?"

Benstead nodded.

"I've been watching them," Lamson said. "He's had two pints of mild since he left her last. He'll be for the men's any minute. When he does, I'm going over and put it to her flat."

The curtain to the other room was still swinging under the wind of the boy's passing when Lamson was whispering to the girl. He was back inside 90 seconds.

"Done and done," he said.

"Never," Benstead said.

"Watch," Lamson said. "She'll make him put her into a cab, she'll go once around the square, I'll be waiting at the top, and I'll get in. You'll see."

"What'd you tell her?" Benstead said.

"Something so outrageous you could never believe it," Lamson said. "Something very simple and outrageous."

The boy came back. The argument was short. He went to the street and when he came back and held the door open for her, they could see the cab at the curb. The boy came in alone and went to the bar, dark-faced, for another pint. Lamson and Benstead left. They stood together at the top of the street and watched the square black nose of the cab poke around the corner. The little blonde was tucked tightly into the far corner of the seat.

"I don't really want her," Lamson said softly to Benstead, "although certainly there must be worse ways to spend an hour or two. But I did want to show you what resolution will do, what action will do. Think of her as platinum, there for our taking, there for our pleasure."

"Ours?" Benstead said.

"Of course," Lamson said. "What else did you think I could say to startle her in that much time? I offered her two men for one boy. It's a fair deal. Get in. After you."

He gave the driver an address and went in himself. He pulled down a jump seat and each time the cab passed a streetlight Benstead saw his placid, incurious eyes. Very much as he looks now, he thought, remembering, and coming away from the train window. Lamson's light snapped on.

"What were you thinking about so hard?" Lamson said. "What was wrinkling up your forehead so?"

"Just then, about Rosemary, if that was her name," Benstead said.

"Weren't you surprised at the amount of ambition in that little thing, and the staying power of her, and she didn't weigh eight stone?" Lamson said.

"She was a marvel," Benstead said. "She'd have managed two more like us. But I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the flat you took us to. Didn't look much lived in, that place."

"If you'll recall," Lamson said mildly, "I didn't tell you it was mine, I didn't say I lived there."

"No," Benstead said. "You didn't. But you hadn't told me, then, about your house in Drayton Gardens, either, had you? As for the flat, you had that just for the night, didn't you?"

"Yes," Lamson said.

"And the girl was bought and paid for as well, wasn't she?"

"No, dear boy," Lamson said. "She's an old friend of mine, Rosemary, and she did it as a favor. As for the boy, he wasn't in on it at all, it was all real for him."

"You're too clever by half," Benstead said.

Lamson shrugged. "I was offering you a ticket to a banquet, and you weren't taking it," he said. "You needed leading. You'll be glad, this time, tomorrow."

"Maybe," Benstead said.

"If you're really miffed about it," Lamson said, "we'll call off the whole party, and go back to London. Because there are three thing that spoil an enterprise like ours: cheating in the split, too much spending afterward, bad feeling at the time. If you hold it against me that I spread the girl's legs for you, say so now, to me, so you won't be tempted to say so later, to the coppers."

"No," Benstead said. "I'm not that much a bastard. If you'd picked some tramp, now ... but she was a flaming marvel, that one."

"Natural aptitude," Lamson said. "And careful schooling."

• • •

An hour and 20 minutes out of London they left the train, at Etchingham in Kent. Five or six others got off with them, all plainly locals. They gave up their tickets to the platform man, walked across the footbridge to the parking lot and the cars Lamson had dropped the day before. One was a black Jensen. "Only schoolboys and motor-magazine fanatics know a Jensen when they see one," Lamson had said, "and there's that big fat American Chrysler engine in it, that'll start before you can get your thumb off the teat, no matter what. And do 140, should one need it."

A black Ford panel van stood beside it. Benstead leaned close to read the chaste gilt lettering: "J. Smithfield & Sons, Provisioners, Bexhill-on-Sea."

"All your own," Lamson said. "No such firm, of course. We're in Seddlescomb at five-thirty. Slow, up the road to Westfield, and if we don't meet him, around again and we'll check the pub."

Benstead gave himself one quick look at the map tucked under the seat. It was the large-scale map, the 50-inch one showing fence posts, footpaths and every building. At 5:30 on the button they started up the hill toward Westfield, the truck ahead, and within a quarter mile the big man on the bicycle passed them, coasting. The caretaker, on his way to The Sawyer's Arms, where, unless the building burned, he'd stay until closing. With him gone, Lamson said, the house was dead empty. He had shown Benstead the cutting from The Times: "Sir Mark Barnal and Lady Barnal will spend Christmas in Gstaad."

They ran up the long drive and around the gray old manor house, formless with the added-on bits and pieces of two and a half centuries. They put the cars under a shed.

The grass underfoot was frozen and lumpy. Thin clouds scudded so low, under a cold, driving east wind, a strong man might have thrown a stone into them. Benstead looked around.

"Not to worry," Lamson said, "the old bastard's too miserly to feed a dog. Or even a cat."

Benstead ran his hands over the door. He slipped a piece of plastic into the crack and felt the latch run back, but the door held. "Probably a little sliding bolt as well," he said. "Put your shoulder on it. Now. Shove." With a stifled woody screech the door swung. "Right," Lamson said. "This way." He walked briskly through long hallways and carpeted rooms up two steps here, down three there.

The door was man-size. Welded in the center of it, a lozenge shape of steel carried Victorian lettering: Marshall & Tate, 12, Strand, London. Locksmiths.

Benstead ran a short file across it. A bright sliver lifted. "Jesus," he said, "it's not true."

He pulled the zipper on his satchel and set up the two short fat tanks. He slipped on a pair of goggles and lit the torch. The good cold steel, a century from a Birmingham forge, ran under the pointed hissing flame. He cut it like cake. The combination fell out.

"What do you think?" Lamson said.

Benstead pushed the goggles to his forehead. "He might have something rigged inside," he said, "but for some reason I doubt it. Let's have a look."

He pushed a light through the raggededged hole where the combination had been.

"The lolly's there all right," he said. "Stacks of it. And not a wire in sight. The place is clean, I'm sure of it. I'm going to knock the bolts loose."

They were inside 30 seconds later.

The discs were stacked, from end to end of the long room, like markers around a roulette table. Benstead had expected they'd shine like silver, but they were dull, the color of aluminum kitchenware. He lifted one off its stack.

"Platinum, 99.4 Percent Fine Guaranteed." The marking was the same on both sides. The edge milling was sharp and hard.

"Oh, ye of little faith," Lamson said. "We should have brought the shovels and the buckets with us. I'll fetch them." He ran into the darkness.

It took them two hours of hard labor, two hours of shoveling platinum. For all the double springs under it, for all the 60 pounds of air in the tires, the Ford sagged. The rear end of the Jensen was down, too.

They closed the vault door. Benstead welded the cut circlet of steel back into it, a crude quick job, but it might pass notice from a little way off; he puttied the bolt back to the doorframe and went out a window. They drove carefully to London. The fog began at Sidcup, and they were two hours from there to Chelsea. They ran the cars into Lamson's little maisonette-cum-garage in Drayton Gardens and closed the doors. The oil-fired furnace stood against the far wall, and in the closet behind it, they knew, the bullion molds awaited the white-hot metal.

"Do you know," Lamson said, "the older I get, the more I realize that the old copybook clichés tell us the truth?"

"Do they?" Benstead said.

"Yes," Lamson said. "For example: 'Riches come to those who toil for them.' Look at my hands. Look at yours."

They admired their reddened palms. Lamson had a couple of small blisters.

"Think how we must sweat, melting the stuff down to bars," Lamson said. "Damned near a ton of it."

"Pitiful," Benstead said. "And for what? For a miserable five million quid."

"Why is there no drama?" Lamson said. "Where is the excitement?"

"You tell me," Benstead said.

"Because we got away with it," Lamson said. "Drama is for losers."

"There may be drama later, after the newspapers have the story," Benstead said.

"Never a line in the papers, you silly bastard," Lamson said. "It's absolutely illegal to hold platinum. He'll not dare say a word, ever."

"That's jolly," Benstead said.

Lamson shrugged. "My own belief," he said, "jobs like this are pulled off every day and nobody ever the wiser. As with killings. Do you know the Interpol estimate? Twenty thousand flipping murders a year, unreported, this side of Russia, every one passed as natural death or accident."

They climbed die narrow winding iron stairs to the floor above. They dropped a double Scotch apiece.

"If we could make it to The Grapes through this muck," Benstead said, "I could do with a Guinness and a sausage."

"Right," Lamson said.

They walked along briskly, and the fog eddied behind them. Lamson was as sure and steady as a bloodhound. Their footfalls were muffled. For a long block, a bus, a great lighted house, crawled along beside them. They passed a couple on a corner. "No, my dear," a soft Negro voice was saying, "it cannot be to the left."

"Do you know what I would like?" Benstead said.

"No," Lamson said. "Tell me—bearing in mind that there is nothing, I should think, that you cannot hope to have very soon, nothing that money can buy, at any rate."

"That Rosemary," Benstead said. "I'd like another go at that. D'you think she'll be in The Grapes?"

"She often is," Lamson said. He laughed. "Are you thinking of telling her what you owe her, in the way of inspiration?"

"No, I'm not," Benstead said. "Isn't that the steeple of the Oratory over there?"

"Right," Lamson said. "Two more squares."

"Coming in, on the wireless," Benstead said, "the B.B.C. said this muck should have blown off by this time, tomorrow."

"We live in hope," Lamson said.

The cut-and-frosted glass of the pub door came up suddenly in front of them, as things do in fog. Lamson pushed it open, and they went into the warm, beery-smelling, softly lighted place.

They were in the public bar. They went on through to the lounge. They stood, just inside, looking around.

"Well, by God," Lamson said, "and there she is!"

"And alone, from the look of things," Benstead said. He smiled slowly. A warm and glowing sense of pleasure crept over him.

"Well, now," he said, "what are we waiting for—or what am I waiting for, since I gather you're not really interested, this time?"

"Press on," Lamson said. "Just one thing—I shouldn't count on making a night of it. Won't do to leave the stuff in Drayton Gardens alone too long. And it'll take both of us to look after it properly, I should think."

"Ah, that," Benstead said. "That'll keep. This might not."

The girl looked across, saw him, smiled in what he chose to regard as a shy and tentative fashion. He walked toward her, resisting an impulse to snap his fingers to the beat of an unheard song. He stood over her, he looked down at her. That, he said to himself, is mine. It's mine, and I'm taking it home with me.

"Hello," she said.