World War Two Will Not Take Place by Bill James

‘When I refer to the evening perspective, I want to find what sound levels are like in the building now most people are at home, relaxed and playing their radios and gramophones and so on. This is quite important. Some people in Britain don’t like neighbours’ din. It’s an attitude they’ve taken from the upper classes, who live in manor houses away from the populace. I’ll stroll the corridors.’
    â€˜You fear that if the plattenbauten have shifted, as your friend suggested, noise might be able to crawl through the gaps and attack?’
    â€˜He was a worrier, wasn’t he?’
    â€˜I won’t slam the door when I leave now in case the apartment block falls on you because the plattenbauten are unstable. Then you wouldn’t be able to go back to your country and say how wonderful the Splanemann-Siedlung apartments are, owing to your death.’
    Mount climbed to the third floor. The corridor was empty. He walked pretty silently, he thought, to thirty-seven. His fourth key turned the lock. The corridor had remained clear. He went in and closed the door quietly behind him. That took a struggle. The training said you always left yourself a ready exit, especially when going on to unknown ground which might contain an enemy – or enemies. And, God, surely it must be a plural, if he was expected. But he could not let the door stand ajar. That would bring attention, because this door’s usual and notorious state was shut. He waited.
    The training had taught him how to disarm someone when not armed himself, but not how to disarm several when not armed himself. He crouched a bit against the door. This seemed the best countermeasure he could manage if guns surrounded him in here. The training hadn’t taught him, either, what a corpse would smell like after a longish time, but he thought it would be fairly bad, and he detected nothing like that now. SB, ex-no-man’s-land, might have been able to tell him. There was a cigarette odour, but ingrained, not new. He stood still, bent against the door for a minute, sniffing the darkness, but also trying to sense whether in fact this place seemed to match thirty-four for layout. He heard what might be footsteps and the scrape of moved furniture. But he thought these sounds came from other apartments, not this one, perhaps because plattenbauten had shifted, leaving holes, or simply because this was an apartment block with the usual neighbourly noises when people lived on top of and alongside one another, jam-packed. If he had really been on an accommodation mission from Britain he would have made a note. He switched on his torch. He was in a small hallway, which gave on to a passage with doors leading off. That did square with thirty-four. All the doors were closed, so he could safely show light here. It did not reach a window. He thought the living room would be straight ahead. He’d try that first. He extinguished the torch and opened the door.
    The curtains were not pulled across the windows. He knew that already, from viewing outside. A middling sized moon escaped the clouds once in a while and gave some light. And a bit of a glimmer came from street lamps a good way below. The room looked untidy, as if someone left in a big hurry, or as if a slam-bang search had happened, with no effort made to restore things. Three drawers in a sideboard had been pulled open and left like that. A crumpled shirt hung over the back of an armchair. Pages from several newspapers lay on the floor near one down-at-heel brown shoe and an empty beer bottle.
    Mount did a full eye-inventory. Two armchairs: brown leatherette, not laminated wood and metal. Of course not: Toulmin and the girls had brought that one to Mount’s apartment. He saw a burly radiogram in what might be mahogany; a couple of straight backed wooden chairs, perhaps also mahogany; beige-brown fitted carpet, newish; three framed watercolours of rural and river scenes, which