by Len Deighton
‘I owe you an apology,’ said M. Datt. ‘I wanted to wait a few days before delivering it so that you would find it in yourself to forgive me.’
‘That humble hat doesn’t fit,’ I said. ‘Go a size larger.’
M. Datt opened his mouth and rocked gently. ‘You have a fine sense of humour,’ he proclaimed once he had got himself under control.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You are quite a joker yourself.’
M. Datt’s mouth puckered into a smile like a carelessly ironed shirt-collar. ‘Oh I see what you mean,’ he said suddenly and laughed. ‘Ha-ha-ha,’ he laughed. Madame Tastevin had spread the Monopoly board by now and dealt us the property cards to speed up the game. The courier was due to arrive, but getting closer to M. Datt was the way the book would do it.
‘Hotels on Lecourbe and Belleville,’ said Madame Tastevin.
‘That’s what you always do,’ said M. Datt. ‘Why don’t you buy railway stations instead?’
We threw the dice and the little wooden discs went trotting around the board, paying their rents and going to prison and taking their chances just like humans. ‘A voyage of destruction,’ Madame Tastevin said it was.
‘That’s what all life is,’ said M. Datt. ‘We start to die on the day we are born.’
My chance card said ‘Faites des réparations dans toutes vos maisons’ and I had to pay 2,500 francs on each of my houses. It almost knocked me out of the game but I scraped by. As I finished settling up I saw the courier cross the terrasse. It was the same man who had come last time. He took it very slow and stayed close to the wall. A coffee crème and a slow appraisal of the customers before contacting me. Professional. Sift the tails off and duck from trouble. He saw me but gave no sign of doing so.
‘More coffee for all of us,’ said Madame Tastevin. She watched the two waiters laying the tables for lunch, and now she called out to them, ‘That glass is smeary’, ‘Use the pink napkins, save the white ones for evening’, ‘Be sure there is enough terrine today. I’ll be angry if we run short.’ The waiters were keen that Madame shouldn’t get angry, they moved anxiously, patting the cloths and making microscopic adjustments to the placing of the cutlery. The taxi-drivers decided upon another game and there was a rattle of wooden balls as the coin went into the slot.
The courier had brought out a copy of L’Express and was reading it and sipping abstractedly at his coffee. Perhaps he’ll go away, I thought, perhaps I won’t have to listen to his endless official instructions. Madame Tastevin was in dire straits, she mortgaged three of her properties. On the cover of L’Express there was a picture of the American Ambassador to France shaking hands with a film star at a festival.
M. Datt said, ‘Can I smell a terrine cooking? What a good smell.’
Madame nodded and smiled. ‘When I was a girl all Paris was alive with smells; oil paint and horse sweat, dung and leaky gas lamps and everywhere the smell of superb French cooking. Ah!’ She threw the dice and moved. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘it smells of diesel, synthetic garlic, hamburgers and money.’
M. Datt said, ‘Your dice.’
‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘But I must go upstairs in a moment. I have so much work to do.’ I said it loud enough to encourage the courier to order a second coffee.
Landing on the Boul des Capucines destroyed Madame Tastevin.
‘I’m a scientist,’ said M. Datt, picking up the pieces of Madame Tastevin’s bankruptcy. ‘The scientific method is inevitable and true.’
‘True to what?’ I asked. ‘True to scientists, true to history, true to fate, true to what?’
‘True to itself,’ said Datt.
‘The most evasive truth of all,’ I said.
M. Datt turned to me, studied my face and wet his lips before beginning to talk. ‘We have begun in a bad … a silly way.’ Jean-Paul came into the café – he had been having lunch there every day lately. He waved airily to us and bought cigarettes at the counter.
‘But there are certain things that I don’t understand,’ Datt continued. ‘What are you doing carrying a case-load of atomic secrets?’
‘And what are you doing stealing it?’
Jean-Paul came across to the table, looked at both of us and sat down.
‘Retrieving,’ said Datt. ‘I retrieved it for you.’
‘Then let’s ask Jean-Paul to remove his gloves,’ I said.
Jean-Paul watched M. Datt anxiously. ‘He knows,’ said M. Datt. ‘Admit it, Jean-Paul.’
‘On account,’ I explained to Jean-Paul, ‘of how we began in a bad and silly way.’
‘I said that,’ said M. Datt to Jean-Paul. ‘I said we had started in a bad and silly way and now we want to handle things differently.’
I leaned across and peeled back the wrist of Jean-Paul’s cotton gloves. The flesh was stained violet with ‘nin’.7
‘Such an embarrassment for the boy,’ said M. Datt, smiling. Jean-Paul glowered at him.
‘Do you want to buy the documents?’ I asked.
M. Datt shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I will give you ten thousand new francs, but if you want more than that I would not be interested.’
‘I’ll need double that,’ I said.
‘And if I decline?’
‘You won’t get every second sheet, which I removed and deposited elsewhere.’
‘You are no fool,’ said M. Datt. ‘To tell you the truth the documents were so easy to get from you that I suspected their authenticity. I’m glad to find you are no fool.’
‘There are more documents,’ I said. ‘A higher percentage will be Xerox copies but you probably won’t mind that. The first batch had a high proportion of originals to persuade you of their
authenticity, but it’s too risky to do that regularly.’
‘Whom do you work for?’
‘Never mind who I work for. Do you want them or not?’
M. Datt nodded, smiled grimly and said, ‘Agreed, my friend. Agreed.’ He waved an arm and called for coffee. ‘It’s just curiosity. Not that your documents are anything like my scientific interests. I shall use them merely to stimulate my mind. Then they will be destroyed. You can have them back …’ The courier finished his coffee and then went upstairs, trying to look as though he was going no farther than the toilets on the first floor.
I blew my nose noisily and then lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t care what you do with them, monsieur. My fingerprints are not on the documents and there is no way to connect them with me; do as you wish with them. I don’t know if these documents connect with your work. I don’t even know what your work is.’
‘My present work is scientific,’ explained Datt. ‘I run my clinic to investigate the patterns of human behaviour. I could make much more money elsewhere, my qualifications are good. I am an analyst. I am still a good doctor. I could lecture on several different subjects: upon oriental art, Buddhism or even Marxist theory. I am considered an authority on Existentialism and especially upon Existentialist psychology; but the work I am doing now is the work by which I will be known. The idea of being remembered after death becomes important as one gets old.’ He threw the dice and moved past Départ. ‘Give me my twenty thousand francs,’ he said.
‘What do you do at this clinic?’ I peeled off the toy money and passed it to him. He counted it and stacked it up.
‘People are blinded by the sexual nature of my work. They fail to see it in its true light. They think only of the sex activity.’ He sighed. ‘It’s natural, I suppose. My work is important merely because people cannot consider the subject objectively. I can; so I am one of the few men who can control such a project.’
‘You analyse the sexual activity?’
‘Yes,’ said Datt. ‘No one does anything they do not wish to do. We do employ girls but most of the people who go to the house go there as couples, and they leave in couples. I’ll buy two more houses.’
‘The same couples?’
‘Not always,’ said Datt. ‘But that is not necessarily a thing to be deplored. People are mental
ly in bondage, and their sexual activity is the cipher which can help to explain their problems. You’re not collecting your rent.’ He pushed it over to me.
‘You are sure that you are not rationalizing the ownership of a whorehouse?’
‘Come along there now and see,’ said Datt. ‘It is only a matter of time before you land upon my hotels in the Avenue de la République.’ He shuffled his property cards together. ‘And then you are no more.’
‘You mean the clinic is operating at noon?’
‘The human animal,’ said Datt, ‘is unique in that its sexual cycle continues unabated from puberty to death.’ He folded up the Monopoly board.
It was getting hotter now, the sort of day that gives rheumatism a jolt and expands the Eiffel Tower six inches. ‘Wait a moment,’ I said to Datt. ‘I’ll go up and shave. Five minutes?’
‘Very well,’ said Datt. ‘But there’s no real need to shave, you won’t be asked to participate.’ He smiled.
I hurried upstairs, the courier was waiting inside my room. ‘They bought it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I repeated my conversation with M. Datt.
‘You’ve done well,’ he said.
‘Are you running me?’ I lathered my face carefully and began shaving.
‘No. Is that where they took it from, where the stuffing is leaking out?’
‘Yes. Then who is?’
‘You know I can’t answer that. You shouldn’t even ask me. Clever of them to think of looking there.’
‘I told them where it was. I’ve never asked before,’ I said, ‘but whoever is running me seems to know what these people do even before I know. It’s someone close, someone I know. Don’t keep poking at it. It’s only roughly stitched back.’
‘That at least is wrong,’ said the courier. ‘It’s no one you know or have ever met. How did you know who took the case?’
‘You’re lying. I told you not to keep poking at it. Nin; it colours your flesh. Jean-Paul’s hands were bright with it.’
‘What colour?’
‘You’ll be finding out,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of nin still in there.’
‘Very funny.’
‘Well who told you to poke your stubby peasant fingers into my stuffing?’ I said. ‘Stop messing about and listen carefully. Datt is taking me to the clinic, follow me there.’
‘Very well,’ said the courier without enthusiasm. He wiped his hands on a large handkerchief.
‘Make sure I’m out again within the hour.’
‘What am I supposed to do if you are not out within the hour?’ he asked.
‘I’m damned if I know,’ I said. They never ask questions like that in films. ‘Surely you have some sort of emergency procedure arranged?’
‘No,’ said the courier. He spoke very quietly. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t. I just do the reports and pop them into the London dip mail secret tray. Sometimes it takes three days.’
‘Well this could be an emergency,’ I said. ‘Something should have been arranged beforehand.’ I rinsed off the last of the soap and parted my hair and straightened my tie.
‘I’ll follow you anyway,’ said the courier encouragingly. ‘It’s a fine morning for a walk.’
‘Good,’ I said. I had a feeling that if it had been raining he would have stayed in the café. I dabbed some lotion on my face and then went downstairs to M. Datt. Upon the great bundle of play-money he had left the waiter’s tip: one franc.
Summer was here again; the pavement was hot, the streets were dusty and the traffic cops were in white jackets and dark glasses. Already the tourists were everywhere, in two styles: beards, paper parcels and bleached jeans, or straw hats, cameras and cotton jackets. They were sitting on benches complaining loudly. ‘So he explained that it was one hundred new francs or it would be ten thousand old francs, and I said, “Gracious me I sure can understand why you people had that revolution.”’
Another tourist said, ‘But you don’t speak the language.’
A man replied, ‘I don’t have to speak the language to know what that waiter meant.’
As we walked I turned to watch them and caught sight of the courier strolling along about thirty yards behind us.
‘It will take me another five years to complete my work,’ said Datt. ‘The human mind and the human body; remarkable mechanisms but often ill-matched.’
‘Very interesting,’ I said. Datt was easily encouraged.
‘At present my researches are concerned with stimulating the registering of pain, or rather the excitement caused by someone pretending to have sudden physical pain. You perhaps remember that scream I had on the tape recorder. Such a sound can cause a remarkable mental change in a man if used in the right circumstances.’
‘The right circumstances being that film-set-style torture chamber where I was dumped after treatment.’
‘Exactly,’ said Datt. ‘You have hit it. Even if they can see that it’s a recording and even if we tell them that the girl was an actress, even then the excitement they get from it is not noticeably lessened. Curious, isn’t it?’
‘Very,’ I said.
The house on the Avenue Foch quivered in the heat of the morning. The trees before it moved sensuously as though anxious to savour the hot sun. The door was opened by a butler; we stepped inside the entrance hall. The marble was cold and the curve of the staircase twinkled where sunbeams prodded the rich colours of the carpeting. High above us the chandeliers clinked with the draught from the open door.
The only sound was a girl’s scream. I recognized it as the tape-recording that Datt mentioned. The screams were momentarily louder as a door opened and closed again somewhere on the first floor beyond the top of the staircase.
‘Who is up there?’ said Datt as he handed his umbrella and hat to the butler.
‘Monsieur Kuang-t’ien,’ said the butler.
‘A charming fellow,’ said Datt. ‘Major-domo of the Chinese Embassy here in Paris.’
Somewhere in the house a piano played Liszt, or perhaps it was a recording.
I looked towards the first floor. The screams continued, muffled by the door that had now closed again. Suddenly, moving noiselessly like a figure in a fantasy, a young girl ran along the first-floor balcony and came down the stairs, stumbling and clinging to the banister rail. She half-fell and half-ran, her mouth open in that sort of soundless scream that only nightmares produce. The girl was naked but her body was speckled with patches of bright wet blood. She must have been stabbed twenty, perhaps thirty times, and the blood had produced an intricate pattern of rivulets like a tight bodice of fine red lace. I remembered M. Kuang-t’ien’s poem: ‘If she is not a rose all white, then she must be redder than the red of blood.’
No one moved until Datt made a half-hearted attempt to grab her, but he was so slow that she avoided him effortlessly and ran through the door. I recognized her face now; it was the model that Byrd had painted, Annie.
‘Get after her.’ Datt called his staff into action with the calm precision of a liner captain pulling into a pier. ‘Go upstairs, grab Kuang-t’ien, disarm him, clean the knife and hide it. Put him under guard, then phone the Press Officer at the Chinese Embassy. Don’t tell him anything, but he must stay in his office until I call him to arrange a meeting. Albert, get on my personal phone and call the Ministry of the Interior. Tell them we’ll need some CRS policemen here. I don’t want the Police Municipale poking around too long. Jules, get my case and the drug box and have the transfusion apparatus ready; I’ll take a look at the girl.’ Datt turned, but stopped and said softly, ‘And Byrd, get Byrd here immediately; send a car for him.’
He hurried after the footmen and butler who were running across the lawn after the bleeding girl. She glanced over her shoulder and gained fresh energy from the closeness of the pursuit. She grabbed at the gatepost and swung out on to the hot dusty pavement of the Avenue Foch, her heart pumping the blood patches into shiny bulbous swellings that burst and dribbled into vertical stripes.
&nb
sp; ‘Look!’ I heard the voices of passers-by calling.
Someone else called ‘Hello darling’, and there was a laugh and a lot of wolf-whistles. They must have been the last thing the girl heard as she collapsed and died on the hot, dusty Parisian pavement under the trees in the Avenue Foch. A bewhiskered old crone carrying two baguettes came shuffling in her threadbare carpet-slippers. She pushed through the onlookers and leaned down close to the girl’s head. ‘Don’t worry chérie, I’m a nurse,’ she croaked. ‘All your injuries are small and superficial.’ She pushed the loaves of bread tighter under her armpit and tugged at her corset bottom. ‘Just superficial,’ she said again, ‘so don’t make so much fuss.’ She turned very slowly and went shuffling off down the street muttering to herself.
There were ten or twelve people around her by the time I reached the body. The butler arrived and threw a car blanket over her. One of the bystanders said ‘Tant pis’, and another said that the jolie pépée was well barricaded. His friend laughed.
A policeman is never far away in Paris and they came quickly, the blue-and-white corrugated van disgorging cops like a gambler fanning a deck of cards. Even before the van came to a halt the police were sorting through the bystanders, asking for papers, detaining some, prodding others away. The footmen had wrapped the girl’s body in the blanket and began to heave the sagging bundle towards the gates of the house.
‘Put it in the van,’ said Datt. One of the policemen said, ‘Take the body to the house.’ The two men carrying the dead girl stood undecided.
‘In the van,’ said Datt.
‘I get my orders from the Commissaire de Police,’ said the cop. ‘We are on the radio now.’ He nodded towards the van.
Datt was furious. He struck the policeman a blow on the arm. His voice was sibilant and salivatory. ‘Can’t you see that you are attracting attention, you fool? This is a political matter. The Ministry of the Interior are concerned. Put the body in the van. The radio will confirm my ruling.’ The policeman was impressed by Datt’s anger. Datt pointed at me. ‘This is one of the officers working with Chief Inspector Loiseau of the Sûreté. Is that good enough for you?’