by Len Deighton
‘Have you got a cold?’ Maria asked him, still inspecting her painted eye.
‘No.’
‘It sounds like it. Your nose is stuffed up. You know that’s always the first sign with those colds you get. It’s having the bedroom window open, I’ve told you about that hundreds of times.’
‘And I wish you’d stop telling me.’
‘Just as you like.’ She scrubbed around in the tin of eye black and spat into it. She had smudged the left eye and now she wiped it clean so that she looked curiously lopsided: one eye dramatically painted and the other white and naked. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Really sorry.’
‘It will be all right,’ said Loiseau. ‘Somehow I will find a way.’
‘I love you,’ she said.
‘Perhaps.’ His face was grey and his eyes deep sunk the way they always were when he had missed a lot of sleep.
They had occupied the same place in her mind, Loiseau and her father, but now she suddenly saw Loiseau as he really was. He was no superman, he was middle-aged and fallible and unrelaxingly hard upon himself. Maria put the eye-black tin down and walked across to the window near Loiseau.
‘I love you,’ she said again.
‘I know you do,’ said Loiseau. ‘And I am a lucky man.’
‘Please help me,’ said Maria, and Loiseau was amazed, for he could never have imagined her asking for help, and Maria was amazed, for she could not imagine herself asking for help.
Loiseau put his nose close to the window. It was hard to see through it because of the reflections and condensation. Again he rubbed a clear place to look through.
‘I will help you,’ said Loiseau.
She cleared her own little portion of glass and peered along the waterfront. ‘He’s a damn long time with that coffee,’ said Loiseau.
‘There’s the Englishman,’ said Maria, ‘and Datt.’
‘Well I’m damned,’ said Loiseau. ‘He’s brought him.’
Datt’s voice echoed down the corridor as the hut door swung open. ‘This is it,’ he said excitedly. ‘All my documents. Colour seals denote year, index letters code names.’ He tapped the boxes proudly. ‘Where is Loiseau?’ he asked the Englishman as he walked slowly down the rank of stacked tins and boxes, stroking them as he read the code letters.
‘The second door,’ said the Englishman, easing his way past the boxes.
Maria knew exactly what she had to do. Jean-Paul said she’d never made one real decision in her life. It was not hysteria, nor heightened emotion. Her father stood in the doorway, tins of documents in his arms, nursing them as though they were a newly-born child. He smiled the smile she remembered from her childhood. His body was poised like that of a tightrope walker about to step off the platform. This time his powers of persuasion and manipulation were about to be tried to the utmost, but she had no doubt that he would succeed. Not even Loiseau was proof against the smooth cool method of Datt, her puppet-master. She knew Datt’s mind and could predict the weapons he would use: he would use the fact that he was her father and the grandfather of Loiseau’s child. He would use the hold he had over so many important people. He would use everything he had and he would win.
Datt smiled and extended a hand. ‘Chief Inspector Loiseau,’ he said. ‘I think I can be of immeasurable help to you – and to France.’
She had her handbag open now. No one looked at her.
Loiseau motioned towards a chair. The Englishman moved aside and glanced quickly around the room. Her hand was around the butt by now, the safety catch slid down noiselessly. She let go of her handbag and it sat upon the gun like a tea cosy.
‘The ship’s position,’ said Datt, ‘is clearly marked upon this chart. It seemed my duty to pretend to help them.’
‘Just a moment,’ said Loiseau wearily.
The Englishman saw what was happening. He punched towards the handbag. And then Datt realized, just as the pistol went off. She pulled the trigger again as fast as she could. Loiseau grabbed her by the neck and the Englishman punched her arm. She dropped the bag. Datt was through the door fumbling with the lock to prevent them from chasing him. He couldn’t operate the lock and ran down the corridor. There was the sound of the outer door opening. Maria wrenched herself free and ran after Datt, the gun still in her hand. Everyone was shouting. Behind her she heard Loiseau call, ‘Lieutenant, stop that man.’
The soldier with the tray of coffee may have heard Loiseau’s shout or he may have seen Maria or the Englishman brandishing a pistol. Whatever it was that prompted him, he threw the tray of coffee aside. He swung the rifle around his neck like a hula-hoop. The stock slammed into his hand and a burst of fire echoed across the waterfront almost simultaneously with the sound of the coffee cups smashing. From all over the waterfront shots were fired; Maria’s bullets must have made very little difference.
You can recognize a head shot by a high-velocity weapon; a cloud of blood particles appeared like vapour in the air above him as Datt and his armful of tapes, film and papers was punched off the waterfront like a golf ball.
‘There,’ called Loiseau. The high-power lamps operated by the soldiers probed the spreading tangle of recording tapes and films that covered the water like a Sargasso Sea. A great bubble of air rose to the surface and a cluster of pornographic photos slid apart and drifted away. Datt was in there amongst it and for a moment it looked as though he was still alive as he turned in the water very slowly and laboriously, his stiff arm clawing out through the air like a swimmer doing the crawl. For a moment it seemed as if he stared at us. The tapes caught in his fingers and the soldiers flinched. ‘He’s turning over, that’s all,’ said Loiseau. ‘Men float face down, women face up. Get the hook under his collar. He’s not a ghost man, just a corpse, a criminal corpse.’
A soldier tried to reach him with a fixed bayonet, but the lieutenant stopped him. ‘They’ll say we did it, if the body is full of bayonet wounds. They’ll say we tortured him.’ Loiseau turned to me and passed me a small reel of tape in a tin. ‘This is yours,’ he said. ‘Your confession, I believe, although I haven’t played it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘That was the agreement,’ said Loiseau.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that was the agreement.’
Datt’s body floated deeper now, even more entangled in the endless tape and film.
Maria had hidden the gun, or perhaps she’d thrown it away. Loiseau didn’t look at her. He was concerned with the body of Datt – too concerned with it, in fact, to be convincing.
I said, ‘Is that your ambulance, Maria?’ She nodded; Loiseau was listening but he didn’t turn round.
‘That’s a silly place to leave it. It’s a terrible obstruction; you’ll have to move it.’ I turned to the Belgian para officer. ‘Let her move it,’ I said.
Loiseau nodded.
‘How far?’ said the officer. He had a mind like Loiseau’s. Perhaps Loiseau read my thoughts. He grinned.
‘It’s all right,’ said Loiseau. ‘The woman can go.’ The lieutenant was relieved to get a direct order. ‘Yes sir,’ he said and saluted Loiseau gravely. He walked towards the ambulance.
Maria touched Loiseau’s arm. ‘I’ll go to my mother’s. I’ll go to the boy,’ she said. He nodded. Her face looked strange, for only one eye was made up. She smiled and followed the officer.
‘Why did you do that?’ Loiseau asked.
‘I couldn’t risk you doing it,’ I said. ‘You’d never forgive yourself.’
It was light now. The sea had taken on a dawn-fresh sparkle and the birds began to think about food. Along the shore herring gulls probed for tiny shellfish left by the tide. They carried them high above the dunes and dropped them upon the concrete blockhouses. Some fell to safety in the sand, some hit the ancient gun emplacements and cracked open, some fell on to the concrete but did not crack; these last were retrieved by the herring gulls and then dropped again and again. The tops of the blockhouses were covered in tiny fragments of shell, for eventually
each shell cracked. Very high, one bird flew purposefully and alone on a course as straight as a light beam. Farther along the shore, in and out of the dunes, a hedgehog wandered aimlessly sniffing and scratching at the colourless grass and watching the gulls at their game. The hedgehog would fly higher and stronger than any of the birds, if only he knew how.
Footnotes
1 Politically mixed but communist-dominated underground anti-Nazi organization.
2 France has a particularly complex police system. The Sûreté Nationale is the police system for all France that operates directly for the Minister of the Interior in the Ministry at rue des Saussaies. At Quai des Orfèvres there is the Prefecture which does the same job for Paris. There is also the Gendarmerie – recognized by their khaki coats in summer – who police the whole of France under the orders of the Army Ministry and are, in effect, soldiers. As well as this there are special groups – Gardes Mobiles and CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) companies – which are highly mobile and have violent striking power. Loiseau worked for the first-named, the Sûreté Nationale, who as well as all standard police work also attend to counter-espionage, economic espionage (unions and potential strikes etc.), frontier policing and gaming. The sixty CRS units are also controlled by one of the directorates (Public Security) of the Sûreté Nationale.
3 An old building on a prison site adjacent to Mazas Square near Austerlitz Station. It is used as a mortuary.
4 Senior police officers in France are assigned their own private lines.
5 baby: a small whisky.
6 Informer.
7 Ninhydrine: a colour reagent, reddish-black powder. Hands become violet because of amino acid in the skin. It takes three days before it comes off. Washing makes it worse.
8 Service de Documentation Extérieure et Contre-Espionage.
9 Paris police have their own telephone system independent of the public one.
10 Under French Law the Prefect of Paris Police can arrest, interrogate, inquire, search, confiscate letters in the post, without any other authority than his own. His only obligation is to inform the Public Prosecutor and bring the prisoner before a magistrate within twenty-four hours. Note that the magistrate is part of the law machine and not a separate functionary as he is in Britain.
When he is brought before the magistrate – juge d’instruction – the police explain that the man is suspected and the magistrate directs the building up of evidence. (In Britain, of course, the man is not brought before a magistrate until after the police have built up their case.)
Inquiries prior to the appearance before a juge d’instruction are called enquêtes officieuses (informal inquiries). In law the latter give no power to search or demand statements but in practice few citizens argue about this technicality when faced with the police.
11 A Chinese description to differentiate pure Chinese from various minority groups in China or even Vietnamese etc. Ninety-five per cent of China’s population are Han Chinese.
LEN DEIGHTON
Spy Story
‘But war’s a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.’
William Cowper, 1731–1800
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Cover designer’s note
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgements
Cover designer’s note
Documents from the Cold War period in which Spy Story is set were invariably produced on a manual typewriter. It was therefore an obvious choice, to me, to use the typewriter keys to spell out the book’s title. An unintentional bonus is that their circular shape is reminiscent of portholes, which suits the nautical element of the story.
Extending that theme further, I have included silhouettes of a pair of nuclear submarines, whose dark outlines look as though they have come straight out of a wartime spotter’s guide. A map of the war games area depicted in the book fills the submarines, which sail through a red sea that leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that Communist USSR looms large in this story.
On each front cover of this latest quartet, I have placed a photograph of the eyes of the bespectacled unnamed spy, in this instance overlaid with a submarine periscope’s graticule. Is our hero in the sights of a Soviet submariner? Or is he inside one of the vessels and spying on us?
Readers who have been faithfully building their collection of these reissues will by now have become familiar with my use of a linking motif on the spines of the books. Being the final foursome in the entire series of reissues, and books in which violence is never too far away, I thought it a good idea to ‘go out with a bang’, as it were. This quartet’s spines accordingly display a different handgun, as mentioned in each of the books’ texts. The example here is a Russian Tokarev TT pistol, developed in the 1920s and still popular with Soviet military police forty years later.
Another recurring feature in this quartet, to be found within each back cover’s photographic montage, is a pair of ‘our hero’s’ glasses, which look suspiciously like those worn by ‘Harry Palmer’ in The Ipcress File and other outings …
Also featured in the montage is a King George Vl Coronation mug, souvenir of a simpler time, which becomes the receptacle for the hero’s glasses. Completing the contents of the mug is a Savoy Hotel matchbox and a rubber stamp, the latter perhaps the archetypal symbol of dull bureaucracy so railed against by our hero. In front of this, a packet of Players cigarettes props up an arctic Soviet submariner’s badge.
A quarter-inch magnetic tape suggests that surveillance of some form is taking place, though of whom and why remains to be discovered. This tape’s secrets are in actual fact a recording of a Radio Luxembourg commercial that I produced with Mick Jagger, promoting one of The Rolling Stones records. A lead toy submarine completes the arrangement, with all items sitting on a copy of a Pravda newspaper.
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
Hollywood 2012
Introduction
I don’t know how or when I became interested in the history of military uniforms but I remember why. It was because John Edgcombe, manager of the Times Bookshop, told me that collectors of model soldiers were the most expert and dedicated group of military enthusiasts he had ever come across. We met on the third Friday of each month in the Tudor Room of Caxton Hall, London SW1. And my first visit there was a revelation. I didn’t know what model soldiers were until I saw these amazing figures, painted with the skill and detail that I had hitherto associated only with the sort of fine miniature paintings on display in museums.
Copies of The Bulletin, the monthly newsletter of The British Model Soldiers Society, alongside those of the associated Military Historical Society (Saturday afternoons at the Imperial War Museum), still fill a shelf in my library and they go back to January 1959. I have never discarded them because they provide a wealth of information not available elsewhere. I never collected or painted model soldiers but I enjoyed those evenings and it was a member of that group who invited me to a naval war game session.
I expected to see a complicated desk game, perhaps something like three-dimensional chess, which was going through a fashionable phase about that time. In the event I went to one of those grim Victorian-period school buildings that are still to be found in south London. It was Saturday morning and the war gamers had taken over the whole premises for the weekend: ‘war doesn’t stop when it gets dark,’ it was explained to m
e.
One classroom was occupied by the staff of battle group Red. Another held the staff of battle group Blue. A ‘sentry’ was at the door to ensure that a trip to the toilets did not include a chance to glimpse the gymnasium. For on the floor of the gymnasium model ships, drawn up into two battle fleets, were arranged and constantly moved by monitors. Isolated in the upstairs classrooms, the staffs would only be given information that could come from the crow’s nest of their tallest warship.
The staffs were all at sea but for us spectators, standing around the gymnasium, the whole picture was provided. On the stage a row of chairs gave half a dozen ‘referees’ a place to supervise, observe and declare damage or sinking as the engagement progressed.
I was captivated. This was serious stuff and there were not many smiles or jokes. This was war and I had no doubt that many of those involved in this game knew what the real thing was like. I must have been an incongruous figure at these gatherings. I never painted a toy soldier or participated in any of the war games; younger than most of the others, all I did was ask questions. Fortunately most people enjoy answering reasonably sensible questions that test their expertise so I was accepted. Many years later it was that elaborate war game that provided the starting place and background to a book, and it was naval combat that was in my mind.