by Len Deighton
‘We’ve got to trust someone,’ said Professor Allenby, without going further to remind Toliver that in the space of five minutes he’d condemned the Americans, the Russians, the Germans – East and West – and the Japanese. But the taunt was obvious to the men present, and there was a long silence during which Ferdy opened his boxes of cigars and passed them down the table with a maximum of displacement activity.
I resisted and passed them to Schlegel. He took one. He rolled it in his fingers and listened to its sound. Only when he had everyone’s attention did he bite the end off it. He lit it with a match that he struck with one hand, using his thumbnail. He fixed me with his beady eyes. ‘Big snafu at the Table today, after you left. Did you hear?’
‘Port for anyone who’d like some,’ said Ferdy nervously.
‘My informant said jackpot,’ I replied.
‘A host’s prerogative,’ said Schlegel. He inhaled, nodded and blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘No time now to pull the back off and probe the balance spring.’
Toliver waved away Schlegel’s cigar smoke and with measured care sipped enough of the Pauillac to commit its flavour to memory. ‘I’m glad there are still some people who serve a Bordeaux with game,’ he said. He finished his wine, then took the port decanter and poured himself some. ‘What kind of a meal can I expect if I visit your Studies Centre? Does your influence obtain there, Foxwell?’ He touched his wavy hair and moved it a fraction off his forehead.
‘You needn’t worry about the food,’ said Schlegel. ‘We don’t run tours.’
Toliver’s knuckles whitened as he grasped the neck of the decanter. ‘I’m not exactly a tourist,’ he said. ‘An official visit … on behalf of the House.’
‘No tourists, no journalists, no free-loaders,’ said Schlegel. ‘My new policy.’
‘Mustn’t bite the hand that feeds you,’ said Toliver. Dawlish watched the exchange. Gently he took the port decanter from Toliver’s clenched hand, and passed it to Eichelberger.
‘I’m not quite sure I understand your duties at the Studies Centre,’ said Dr Eichelberger to Ferdy. He took the decanter, poured himself some port and passed it.
‘War Games,’ said Ferdy. He was relieved to deflect the collision course of Toliver and Schlegel. ‘I usually do the Russian Navy side of it.’
‘That’s funny,’ said Toliver. ‘You don’t look Russian.’ He looked round and then laughed heartily with every one of his perfect white teeth.
‘But what does he do?’ Eichelberger asked Schlegel.
‘He introduces the element of human fallibility,’ said Schlegel.
‘And very important, too,’ said Eichelberger, and nodded seriously.
‘The nuclear submarine,’ said young Professor Allenby, ‘is the most perfect symbol of imperialistic aggression. It is designed solely for long-range use to distant countries and can only destroy the civilian populations of large cities.’
He fixed me with his bright eyes. ‘I agree,’ I said, ‘and the Russians have more of them than the American, British and French fleets combined.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the professor.
‘A palpable hit,’ said Mr Flynn.
‘What’s more,’ said Schlegel, poking a finger at Allenby, ‘your goddamn red buddies are building at a rate of one a week, have been for years, and show no sign of slowing construction.’
‘My goodness,’ said Flynn, ‘the seas must be filled with the awful things.’
‘They are,’ said Schlegel.
‘It’s probably time we joined the ladies,’ said Ferdy, dreading an argument among his guests.
Dawlish stood up politely and so did I, but Schlegel and his new-found enemy, Professor Allenby, didn’t give up so easily. ‘A typical example of propaganda from the rearmament lobby,’ said Allenby. ‘Isn’t it obvious that the Russians need more submarines: their coastline is incredibly long and they need naval forces for their land-locked seas.’
‘Then what the hell are they doing all over the Med, the Atlantic, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean?’
‘Just showing the flag,’ said Allenby.
‘Oh, pardon me,’ said Schlegel. ‘I thought only cryptofascist reactionary imperialists did that.’
‘I don’t know why you Yanks should be so frightened of the Russians,’ said Allenby. He smiled.
‘You Brits should be a little more frightened of them, if you ask me,’ said Schlegel. ‘You depend upon imports just in order to eat. Hitler came into the war with twenty-seven long-range submarines. He sank enough of your merchant shipping to make it touch and go whether you could continue the war. Today, with a Royal Navy no longer visible to the naked eye, the Russian Navy has about four hundred subs, many of them nukes. Maybe they are just for showing the flag, Prof, but you want to start asking yourself where they are planning to run it up.’
‘I think we really should join the ladies,’ said Ferdy.
Coffee was served in the drawing-room. It was a fine room; tapestries, placed to absorb stray sounds, made its acoustics as good as any recital room. There were a dozen delicate gilt chairs placed equidistant upon the pale green Afghan carpet. The Bechstein grand piano had been stripped of family photos and cut flowers, and placed under the huge painting of Ferdy’s grandfather’s favourite horse.
The pianist was a handsome youth with an evening shirt even frillier than those currently de rigueur at Oxford, and his tie was bright red and droopy. He found every note of one of the Beethoven Opus 10 Sonatas, and held many of them for exactly the right duration.
Coffee was kept hot in a large silver samovar – OK, don’t tell me, but it was Ferdy’s samovar – and thimble-sized demi-tasses were positioned alongside it. Dawlish held his cigar in one hand and the coffee cup and saucer in the other. He nodded his thanks as I operated the coffee tap for him.
I held up the jug of hot milk and raised an eyebrow.
‘Worcester,’ said Dawlish, ‘late eighteenth century, and damned nice too.’
The old idiot knew that I was asking him if he wanted milk, but he was right. Holding a hundred pounds-worth of antiques in your hand to pour hot milk was part of the miracle of the Foxwells’ lifestyle.
‘Mozart next,’ said Dawlish. He was wearing an old-fashioned dinner suit with a high wing collar and a stiff-fronted shirt. It was difficult to know if it was an heirloom or whether he had them made like that.
‘So I read on the programme,’ I said.
‘That’s my car outside, that Black Hawk Stutz.’
‘Come along, you chaps,’ called Toliver from behind us. ‘Move along there. Can’t stand milk in coffee – ruins the whole flavour. You might just as well have instant if you’re going to put that stuff in it.’
‘I know you’re interested in motors,’ said Dawlish. On the far side of the room I heard the strident voice of the history professor proclaiming how much he liked cowboy films.
‘He’s going to play the Mozart A Major in a minute,’ said Dawlish.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘and I quite like that.’
‘Well then …’
‘It better have a heater.’
‘Our friend wants to look at the motor,’ he told Ferdy, who nodded silently and looked around to see if his wife Teresa was likely to see us abandon their protégé.
‘He’s had more practice with the Mozart,’ said Ferdy.
‘It’s a thirsty beast,’ said Dawlish. ‘Seven or eight miles to a gallon is good going.’
‘Where are you going?’ said Marjorie.
‘To see my motor,’ said Dawlish. ‘Overhead camshaft: eight cylinders. Do come, but put a coat on. They tell me it’s beginning to snow.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Marjorie. ‘Don’t be long.’
‘Sensible girl, that,’ said Dawlish. ‘You’re a lucky man.’
I wondered what climatic conditions he’d have invented had she accepted his invitation. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.
Dawlish put on his spectacles and looked at the instruments. He sai
d, ‘Black Hawk Stutz, nineteen twenty-eight.’ He started the engine and so got the primitive heater to work. ‘Straight eight: overhead camshaft. She’ll go, I’ll tell you that.’ He struggled to open the ashtray. Then he inhaled on his cigar so that his rubicund face loomed out of the darkness. He smiled. ‘Real hydraulic brakes – literally hydraulic, I mean. You fill them up with water.’
‘What’s all this about?’
‘A chat,’ he said. ‘Just a chat.’
He turned in order to tighten the already firmly closed window. I smiled to myself, knowing that Dawlish always liked to have a sheet of glass between himself and even the remotest chance of a parabolic microphone. The moon came out to help him find the handle. By its light I saw a movement in a grey Austin 2200 parked under the lime trees. ‘Don’t fret,’ said Dawlish, ‘a couple of my chaps.’ A finger of cloud held the moon aloft and then closed upon it like a conjurer’s dirty glove upon a white billiard ball.
‘What are they here for?’ I asked. He didn’t answer before switching on the car radio as another precaution against eavesdroppers. It was some inane request programme. There was a babble of names and addresses.
‘Things have changed a lot since the old days, Pat.’ He smiled. ‘It is Pat, isn’t it? Pat Armstrong, it’s a good name. Did you ever consider Louis to go with it?’
‘Very droll,’ I said.
‘New name, new job, the past gone for ever. You’re happy and I’m glad it all went so well. You deserved that. You deserved more than that, in fact, it was the least we could have done.’ A fleck of snow hit the windscreen. It was big, and when the moonlight caught it it shone like a crystal. Dawlish put a finger out to touch the snowflake as if the glass was not there. ‘But you can’t wipe the slate clean. You can’t forget half your life. You can’t erase it and pretend it never happened.’
‘No?’ I said. ‘Well, I was doing all right until this evening.’
I sniffed his cigar smoke enviously but I’d held out for about six weeks and I’d be damned if it was Dawlish who’d make me weaken my resolve. I said, ‘Was this all arranged? Us both being invited tonight?’
He didn’t answer. Music began on the radio. We watched the snowflake as the heat from his fingertip melted it. It slid down the glass in a dribble of water. But already another snowflake had taken its place, and another, and another after that.
‘And anyway there’s Marjorie,’ I said.
‘And what a beautiful girl she is. But good grief, I wouldn’t think of asking you to get mixed up in the rough and tumble side of it.’
‘There was a time when you pretended that there was no rough and tumble side of it.’
‘A long time ago. Regrettably, the rough parts have become much rougher since then.’ He didn’t elaborate on the tumbles.
‘It’s not just that,’ I said. I paused. No point in hurting the old boy’s feelings but already he had me on the defensive. ‘It’s simply that I don’t want to become part of a big organization again. Especially not a government department. I don’t want to be just another pawn.’
‘Being a pawn,’ said Dawlish, ‘is just a state of mind.’
He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and produced a small multi-bladed device that I’d seen him use for everything from picking a despatch box lock to reaming his pipe. Now he used the pin of it to probe the vitals of his cigar. He puffed at it and nodded approval. He looked at the cigar as he began to talk. ‘I remember this boy – young man perhaps I should say – phoning me one night … This is a long time ago now … public call box … he said there’d been an accident. I asked if he wanted an ambulance, and he said it was worse than that …’ Dawlish puffed at the cigar and then held it up for us both to admire the improvement he’d wrought. ‘Do you know what I told him?’
‘Yes, I know what you told him.’
‘I told him to do nothing, stay where he was until a car came for him … He was whisked away … a holiday in the country, and the whole business never got into the papers, never went into the police files … never even went on record with us.’
‘That bastard was trying to kill me.’
‘It’s the sort of thing the department can do.’ He gave the cigar a final adjustment and then admired it again, as proud as some old ferry-boat engineer putting an oily rag over an ancient turbine.
‘And I admire the way you’ve done it all,’ said Dawlish. ‘Not a whisper anywhere. If I went back into that house and told Foxwell – one of your closest friends – to say nothing of your good lady, that you used to work in the department, they’d laugh at me.’
I said nothing. It was typical of the sort of moronic compliment that they all exchanged at the Christmas party, just before that stage of inebriation when the cipher girls get chased round the locked filing cabinets.
‘It’s not a cover,’ I said. ‘Nothing to admire: I’m O.U.T.’
‘We’ll need you for the Mason business, though,’ he said.
‘You’ll have to come and get me,’ I said. From the radio came the voice of Frank Sinatra, change partners and dance with me.
‘Just an hour or so for the official inquiry. After all, it was you and Foxwell they were impersonating.’
‘While we were away?’
‘Stupid, wasn’t it? They should have chosen someone more remote, one of the radio-room clerks, perhaps.’
‘But it nearly came off.’ I was fishing for information and he knew it.
‘It did indeed. It seemed so genuine. Your old flat, your address in the phone book and one of them even looking a bit like you.’ He puffed smoke. ‘Ninety thousand pounds they would have collected. Well worth the money spent on those retouched photos. Beautifully done, those photos, eh?’ He gave the cigar another adjustment and then held it up for us both to look at it.
‘For what?’
‘Oh not just the ASW Task Force procedures. A whole lot of stuff – radio fuse diagrams, the latest SINS modifications, lab reports from Lockheed. A rag-bag of stuff. But no one would have paid that sort of money for it if they hadn’t set up all the pantomime of it coming from you and Foxwell.’
‘Very flattering.’
Dawlish shook his head. ‘There’s a lot of dust still in the air. I was hoping to soft-soap your Colonel this evening but I judged it not opportune. He’ll be angry, of course.’ He tapped the polished wooden dashboard. ‘They don’t make them like that any more.’
‘Why should he be angry?’
‘Why indeed, but that’s how it always is, you know that. They never thank us for getting onto these things … slack security, the change of directors, your trip, the empty flat, no proper co-ordination: it’s the old story.’
‘And?’
‘There will probably be a trial, but their lawyers will do a deal if they have any sense. Don’t want it all over the papers. Delicate situation at the moment.’
‘Schlegel asked me how I got the job at the Centre.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I bumped into Ferdy in a pub …’
‘Well, that’s right isn’t it?’
‘Can’t you ever give a straight answer?’ I said angrily. ‘Does Ferdy know – must I pry every last syllable … Schlegel is quite likely to bring it up again.’
Dawlish waved away his cigar smoke. ‘Don’t get so agitated. Why the devil should Foxwell know anything?’ He smiled. ‘Foxwell: our man at the Studies Centre, you mean?’ He laughed very softly.
‘No, I didn’t mean that exactly.’
The front door of the house opened. In the rectangle of yellow light, Toliver swayed as he tied his scarf and buttoned his overcoat to the neck. I heard the voices of Toliver and Ferdy as the two men walked across to Toliver’s shiny new two-door green Bentley. It was icy underfoot and Toliver grabbed Ferdy’s arm to steady himself. In spite of the closed windows I heard Ferdy’s ‘Goodnight. Goodnight. Goodnight.’
Dawlish had made it sound ridiculous. Why would Dawlish have an agent in the Studies Centre when he
could have the analysis delivered every month merely for the asking.
He said, ‘Another extraordinary thing, after all the procedures we’ve been through, we’ve gone right back to routing our phone connections through the local engineers into Federal exchange.’
‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear about it,’ I said. I opened the catch of the car door. It made a loud click but he gave no sign of noticing it.
‘Just in case you want to get in touch,’ he said.
Write in today for the Dawlish system: sent in a plain sealed envelope and it might change your life. But not for the better. I could see it all now. The Dawlish gambit – a piece sacrificed and then the real move. ‘Not a chance,’ I said. ‘Not. A. Chance.’
And Dawlish heard that new tone in my voice. He frowned. On his face there was bewilderment, hurt feelings, disappointment and a sincere attempt to understand my point of view. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Just forget it.’ You may never want to change partners again, sang Sinatra, but he had an arranger and a big sobbing string section.
Dawlish knew then that I’d slipped the hook. ‘We’ll have lunch one day,’ he said. It was as near to admitting defeat as I’d ever seen him. At least, I thought so at the time. For a moment I didn’t move. Toliver’s car leaped forward, almost stalled and then swung round, missing the next car by only inches. It revved loudly as Toliver changed gear and then lumbered out through the gate. After only a few moments the Austin 2200 followed it.
‘Nothing’s changed,’ I said, as I got out. Dawlish continued smoking his cigar. I’d thought of all the things I’d rather have said by the time I got to the front door. It was ajar. From the end of the corridor there was the music of the piano: not Mozart but Noel Coward. It was Ferdy doing his fat-rich-boy-makes-good act. ‘The Stately Homes of England …’ sang Ferdy gaily.
I helped myself to another cup of coffee. Dawlish hadn’t followed me. I was glad of that. I didn’t believe Dawlish’s glib explanations specially designed so that I had to drag the lies out of him. But the fact that Dawlish was even interested made me nervous. First Stok and now Dawlish …
‘Shall I tell you something?’ said Schlegel. He was rocking on the two rear legs of the delicate gilt chair and beating time to the music with his cigar. ‘This is a whole new side of Foxwell. A whole new side of him.’