by Len Deighton
Several times I had almost awakened into a hazy snow-white world of ether and antiseptic. Through the window bright sun shone on a world of dark-green pine forests, the trees sagging under layers of snow.
Someone lowered the blinds so that the room filled with soft shadowless light. There was a table with fruit, flowers and newspapers on it. The newspapers were in some unreadable script. At the end of the bed sat a man I recognized. He wore a dark suit and his face was elderly and slightly blurred.
‘He’s waking up again.’
‘Pat!’
I groaned. And now another figure came into view, looming over the end of the bed like a sun rising over the Arctic wastes. ‘Wake up, sweetheart, we’ve got other appointments.’
‘I’ll pour him some tea,’ said Dawlish. ‘There’s nothing so reviving as a nice cup of tea. Probably hasn’t had a proper one since coming in here.’
‘Where am I?’ I said. I didn’t want to say it but I wanted to know where I was.
Schlegel smiled. ‘Kirkenes, Norway. A Norwegian chopper brought you off the submarine a few days ago.’
‘Is that right?’ I asked Dawlish.
Dawlish said, ‘We were worried.’
‘I can imagine you were,’ I said. ‘I carry about ten thousand pounds in government insurance.’
‘He’s getting better,’ said Schlegel.
‘If you’d rather we went …’ Dawlish offered.
I shook my head very gently in case it rolled under the bedside cabinet and we had to prod it with sticks to get it out. ‘Where’s Ferdy?’
‘You know where Ferdy is,’ said Schlegel. ‘You did your best for him – but Ferdy’s dead.’
‘What for,’ I said, ‘what the hell for?’
Dawlish smoothed out his English newspaper. The headline said: GERMAN TALKS END WHEN RED KATYA WALKS OUT.
Dawlish said, ‘Stok’s people arrested Remoziva’s sister yesterday morning. Only thing they could do really.’
I looked from Schlegel to Dawlish and back again. ‘So that’s what it was all about – the German reunification.’
‘They’re cagey blighters,’ said Dawlish. ‘They weren’t convinced that the Admiral was coming over to us until they saw that corpse you took out there. They’re cynics I suppose, like you, Pat.’
‘Poor Ferdy.’
‘It was only thanks to Colonel Schlegel that you were saved,’ said Dawlish. ‘He thought of using the radar, and bullied the Captain into using it so close to their monitors.’
‘Bad security, Colonel,’ I said.
‘We brought some fruit for you,’ said Schlegel. ‘You want a grape?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said.
‘I told you he wouldn’t want it,’ said Schlegel.
‘He’ll eat it,’ said Dawlish. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t mind a grape myself.’ He helped himself to two, in rapid succession.
‘You encouraged them to snatch Ferdy,’ I accused Schlegel.
‘These grapes are good,’ said Dawlish. ‘Must be hothouse at this time of year but they’re awfully sweet.’
‘You bastard,’ I said.
Schlegel said, ‘Ferdy was deep into Toliver’s set-up. He needn’t have gone on the trip at all, but he insisted.’
‘So you two have been conniving all down the line?’
‘Conniving?’ said Dawlish. ‘Sure you won’t try a grape? No? Well, I mustn’t eat them all.’ But he helped himself to another. ‘Conniving isn’t at all the word I’d choose. Colonel Schlegel was sent to help us sort out the Toliver complication – we appreciated his help.’
‘… got it,’ I said. ‘Use Colonel Schlegel to beat Toliver over the head. Then if Toliver complains to the Home Secretary you say it’s the CIA doing it. Neat, but not gaudy.’
‘Toliver came near to knocking you off,’ said Schlegel. ‘Don’t shed any tears for that bastard.’
‘Well, I’m sure he’ll be taken care of, now.’
‘He’s discredited,’ said Dawlish. ‘That’s all we wanted.’
‘And all the hard work is being done by Russian security,’ I said. I picked up the newspaper.
TWO JOIN SOVIET POLITBURO, THREE OUSTED.
Moscow (Reuters)
The first Politburo shake-out since the ousting of Nikita Khrushchev was announced at the end of a two-day meeting of the Central Committee.
According to observers here the new line-up means the end of all hopes for the German treaty of federalization.
I pushed the paper aside. The stop press said the D Mark had already begun falling against the dollar and sterling. So that was it. A united Germany would have upset the status quo. Its agricultural East would make French agriculture suffer, with a resulting gain for the French communists. Meanwhile Germany got a share in the Common Market’s agricultural share-out. Germany’s contribution to NATO – something like a third of all NATO forces – would certainly have to be dismantled under the treaty’s terms. US forces in Germany would not be able to withdraw to France, which wasn’t a member of NATO. And this was timed for a period when the USA would be changing to an all-volunteer force. It would inevitably mean US withdrawal from Europe. Just as Russia had completed its big five year military build-up. Yes, worth a couple of operatives.
They both watched me as I finished reading. ‘And the Russians arrested all the Remozivas just on the basis of us meeting that chopper?’
‘Sippenhaft. Isn’t that what the Germans call it?’ said Dawlish. ‘Collective family responsibility for the actions of one person.’
‘Don’t you care that you’ve helped to frame completely innocent people?’
‘You’ve got it wrong, haven’t you? It wasn’t British policemen who went out arresting everyone named Remoziva the other morning, it was Russian communist policemen. And the people they arrested were working very energetically to strengthen, improve and expand this system that arrests people in the middle of the night on the grounds that they might be an enemy of the state. I don’t intend to lose any sleep over it.’
‘Just to foul up the reunification, eh?’ I said.
‘They’ve got an analog computer at the Foreign Office, you know,’ said Dawlish.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s not supposed to mean anything. It’s a fact. They put the German reunification on it and didn’t like the scenario one little bit.’
I helped myself to one of my fast disappearing grapes. Dawlish said, ‘You are bound to feel a bit depressed for a while: it’s the drugs. You were in a bad way, you know.’
‘Does Marjorie know I’m here?’
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of her, Pat. She’s left the hospital.’ It was a softer voice he used. ‘She seems to have cancelled the bread and the milk deliveries.’
‘Did she go to Los Angeles?’
‘We’re not sure,’ said Dawlish, trying to break it to me gently. ‘We’ve only just got her family’s address in Wales. Quite a tongue-twister, it is. She might be there.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Forget it.’
I turned away from my two visitors. For a moment I saw the wallpaper that I never did replace and heard Marjorie greet me as I returned from a trip. The bookshelves would now be cleared of those damned anaemia books but I’d go on finding hairpins down the back of the sofa.
Self-pity reached in and grabbed my breakfast. It hurt, and if you want to say it was nothing but a self-inflicted wound, I can only reply that it hurt none the less because of that. Ferdy had gone and Marjorie too: the comfortable little world I’d built up since leaving the department had disappeared as if it had never been.
‘Are they treating you well in here?’ said Dawlish.
‘Pickled fish for breakfast,’ I said.
‘The reason I ask,’ said Dawlish, ‘is that we have a bit of a problem … It’s a security job …’
I suppose I might have guessed that a man like that doesn’t fly to Norway to bring anyone grapes.
Acknowledgements
/> The author would like to acknowledge the help and assistance of Major Berchtold, US Army (retired), and the staff of the institute of War Studies, London, and in particular the permission given for the inclusion of extracts and quotations from the Institute’s previously unpublished confidential reports and private papers. All such extracts are subject to full copyright protection provided by the Berne Convention and the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. No part of these extracts may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or stored in any form or by any means, either electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
LEN DEIGHTON
Yesterday’s Spy
Contents
Cover
Title Page
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
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Cover designer’s note
As one of the key themes at the heart of Yesterday’s Spy is identity, I decided that a masked, anonymous German soldier would dominate the cover. That he appears German, from his uniform and the official stamp is not in doubt – but his identity is hidden, and by extension his true allegiance. The disguising black panel offered a neat frame in which to sit the title of the book, which I have reproduced in a typewriter font that would have been commonplace during the war.
On each front cover of this latest quartet, I have placed a photograph of the eyes of the bespectacled unnamed spy, in this instance superimposed with an oscillograph to represent audio surveillance, which would have been one of the many weapons in the arsenal of the Guernica network. The fact that I have reversed the image is a further nod to the switching of sides carried out by double-agents.
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 Luger ‘Parabellum’, a well-known German sidearm that was popular with all branches of their military but would have fallen out of use by the time of this story. Its appearance here is to reinforce the idea that ‘yesterday’s spy’ was in action during a time that pre-dates the action in this book.
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…
A small collection of postcards reflect the various locations that the story takes us: from London to Vichy France to Egypt, as Charlie sets out to track down Steve Champion. A luggage label from the Cairo Hilton Hotel, a British Intelligence Corps, cap badge, plus a souvenir medallion commemorating the 1929 ‘Around the World’ flight of the Graf Zeppelin offer clues to the history of the elusive Mr Champion, and all these objects sit on a coded silk handkerchief. What is the message contained within the handkerchief? Well, that’s a secret…
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
Hollywood 2012
Introduction
They say that New York City is the place to enjoy when you are young and Paris is the city for those of mature years. Maybe it depends how much money you spend.
It is not true that I prefer to stay in broken-down dumps rather than grand hotels. I love grand hotels but I also find certain sorts of dumps, and the people who frequent them, intriguing. Back in the distant past I had a room in the Adlon in Communist East Berlin, or at least in that hotel’s ruined remains. It was so dilapidated that it seemed as if a violent sneeze would be enough to make it fall apart. But looking down from this back room I could see the East German border guards and their barrack rooms, their armoury, kennels and guard dogs. The noise from the dogs being brought out gave notice of some new drama at the nearby Wall. It was rather like standing in the wings for a Grand-Guignol show.
A quite different and more enjoyable time came when my family squeezed into the attic of a Gasthof not far from Munich. The discomfort was more than made up for by the friendliness of the Swabian couple who worked so hard and kept so cheerful and let us into the kitchen to learn some secrets of south German cooking. We stayed in that lakeside village for months. My two sons went to school nearby and my understanding of the German south and its people proved valuable for my book Winter, which I wrote there using one of the earliest laptop computers. We were all sorry to depart.
When Charlie Kasher, the executive producer of the film of The Ipcress File, visited me in the Hotel Chelsea – on West 23rd Street NYC – he was appalled at what he described as its ‘squalour’. He dragged me away to somewhere he felt more salubrious: a small smart luxury hotel on Fifth Avenue. It was more convenient and more comfortable but only half the fun. In the fifties, in several tiny Japanese villages I found clean accommodation so cheap that my Japanese friends refused to believe the low prices I had paid and thought I didn’t understand the money. When I first booked into the famous Hotel Sacher in Vienna it had not fully recovered from its occupation by some of the more uncaring, and trigger-happy, elements of the Red Army infantry, and I looked in vain for the Schlagobers and Sachertorte.
As I see it, it is the task of a writer to seek the truth and truth is not to be found in the silky indulgence of grand hotels, which tend to be the same in all parts of the world. Truth is found where people work and suffer. As a base for my research for Yesterday’s Spy I rented a room in a flea-bitten little hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was an establishment that I have depicted realistically in this story. The Princess was much as I have described.
Why Villefranche? The bay of Villefranche has water deeper than any other such port anywhere in the Mediterranean. From 350 feet near the shore the ocean bed slopes away steeply to 1,700 feet of dark water. It was this unique deep-water anchorage that brought the US Sixth Fleet here regularly: carriers, cruisers and even big battleships such as the USS Missouri. In those frantic years of the Cold War, France was in love with its American protectors. Americans were subject to the draft and these little streets and alleys were packed with high-spirited young sailors on brief shore leave looking for action of one kind or another.
When the dollar was high, France fondly embraced all American visitors, but love affairs can cool and lovers prove unkind. France switched its affections to Teutonic neighbours brandishing Deutschmarks, and the Sixth Fleet found other spots to drop anchor. By the time I was researching this book Villefranche was going through a period of quiet. Visitors of any kind were not much in evidence and the whole place had a hushed spooky feeling, as if the lonely little town was waiting for the sailors to return.
The Savoy is one of the most attractive regions that I have ever known. I have returned to it time and time again. Eventually – and long after this book was written – it became home to my wife’s parents, and in a comfortable rented house nearby we made it our home too. My children went to the local village school, learned to speak French like the natives, enjoyed long-lasting
friendships and, like us, count it among the happiest times of their lives. The inhabitants of the Savoy are unique for their welcoming ways, neighbourliness and love of food and cooking. During our time there I wrote much of a book later published as the ABC of French Food. Cooking provides the lingua franca of this region, and while the affable sociability is – like so many of the family names – Italian, the cooking is French. The winter hereabout is not always mild. The Alps and the River Rhone both bring winds and cold weather but that in turn means heartwarming food and roaring log fires. In summary it is an excellent place in which to settle back and write a book.
Writing books is like a spell on a battlefield. For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes. To construct Yesterday’s Spy I decided to use a second character and thus create a dual leading role. Conan Doyle had shown us how Dr Watson could be a useful tool for explaining facts and theories to the reader. I was right to believe that Yesterday’s Spy would benefit from assigning to ‘Harry Palmer’ a belligerent American boss, Schlegel, but I didn’t include in my calculations the intimacy that would come from sending Harry back to fraternize with his old friends from the Resistance. This intimacy battled against the closeness between Harry and his boss. Perhaps it is a minor matter, and only applied to this special circumstance of this story, but I soon became aware of the limitations this put upon the crisscross relationships.
Dividing the number of major characters into the size of your typescript tells you how much space you have for character development. Yesterday’s Spy has quite a lot of major characters and that meant wasting no time when it came to describing each of them. The idea of having a group of Second World War Resistance workers who, some long time later, have different allegiances and different enemies provided an interesting writing problem. It was so interesting that I felt afterwards that I should have made it a far longer book.