by Len Deighton
Though as to who has the last laugh, you will have to discover for yourself.
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
Hollywood 2012
Introduction
I was flying to southern Spain with Kevin McClory who wanted to talk to Sean Connery about a James Bond film that he was planning. (Many rewrites later it became Never Say Never Again, its title based upon a remark made by Sean’s wife after this meeting.) Persuading Sean to return to his James Bond role was going to be a hard sell, and Kevin knew it. Immediately after take-off an attractive young woman passenger came forward to where McClory was seated. She recognized him and asked if he would like a game of backgammon. Yes, he said. Small stakes, she promised, for I have never seen a game of backgammon played other than for money. It’s a game of skill but it is a gambler’s game. During the flight – while they played backgammon – she told me that she was a professional gambler. Every month there was a major tournament somewhere in the world and she attended every one of these gatherings, winning enough to provide a comfortable lifestyle. She had recognized McClory from his presence at a backgammon tournament in the Bahamas. Although I spent no more than two hours talking with this woman, I took her skills and audacious lifestyle as a background for the character Red Bancroft in this story.
For a few weeks after this chance encounter, I lived in the beachside home of Kevin and worked on a James Bond script. To research it I had gone on a trip around Florida, attended long, long, New York meetings and endured a splashy exploration of the dark Manhattan sewers for a sequence that I later deleted. (Despite persistent stories otherwise, there were no alligators living there as far as I could see.) Recovering in the sunny Bahamas, I found myself in a community of actors, writers and musicians. Backgammon was the common obsession and, until I found a ‘teach yourself backgammon’ sort of book in a local shop, I found it baffling. But once I understood the rules and skills of the game I found it to be a rewarding spectator sport. I never did play against McClory or any of his friends; they were far too skilled and far too rich. But I did learn enough to keep Red Bancroft in play in this story.
It was another entrepreneurial friend – Wylton Dickson, an Australian – who invited me to go rally driving deep into the Sahara Desert. Wylton had married an art school friend of mine and from that day of their wedding onwards he was a valuable element of my life and a treasured adviser. He was a man of many parts, many trades and countless fresh and original ideas. Restless, in a way that Australians sometimes are, he was always brimming with energy. He had offices, and the most beautiful old houses, in many parts of London. I never saw him drunk or even tipsy, but every time I entered Wylton’s office he was opening a bottle of chilled champagne to pour a glass of it for me. French Champagne? Don’t be silly; only the best of the best was good enough for Wylton’s friends. A considerable proportion of all the champagne I ever drank must have been the bottles of the Australian champagne that I consumed in Wylton’s company. During my time as a film producer I rented my wonderful Piccadilly film office from him. The old high-ceilinged room overlooked Hyde Park Corner and the view was so captivating that it was difficult to tear myself away at day’s end. I worked with him to advertise Australian wine.
In 1974 he created a World Cup Rally and invited me to participate. I drove one of the specially tuned Peugeot cars, and joined the ‘marshals’ that timed and checked the progress of the contestants. The route went hundreds of miles into the Sahara. It was an adventure, and the desert sequences in Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy faithfully reflect my time in Algeria – at that time a forbidden and little-visited nation. Pounding along on the desert tracks with these professional drivers made me realize what a complicated and scientific business rally driving is for such men and women. I learned the Arabic word for oranges, heard some new profanities and improved my driving, too.
Although I do not favour giving my fictional characters the names of real people, I inserted the name of Charlie Kelly into this story because Charlie was one of the most highly regarded Irish detectives in New York’s Police Department and a good friend who opened many doors for me. It was Charlie who secured for me my honorary membership of the NYPD. And Charlie provided a characterization that he never recognized.
Is this a Harry Palmer story I am sometimes asked, and the answer is ‘yes’. But the principal difference in the story construction is having Major Mann with him. Conan Doyle was probably not the first fiction writer to discover the advantage of giving your principal character a close friend. Comedians in the Victorian music halls had proved the rich benefits that come from having a ‘straight’ man ‘feed’ the comic. But like his predecessor – Colonel Schlegel in Yesterday’s Spy – Major Mann turned the tables on me. I had hardly started the outline when I found that my memories of my times with US servicemen – flyers in particular – were demanding a voice in the story. And, unlike Dr Watson’s passive role, Mann’s participation was a vital and dynamic one. American syntax gave the galloping Major the primary role in the story and the Harry Palmer figure (Frederick Anthony in the book), is my Doctor Watson. But it is of course Dr Watson with whom the reader identifies, and so it should be in this story.
Another distinction that followed publication of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy was that my use of ‘rat fink’ was recorded in a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was this vulgar expression that came to my mind when I heard that my American publishing house insisted upon changing the title of this book for the US market. It did not do much to warm my relationship with that concern or with the English friend who was the editor responsible.
Over the years many readers have told me that I write love stories and most of them are surprised when I agree with that verdict. Men and women share our world but do not share its rewards. Neither do they share the same dreams and pleasures. It is this fundamental mismatch that makes true love so sublime. It also makes observing the world around us so surprising, and writing about relationships so difficult and so sustaining. Twinkle is a love story but it does not celebrate the elation and unremitting joy that love is supposed to bring. Like many true love stories it is sad.
I usually feel a sense of deprivation when the writing ends. But that feeling is usually accompanied by dissatisfaction; knowledge that one might have done better in some aspect or other of the process. It is that dissatisfaction which starts us on the next book, swearing to do better. Twinkle was no exception to that sad feeling but this time I had the unusual belief that I had come near to what I started out to do.
Len Deighton, 2012
1
‘Smell that air,’ said Major Mann.
I sniffed. ‘I can’t smell anything,’ I said.
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Mann. He scratched himself and grinned. ‘Great, isn’t it?’
There’s not much to smell when you are one thousand miles into the Algerian Sahara; not much to smell, not much to do, not much to eat.
For those travellers who know the swimming-pools and air conditioning of the government hotels along the northern edge of the Sahara, Adrar comes as a shock. Here the hotel has no more than tightly drawn curtains to protect the tourist from the sun, and the staff have noisy arguments about who should siesta on the cold stone floor of the entrance hall. Only Europeans stayed awake all day, notably four bearded Austrians who, night and day, played cards in the shuttered dining-room. They were waiting for a replacement petrol pump for their truck. Between games they swigged sweet, warm cola drinks. There was no alcohol on sale, and smoking was frowned upon.
Even on this winter’s evening the stones and the sand radiated the heat of the desert day.
There was no moon but the stars were so bright that we could easily see our vehicles piled high with stores and sextant and a sign that said ‘Dempsey’s Desert Tours’. They were parked on the huge main square of Adrar. Mann walked round the vehicles just to make sure the supplies had not been plundered. It was unlikely, for they were outside the police station
.
Mann stopped and leaned against the Land Rover. He took out a packet of cheroots; there were only four left. ‘Look at those stars,’ he said.
‘The Milky Way – I’ve never seen it so clearly. A spaceship travelling at 100,000 miles per hour would take 670 million years to cross the Milky Way,’ I said. ‘There’s a hundred thousand million stars there.’
‘How do you know?’ said Mann. He put the cheroot in his mouth and chewed it.
‘I read it in the Reader’s Digest Atlas.’
Mann nodded. ‘And do you know something else … the way they’re going, in another few years there will be another million stars there – enough spy satellites to put both of us out of business.’
‘Twinkle, twinkle, little spy,’ I said.
Mann looked at me to see if I was being insubordinate. ‘Let’s go back inside,’ he said finally. He decided not to light the cheroot. He put it away again. ‘I’ll buy you a bottle of Algerian lemonade.’ He laughed. Mann was like a small, neatly dressed gorilla: the same heavy brow, deep-set eyes and long arms – and the same sense of humour.
The dining-room is large, and although the big fans no longer turned it was the coolest place for hundreds of miles. The walls are whitewashed light blue, and crudely woven striped rugs are tacked to floor and walls. Overhead, the wooden flooring rattled like jungle drums as someone moved. There was the sudden roar of the shower and the inevitable violent rapping of the ancient plumbing. We helped ourselves to soft drinks and left the money on the till.
‘That Limey bastard takes a shower every five minutes.’
‘Yes, about every five minutes,’ I agreed. Major Mickey Mann, US Army Signal Corps, Retired, a CIA expert on Russian electronics and temporarily my boss, had showed no sign of discomfort during the heat of day in spite of his tightly knotted tie and long trousers. He watched me carefully, as he always did when offering criticism of my fellow countrymen. ‘That particular Limey bastard,’ I said quietly, ‘is sixty-one years old, has a metal plate in his skull and a leg filled with German shrapnel.’
‘Stash the gypsy violin, feller – you want to make me weep?’
‘You treat old Dempsey as if he’s simple-minded. I’m just reminding you that he did four years with the Long Range Desert Group. He’s lived in Algeria for the best part of thirty years, he speaks Arabic with all the local dialects and if it comes to real trouble in the desert we’ll need him to use that sextant.’
Mann sat down at the table and began toying with the Swiss army penknife that he’d bought in the souvenir shop at Geneva airport. ‘If the wind starts up again tonight …’ he balanced the knife on its end, ‘sand will make that road south impassable. And I don’t need your pal Percy to tell me that.’
‘Even in the Land Rover?’
‘Did you see that three-tonner down to the axles?’ He let go of the knife and it stayed perfectly balanced. ‘Sand that bogs down a three-ton six by six will bury a Land Rover.’
‘They were gunning the motor,’ I said. ‘You bury yourself that way.’
‘You’ve been reading the camping-in-the-desert section of the boy scout handbook,’ said Mann. Again he banged the folding knife down on to the table, and again it balanced on its end. ‘And in any case,’ he added, ‘how do we know the Russkie will be able to steal a four-wheel drive? He might be trying to get here in a Moskvich sedan for all we know.’
‘Is he stupid?’
‘Professor Bekuv’s intellect is not universally admired,’ said Mann. ‘During the time he was with the Russian scientific mission at the UN he wrote two papers about little men in flying saucers, and earned his reputation as a crank.’
‘Defecting cranks don’t get the department’s OK,’ I said.
‘Looking for messages from little men in flying saucers probably motivated his work on masers,’ said Mann. ‘And Bekuv is one of the world’s experts on masers.’
‘I’m not even sure I know what a maser is,’ I said.
‘You read the Technical Brief.’
‘Twice,’ I said. ‘But not so as to understand it.’
‘Maser,’ said Mann. ‘It’s an acronym – “m” for microwave, “a” for amplification, “s” for stimulated, “e” for emission, “r” for radiation.’
‘Do you mind if I take notes?’
‘Listen, dummy. It converts electromagnetic radiation – from a whole range of different frequencies – to a highly amplified, coherent microwave radiation.’
‘Is it anything to do with a laser?’
‘Well, a maser is a laser but a laser is not necessarily a maser.’
‘Is it anything to do with that guy looking in a mirror who says “Brothers and sisters have I none”?’
‘Now you’re beginning to get the idea,’ said Mann.
‘Well, somebody must be very interested in masers,’ I said, ‘or they wouldn’t have sent us two down here to provide Bekuv with a red-carpet reception.’
‘Or interested in flying saucers,’ said Mann.
‘If this Russian is such an idiot, what makes anyone believe that he’s capable of escaping from that Russian compound, stealing a roadworthy vehicle and getting all the way up here to meet us?’
‘Don’t get me wrong, pal. Bekuv is crazy like a fox. Maybe he is a flying-saucer freak, but when he was in New York with that UN scientific set-up he was reporting back to the KGB. He joined the 1924 Society – crackpots maybe, but they have some of the world’s top scientists as members. Bekuv was only too keen to read them long papers about gabfests through the galactic plasma by Soviet scientists, but he was listening very carefully when they told him what kind of work they were doing with their radio telescopes and electromagnetic wave transmissions.’ Major Mann ran his fingers back through his wispy hair that each day went greyer, now that he’d used up the last of his dark rinse. Almost without being conscious of what he was doing, he pushed hair over the balding patch at the back of his head. ‘Professor Bekuv was a spy. Don’t ever forget that. No matter how you dress it up as being a free exchange of scientific know-how, Bekuv was skilfully digging out a whole lot more than rumours about flying saucers.’
I looked at Mann. I’d seen plenty of such men all the world over from the Shetlands to Alaska, and all the way through Communist Algeria too: foot-loose Americans, their linen clean and their livers tormented, soft accents blunted by a lifetime of travelling. It would have been easy to believe that this wiry fifty-year-old was one of those condottieri of the oil fields – and that’s what was written in his nice new passport.
‘Where did Bekuv go wrong?’ I asked.
‘To be sent down to Mali, as part of Soviet aid to under-developed African countries … deputy head of a six-man team of Soviet scientists.’ Major Mann reached for his hip-flask. He looked round the room to be sure he was not observed before putting a shot of whisky into his sweet, fizzy Algerian cola. ‘Nobody knows for sure. The latest guess is that Bekuv’s flying saucers began to be an embarrassment for the Soviet Academy and they sent him down here for a spell to concentrate his mind on political realities.’
‘I thought the Soviet Academy were very enthusiastic about flying saucers,’ I said. ‘What about this big radio telescope they’ve built in the northern Caucasus – the RATAN-600?’
‘Now you reveal the depths of your ignorance,’ said Mann. ‘There’s a whole lot of difference between the respectable scientific work of searching deep space for signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence and the strictly infra dig. pastime of looking for unidentified flying objects, or what the sci-fi freaks call ufology.’
‘Now, I’m glad you told me that,’ I said waving away Mann’s offer of the flask. ‘And so Bekuv was kicked downstairs into the foreign aid programme, and that’s why he decided to defect. Well, that all fits together very neatly.’
Mann swallowed his drink and gave a grim smile to acknowledge that such a verdict was seldom intended as a compliment in the circles in which we moved. ‘Right,’ he said.
<
br /> ‘Last one in the shower is a cissy,’ I said. As I got up from the table I noticed that his knife was not balanced there after all; he’d driven its short screwdriver right into the wood.
2
The Trans-Sahara Highway is a track that goes south, through In-Salah and Tam, to the Atlantic. But we were using another trans-Sahara highway; the lesser known route that runs parallel to it, and many miles to the west. This was the way to the least known parts of Africa. This was the way to Gao and to Bamako, the capital of landlocked Mali. This was the way to Timbuktu.
It was four fifteen the next morning when we left the hotel in Adrar. Mann and Percy were in the Land Rover. I followed in the VW bus with Johnny, an extra driver from ‘Dempsey’s Desert Tours’. We drove through the market-place in the gloom of desert night. It was damned cold, and the drivers wore scarves and woolly hats. The big trucks that cross the desert in convoy, loaded with dried fish and oranges, were nearly ready to move off. One of the drivers waved us past. Desert travellers have survival in common; never knowing when you might need a friend.
We turned south. I followed the rear lights of the Land Rover. The road was hard sand, and we maintained a good speed past the roughly painted signs that pointed to distant villages. In places, loose sand had drifted on to the track, and I braked each time the Land Rover rear lights bounced; but the drift had not yet built up into the humps that tear an axle in half.
The gun-metal sky lightened and glowed red along the horizon until, like a thermic lance, the sun tore a white-hot hole in it. This road skirted the edges of the Sahara’s largest sand-seas. To the west the horizon rolled like a storm-racked ocean, but to the east the land was flat and featureless, as grey and as hard as concrete. Sometimes we passed herds of moth-eaten camels, scratching for a bite of thorn-bush or a mouthful of scrub. The route south was marked by small cairns of stones. Often there was a solitary Arab riding astride some wretched beast, so small and bowed that the rider’s feet almost touched the ground. Once an Arab family were rearranging the burdens upon the saddles of their three camels. We saw no motor traffic.