by Len Deighton
I tried to reassure him. ‘It was an amateur kind of job,’ I said. ‘I never heard of the KGB using a shiv artist who hit the wrong target, and even then let them grab the knife away.’
‘It damn nearly worked, and you know it,’ said Mann. ‘And there was nothing amateur about the way they found out where the Bekuvs would be last night.’
‘They might have followed us all the way from New York City, and then staked out the hotel, waiting for an opportunity,’ I suggested.
‘You know nothing followed us,’ said Mann. ‘Even in the back seat with Red, you’ve got to know nothing followed us.’
I didn’t answer. He was right, nothing had followed us down the highway and we’d had a helicopter to help check-out that fact.
‘You get back to your girl-friend,’ said Mann. ‘Give me a call here in the morning. I’ll have doped it out by then.’
Red was half asleep as I got into bed. She reached out for me in dreamy wantonness. Perhaps it was part of an attempt to forget the events of the previous evening that made us so abandoned. It seemed hours before either of us spoke a word.
‘Is it going to be all right?’ Red asked me in a whisper.
‘She’s not badly hurt. Andrei isn’t even scratched.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I’m glad she’s not badly hurt, but I didn’t mean that.’
‘What then?’
‘This is all part of what you’re doing, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And it’s going wrong?’
‘It looks like it,’ I admitted. ‘Mrs Bekuv will have to be kept under surveillance and that will be more difficult now she needs medical attention.’
‘In London,’ said Red suddenly. ‘What sort of house do you live in?’
‘I don’t have a whole house,’ I said. ‘I rent the top floor to a friend – a reporter – and his wife. It’s a small Victorian terrace house, trying to look Georgian. The central heating is beginning to crack the place apart – first thing I must do when I get back is to get some humidifiers.’
‘Where is it?’
‘That part of Fulham where people write Chelsea on their notepaper.’
‘You said there was a garden.’
‘It’s more like a window-box that made it. But from the front you can see a square with trees and flower-beds – in summer it’s pretty.’
‘And what kind of view from the back windows?’
‘I never look out of the back windows.’
‘That bad?’
‘A used-car dealer’s yard.’
She pulled a face. ‘I’ll bet it’s the most beautiful car dealer’s yard in the world,’ she said.
I kissed her. ‘You can decide that when we get there,’ I said.
‘Do I get to change the drapes and the kitchen layout?’
‘I’m serious, Red.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. She kissed me again. ‘Don’t let’s be too serious though – give it time.’
‘I love you, Red,’ I said.
‘I love you too – you know that. Do you want a cigarette?’
I shook my head. She reached across me to the bedside table and found her cigarettes and lighter. I couldn’t resist the chance to hug her close to me, and she tossed the cigarettes aside and said, ‘Well, if I can choose.’ The cigarette-lighter slid down behind the mattress, and clattered to the floor. Red giggled. ‘Will you always want me?’ she said.
‘Always,’ I said.
‘Not that, you fool,’ she said.
She kissed me with opened mouth. Eventually I said, ‘What then?’
‘Would Major Mann let me stay with you?’ she asked. ‘I could make the coffee, and sweep the floor, and look after Mrs Bekuv.’
I said, ‘I’ll ask him tomorrow, if he’s in a good mood.’
She kissed me again, more seriously this time. ‘If he’s in a good mood,’ I repeated.
‘Thanks,’ she mumbled.
I reached for her. ‘You chatter too much,’ I said.
10
There was no sky, no sun, no earth: until a few hundred square miles of France appeared like a smear upon the lowest layer of cloud. And as suddenly it was gone again.
‘I don’t want to phone from the airport,’ I told Mann, ‘but I’ll check that there is nothing for us on the telex.’
‘Worry about something else,’ Mann told me, as the stewardess removed the tray containing the dried-out chicken, shrivelled peas and brightly coloured pieces of tinned fruit. ‘Worry about income tax. Worry about the inflatable life-rafts. Worry about pollution. Worry about ptomaine poisoning. Worry about youth. But quit worrying about Red Bancroft.’
‘I’ve stopped worrying about Red Bancroft,’ I said.
‘She’s been checked by the FBI, by the CIA and her hometown police department. That girl is OK. There is good security: she’ll be safe. It will all be OK.’
‘I’ve stopped worrying. I told you that.’
Mann turned in his seat so that he could see my face. He said finally, ‘Bessie said you two were hitting it off, and I didn’t believe her.’ He leaned across and punched my arm so that my coffee spilled. ‘That’s just great,’ he said.
‘There’s something wrong there,’ I confided. ‘She’s a wonderful girl and I love her – at least I think I do – but there is something in her mind, something in her memory … something somewhere that I can’t reach.’
Mann avoided my eyes as he pressed his call-button and asked the stewardess to bring a bottle of champagne. ‘We’re getting awfully near Paris,’ said the girl.
‘Well, don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, honey,’ Mann told her. ‘We’ll gulp it down.’
I saw him touch the document case beside him. It contained the paperwork that we would need if Mann decided to drag Hank Dean, screaming and swearing, back to the New World. Mann caught my glance. ‘I’m not looking forward to it,’ he admitted. ‘And that’s a fact.’
‘Perhaps he will talk,’ I said.
‘Perhaps he knows nothing,’ said Mann.
The stewardess brought the champagne. Her uniform was one size too small, and the hair-do three sizes too big. ‘We’ll be going down in a minute or two,’ she told us.
‘All three of you?’ said Mann. The stewardess departed. Mann poured the champagne, and said, ‘I guess everything depends upon the way you look at it. Maybe if I’d been at college with Andrei Bekuv, I could even feel sorry for that schmendrik.’
‘Everything depends upon the way you look at it,’ I agreed. ‘But I already feel a bit sorry for Andrei Bekuv.’
Mann made a noise like a man blowing a shred of tobacco from his lips. It was a sign of his disagreement.
‘I feel sorry for him,’ I said. ‘He’s crazy about his wife, but she’s wrong for him.’
‘Everybody is wrong for that jerk,’ said Mann. ‘Everybody and everything.’ He picked up his champagne. ‘Drink up,’ he commanded.
‘I don’t feel like celebrating,’ I said.
‘Neither do I, my old English buddy, but we are pals enough to drink together in sorrow – right?’
‘Right,’ I said, and we both drank.
He said, ‘Mrs Bekuv is the best thing that ever happened to that creep. She’s one of the most beautiful broads I’ve ever seen – and I’m telling you, pal, if Bessie wasn’t around, I’d be tempted. Bekuv doesn’t deserve a doll like that. And she wet-nurses that guy: wipes his bottom, checks his haircuts, demands more dough from us. And she even takes a blade that’s coming his way. No wonder he’s in a constant sweat in case she kisses him goodbye.’
‘Well, everything depends on the way you look at it,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t felt some stirring of carnal lust for Mrs Bekuv,’ said Mann. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t fancied it.’
‘I’ve got Red,’ I said smugly.
Mann repeated his tobacco noise. ‘You know something,’ he said scornfully. ‘You can
be very, very British at times.’
I smiled, and pretended to think that it was a compliment. And I returned to him the Biographical Abstract I’d been reading. He locked it away in his case.
‘Drink up. We’ll be landing any minute,’ he said. But, in fact, we joined the stack, somewhere over the great wooded region of Compiègne, and circled to await landing permission which did not come until forty minutes later.
It gave me time to think about Hank Dean. It was the new format bio-ab, dressed up to look like a report from a particularly energetic personnel manager. This one was typed on onion-skin paper, carrying the logo of a small furniture factory in Memphis, Tennessee. Attached to it was an employee-record punchcard and a photo. It had been ‘styled’ to provide a cause-and-effect view of Hank Dean’s life, instead of being, as the earlier sheets were, a list of dates and a terse summary.
And yet these sheets are always a poor substitute for sight and sound of the real person. What use was it to know that his middle name was Zacharias, and that some schoolfriends call him Zach. How many schoolfriends remain for a man who is nearly fifty years old? Dean had ‘a drinking problem’. That had always struck me as an inappropriate euphemism to apply to people who had absolutely no problem in drinking. What Dean had was doubtless a sobriety problem. I wondered if that was anything to do with the break-up of his marriage. The wife was a New Yorker of German extraction, a few years younger than Dean. There was one child – Henry Hope Dean – who lived in Paris and spent his vacations fishing with his father.
I closed the file. Henry Zacharias Dean, PhD, 210 pounds at last dossier revision, soldier, company executive, failed CIA agent, failed husband but successful father … here we come. And won’t you wish you were back in that village near Cleveland, getting punched in the head by the local kids.
‘Did you say something?’ asked Mann.
‘The no-smiling sign is on,’ I said.
Mann poured the last of the champagne into our glasses.
One Christmas – so many decades ago that I can’t remember when exactly – an aunt gave me a book about some children who were captured by the crew of a pirate ship. The pirate captain was a huge man, with a hooked nose and a magnificent beard. He drank rum in copious amounts, and yet was never obviously drunk. His commands could be heard from fo’c’s’le to crow’s-nest, and yet his footsteps were as deft, and as silent, as a cat’s. That pirate captain’s mixture of bulk and dexterity, cruelty and kindness, shouts and whispers, drinking and sobriety were also the make-up of Hank Dean.
He would need only a Savile Row suit, some trimming of the beard and a glass of sherry in his hand to be mistaken for a wealthy gynaecologist or a stockbroker. And yet, in this shaggy sweater, that reached almost to his knees, denim trousers washed to palest blue, and swilling Cahors, the local wine, round and round in the plastic cup that had once contained Dijon mustard, he would have had trouble thumbing a ride to Souillac.
‘Should have done it years ago. Should have done it when I was eighteen. We both should have done it, Mickey.’ Hank Dean swigged his wine and poured more. He closed the typescript of his comic detective novel Superdick, put it into a manila envelope and shut it away in a drawer. ‘That’s just my excuse for staring into space,’ he explained.
The heat from the big black iron stove disappeared up the huge chimney, or through the cracks and crevices that could be seen round the ill-fitting doors and windows. Only when Hank Dean threw some wax cartons and wrapping paper into the stove did it give a roar and a brief show of flame.
Dean lifted the frying-pan that was warming on the stove. ‘Two eggs or three?’
‘I’m not hungry,’ said Mann. ‘Give me a piece of that salami.’ He picked up a slice of the sausage on his fork and chewed at it.
Dean said, ‘Jesus Christ, of course you’re hungry. You’ve come all the way down from Paris, haven’t you. And this is the greatest food in the world. You’re having an omelette with truffles – it would cost you a king’s ransom in one of those phoney New York traps – and that’s not salami, goddamn it, it’s pork sausage, smoked at the farm just up the hill there.’
Mann stopped eating the pork sausage and put his fork down.
‘I miss the ball games,’ said Dean. ‘I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit to missing the ball games. But I can hear them on the radio sometimes.’
‘Short-wave radio?’ said Mann.
‘And the Voice of America. On a good night, the Armed Forces Network from Germany. But I’m surrounded by high ground here, as you can see.’
‘Sure,’ said Mann.
I wondered how much of that exchange was about baseball, and how much was about short-wave radio reception – and maybe transmission too. I took some sausage, and tore a crusty piece of bread from the end of the loaf. It would all go on a long time yet, I decided. Mann and Dean would pretend to talk about old times, while talking about new times. And Mann would pace up and down, looking into cupboards and assessing the length of drawers and the thickness of walls to decide whether something could be concealed behind them. He would judge it all on a basis of infallibility, while hoping for a careless mistake.
‘My kids went to camp this Christmas,’ Mann told Dean. ‘It cost me an arm and a leg. How I’m going to pay for them when they go to college, like your boy, sometimes scares the arse off me.’
Dean was cutting a large truffle into slices as thin as a razorblade. He was using a wooden-handled folding knife, of the type the Wehrmacht issued to special units that had to cut sentries’ throats.
‘Living here costs me practically nothing,’ explained Dean. ‘The company pays me five hundred bucks a month, and I’m still getting ten dollars a week for that ball-game injury back when we were kids. The team carried insurance and that was lucky for me.’ He lifted the bread-board and carefully bulldozed the truffle slices into the beaten egg, then stood up and walked to the stove. There was a limp in his left leg. Whether this was for our benefit because he’d been thinking about it, or simply a result of sitting too long I could not be sure.
‘But didn’t you say your boy went to some kind of private college in Paris? Doesn’t that really cost?’
Dean stirred the egg, and checked the heat of the frying-pan by tossing a scrap of bread into it. It went golden brown. He forked it out, blew on it and ate it before adding some salt and pepper to the egg mixture. Then he stood with the bowl of egg poised above the stove. ‘You must have got it wrong, Mickey,’ he said. ‘The boy went to an ordinary French technical school. There were no fees.’
With a quick movement, and using only one hand, he closed the knife and slipped it back into the pocket of his jeans. He said, ‘My old Renault will do more miles per gallon than any automobile I ever used. The running repairs I do myself. In fact, last month I changed the piston rings. Even with the present price of gas, I spend no more than the ten bucks a week that my injury provides – I figure I owe my leg that car.’
He turned round from the stove and smiled. ‘As for the rest; that little restaurant next door sells me my lunch for about what I could buy the ingredients for. I don’t know how they do it. In the evening I manage on a bit of charcuterie, eggs, bread and stuff. For special occasions, one of these twenty-franc truffles …’ He smiled. ‘Of course if my book hit the jackpot …’
‘How often do you manage to get to the big city?’ Mann asked him. Dean tipped the egg mixture into the pan. The sudden splutter of the egg in the hot fat made Mann turn his head.
‘Paris, you mean?’ said Dean.
‘Or New York,’ said Mann. ‘Or London, or Brussels – even Berlin.’ He let the word hang in the air for a long time. ‘Any big city where you can do some shopping and see a show.’
‘I haven’t seen a show – or even a movie – in a lot of years, Mickey,’ said Dean. He dragged at the eggs with urgent movements of a wooden spoon, twisting and turning the pan, so that the uncooked egg would run on to the hot metal that he uncovered. ‘No time, and no money
, for those bourgeois pastimes.’
In another place, and at another time, such comment would have passed unnoticed but now Dean bent low to the pan, and watched the egg cooking with a concentration that was altogether unmerited, and I knew he could have bitten his tongue off.
Dean turned the pan up, so that the giant omelette rolled on to a serving-dish. He divided it into three equal parts and put it on our plates. Above the table the lamp was a curious old contraption of brass and weights and green shades. Dean pulled at the strings so that the lights came low over the dining-table.
We ate the meal in complete silence. Now that only the table was illuminated, it gave everything there an artificial importance. And the three sets of busy hands, under the harsh light, were like those of surgeons co-operating in some act of dissection. In spite of his protests about not being hungry, Mann gobbled the omelette. When there was no more than a few smears of uncooked egg on his plate, he took a piece of bread and wiped up the egg with obsessional care before putting the bread into his mouth.
‘The reason we came down here to see you, Hank …’ Mann took another piece of bread, tore it into pieces and ate it piece by piece, as if trying to find reasons for not continuing.
‘You need no reasons, old buddy,’ said Dean. ‘Nor your friend either. Hank Dean – open house. You know that by now, don’t you? In the old days, I’ve had parties where they’ve slept under the table, and even in the bath.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Mann.
‘And done a few other things under the table and in the bath,’ said Dean. He let out a whoop of laughter and refilled the glasses. ‘Cahors – black wine they call it here. Drink up!’
‘We’re squeezing a couple of Russkies,’ said Mann. Again his tone of voice made it sound as if he’d stopped in the middle of a sentence.
‘Defectors?’ said Dean, helping himself to a slice of goat cheese, and pushing the plate nearer to me. ‘Try the tiny round one, that’s local,’ he said.