by Len Deighton
Downtown Miami may be the usual gridiron of office blocks, shopping plazas, city hall and war memorial. Downtown Miami may be like that, if you ever find it amongst the tower hotels. But the Reid-Kennedys didn’t live in downtown Miami, and they didn’t live in any of the hotel towers either. They enjoyed a five-acre spread of waterfront, with a Spanish-style eight-bedroom house – and an appropriate number of Spanish-style retainers to keep it polished – a garden filled with tropical flowers and a place to moor the fifty-foot motor cruiser. And if it was the right sort of conversation they needed, they could summon the light-blue Rolls-Royce with the uniformed driver, and go to the Yacht Club which was about one hundred and fifty yards along the waterfront. Mr Reid-Kennedy was still ‘on business in Europe’ but Mann decided to spread some alarm and despondency through the household.
‘If you are a friend of Henry-Hope, we are just delighted to see you,’ said his mother. She called her son Henry-Hope. If he’d come back to live with them, he would have become Henry Hope Reid-Kennedy, which sounds like a good reason for staying in Paris.
There was soft music playing and the woman reached behind her to a fluffy pink toy dog and the music went very quiet. I wondered whether that was a product of the Reid-Kennedy radio company. She smiled at us. She was in her middle forties, but a lot of expensive facials, lotions, massages and steambaths had been devoted to keeping her thirty-nine. It had almost succeeded. For some people, middle age brought a softening of the features, but her skin was tight rather than flabby, and there were white lines along the bone of her nose and her jaw. Yet there was no mistaking the beauty that she had once been, and her imperious manner suggested that she hadn’t forgotten it either. She stroked the head of a white poodle she was nursing. ‘Yes, if you are friends of Henry-Hope, we are just delighted to see you.’
She said it in such a way that we knew that if it turned out that we were not friends of her son, she would arrange for us to be roasted in hell: very slowly. She smiled again as she looked at the heavy woollen suits that Major Mann and I had chosen for a Christmas in Virginia, and at the shapeless tweed hat that Mann had bought at Dublin Airport. She was wearing pale-pink silk lounging pyjamas, with a Dior label twisted to face outwards. The poodle’s collar was Gucci.
‘You were a major in the American army?’ She took a delicate sip at the bright red drink that was in a cocktail glass at her elbow.
‘Signal Corps, Ma’am.’
‘Oh, Signal Corps,’ said the woman as if that explained everything. It was about this time that the servant decided that we were not borrowing money or selling encyclopedias. She departed silently.
‘Although we have met your son and talked with him, it would be falsely representing ourselves unless I told you that we are here to make inquiries about your husband,’ said Mann. He held his hat in both hands and turned it like a steering-wheel.
‘About my husband?’ she said. There was a note of alarm in a voice that seldom betrayed alarm. She reached for a pink shawl and tossed it round her shoulders in a way that made me feel that we had brought the temperature down.
‘Dr Henry Dean,’ said Mann.
‘Ah, you mean my ex-husband,’ said Mrs Reid-Kennedy. She began stroking the poodle, with urgent little movements, quite unlike the measured voice and relaxed smile that she was giving us. ‘Do put your hat down, and be seated.’ She had that Gone with the Wind Dixieland accent, but the low voice made her sound more like Clark Gable than Vivien Leigh.
Mann looked at her full in the eyes for a moment, and then said, ‘That’s what I meant, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. About Dr Henry Dean, your ex-husband.’ He didn’t sit down, and he didn’t let go of his hat.
‘Is he in some sort of trouble?’ she asked.
‘Yes, he is,’ said Mann.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. She frowned, but didn’t break down and weep about it.
Mann said, ‘He had a lot of currency with him. So far he’s not been able to account for it,’ Mann shrugged. ‘It could all mean nothing – on the other hand it could be serious.’
‘And you are from?’
‘The Internal Revenue Service,’ said Mann. ‘I thought I told you that already.’
‘No,’ she said. She wasn’t sure whether to be more relaxed or more anxious. ‘And what do you do?’
‘Are you kidding?’ said Mann with a smile. ‘You know what the IRS do, Ma’am, we’re modern Robin Hoods: we rob the rich and give it to the poor.’
‘I mean you personally,’ she said. She reached for a box with a coloured photo of kittens on its lid. The label said ‘Hand-coated chocolate-covered brandied cherries’. She took a bite out of one so that she could see the inside, and then read the label again. Without looking up, she repeated the question. ‘What do you do personally?’
‘Now, I’d have to claim the Fifth Amendment on that one, lady, on account of the way I might incriminate myself.’ He leered at her, but she gave no sign of having understood. ‘In an inquiry like this one …’ Mann paused, hoping that she would look up at him but she didn’t. He continued, ‘… there’s a whole lot of purely routine material to be filed. In the normal way of things, I suppose we would have extended the investigation into the business affairs of people associated with Dr Dean. But personally, Mrs Reid-Kennedy, I don’t like probing into people’s private affairs …’
She looked up and waited for him to continue but he didn’t continue. She turned to glance through the huge Spanish-style picture window to where the palm trees cut jagged patterns into the blue water of the bay. Then she gave her whole attention to eating the chocolate-coated cherry and waited and waited.
‘What kind of business is your husband in?’ Mann asked suddenly.
‘Electronics,’ she said. I had the feeling that she was going to phone her lawyer and say nothing more until he arrived, but if that was in her mind she must have changed it.
‘Has he always been in electronics?’ Mann asked.
‘How do I know you are on official business?’ she said.
He didn’t answer. Finally she said, ‘He inherited the business from his father – Reid-Kennedy Radio Components, Inc. It was Douglas who saw the possibilities in electronics. The Chicago factory still manufactures pocket calculators and desk models but most of our business is concerned with very advanced electronic equipment.’ She stopped stroking the dog long enough to sip at her drink.
‘I appreciate your very complete answer, Mrs Reid-Kennedy,’ Mann told her. ‘Can I take it that neither you nor your husband have any connections, business or social, with this man Henry Dean?’
This man – that was a good touch. She brightened considerably at that and fluttered her eyelashes. ‘None whatsoever, Major,’ she said. She frowned as if trying to scrape the very bottom of her memory barrel for us. ‘I believe my son, Henry-Hope, has kept in touch with Mr Dean from time to time, but neither myself nor my husband have contacted him personally since the divorce.’
‘Since 1955, you mean.’ He walked to her.
‘Yes, since 1955,’ she said and frowned again.
‘Have you got a recent photo of Mr Douglas Reid-Kennedy?’ Mann asked. He picked up a small photo in a leather frame and looked at it. It was an old sepia-tinted photo of a man in a wing collar and a boy in Bavarian-style shorts and top.
‘Where did you get that?’ she said.
‘Right off your table there,’ said Mann.
‘It’s my husband and his father, a photo taken before the war – he usually takes it with him. It’s a sort of lucky piece.’
‘Well, looks like this time his luck ran out,’ said Mann. ‘But anyway I want something recent. A passport shot would do.’
‘He hates having his photo taken,’ she said.
‘Is that right,’ said Mann. ‘Maybe he was bitten by a little birdie.’
She took the photo from Mann and replaced it on the table. ‘Yes, I expect that was it,’ she said.
Mann smiled. ‘Well, stay loose,’ he said, ‘
we’ll maybe be back again.’
‘Will you?’ she said.
‘Just tying up a few routine odds and ends,’ said Mann.
She smiled doubtfully, and got to her feet to show us out.
‘Thank you again for all your kindness,’ said Mann, waving an arm vaguely in the direction of the coffee table which was still as empty as it had been when we arrived, just as the drinks cabinet and cigarette box were no less full.
‘It’s just too bad we can’t get out of this dinner at the White House,’ said Mann, walking to the door.
Mrs Reid-Kennedy frowned at him. He stopped, turned and twisted the Irish tweed hat in his hands until she looked at it. Then he turned it inside out, to show her the irregular stitches that held the lining. Already it was coming loose. ‘A more leisurely way of life over there,’ said Mann. ‘I bought that in Dublin yesterday, Mrs Reid-Kennedy.’ He put the hat on and smiled.
Mrs Reid-Kennedy wet her lips nervously, and said, ‘It’s an Irish fishing hat, isn’t it?’
Mann’s smile came up slowly and beautifully, like the sun rising from the desert. ‘Trouble was – that while I went there to do a little fishing, the guy I wanted to see was shooting.’ Before she had a chance to reply, he doffed his hat solemnly, took my arm, and we departed.
A CIA courier was waiting at the airport. He’d brought a stage-one interim file on Reid-Kennedy, and another one designated Reid-Kennedy Inc. There was also a computer analysis of twelve years of tax returns – personal and corporate – with more to come. There was also time to feed two dollars into a jovial robot which dispensed cold cheeseburgers in warm Cellophane, and hot, watery coffee in dark-brown plastic cups. Mann wolfed it and said, ‘Another one you don’t approve, eh?’
‘Of the way you handled the Reid-Kennedy woman?’
‘You think she guessed what we were after, eh?’ he grinned and bit into the cheeseburger.
‘You should have unbuttoned your jumper and showed her your CIA teeshirt,’ I told him.
‘Crude Yankee wrassling, was it? Not the kind of cricket you play at Lords?’
‘It might make them run: or it might make them destroy the evidence, shut their mouths and phone the lawyers.’
‘Or she might not even mention it to her husband,’ said Mann. ‘Did you think of that possibility? Jesus, this coffee is terrible.’
He crushed the disposable cup, with the remains of the coffee still inside it. He lobbed it at the bin, so that it hit the swing-top and exploded softly. The wreckage steamed.
‘Yes, I thought of that too,’ I said.
Our gate number flashed on the indicator. Mann threw away the rest of his cheeseburger, wiped his hands on a paper towel and tossed that after it. ‘You want a mint?’ said Mann, reaching into his waistcoat pocket for his indigestion tablets.
‘I’m getting too old for these formal dinners,’ I said.
‘I don’t even know why you’re heading north,’ said Mann. ‘You should just stay here with all the senior citizens.’
On the plane we had the first-class accommodation to ourselves. I settled down with the Reid-Kennedy, Inc, file.
The Reid-Kennedy dossier was an American success story: local boy makes good by inheriting his father’s factory. The sort of electronic equipment the Reid-Kennedy laboratories designed and made was not secret, they were on sale to anyone who wanted to buy. Included in the dossier there were some beautifully printed booklets that were sent to any potential purchaser, at home or abroad. I read the advertising carefully.
Telephone conversations – and a lot of other communication material – can be all jumbled together. One single wire can carry a hundred or more conversations simultaneously, providing that you have the ‘time division multiplex switch’ that Reid-Kennedy’s laboratories designed (or, the brochure omitted to say, one from some rival manufacturer). These switches chopped the continuous transmissions into pieces one ten-thousandth of a second long, and then reassembled the pieces so that the human ear could not tell that it was receiving only ‘tiny samples’ of the voice at the other end.
Most of Reid-Kennedy’s profits came from telephone users, and latterly from the commercial satellites that, on a 24-hour orbit 22,300 miles away from Earth, appear stationary. Hovering somewhere over Labrador, such satellites link London with Los Angeles. But the big breakthrough when it came would be from a ‘time division multiplex switch’ that could pack together the wider bands of frequencies that you need in order to transmit TV pictures. Phone users will endure a human voice that sounds like Donald Duck inside a biscuit-tin, but a flawed TV picture is useless. R.-K., Inc, were working on it, promised the brochure.
‘But no military secrets,’ said Mann.
‘Not that I can see,’ I said.
‘Does a guy with this kind of gravy moonlight as a hit man?’ Mann held the photocopy at arm’s length as if trying to discern something new there. ‘Does he?’
‘I left the ouija board in my other pants.’
‘A man running a multi-million-dollar corporation takes a weekend in Europe in order to kill that family in Drogheda?’
‘Don’t go limp on me,’ I said.
‘A jury will need a lot of proof – better than an Irish hitch-hiker recognizing a rented car.’
‘But you agree Reid-Kennedy must be the one who killed those people in Ireland?’
‘You just bet your ass,’ said Mann.
‘You’ve a wonderful way with words, Major.’
14
The need for medical care, security and isolation were all met by moving the Bekuvs to the Commodore Perry US Navy Psychiatric Hospital, half an hour’s drive out of Newport News, Virginia. There had been a hospital there before the word psychiatry was invented. It was an ugly sprawl of buildings on a desolate site near the water. The north wing was still used as a naval hospital, but all mentally disturbed sailors had been moved out of the inner compound that had been built to hold them. That was now a high security area, used by the CIA for debriefing American agents, interrogating enemy agents, and sometimes for deciding which were which.
A US Navy car met us at the airport. It came complete with uniformed driver and an ‘official use only’ sign stencilled on the door. Mann fumed, and at first refused to get into the car. ‘Did you bring party hats and whistles, sailor?’
‘There are no plain cars in the pool, sir,’ said the driver. He was an elderly man with Second World War ribbons on his chest.
‘Well, maybe we’ll take a cab,’ said Mann.
With commendable restraint, the sailor refrained from telling Mann that standing outside an airport building arguing with a uniformed sailor was more conspicuous than riding away in an official car. Instead, he nodded solemnly and said, ‘The trouble with taking a cab is that they won’t let you through the main gate without one of these stickers on the windshield. So you’d have to walk right through the hospital to the inner compound – it’s about a mile.’
‘OK, smart ass,’ said Mann. ‘Just as long as you don’t use the flashing light and siren.’ He got into the car. It didn’t have a flashing light, and probably didn’t have a siren either.
‘You’re a lousy loser,’ I told him quietly as I got in beside him.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Mann. ‘Well, I don’t get as much practice as you do.’
We watched the scenery go past. Mann put his documents case on his knees as if about to do some paperwork, but then put it down again unopened. ‘I should never have agreed to them putting the Bekuvs into this nut-house.’
‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘You over-react.’
‘How the hell do you know if I over-react – you don’t even know what I’m reacting to.’
I decided to let him cool down, but I suppose he wanted to get it off his chest. ‘We’re losing control of this operation,’ he said.
‘Speaking personally,’ I told him, ‘I never had control of it – you did.’
‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘I’ve got these Washington kn
ow-alls crawling all over me like bugs. You know what the PAD is?’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. The Psychological Advisory Directorate was a cosy assembly of unemployed head-shrinkers who knew how to avoid every mistake that the CIA ever made, but unfortunately didn’t tell anyone until afterwards. ‘Twenty-twenty hindsight,’ said Mann after one of their cryptic admonishments.
‘PAD are moving in on Mrs Bekuv. They are taking her down to that farm near St Petersburg and Red Bancroft will be with her.’ He reached into his waistcoat, found some Bufferin tablets, and swallowed two without water. ‘Headache,’ he said. I knew it was that sort of headache that comes through official channels from Washington.
‘Red Bancroft,’ I said. I looked at him, waiting for some explanation.
‘Red Bancroft works for the department – did you guess that?’
‘No, I didn’t guess that,’ I said. ‘And I don’t remember any prompting from the studio audience.’
‘Now don’t get mad,’ he said. ‘I’m disobeying orders by telling you. I’m breaking orders because you’re a buddy, and I don’t want you caught in the mangle.’
‘Why the hell didn’t she tell me herself?’ I said.
‘Me and Bessie have known her a long time,’ said Mann. ‘She’s had a lot of lousy breaks, and it’s left her in a tangle – you know what I mean?’
‘No.’
He leaned forward and gripped my arm. ‘Stay loose. She’s a nice girl and I’d like to see her settle down – but not with you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘For your sake,’ he added hurriedly. ‘She’s a tough girl. She’s a damned good operative and she can look after herself. Two years back she infiltrated a Marxist group in Montreal. She nearly got herself killed – she went into hospital for three months – but she put three conspirators into hospital too, and another five into jail. This is a very special kind of girl, and I love her very dearly – but do yourself a favour: move on.’
‘She’s working for PAD and going down to the farm with Mrs Bekuv?’