by Len Deighton
‘Is it something Vienna Field Unit could do?’ I asked as diffidently as I was able. ‘I’ve never known any of them to become even slightly ruffled.’
Stowe touched his bald head very delicately almost as if he was smoothing his hair. He must have thought the fly had settled upon his head but in fact it was tramping across his desk. For a moment he seemed to forget the conversation we were having, then he looked at me. ‘I told you: we’ve got to avoid the Yanks.’ His eyes fixed on me, he added, ‘Vienna is packed with Yanks…CIA I mean.’
So it wasn’t tourists or encyclopaedia salesmen he was worried about. ‘Why would the CIA be interested?’ I asked. ‘Or do you mean we are going to send someone to Vienna for every off-the-record contact?’
Slowly a smile came to Stowe’s face. It was not much of a smile but what it lacked in joy it made up for in guile. ‘Very good, Bernard!’ he said, and there was in his voice a note of approval that I had not heard before. ‘Very good!’ He turned his head to share the fun with Dicky. Dicky gave a dutiful smirk that revealed that he didn’t know what the hell was going on. I recognized it easily: it was one of Dicky’s standard expressions.
But soon I saw that Stowe’s pleasure was feigned; the way he reacted to what he judged to be insubordinate questioning. Speaking slowly Stowe said, ‘I know the CIA are interested, Bernard, because a little bird told me. And if I’m told to make sure such events go smoothly in the future, maybe I will send someone to Vienna every time. And it might bloody well be you. Would you like that, Bernard?’
I didn’t answer. Dicky smiled to show that now he knew what Stowe was talking about. Helpfully he said, ‘So you think the Vienna CIA will try to interfere, Gus?’
‘I know they bloody will,’ he said. ‘Brody, the Vienna Station Chief, is an old sparring partner of mine. He’ll screw this one up for us if he gets half a chance.’
‘And he knows it’s on?’ I asked.
‘Joe Brody is a tough old bastard,’ said Stowe. ‘And he’s very good at guessing.’
Stowe stared at me and nodded his head. I wondered if that was intended to be some special warning for me.
‘What do you make the time now?’ Stowe asked while he was tapping his watch. Dicky told him having consulted an elaborate wristwatch that had a tachometer, a perpetual calendar programmed to allow for leap years until the year 2100 and a little moon that waxed and waned. Stowe growled and hit his old timepiece with the flat of his hand, as if punishing it for failing to meet requirements.
Dicky got to his feet. ‘Okay, Gus. I’ll come back to you with some ideas tomorrow.’ As Stowe opened his mouth to object Dicky said, ‘Or perhaps this afternoon.’
‘Jesus Christ, Dicky,’ Stowe said. ‘I know how jealously you guard your little realm, and about this overdeveloped amour propre that is a byword of all dealings with German Desk. But if you think I don’t know you went to the Deputy D-G last week demanding Bernard’s return because he was the only man for this job, you’d better think again.’
Dicky’s face went bright red with anger, or with embarrass ment, or perhaps a combination of those emotions over which English gentlemen have been supposed to exercise complete control. No doubt my presence added to his discomfort. ‘Did Sir Percy tell you that?’ Dicky stammered.
‘A little spy told me,’ said Stowe abrasively. Then: ‘Yes, what do you think Sir Percy and I talk about at the briefing, except what all you bloody Controllers go snivelling to him about?’
Dicky was standing now, and he gripped the back of the chair he’d been occupying, like a prisoner in the dock. Flustered he said, ‘I merely said, confirmed that is…I told Sir Percy no more than I told you…that…’
‘That Bernard could manage it? Yes, right. Well, why come in here pretending you hadn’t already gone above my head?’ The fly appeared, did a circuit and went into a holding pattern around Stowe’s cranium.
‘I assure you that using Bernard was not my idea,’ said Dicky indignantly. Stowe smiled grimly.
So that was it. This meeting had been called specifically to stage a Departmental brawl, and it was now evident that the clash was not really about who should attend an off-the-record meeting with a KGB delegation. This bare-knuckle contest was calculated to rebuff some rash attempt by Dicky to assail Stowe’s territory. It was my bad luck to be the blunt instrument that Stowe had chosen to beat upon Dicky’s head.
In the manner of the English, Dicky’s voice had grown quieter as he became angry. Now he weighed his words carefully as he went into an involved explanation. Dicky was so offended that it made me wonder if he was telling the truth. In that case it would mean that the Deputy had arranged my recall, and pretended that it was at Dicky’s request to conceal the fact from Stowe.
I was determined to get out of this quarrel. ‘May I get back to my desk?’ I asked. ‘I’m expecting an important phone call.’ Stowe waved a hand in the air in a gesture that might have signalled agreement to my leaving the room but which might have been rejecting something Dicky was saying. Or might have been a bid for the fly.
As I was leaving the room, Stowe’s words overlaid Dicky’s and Dicky said, ‘Look here, Gus, I give you my solemn word that Bernard wasn’t mentioned…’ and then sat down again as if he was going to be there a long time.
With a sigh of relief I stepped out into the corridor. The fly came with me.
That evening I was very happy to get back to my little house in Balaklava Road. Until now I had not felt much affection for this cramped and inconvenient suburban house, but after my cold and lonely bed in Berlin it had become a paradise. My unexpected arrival the previous evening had been discounted. Tonight was to be my welcome home.
The children had painted a bright banner – Welcome Home Daddy – and draped it across the fireplace where a real fire was flickering. Even though half of me was a Berliner, the sight of a coal fire always made me appreciate the many subtle joys of coming home. My wonderful Gloria had prepared a truly miraculous meal, as good as anything any local restaurant could have provided. She’d chilled a bottle of Bollinger and I sat in our neat little front room with the children squatting on the carpet and demanding to hear about my adventures in Berlin. Gloria had told them only that I was away on duty. After a couple of glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, I invented an involved story about tracking down a gang of thieves, keeping the narrative sufficiently improbable to get a few laughs.
I was more and more surprised at the manner in which the children were maturing. Amongst their ideas and jokes – comparatively adult and sophisticated for the most part – the evidence of some childish pleasure would break in. Requests for a silly game or a treasure hunt or infantile song. How lucky I was to be with them while they grew up. What misplaced sense of patriotic duty persuaded Fiona to be elsewhere? And was her choice of priorities some bounden commitment that enslaved only the middle classes? I’d grown up amongst working-class boys from communities where nothing preceded family loyalty. Fiona had inflicted her moral obligations upon me and the children. She had forced us to contribute to her sacrifice. Why should I not feel grievously wronged?
A timer pinged. Effortlessly Gloria led the way into the dining room where the table was set with our best china and glass. When the dinner came it was delicious. ‘Would champagne be all right with the whole meal?’ ‘Can a fish swim?’ Another bottle of Bollinger and a risotto made with porcini. After that there was baked lobster. Then a soft Brie with French bread. And, to finish, huge apples baked with honey and raisins. A big jug of rich egg custard came with it. It was a perfect end to a wonderful meal. Sally sorted out each and every raisin and arranged them around the edge of her plate but Sally always did that. Billy counted them, ‘Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief…’ to foretell that Sally would marry a beggarman. Sally said she’d always hated that rhyme and Gloria – optimist, feminist and mathematician – rejected it as inaccurate on the grounds that it gave a girl only one chance in four of a desirable partner.
&nbs
p; The children were both in that no-man’s-land between childhood and adult life. Billy was dedicated to motorcars and beautiful handwriting. Sally was chosen to play Portia in Julius Caesar and gave us her rendition of her favourite scene. Her Teddy Bear played Brutus.
‘Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,
Is it excepted I should know no secrets
That appertain to you?’
Dismissing the marital prophecy we all declared it to be a memorable family occasion.
‘The children are old enough now to enjoy celebrating together as a family,’ said Gloria after they had been put to bed. She was standing looking into the dying embers of the open fire.
‘I’ll never forget this evening,’ I said. ‘Never.’
She turned. ‘I love you, Bernard,’ said Gloria as if she’d never said it before. ‘Now before I sit down. Do you want a drink or anything?’
‘And I love you, Gloria,’ I said. I’d resisted voicing my feelings for too long because I still felt a tinge of guilt about the difference in our ages but my time away from her had changed things. Now I was happy to tell her how I felt. ‘You are wonderful,’ I said, taking her hand and pulling her down to sit with me on the sofa. ‘You work miracles for all of us. I should be asking you what I can do for you.’
Her face was very close. She looked sad as she put a hand on my cheek as if touching a statue, a precious statue but a statue nevertheless. She looked into my eyes as if seeing me for the very first time and said, ‘Sometimes, Bernard, I wish you would say you loved me without my saying it to you first.’
‘I’m sorry, darling. Did the children thank you for that delicious meal?’
‘Yes. They are lovely children, Bernard.’
‘You are good for all of us,’ I said.
‘I got all the food from Alfonso’s,’ she confessed in the little-girl voice she affected sometimes. ‘Except the baked apples. I did the baked apples myself. And the egg custard.’
‘The baked apples were the best part of the welcome home.’
‘I hope the best part of the welcome home is yet to come,’ she said archly.
‘Let’s see,’ I said. She switched out the light. It was a full moon and the back garden was swamped with that horrid blue sheen that made it look like a picture on television. I hate moonlight.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s good to be home,’ I said, staring at the ugly little garden. She came up behind me and put her arm round me.
‘Don’t go away again,’ she said. ‘Not ever. Promise?’
‘I promise.’ This was no time to reveal that Dicky and Stowe had got a little jaunt to Vienna lined up for me. She might have thought that I welcomed the prospect and the truth was that I had some irrational dread of it. Vienna was not a big city and never has been: it is a little provincial town where narrow-minded peasants go to the opera, instead of the pig market, to exchange spiteful gossip. At least that’s the way I saw it: in the past Vienna had not been a lucky town for me.
7
I remember telling a young probationer named MacKenzie that the more casual the briefing was, the more hazardous the operation you were heading into. It was the glib sort of remark that one was inclined to provide to youngsters like MacKenzie who hung upon every word and wanted to do everything the way it was done in the training school. But I was to be given plenty of time to think about the truth of it. When, afterwards, I considered the way in which I’d been brought into the Vienna operation, I inclined to the view that Stowe had been given no alternative: that he was instructed to choose me to go.
The operation was called Fledermaus, not ‘Operation Fledermaus’ since it had been decided that the frequency rate of the word ‘operation’, and the way in which it was always followed by a code name, made it too vulnerable to the opposition’s computerized code breaking.
Certainly Fledermaus was cloaked in Departmental secrecy. These BOA – Briefing On Arrival – jobs always made me a little nervous, there being no way of preparing myself for whatever was to be done. It seemed as if the determination to keep this task secret from the Americans had resulted in a strictness of documentation, a signals discipline and a delicacy of application that were seldom achieved when the aim was no greater than keeping things secret from the KGB.
I flew to Salzburg, a glittering toytown dominated by an eleventh-century fortress with a widely advertised torture chamber. The narrow streets of the town are crammed with backpack tourists for twelve months of every year, and postcards, icecreams and souvenirs are readily available. My hotel – like almost everywhere else in Austria – was not far from a house in which the seemingly restless Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart once resided.
My arrival, had been timed to coincide with an important philatelic auction and I checked into the hotel together with a dozen or more stamp dealers who’d come in on the same flight. Their entries in the book showed a selection of home addresses including Chicago, Hamburg and Zurich. On the reception desk a cardboard sign depicted a youthful Julie Andrews, arms outstretched, singing ‘The Sound of Music tour – visit the places where the film was shot.’ Behind the desk sat a fragile-looking old man in a black suit and stiff collar. He used a pen that had to be dipped in an inkwell and rocked a blotter upon each entry.
The hotel was gloomy, spacious and comfortable. It was the old-fashioned sort of grand hotel still to be widely found in Austria, and the sweet synthetic scent of polish hung in the air: an indication of manual work. An ancient lift, crafted of brass and mahogany, lurched upwards inside a wire box with a wheezing sound, and sudden rattles, that persuaded me to use the stairs for the duration of my visit. There was even a man in black waistcoat and green baize apron to carry my bag.
An Austrian named Otto Hoffmann had met me at the airport and made sure I got a comfortable room in the hotel. ‘At the back overlooking the river,’ he said in his powerful Austrian accent, and a chilly draught hit me as he opened the window and peered out to be sure the water was still there. ‘No traffic noise, no smells of cooking, no noise from the terrace café. Tip the porter ten schillings.’ I did so.
Hoffmann was about forty years old, a short, hyper-active man with merry little eyes, a turned up nose and smiling mouth. His manner plus his large forehead, his pale unwrinkled skin, the way his small features were set in his globular head, and his sparse hair, all gave him the appearance of an inebriated baby. I don’t know how much Hoffmann had been told about ‘Fledermaus’ but he never mentioned that name. He knew that my cover story of being a stamp dealer was completely untrue and he’d obviously been chosen for his knowledge of philately.
‘And now I shall buy you a drink,’ he said as he closed the inner window and put his hand on the radiator to be sure the furnace was working. He meant a cup of weak tea. Because he kept his money in his back pocket, in a large roll secured with a rubber band, he had a disconcerting habit of tapping his behind to make sure his money was still there. He did this now.
He briefed me while we were sitting in the hotel lounge. It was a cavernous place with a celestial done where angels cavorted and from which hung an impressive cut-glass chandelier. Around the walls there were potted plants set between other small tables and soft chairs where fellow guests, unable or unwilling to face the crowded streets, sat drinking lemon tea in tall glasses together with the rich pastries, or gargantuan fruit and icecream concoctions, that punctuate the long Austrian days.
He ordered two teas and a rum baba. He told me they were delicious here but I was trying to give up rum babas.
‘The auction sale consists almost entirely of Austrian and German material,’ he told me. ‘Of course the biggest market for that is Austria and Germany, but there will be American dealers, bidding as high as the present exchange rate of the dollar permits. Also there will be compatriots of yours from London. London is an important trading centre for philatelic material, and there are still many important German and Austrian collectors there. Mostly they are refugees who fled the N
azis and stayed in England afterwards.’
The waitress brought our order promptly. The tea came in a glass, its elaborate silver-plated holder fitted with a clip from which a spoon was suspended. She put two large chunks of lemon on the table and splashed a generous amount of an alcoholic liquid upon a shiny sponge cake which bore a crown of whipped cream. ‘Are you sure…?’ Hoffmann asked again. I shook my head. The waitress scribbled a bill, put it on the table and sped away.
‘And what am I doing here?’ I asked, keeping my voice low.
He frowned. Then, as he understood me, he twitched his nose. On the table he had two beautiful catalogues. He passed one to me. It was an inch thick, its coloured cover, magni ficent art paper and superbly printed illustrations, making it look more like an expensive book of art reproductions than a commercial catalogue. They must have cost a fortune to produce. He opened it to show me the pictures of stamps and old envelopes, tapping the pages as some picture caught his attention. ‘Most of the really good items are from the old German states. Württemberg and Braunschweig, with a few rarities from Oldenburg, Hannover and so on. Here too are some choice things from old German colonies: mail from China, Morocco, New Guinea, Togo, Samoa.’
As he leafed through the catalogue Herr Hoffmann lost the thread of his conversation. His eyes settled upon one page of the catalogue. ‘Some of these Togo covers sound wonderful,’ he said in an awed voice, and read the descriptions with such concentration that his lips quivered. But he tore himself away from the wonderful offerings to show me the auction schedule printed on the inside cover. The hours – eight o’clock in the morning until approximately three o’clock in the afternoon, with an hour off for lunch – were listed to show the numbered Lots that would be offered in each session. There were several thousand Lots for the sale, which would last five days. ‘Some rich collectors employ agents to come to the auction and buy selected items on their behalf. The agent gets a nice fee. You will be such a person.’