by Len Deighton
‘I’m sure you are. Is your drink all right? Too much gin?’
‘No, it’s just the way I like it.’ She drank some to show him that it was true. She was uneasy. After a few minutes of small-talk – Kennedy had been discovering the pleasures of the opera – she said, ‘Perhaps you could ring for a taxi? They sometimes take ages to come at this time.’
‘I’ll drive you.’
‘You must wait for the phone call from the police.’
‘You are right. But must you go so soon?’
‘Yes, I must.’
‘Could I see you again?’
‘That would be less wise.’
‘I’m delivering a Cessna to Nice next week – Friday, maybe Saturday – and collecting a Learjet. It’s a sweet job: not many like that come along. There’s a really good restaurant twenty minutes along the highway from Nice airport. I’ll have you back in central London by six p.m. Now don’t say no, right away. Maybe you’d like to bring your husband or your children. It’s a four-seater.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Think it over. It could make just the sort of break that would do you good.’
‘Is that a medical opinion?’
‘It sure is.’
‘It’s better not.’
‘Let me give you my phone number,’ said Kennedy. Without waiting to hear what she decided he gave her a printed card. ‘This lousy weather keeps up and maybe you’ll feel like a spot of Riviera sunshine.’ She looked at the card: Dr H. R. Kennedy and the Maida Vale address and phone number. ‘I had them done last month at one of these fast print shops. I was going to see patients here but I decided not to.’
‘I see.’
‘It was against the terms of the lease and I could see there would be arguments if my patients started using the car park spaces.’ He went to the phone and asked for a taxi. ‘They are usually very prompt,’ he said. ‘I have an account with them.’ Then he added thoughtfully, ‘And seeing patients here might have set the immigration guys on my tail.’
‘I hope your niece returns soon.’
‘She will be okay.’
‘Do you know the man she’s with?’
Kennedy paused. ‘He is a patient. At the clinic. He met her when she was waiting for me one afternoon.’
‘Oh.’
‘He can be violent. That’s why the police were so good about it.’
‘I see.’
‘You helped me, Mrs Samson. And I appreciate your keeping me company, I really do.’ The phone rang to say the cab was waiting outside. He helped her on with her coat, carefully making sure that her long hair was not trapped under the collar. ‘I would like to help you,’ he said. In bidding her a decorous goodbye his hand held hers.
‘I don’t need help.’
‘You go to railway stations in order to hide your unhappiness. Don’t you think that a marriage in which a wife is frightened to be unhappy in the presence of her husband might leave something to be desired?’
Fiona found his apparent simplicity and honesty disarming. She had no great faith in psychiatry and in general distrusted its practitioners, but she felt attracted to this amusing and unusual man. He was obviously attracted to her, but that had not made him fawn. And she appreciated the way that Kennedy so readily confided his fears of the Immigration Department and the trust he’d shown in her. It made her feel like a partner in his lawless activities. ‘Is that the sort of dilemma patients like me bring along to you?’
‘Believe me, I have no patients who in any way resemble you, Mrs Samson, and I never have had.’
She gently pulled her hand away from his and went through the door. He didn’t follow her but when she glanced up, before getting into the taxi, she could see his face at the window.
She looked at her watch. It was late. Bernard tried to phone about this time each evening.
‘Hello, sweetheart.’ To her astonishment she arrived home to find Bernard, Nanny and the two children sitting round the little kitchen table. The scene was printed upon her memory for ever after. They were all laughing and talking and eating. The table displayed the chaos she had seen at Bernard’s mother’s house: tea in cups without saucers, teapot standing on a chipped plate, tin-foil frozen food containers on the tablecloth, sugar in its packet, a slab of cake sitting on the bag in which it was sold. The laughter stopped when she came in.
‘We wondered where you’d got to,’ said Bernard. He was wearing corduroy trousers and an old blue roll-neck sweater that she had twice thrown away.
‘Mr Samson said the children could eat down here,’ said the nanny nervously.
‘It’s all right, Nanny,’ said Fiona and went and kissed the children. They were newly bathed and smelled of talcum powder.
‘You’ve got a cold nose,’ said Billy accusingly and then chuckled. He looked so like Bernard.
‘You’re rude,’ his little sister told him. She had been raised to the level of the table by sitting upon a blue silk cushion from the drawing room sofa. Fiona noticed that a dollop of tomato sauce had fallen upon it but kept smiling as she gave her daughter a kiss and a hug. She had a special love for little Sally, who sometimes seemed to need Fiona in a way that no one else had ever done.
Fiona embraced Bernard. ‘What a wonderful surprise. I didn’t expect you until the weekend.’
‘I slipped away.’ Bernard put an arm round her, but there was a reluctance to his embrace. For some other wives such a hesitation might have been a danger signal. Fiona knew that it was a sign that something had gone wrong in Berlin. A shooting? A killing? She looked at him to make sure he was not injured. She wouldn’t ask him what had happened, they didn’t talk about departmental matters unless they concerned the both of them, but she knew it would take a little time before Bernard would be capable of physical contact with her.
‘You’re all right?’
‘Of course I’m all right.’ A smile did not hide the hint of irritation. He did not like her to show her concern.
‘Will you have to go back?’ The children were watching them both with great interest.
‘We’ll see.’ He contrived a cheerfulness. ‘Nothing will happen for a few days. They think I’m chasing around Bavaria.’
She gave him another decorous kiss. She wished Bernard would not be so intractable. Deliberately disobeying instructions in order to come home early was flattering but it was the sort of behaviour that the Department found inexcusable. This was not the time to say that. ‘It’s a lovely surprise,’ she said.
‘Eat some dinner, Mummy,’ said Sally. ‘There’s plenty.’
‘Mummy doesn’t eat frozen meals, do you Mummy?’ said her brother.
Nanny, who had no doubt purchased the ‘delicious ready-to-eat country farmhouse dinner’, looked embarrassed. Fiona said, ‘It depends.’
‘It’s not meaty,’ said Billy, as if that was a recommendation. ‘It’s all sauce and pasta.’ He pushed a spoon into the remains to show her.
‘It’s very salty,’ said Sally. ‘I don’t like it.’
The nanny took the spoon away from Billy and then went to get a cup and saucer for Fiona to have tea with them.
Fiona took off her coat and hat. Then she grabbed a piece of kitchen paper in order to see what could be done to remove the sauce from the silk cushion. She knew that in doing so she would be spoiling the gemütlich atmosphere into which she had intruded but she simply could not sit down and laugh and talk and forget it. She couldn’t. Perhaps that was what was wrong with her and with her marriage.
Before she could get started, Nanny poured tea for her and then began clearing the table. Bernard leaned over and said to the children. ‘Now who’s my first passenger on the slow train to Dreamland?’
‘Me, Daddy, me!’ They both yelled together.
Soon Fiona was left alone, dabbing at the stain on the cushion. From somewhere above she could hear the excited calls of the children as Bernard carried them up to bed. ‘Choo-choo! Choo-choo!’
Darlin
g, darling, Bernard. How she wished he could be a wonderful father without making her feel like an inadequate mother.
7
London. September 1978.
Sylvester Bernstein was a fifty-year-old American. Together with his wife he lived in a Victorian red brick terrace house in Battersea. One small room on each of three floors with a kitchen and bathroom that had been added at the back by a previous owner in the early Seventies. Now that this south side of the river had been invaded by affluent young couples – who’d discovered how close it was to central London – the whole street was undergoing a transformation. There were yellow coloured front doors, and even pink ones with brass knockers, and nowadays more and more of the cars parked nose to tail along the street were without rust. The local ‘planning department’ regulations prohibited the use of these houses as offices but Bernstein was confident that no one would complain about the way he’d made his garret room into an office with a typewriter, a couple of desks, two phone lines and a telex machine. Private investigators didn’t spend much time in offices: at least Sylvester Bernstein didn’t.
Bernstein had been a CIA man for twenty-one years. He took retirement after the wounds in his leg refused to heal. He’d married a girl he’d met in Saigon, an English nurse working for Christian Aid, and she suddenly decided that they must live in England. At that time the dollar was high against sterling, so his retirement pay gave him enough to live well in London. When the dollar weakened, Bernstein was forced to go back to work. His contacts in Grosvenor Square helped him to get that elusive work permit and he set up in business as Sylvester Bernstein, private investigator. But truth to tell, most of his clients came to him because of his long career as a CIA man. Some of those clients were still in the twilight world of ‘security’; people who wanted a job done while they remained at arm’s length from it. The job Bernstein was doing for Bret Rensselaer was typical of the work he did, and because he’d known Bret a long time, and because Bret was a demanding client, Bernstein did not have one of his sub-contractors do the job for him. He did most of it personally.
They were sitting in the downstairs room. On the walls hung cheap Victorian prints of scenes from Walter Scott novels. The elaborate fireplace was complete with lily-patterned tiles and polished brass fender and all the fire-irons. The iron grate however held not coal but an arrangement of dried flowers. Virtually everything, even the furniture, had come with the house. Only his wife’s china collection, the beige wall-to-wall carpet, the American-style bathroom and such things as the large-screen TV on a smart trolley were new. It was a diminutive room, but panelled wooden connecting doors were open to reveal an even smaller dining room, and through its window a view of the tiny back garden. Bret lounged on the sofa, the papers Bernstein had prepared for him fanned out so that he could refer to them.
‘Is Martin Euan Pryce-Hughes his real name?’ asked Bret, who was unfamiliar with Welsh names. He had to look down at the papers to remember it.
‘His old man was Hugh Pryce-Hughes.’ Bernstein was a short pot-bellied man wearing a grey three-piece suit that he’d been heard to describe as ‘native costume’. It was more or less like the suit that Bret Rensselaer wore – and which gave him the urbanity one expected of a diplomat or surgeon – but the suit looked wrong on Bernstein, for his features, complexion and demeanour suggested a manual labourer, or maybe an infantryman. He was not now, however, in the right physical shape to be either; his face was red, the sort of complexion that comes with high blood-pressure, and he had a wheeze that smoking aggravated. Enough grey hair remained to see that it had once been brown and curly, and his hands were strong with short thick fingers upon one of which he wore a fraternity ring and upon another a flashy diamond. With ramrod spine, he sat splayfooted on a little bentwood chair. One black sock had sagged to reveal a section of bare leg. He was aware of his stiff unnatural pose but it reconciled his legs with the fragments of Vietnamese metal embedded in them. His voice was low and firm; unmistakably American but not stridently so. ‘The famous Pryce-Hughes.’
Bret looked down and furrowed his brow.
‘The writer,’ said Bernstein. ‘Internationally famous…the one who wrote those books about the Fabian Society. His memoirs created all the fuss about Wells and Shaw. You must have heard of him.’ Bernstein was a great reader. The bookcase held Dreiser, Stendhal, Joyce, Conrad and Zola – he was not too fond of the Russian novels – and he’d read them all not once but several times. He was proud to be a graduate of Princeton but he was also aware that Bret, and others like him, regarded Bernstein as reassuring proof that an Ivy League education did not guarantee success in what Bret called ‘the real world’.
‘No, Sylvy, I’ve never heard of him,’ said Bret. ‘For these Brits, internationally famous means known in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. How many books?’
Bernstein smiled briefly. ‘Maybe half a dozen.’
‘You’d better get them for me.’
‘His father’s books? What for? You’re not going to read them?’
‘Of course I am.’ Bret was thorough, and he wanted Bernstein to be reminded of that.
‘As long as you don’t ask me to read them,’ said Bernstein.
‘No,’ said Bret. ‘There is no call for you to read them, Sylvy.’
‘You haven’t suddenly taken against smoking, have you?’ When Bret shook his head Bernstein took out a packet of Lucky Strike and shook one loose.
Bret said, ‘Could you initiate a file for me?’
Bernstein flicked open a well-worn Zippo lighter with an inscription that read ‘Rung Sat Special Zone’, a souvenir of an unhealthy trip into a mangrove swamp southeast of Saigon during the Vietnam war. He kept it to remind himself, and anyone else who had to be reminded, that he’d had another sort of life not so long ago. He took his time lighting a cigarette and then said, ‘What’s on your mind?’
‘A secret file, recording meetings, reports and payments and so on. A file of stuff coming in from one of our own people.’
‘We don’t work like that. No one works like that. No one keeps all the information from one agent in the same file. The Coordination people take it and distribute it. They make damn sure no name, nor any clue to the source, is on it.’
‘I didn’t ask you how we work,’ said Bret.
Bernstein blew smoke while looking at Bret. Bret stared back. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. A bogus file.’ Bret nodded. A file to prove that someone was one of our people when actually he wasn’t one of our people.’
‘Don’t let’s get too deeply into existentialism,’ said Bret.
‘A file with real names?’
‘A few real names.’
‘You want to frame Martin Pryce-Hughes? You want to make someone think he’s reporting to us?’
‘That’s what I want.’
Sylvy blew more smoke. ‘Sure. It can be done; anything can be done. How far back would you want to go?’
‘Ten years?’
‘That would take us back to the days of mechanical typewriters.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re not thinking of something they could take back to Moscow and put under the microscope?’
‘No. Something to show someone briefly.’
‘’Cause real good forgeries cost. We’d need real letterheads and authentic department names.’
‘Not that ambitious.’
‘And I get it back?’
‘What for?’
‘To feed it into the shredder.’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Bret.
‘Why don’t I throw something together then? I’ll sort out some photocopies and provide a sequence of material the way it would be if we filed it that way. It will give us something to look at and talk about. When we get that the way you want it, I’ll find someone good to do the forgeries.’
‘Great,’ said Bret. He wished Bernstein wouldn’t use words such as forgeries, it made him feel uneasy. ‘Keep it very circumstantial. We’re not trying to pro
duce exhibit A for Perry Mason.’
‘A subtle, tasteful kind of frame-up. Sure, why not? But I’d need to know more.’
‘You take it and show it to this creep and lean on him.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Lean on him. Say you’re from a newspaper. Say you’re from the CIA, say anything but scare the shit out of him.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to see which way he jumps.’
‘I don’t see your purpose. He’ll know it’s a fake.’
‘Do it.’
Bernstein looked at him. He knew Bret because he knew other men like him. Bret didn’t have any operational purpose for frightening the old man: he just felt vindictive. ‘It would be cheaper just to beat him up,’ said Bernstein.
Bret scowled. He knew exactly what Bernstein was thinking. ‘Just do it, Sylvy. Don’t second-guess me.’
‘Whatever you say, doc.’
Bret smiled politely. ‘Anything more on the woman?’
‘No. She hasn’t seen the boyfriend for a week. Maybe they had a fight.’
‘Boyfriend? Is that it?’ said Bret as casually as he could.
‘Oh, sure. She doesn’t go along to his fancy apartment in Maida Vale to play chess.’
‘He’s a psychiatrist,’ said Bret.
‘I’ll bet he is.’
Bret found that offensive. He didn’t want that kind of wisecrack; this was strictly business. ‘Just four beats to the bar, Sylvy,’ he said. It was the nearest he got to a reprimand.
Bernstein smoked and didn’t reply. So this wasn’t just a job, there was more to it. Was this guy Kennedy a relative of Bret Rensselaer, or what? ‘If she wanted to consult him, why wouldn’t she go and consult him at the hospital?’
‘She would have to report any kind of medical treatment, especially a visit to a psychiatrist,’ said Bret. ‘Remember the way it goes?’
‘So this might be a way of seeing a shrink in secret? Is that what you mean?’
‘She’s under a lot of strain.’
Bernstein took a quick drag at his cigarette. ‘Yeah, well, I’m not asking you too many questions about this one, Bret, because you told me it’s touchy, but…’