Billion-Dollar Brain

by Len Deighton

  Stok opened the file and signed the corners of eight sheets of paper. Then from the back of the file he took six more sheets of paper, perused them hurriedly and then signed those too. He spoke slowly to the papers which were still receiving his attention. ‘Ten men were taken into custody and we require…’ he turned the pages without haste ‘…thirty-five sheets of paper covered with reasons and thirty signatures from four different police authorities. I am buried under the paperwork. And do you know,’ he leaned across the table staring at me and tapping the open file softly with his huge fingers, ‘if tomorrow I decide to release one of them, there will be over three times as much paperwork.’ Stok laughed a hoarse laugh as though the prisoners had pulled that trick upon him and he wanted to show that he didn’t mind.

  ‘Things are tough all over,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stok. He drew on his cigar carefully, then waved it at the major. ‘Guards Major Nogin. GRU,’* Stok explained. The major looked surprised at being introduced to a prisoner, but he played along with it. ‘The major has just become the father of an eight-pound boy,’ Stok said, and then there was a lot of soft rapid Russian, which was probably Stok wising the major up on me and my department. Then Stok gave Major Nogin a cigar, and the major smiled at both of us and left the room. ‘He is a nice fellow for a GRU officer,’ said Stok.

  I smiled.

  Stok said, ‘Baltic Military District GRU are handling the whole thing. The District Military Council sent me over to the Area Military Commissariat as an adviser, but these young men don’t want an old man’s advice. They have handled the people that NTS† sent here, and they can quite well handle these new people.’ Stok gave an angry flick of his gigantic fist. ‘We don’t send men into other countries to interfere with their internal affairs, why should you send your criminals here?’

  I said, ‘What about the suppression of the Budapest rebellion?’

  Stok shouted, ‘What about the Bay of Pigs? What about Suez? Tell the truth, English, the thing that sticks in your throat is that we were successful and you were not.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed wearily, ‘you are successful and we are not.’

  ‘Modern victories are not won by movements of armies, but by imperceptible change of molecules. Victories must be won inside the hearts of men.’

  ‘I prefer my victories inside their heads,’ I said.

  ‘Come along, English. We soldiers must not talk politics. Our job is to take the stupid and impossible fantasies of our politicians and try to make them work in terms of flesh and blood.’ Stok stood up and put his hands on the small of his back and threw his head back like a man in pain. ‘I am tired,’ he said.

  ‘I’m half dead,’ I told him.

  He took my arm. ‘Come along then, we’ll support each other.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

  ‘Of course you are, and so am I. Let’s go somewhere civilized and have a meal.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘But I must be back by nine-thirty. Tonight Moscow will inevitably take its revenge.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Football,’ said Stok. ‘Tonight on television.’

  The Luna Café on Soviet Boulevard faces the gardens and the old Liberation monument that had been built there several régimes back and—so it is said—was something of a milestone in municipal graft. Already there was a small queue of young people at the café door, for this was Saturday night and the boys had put on their one-hundred-and-thirty-rouble English wool suits and the girls had fifty-rouble pointed shoes wrapped in a parcel, for they were far too valuable to wear out on the icy streets. Everyone stood aside for the barrel-like KGB colonel in full uniform and his scruffy civilian companion. We got a small table near the orchestra, which was faking jazz music from their memories and short-wave radio.

  Stok took the menu. ‘What about port wine?’ he asked.

  ‘I prefer vodka.’ A lot of vodka might numb the pain in my hand.

  ‘They don’t sell vodka,’ said Stok. ‘This is a nice cultural place.’ He had chosen a seat that faced towards the door, and he watched the young couples entering. The dance floor was crowded.

  ‘When I was a young man,’ said Stok, ‘we had a song called “When Tears Fall a Rose will Grow”. Do you know that song?’

  ‘No.’

  Stok ordered two glasses of port wine. The waitress looked at the marks on my face and at Stok’s uniform. Her face was kind but rigid.

  ‘If it was true then this would be a land of roses. You have a word meaning unlucky people?’

  ‘Losers.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a good word. Well this is a land of losers. It’s a land where doom hangs upon the air like poison gas. You have no idea of what awful things have happened here. The Latvians had Fascists who were more vicious than even the Germans. In Bikernieki Forest they killed 46,500 civilians. In Dreilini Forest, five kilometres east of here, they killed 13,000. In the Zolotaya Gorka, 38,000 were murdered.’

  While Stok was talking I had seen a familiar figure enter the door. He had left his outer clothes downstairs and he wore his cheap Latvian suit with its wide trouser bottoms as though it was from Savile Row. He sat down on the far side of the room and I caught only a brief view of him through the dancers, but it was undoubtedly Ralph Pike still at large.

  ‘…the old, the pregnant, the lame,’ Stok said. ‘They killed them all, sometimes with the most terrifying and prolonged torture. The Germans were so pleased to find such enthusiastic murderers that they used Riga as a clearing house for people they wanted killed. They sent them here in train loads from Germany, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, from all over Europe, because the Latvian-recruited SS units were the most efficient killers.’

  Ralph Pike suddenly saw me. He didn’t make any sort of sign of recognition, but he gulped his drink with urgency.

  ‘…we have dossiers on hundreds of such Latvians. War criminals now living in Canada, America, New Zealand and all over the world. You would imagine that people guilty of such terror would remain quiet and be thankful that they have escaped justice, but no. These scum are the foremost trouble-makers. Your friend there is such a person as I describe: a war criminal with more murders of children than I would care to name upon his conscience. He thinks his crimes are forgotten, but our memories are not so short.’

  Ralph Pike had taken on a strange rigidity. I glimpsed him only through dancing couples. He leaned back in his seat, casually turning his head to take in the whole room. Two tables to his left I recognized the handsome young Guards major who had just become a father.

  ‘You wouldn’t think that he was like that,’ Stok said. ‘He looks so respectable, so bourgeois.’

  Pike was staring at me and at Stok’s uniformed back. ‘He’s wondering whether to kill himself,’ Stok said.

  ‘Is he?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry, he won’t. People like him are not losers. They’re survivors, professional survivors. Even on the gallows such men would not bite a poison pellet.’

  The dancers opened and my eyes met Pike’s. He was holding his glass of port wine and swallowing hard. The music was a vintage piece of Victor Herbert, ‘Sweet summer breeze, whispering trees.’

  ‘Warn him,’ Stok said. ‘Warn your comrade he’s in danger. You must have a pre-arranged signal and I’d like to see it in action.’

  ‘Who is it you are talking about?’

  ‘Very good,’ said Stok admiringly. Pike had noticed Guards Major Nogin now. Stok waved to the waitress and said, ‘Two more port wines.’

  I said, ‘If you are going to arrest him, do it. Don’t play cat and mouse like a sadist.’

  Stok said, ‘He killed over two hundred people. Six of my men taken prisoner in 1945 were tortured by this man personally.’ Stok’s face had gone rigid and he didn’t look like himself, just as those mathematically accurate waxworks never look like the people they portray. ‘Do you think he should go free?’ Stok said.

  I said, ‘I happen to be in
custody, remember?’

  Stok shook his head in disagreement. ‘You are a casualty, not a prisoner. Now answer my question.’ Stok’s mouth was tense with hatred, he could hardly force the words through it.

  ‘Take a hold on yourself,’ I said.

  ‘I could walk across there and kill him very slowly,’ Stok said. ‘Very slowly, just as he killed them.’

  Major Nogin was looking expectantly towards our table and Ralph Pike couldn’t take his eyes off the major. He knew that he was just awaiting Stok’s signal.

  ‘You’d better get a grip of yourself,’ I said. ‘Major Nogin is awaiting orders.’

  The music played.

  Stars shining softly above; Roses in bloom, wafted perfume, Sleepy birds dreaming of love.

  Pike was talking to a waitress and gripping her wrist very tightly. It was impossible to witness Pike’s terror without identifying with it. The waitress stepped back from him and wrenched her arm free. Ralph Pike was positively radiating doom by now and in a country like Latvia such radiations are quickly picked up. I wondered if Pike had a Latin tag for this moment; perhaps bis peccare in bello non licet—in war two blunders aren’t permitted.

  Stok said, ‘Do you seriously and honestly tell me that such a man should go free? Truth now.’

  ‘What’s truth,’ I said, ‘except a universal error?’

  Stok’s huge hand leaned across the table and tapped my chest. ‘Shooting is too good for him,’ Stok said. The music played, ‘Safe in your arms, far from alarms.’

  I said, ‘You’ve done your piece and said it nicely.’ I brushed his hand away. ‘You’ve made sure that I am seen talking to you at the time of this man’s arrest in a public place. You will now release me: the resulting implication being that I bought my freedom at the expense of his. My organization will write me off as unreliable.’ I nursed my hand. It was swollen now like a blue boxing glove.

  ‘Are you frightened?’ asked Stok, without delighting in it. Perhaps he was being sympathetic.

  I said, ‘I’m so afraid that the motor areas are taking over; but at least reflex actions are true to oneself, which is more than I can say for blind hatred.’ And that’s when I waved at the Guards major Nogin and set in motion the arrest of Ralph Pike.

  Daylight shall come but in vain, Tenderly pressed close to your breast, Kiss me, kiss me again.

  * * *

  *GRU: see Appendix 2.

  †NTS: see Appendix 3.

  SECTION 5

  New York

  Now he acts the Grenadier, Calling for a pot of beer.

  Where’s his money? He’s forgot: Get him gone; drunken sot.

  NURSERY RHYME

  Chapter 15

  There are three styles in cities. There are river cities—London and Paris—and waterfront cities like Chicago, Beirut and Havana; and there are island cities. Stockholm and Venice are island cities. So are Helsinki and Leningrad, and so is Manhattan that sparkled in the dust like a wet finger dipped into the caster sugar of electricity. The plane dropped a wing towards Brooklyn and the dark water of Jamaica Bay and nosed gently down the traffic pattern of Kennedy Airport.

  Kennedy Airport is the keyhole of America. You peer into it and glimpse the shiny well-oiled pieces, the bright machine-finished gleaming metal; it’s clean and safe and operates smoothly. It’s a great keyhole.

  I got off the Air India jet spitting betel nut and nursing a swollen hand. The airport was crowded with hurrying people, men in stetsons or tartan jackets, men carrying suits in bright polythene bags. I found myself hurrying too, until I realized that I had no destination: I wondered how many people around me had fallen into the same trap. A woman with all her baggage and a raucous infant in a wire buggy wheeled it over my foot, and a woman in a yellow overall rushed out of a shop yelling, ‘Did you just buy a Scrabble game?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You forgot your instructions,’ she said. ‘They didn’t enclose the instructions.’

  The loudspeaker was calling, ‘Skycap to the information centre.’

  The woman in the yellow overall said, ‘It’s not like you didn’t pay for it. A Scrabble game is complicated.’

  ‘I didn’t buy it,’ I said. A lady with a lot of packages marked ‘Shannon duty-free shop’ said, ‘I’d just love chicken-burger and French fries. I haven’t had real good French fries since I left San Francisco.’

  The woman with the Scrabble game rules waved them in the air. ‘Unless you know how to use it,’ she sighed, ‘a Scrabble game is just a boxful of junk.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I turned away from her. ‘It’s not like you didn’t pay for it,’ she said again.

  The lady with the duty-free packages said, ‘Not even in Paris. Not real good French fries.’

  A man in an Air India uniform said, ‘Are you Mr Dempsey? Air India passenger?’ A transistor radio was playing so loud that he had to shout. I nodded. He looked at my passport, then handed over a large envelope. Inside there was three hundred dollars in bills, two dollars in small change sealed into a plastic bag labelled ‘small money’, and a thick bundle of political literature. One pamphlet said that eighty per cent of all US psychiatrists were Russian, educated in Russia and paid by the Communists to indoctrinate Americans. As a first step they tend to make sexual attacks on their female patients. Another booklet said that the mental health programme was a Communist-Jewish conspiracy to brainwash the USA. Two booklets said that the President of the USA was a Communist and suggested that I should ‘…buy a gun now and form a secret minuteman team’. The last thing was a bright blue bumper-sticker, ‘Are you a Commie without knowing it?’ I stuffed the whole wad back into the envelope and phoned the Brain. The metallic voice said, ‘No instructions. Call tomorrow at this same time. Have you read the literature? Record your reply then ring off.’

  ‘I read it,’ I said. It was all very well for Dawlish to tell me to take orders from the Brain, he didn’t have to obey them.

  I threw my baggage into a battered cab. ‘Washington Square,’ I said.

  Tunnel or bridge?’ said the driver. ‘I always ask ’em. Tunnel or bridge?’

  ‘Bridge,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep the East River where we can see it.’

  ‘You bet,’ said the driver. ‘Six bucks.’

  ‘Could we find a doctor somewhere on the way in?’ I asked him. ‘I think I’ve got a broken finger.’

  ‘You’re British aintcha, fella, well I’ll tell ya sumpin. Just one thing dough don’t buy ya in this town, fella; total silence. Know what I mean? Total silence.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘Total silence.’

  I joined the cast of the relentless 3D movie that calls itself Manhattan, where it’s always night and they keep the lights on to prove it. I prefer to arrive in New York at night, to lower myself into the city gradually, like getting into a bathful of very hot water. The rusty taxi-cab clattered down the spine of the city and the driver told me what was wrong with Cuba, and we went past the silent skyscrapers, kosher pizzerias, glass-fronted banks, bagel factories, Polish gymnasiums with belt-vibrators for rent, pharmacies selling love-potions and roach-killers, and all-night supermarkets where frail young men were buying canned rattlesnake. New York, New York; where the enterprise is free if nothing else is.

  From my hotel at the foot of Fifth Avenue I made short forays into the neon between soaking my cuts, counting my abrasions and nursing anxiety to sleep. On the third night in New York I settled down to watch one of those TV programmes where relaxed, informal chatter had been perfected by hours of intensive rehearsal. Outside I could hear rain falling upon the fire-escape and bouncing back against the window. I closed the window tight and turned up the heat.

  I seemed to have spent most of my life in hotel rooms where room service wanted money in advance and the roller towels were fixed with a padlock. Now I had graduated to the Birmingham-rug and Dufy-print circuit, but I wondered what I had sacrificed to do it. I had few friends. I stayed well clear of the sort
of people who thought I had a dead-end job in the Civil Service, and those who knew what the job was stayed clear of me. I poured myself a drink.

  On the TV a man in an open convertible was saying, ‘It’s sunny and hot here in Florida. Why not fly down tonight? You can take twenty-four months to pay.’ My broken finger hurt like hell. I soaked it in hot water and antiseptic and I drank a little more whisky. By the time the phone rang I was well beneath the label.

  ‘Stage Delicatessen,’ the voice on the phone said. ‘Eight three four, seventh. Immediate. Secure. Are you waiting to go in?’ I wondered what would happen if I ignored the call or pretended it wasn’t me, but I had a strong feeling that they knew it was me. I had a feeling that if I had been somewhere in the midst of a mob at Madison Square Garden they would have still got that metallic voice to talk to me. So I put my head under a cold shower and climbed into my raincoat and the doorman whistled up a cab for the Stage Delicatessen. The schlock-shops were afire with sale signs and smiling suckers, and the cops were buttoned tight and growling. A man in a blue poplin raincoat was standing outside the Delicatessen waving a bundle of show-biz newspapers. He ignored the code introduction.

  ‘OK slim,’ he said as I arrived. ‘Let’s go.’

  I said, ‘I’m going nowhere till I’ve had a hot pastrami sandwich.’ We crowded into a mêlée like the Eton Wall Game. We both had a sandwich, the man in the blue raincoat saying ‘We’d better make it snappy’ between every bite. Waiting for us was a black Ford Falcon with a DPL (diplomats’) licence plate. We got in and the Negro driver gunned it away without a word. He passed Columbus Circle. Blue raincoat buried himself into an article headlined ‘Bliz Boffs Borscht Biz’ and chewed on a toothpick. The car radio was saying, ‘…New Jersey Turnpike traffic moderate, Lincoln Tunnel, heavy. Route twenty-two moderate, Holland Tunnel moderate. Folks this is the time of year to think about buying a new car…’ The driver tuned to another station.