Billion-Dollar Brain

by Len Deighton

  ‘No,’ said Harvey.

  ‘It makes me feel terrible. Embarrassed, Harvey: that’s how it makes me feel.’

  Harvey screwed up his eyes and stared at her. ‘You know something, honey?’ he said. ‘Drinking makes you very beautiful.’

  ‘I haven’t been drinking, Harvey,’ she said patiently, as if this was a dialogue they had been through many times before.

  ‘No,’ said Harvey triumphantly. ‘But I have.’

  ‘If your marriage means nothing to you, Harvey,’ she said, ‘then your self-respect should. I’ll be ready to go home in fifteen minutes.’ Then she swept away, skilfully rustling her long dress for maximum effect.

  ‘My wife,’ said Harvey in explanation.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘One of these days I’ll wire up her electric toothbrush…’ He stopped. It was a joke, I suppose, but he didn’t grin.

  ‘She spies on me. Do you know that? My own wife spies on me. To hear her talk you’d think I was the hired help. To hear her talk you’d think that guy Midwinter was the right hand of God.’

  ‘That’s what you’d think if you hear anyone around here talk about Midwinter.’

  ‘Right. These punks think he’s MacArthur, George Washington, Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie all rolled into one.’

  ‘But you don’t?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I think he’s a great man. Seriously. A really great man and a powerful man. Midwinter will never be the President of the United States but he will be close to the President. When the forces of conservatism take control of this country then Midwinter will be the power behind the throne…and man I do mean the throne.’ Harvey smiled. ‘But he doesn’t trust anyone. He doesn’t trust anyone.’

  ‘That’s a common failing among people in our business.’

  ‘Aw, but this guy taps phones, intercepts mail, checks up on friends and relatives. He even puts agents in to spy on his own staff. That’s pretty crummy, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘All I’d say is, why are you so sure that this balcony isn’t bugged?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’m too drunk to give a good goddamn is all.’ Harvey suddenly thought of something else. ‘Tell me something, you bastard,’ he said. ‘Why did you change over the eggs in that package?’

  ‘I told you, Harvey, the package of eggs was stolen from my baggage on the way to London Airport.’

  ‘Tell me about that again.’

  ‘I already told you. It was the same man who followed me from the doctor’s surgery. Full face. Black hornrimmed spectacles. Medium height.’

  Harvey said, ‘You said projecting ears, bad teeth, long hair, sounded like an Englishman who wanted to be taken for a Yank, bad breath. You gave me a long description.’

  ‘That’s right, the horn-rimmed spectacles were adapted to make his ears project. He was an American who put flat Cockney vowel-sounds into his American accent to sound like an Englishman assuming an American accent. He used a hair-piece to cover a bald patch on top of his head. (It didn’t come near the hair line so if he hadn’t kept tapping it no one would have noticed it.) He blacked out a couple of his front teeth with stage cosmetics and made his breath smell with chemical—oldest trick in the business to prevent people looking you in the face close to. He stole the baggage after it had been through customs.’ I paused.

  Harvey was grinning. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was me.’

  I went on. ‘I’d say he was a transit airline passenger on a refuelling stop who got off his aeroplane, changed into a pair of overalls in the toilet, drove off with a van-load of baggage, took what he wanted and was back on his plane well within the time his flight was called, to continue his journey without even going through customs. Not bad for someone who had just barn-stormed around after leaving college.’

  Harvey laughed and said, ‘Elevator shoes, contact lenses to change the eye colour, dirtied fingernails and a trace of colouring on the lips to make the face seem pale. You forgot all those.’

  Harvey stared down at his toes and watched them while they did a little dance.

  ‘You think you are a pretty smart bastard, don’t you?’ Harvey said. He was still looking down and still doing a little dance. I didn’t answer. ‘A pretty smart bastard.’ Harvey split the words into syllables and made each syllable a step in his dance, then he changed the accents round and danced the same remark again. He zinged an end to his dance with one foot high in the air. He turned his face to me. ‘You made sure your prediction about Pike came out OK, didn’t you? You’re like these dames who see two knives crossed on the table, then start a row to prove it’s a bad sign. Pike gets burned. You have a nice chat with Stok?’

  I think Harvey wanted me to hit him. Whether he wanted to be hurt and suffer, or an excuse to hit me back, I don’t know, but I’m sure he wanted me to hit him.

  Harvey said, ‘You were having a nice chat about Turgenev. You knew that Stok wouldn’t harm you. As far as he’s concerned you are a representative of the UK Government. If he cracks down on you, London would crack down on all the fringe people who go in and out of the Soviet network there. No; providing you are reasonably discreet you are safe anywhere in Russia. That’s what makes me sick: you laughing and chatting with Stok while our boy was sitting there petrified.’

  I said, ‘Stok’s OK compared with some of the people I work with, let alone compared with the people I work against. Stok knows which side he’s on. So do I. That’s why we can talk.’

  ‘Stok is a bloodthirsty ruthless bastard.’

  ‘So are we all,’ I said. ‘Ruthless and doomed.’

  ‘Maybe you should have walked over to Pike and told him that. Half of us are ruthless and the other half are doomed. You should have told Pike which half he belonged to.’

  ‘We are all half ruthless and all half doomed.’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ said Harvey, ‘or you wouldn’t be so corny.’

  The balcony door was open. I looked through it to see why the music had stopped. General Midwinter was in front of the band smiling benignly at the closely packed guests and holding his gloved hand high as if he was auctioning it. The guests were silenced.

  ‘We interrupt your pleasure for a brief prayer,’ said Midwinter; he bowed his head and so did everyone.

  ‘Dear Heavenly Father,’ Midwinter intoned. ‘Help us to awaken our beloved country to its great danger. Help us to cleanse it and hold it safe from the Godless forces of Communism that surround it and threaten it from within. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.’ The guests said ‘Amen’.

  I looked at Harvey, but he was staring at his feet which twitched for another little dance. I eased my way through the crowds that were watching Midwinter climb down from the platform. Mercy Newbegin pushed past me.

  ‘How does Harvey know what I said to General Midwinter?’ she asked me as she passed.

  I shrugged. How the hell did he know what I’d said to Colonel Stok?

  Chapter 16

  Next morning my phone rang at nine forty-five. I had a headache. A voice that called me ‘old boy’ suggested that I ‘toddle over the road and meet me in Greenwich Village at the corner of Bleeker Street and MacDougal. I’ll be wearing a green tweed overcoat and a brown felt hat.’

  I’ll bet, I thought, with a small Union Jack flying from the crown of it. So I walked across Washington Square and along MacDougal where there are coffee houses for rich vagrants. The black chairs and marble tables were silent and empty and men in white aprons were sweeping the floors, carrying ice and emptying the garbage. Two kids were playing draughts with Coca-Cola caps on the steps of an art-jewellery studio. A dozen stray cats were asleep under a Con Edison awning and so were two winos. I stopped at the corner of Bleeker Street. It was a bright cold day with a freezing wind blowing on the cross-town streets. There was no sign of anyone resembling the tweedy man that phoned. Outside Perazzo’s Funeral Church there was an old-style funeral. There were six black Fleetwoods with Negro chauffeurs, and flower arrangements as big as al
lotments. Three men in black overcoats and dark glasses were fussing around the long cars and a small crowd had gathered to weep and wonder. I watched the first of the Fleetwoods roar away with headlights shining and felt a nudge in the kidneys and heard a soft voice.

  ‘Don’t turn round, old fruit. No point in both of us knowing what I look like. Billet-doux from the old firm. Lots of luck and all that, don’t you know.’ He paused. ‘Fascinating people, eh? Carries great status a fine funeral, you know.’

  I said, ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. You’ll love the Village. Fascinating. I live here. Wouldn’t live anywhere else. Love the Village. Fascinating people, eh?’ He prodded my ribs with something that turned out to be a manilla envelope.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I gripped the envelope. He moved away and I heard a murmur of protest as he trod on feet and pushed ribs to move back through the sightseers. I gave him two or three minutes to disappear, then drifted away as the last hearse disappeared. A sign on the wall said, ‘Live and trade in the Village’. I walked past it and headed north to have breakfast.

  In Washington Square a camera crew were measuring the width of the arch and being important. It was one of those days when police academy cadets were controlling the traffic and miles of brightly coloured taxi-cabs slithered very slowly up the avenue of graceful skyscrapers like banded snakes between jungle trees. On Eighth Street the wind was lifting discarded newspapers like wounded pigeons. The sky was low and pregnant with rain which would fall as soon as the wind dropped. Even now the air was damp with the threat of it.

  I went into the Cookery coffee shop. I got a seat near the window and ordered Canadian bacon and a pot of coffee. At the next table a group of kids in white cricket pullovers and sneakers were arguing about who ordered two lots of French toast. A middle-aged woman passed along the street on roller skates, and across the road a fat man was fixing a notice, ‘Only a few days to go. Accountant will do your tax forms $5.’ He felt the first dabs of rain, and held out his palm to inspect the circles of water as though they might be gold or a map of the city.

  I opened the manilla envelope that the Englishman had given me. There were four letters addressed to me at my London flat. Jean had opened them. One was the Military Historical Society Bulletin, two were receipted bills for gas and phone, Jean had paid them. The fourth was a letter from the landlord about making too much noise late at night. Me, that is, not my landlord. There was also a note from Jean.

  The note from Jean said:

  Dawlish passed the January expenses OK so you were right after all, you clever thing. Your washing-up lady left a message that she was three weeks in arrears and she was going to see her brother in Brighton—whatever that means—anyway I took it out of the petty cash and paid her. You forgot to stop the milk. Mr Dawlish says I should tell you that the Pike brothers are both Latvians but hold British passports. They have been members of some very dodgy Latvian old-pals club but nothing else is known. No form etc. of course.

  They are a very clever family the Pikes, they all hold medical qualifications, but Ralph Pike (the younger one, who took a trip you know where) has biochemical qualifications too. He was probably sent there to take a look at some local biochemical machines because even a quick glance would be very revealing to an expert, and Ralph Pike is an expert. We are sure this end that the Pikes wouldn’t be a party to exporting the virus to (or in even the slightest way aiding) the place you’ve just been. On the contrary, politically they are as far right as it’s possible to go without falling off the edge.

  I can’t do much to answer your queries about Kaarna. He knew that there was a group of people interested in selling a stolen virus. He decided that they were British (for no reason that we yet know). He had a rudimentary training in science and probably offered to look at the virus and give an opinion as to its value in order to gain information. That’s why he was in a white jacket (I remember that you said he looked like a phoney dentist in a toothpaste ad). The post mortem now states quite categorically that he was not killed by any sort of missile (the open window must have been a red herring). He was killed by a needle-like instrument (punctured wound the report says, but it was four and a quarter inches deep) going into his kidney, renal artery, peritoneum and loop of jejunem. This seems to suggest an assailant unknown to him coming up behind him with a weapon in the right hand, holding him round the neck with the left arm (fabric traces in the teeth) to prevent him shouting. ‘A skilful piece of placing,’ the Helsinki path. lab. said. We haven’t mentioned eggs to the Central Criminal Police in Helsinki but the Security Police are getting interested and we may have to give them at least some explanation of the raw egg on Kaarna’s body. Did you get your clean laundry? I told them it was urgent, but I don’t think your van does you on Tuesdays. I divided some of those files into sub-files and we have got rid of quite a bit of it now so you needn’t be frightened of coming back to weekend working. Mr Dawlish told me to give you a summary of the virus. (It’s enclosed.) It’s a bit fourth-form biology, but then you were a little fourth-form biology yourself the last time I saw you. All my love darling,

  JEAN

  A blue flimsy attached to the letter said,

  This is to tell you about those raw eggs on Kaarna and in the box from Pike. Viruses have a regular geometric shape. They are bigger than protein molecules but smaller than bacteria. They cause polio, smallpox, foot-and-mouth, ’flu, cattle diseases, plant diseases, sore throats and cancer. New ones are discovered every week. They attack man, plants, bacteria and animals. Some viruses attack bacteria, others attack body cells. They live in a host cell which they invade. It is a medical problem to attack the virus without attacking the normal cells. When the virus takes over a cell it takes over the master-plan or system of instruction of that cell and the cell is thereafter directed to reproduce itself with the virus already in command.

  Transport of the virus

  The virus lives at body heat—37º C.—and can be reared in a fertile hen’s egg. Candle the egg to see which way it is sitting, trepan the egg, inject virus into the yolk via the hyaline membrane (tough white skin), replace shell section.

  The particular virus in which we are interested is an anti-virus virus. It enters the body by droplet infection—e.g. nasal passage—stimulates the reticulo-endothelial system to produce an amino-acid complex like interferon. This attacks the growth of other viruses by attacking the foreign nucleic acid before it gets into the cell.

  I hope this is of some use to you. It took me four hours at a boffin-house and lasted through two sherries, three bottles of wine, a little brandy and a proposal (of marriage). Bring some records. How about Coltrane, Kirk & Rollins?

  JEAN

  I sipped my coffee. I wondered whether they were using my secretary Jean to do the work of other departments. I wondered if they passed that Trade Union (positive vetting) File over to someone else or whether they were keeping it for my return. None of those public-school boys would be able to do that job with the instinct that I would be able to bring to it. Yet some of the people concerned would be people I was at school with; and in any case it would call upon questions and allegiances that I had continuously pushed into the rear recesses of my mind. I dreaded that file landing on my desk, and yet to make clear how much I wished to avoid it would…I was deep into a descending spiral when I heard a tap at the window against which I was sitting. It was pouring with rain now, but standing right there on the shiny Eighth Street pavement was Signe. She was standing there crammed full of enthusiasm and energy like a bomb on a short fuse. Her skin was tanned and freckled like a brown farm egg. When she smiled that big smile with her slightly too big mouth and too many very white teeth it was as if the explosion was starting to blow the top of her head off. Rain was bouncing off the street like corn-stubble and Signe’s hair was plastered against her head like a pot of mustard that someone had poured over her. She wore a man’s yellow oilskin coat that was many sizes to
o big for her and the rain made it even shinier, flashing there like a neon sign advertising gold.

  She tapped on the glass again. Several customers looked at Signe and made soft noises of approval. I beckoned her to come in and have coffee, but she shook her head and tapped on the glass again and mouthed the words, ‘I want you,’ like a trapped goldfish.

  I left two dollars and a half-eaten bacon sandwich on the table and walked out into the street. Signe wrapped her yellow oilskin arms around my neck and planted a kiss on me. Her sharp nose was icy cold and her face wet with rain. She was bubbling over with words and explanations and kept pumping my arm and staring at my face as though she couldn’t believe it was really me.

  She said, ‘Did you go to General Midwinter’s fancy-dress party last night? Was it wonderful? Don’t tell me if it was, I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to go. Did you see General Midwinter? Isn’t he marvellous? Did you see Harvey? We’re finished, Harvey and me. Harvey and I. His wife was there, wasn’t she? Did they have champagne? I love champagne. Will you buy champagne if I cook dinner tonight? Just the two of us. Don’t you adore that house? Did you dance? Was the band good? What was Mercy Newbegin wearing? Was everyone in costume? What time did it finish? Did they have oysters? I adore oysters. I’ll get oysters for us tonight. Oysters and champagne. Isn’t Mercy Newbegin awful? Did you get to speaking with her? Isn’t she awful? What was she wearing? What sort of shoes? Did they dance the Paul Jones? I hate all women. Except two that you don’t know. I didn’t go because Harvey and I are through. And also I didn’t want to see that Mercy Newbegin. Also I didn’t have any proper shoes.’ She stopped. She looked up at me and said, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. You don’t hate me, do you?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Well, I’m always weeping on your shoulder. Men don’t like that. Especially hearing about other men. It’s natural. I wouldn’t want you to tell me about your love affairs.’