by Len Deighton
‘And now the crunch has come?’ I asked.
‘Could be,’ said Bret.
‘Or it could simply be the prelude for another demand for money,’ said Silas.
‘It’s a pretty fancy one,’ said Bret. ‘A pretty damn complicated way of getting a raise in pay. No, I think he wants out. I think he really wants out this time.’
‘What does he do with all this money?’ I asked.
‘We’ve never discovered,’ said Bret.
‘We’ve never been allowed to try,’ said Cruyer bitterly. ‘Each time we prepare a plan, it’s vetoed by someone at the top.’
‘Take it easy, Dicky,’ said Bret in that kind and conciliatory tone a man can employ when he knows he’s the boss. ‘No point in upsetting a darn good source just in order to find he’s got a mistress stowed away somewhere or that he likes to pile his dough into some numbered account in Switzerland.’
It was of course Silas who decided exactly how much it was safe to confide to me. ‘Let’s just say we pay it into a Munich bank to be credited to a publishing house that never publishes anything,’ said Silas. If I was going over the wire, they’d make sure I knew only what they wanted me to know. That was the normal procedure; we all knew it.
‘Hell, he wants a chance to spend his pay,’ I said. ‘Nothing wrong with that, is there?’
Silas turned to me with that spiteful look in his eye and said, ‘Nothing wrong with that, unless you need the stuff he’s sending us. Then there’s everything wrong with it, Bernard. Everything wrong with it!’ He cleared the pocket and sent the ball down the table with such violence that it rebounded all the way back to him. There was a cruel determination in him; I’d glimpsed it more than once.
‘Okay, so you’re trying to prove that I’m the only one who can go and talk to him,’ I said. ‘I guess that’s what this friendly little game is all about. Or am I mistaken?’ I fixed Silas with my stare and he smiled ruefully.
‘You’re not the right person,’ said Bret unconvincingly. No one else spoke. They all knew I was the right person. This damn get-together was designed to show me the decision was unanimous. Dicky Cruyer touched his lips with the wet end of his cigar but did not put it into his mouth. Bret said, ‘It would be like sending in the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards playing “Rule, Britannia!”. Brahms Four will be terrified, and rightly so. You’ll have a tail from the moment you go over.’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Cruyer. They were talking about me as if I were not present; I had the feeling that this was the sort of discussion that would take place if I went into the bag, or got myself killed. ‘Bernard knows his way about over there. And he doesn’t have to be there very long – just a talk with him so that we know what’s on his mind. And show him how important it is for him to stay in position for a couple of years.’
‘What about you, Bernard?’ Silas asked me. ‘You haven’t said much about it.’
‘It sounds as if someone will have to go,’ I said. ‘And someone he knows would have a better chance of getting a straight answer.’
‘And,’ said Bret apologetically, ‘there won’t be much time…Is that what you mean?’
Cruyer said, ‘We sent a courier over by tour bus last month. He took the regular tourist bus over there and came back as easy as falling off a log.’
‘Do they let the tourists from West Berlin get off the bus nowadays?’ asked Silas.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Cruyer, smiling cheerfully. ‘Things have changed since your day, Silas. They all visit the Red Army memorial. They even stop off for cakes and coffee – the DDR desperately needs Westmarks. Another good place for a meeting is the Pergamon Museum. Tour buses from the West go there too.’
‘What do you think, Bernard?’ said Bret. He fidgeted with his signet ring and stared at the table as if interested in nothing but Cruyer’s tricky corner shot.
I found their sort of conjecture exasperating. It was the stuff of which long memos are made, the paperwork under which the Department is buried. I said, ‘What’s the use of my guessing? Everything depends upon knowing what he is doing. He’s not a peasant, he’s a scholarly old man with an important and interesting job. We need to know whether he’s still got a happy marriage, with good friends who make speeches at the birth celebrations of his grandchildren. Or has he become a miserable old loner, at odds with the world and needing Western-style medical care…Or maybe he’s just discovered what it’s like to be in love with a shapely eighteen-year-old nymphomaniac.’
Bret gave a short laugh and said, ‘Two first-class tickets to Rio, and don’t spare the champagne.’
‘Unless the shapely one is working for the KGB,’ I said.
Bret stared at me impassively. ‘What would be the best way of “depositing” someone for this sort of job, Bernard?’
‘I certainly wouldn’t discuss with you guys the way I’d choose to go over there, except to say I wouldn’t want any arrangements made from this end. No documents, no preparations, no emergency link, no local backup – nothing at all. I’d want to do it myself.’ It was not the sort of private enterprise that the Department liked to encourage. I was expecting vociferous objections to this proposal, but none came.
‘Quite right too,’ said Silas.
‘And I haven’t agreed to go,’ I reminded them.
‘We leave it to you,’ said Silas. The others, their faces only dimly seen in the gloom beyond the brightly lit table, nodded. Cruyer’s hands, very white in the glare, crawled across the table like two giant spiders. He played the shot and missed. His mind wasn’t on the game; neither was mine.
Silas pulled a face at Cruyer’s missed stroke and sipped his port. ‘Bernard,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’d better –’ He stopped mid-sentence. Mrs Porter had entered the room quietly. She was holding a cut-glass tumbler and a cloth. Silas looked up to meet her eyes.
‘The phone, sir,’ she said. ‘It’s the call from London.’
She didn’t say who was calling from London because she took it for granted that Silas would know. In fact we all knew, or guessed, that it was someone urgently interested in how the discussion had gone. Silas rubbed his face, looked at me, and said, ‘Bernard…help yourself to another brandy if you fancy it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, but I had the feeling that Silas had been about to say something quite different.
Weekends with Uncle Silas always followed the same pattern: an informal Saturday lunch, a game of billiards or bridge until teatime, and a dress-up dinner. There were fourteen people for dinner that Saturday evening: us, the Cruyers, Rensselaer and his girlfriend, Fiona’s sister Tessa – her husband away – to partner Uncle Silas, an American couple named Johnson, who were in England buying antique furniture for their shop in Philadelphia, a young trendy architect, who converted cottages into ‘dream houses’ and was making enough money at it to support a noisy new wife and a noisy old Ferrari, and a red-nosed local farmer, who spoke only twice the whole evening, and then only to ask his frizzy-haired wife to pass the wine.
‘It was all right for you,’ said Fiona petulantly when we were in the little garret room preparing for bed that night. ‘I was sitting next to Dicky Cruyer. He only wants to talk about that beastly boat. He’s going to France in it next month, he says.’
‘Dicky doesn’t know a mainsail from a marlin-spike. He’ll kill himself.’
‘Don’t say that, darling,’ said Fiona. ‘My sister Tessa is going too. And so is Ricky, that gorgeous young architect, and Colette, his amusing wife.’ There was a touch of acid in her voice; she wasn’t too keen on them. And she was still angry at being shut out of our conference in the billiards room.
‘It must be a bloody big boat,’ I said.
‘It will sleep six…eight if you’re all friendly, Daphne told me. She’s not going. She gets seasick.’
I looked at her quizzically. ‘Is your sister having an affair with Dicky Cruyer?’
‘How clever you are,’ said Fiona in a voice from which any trace of adm
iration had been carefully eliminated. ‘But you are behind the times, darling. She’s fallen for someone much older, she told me.’
‘She’s a bitch.’
‘Most men find her attractive,’ said Fiona. For some reason Fiona got a secret satisfaction from hearing me condemn her sister, and was keen to provoke more of the same.
‘I thought she was reconciled with her own husband.’
‘It was a trial,’ said Fiona.
‘I’ll bet it was,’ I agreed. ‘Especially for George.’
‘You were sitting next to the antique lady – was she amusing?’
‘A lady in the antique business.’ I corrected her description, and she smiled. ‘She told me to beware of dressers, they are likely to have modern tops and antique bottoms.’
‘How bizarre!’ said Fiona. She giggled. ‘Where can I find one?’
‘Right here,’ I said, and jumped into bed with her. ‘Give me that damned hot-water bottle.’
‘There’s no hot-water bottle. That’s me! Oh, your hands are freezing.’
I was awakened by one of the farm dogs barking, and then from somewhere across the river there came the echoing response of some other dog on some other farm. I opened my eyes to see the time and found the bedside light on. It was four o’clock in the morning. Fiona was in her dressing gown drinking tea. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It was the dog.’
‘I can never sleep properly away from home. I went downstairs and made tea. I brought up an extra cup – would you like some?’
‘Just half a cup. Have you been awake long?’
‘I thought I heard someone go downstairs. It’s a creepy old house, isn’t it? There’s a biscuit if you want it.’ I took just the tea and sipped some. Fiona said, ‘Did you promise to go? Berlin – did you promise?’ It was as if she felt my decision would reveal how important she was to me compared with my job.
I shook my head.
‘But that’s what your billiards game was all about? I guessed so. Silas was so adamant about not having any of us in there. Sometimes I wonder if he realizes that I’m senior staff now.’
‘They’re all worried about the Brahms Four business.’
‘But why send you? What reason did they give?’
‘Who else could go? Silas?’ I told her the essence of the conversation that had taken place in the billiards room. The dogs began barking again. From downstairs I heard a door closing and then Silas trying to quieten the dogs. His voice was hoarse and he spoke to them in the same way he spoke to Billy and Sally.
‘I saw the memo that Rensselaer sent to the D-G,’ Fiona said, speaking more quietly now as if frightened that we might be overheard. ‘Five pages. I took it back to my office and read it through.’ I looked at her in surprise. Fiona was not the sort of person who disobeyed the regulations so flagrantly. ‘I had to know,’ she added.
I drank my tea and said nothing. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know what Rensselaer and Dicky Cruyer had in store for me.
‘Brahms Four might have gone crazy,’ she said finally. ‘Bret and Dicky both suggest that as a real possibility.’ She waited while the words took effect. ‘They think he might have had some kind of mental breakdown. That’s why they are worried. There’s simply no telling what he might do.’
‘Is that what it said in the memo?’ I laughed. ‘That’s just Bret and Dicky covering their asses.’
‘Dicky suggested that they let some high-powered medical people attempt a diagnosis on the basis of Brahms Four’s reports but Bret squashed that.’
‘It sounds just like one of Cruyer’s bright ideas,’ I said. ‘Let the headshrinkers into a meeting and we’ll be the front page of next week’s Sunday newspapers’ review section, complete with misquotes, misspellings and bits written “by our own correspondents”. Thank Christ Bret killed that one. What form does the Brahms Four madness take?’
‘The usual sort of paranoia: enemies round every corner, no one he can trust. Can he have a full list of everyone with access to his reports? Do we know there are top-level leaks of everything he sends us? The usual sort of loony stuff that people imagine when they’re going round the bend.’
I nodded. Fiona didn’t have the faintest idea of what an agent’s life was like. Dicky and Bret had no idea either. None of these desk bastards knew. My father used to say, ‘Eternal paranoia is the price of liberty. Vigilance is not enough.’
‘Maybe Brahms Four is right,’ I said. ‘Maybe there are enemies round every corner over there.’ I remembered Cruyer telling me the way the Department helped Brahms Four to ingratiate himself with the regime. He must have made a lot of enemies. ‘Maybe he’s not so loony.’
‘And top-level security leaks too?’ Fiona said.
‘It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’
‘Brahms Four asked for you. Did they tell you that?’
‘No.’ I concealed my surprise. So that was at the back of all their anxiety in the billiards room.
‘He doesn’t want any more contact with his regular Control. He’s told them he’ll deal with no one but you.’
‘I’ll bet that finally convinced the D-G that he was crazy.’ I put the empty teacup on the side table and switched out my bedside light. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep,’ I told her. ‘I wish I could manage on five hours a night like you, but I need a lot of sack time.’
‘You won’t go, will you? Promise you won’t.’
I grunted and buried my face in the pillow. I always sleep face downwards; it stays dark longer that way.
5
On Monday afternoon I was in Bret Rensselaer’s office. It was on the top floor not far from the suite the D-G occupied. All the top-floor offices were decorated to the personal taste of the occupants; it was one of the perks of seniority. Bret’s room was ‘modern’, with glass and chrome and grey carpet. It was hard, austere and colourless, a habitat just right for Bret, with his dark worsted Savile Row suit and the crisp white shirt and club tie, and his fair hair that was going white, and the smile that seemed shy and fleeting but was really the reflex action that marked his indifference.
The nod, the smile, and the finger pointed at the black leather chesterfield did not interrupt the conversation he was having on his white phone. I sat down and waited for him to finish telling a caller that there was no chance of them meeting for lunch that day, next day, or any day in the future.
‘Are you a poker player, Bernard?’ he said even while he was putting the phone down.
‘Only for matchsticks,’ I replied cautiously.
‘Ever wonder what will happen to you when you retire?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘No plans to buy a bar in Málaga, or a market garden in Sussex?’
‘Is that what you’re planning?’ I said.
Bret smiled. He was rich, very rich. The idea of him working a market garden in Sussex was hilarious. As for Málaga and its plebeian diversions, he’d divert the plane rather than enter its air space. ‘I guess your wife has money,’ said Rensselaer. He paused. ‘But I’d say you’re the type of inverted snob who wouldn’t want to use any of it.’
‘Would that make me an inverted snob?’
‘If you were smart enough to invest her dough and double it, you’d do no one any harm. Right?’
‘In the evenings, you mean? Or would that be instead of working here?’
‘Every time I ask you questions, I find you asking me questions.’
‘I didn’t know I was being questioned,’ I said. ‘Am I being vetted?’
‘In this business it does no harm to flip the pages of someone’s bank account from time to time,’ said Rensselaer.
‘You’ll find only moths in mine,’ I said.
‘No family money?’
‘Family money? I was thirty years old before I got a nanny.’
‘People like you who’ve worked in the field always have money and securities stashed away. I’ll bet you’ve got numbered bank accounts in a dozen town
s.’
‘What would I put into them, luncheon vouchers?’
‘Goodwill,’ he said ‘Goodwill. Until the time comes.’ He picked up the short memo I’d sent him about Werner Volkmann’s import-export business. So that was it. He was wondering if I was sharing the profit in Werner’s business.
‘Volkmann is not making enough dough to pay handsome kickbacks, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ I said.
‘But you want the Department to bankroll him?’ He was still standing behind his desk; he liked being on his feet, moving about like a boxer, shifting his weight and twisting his body as if avoiding imaginary blows.
‘You’d better get yourself some new bifocals,’ I said. ‘There’s no suggestion that the Department give him a penny.’
Bret smiled. When he got tired of playing the shy Mr Nice Guy, he’d suddenly go for confrontation, accusation and insult. But at least he was unlikely to go behind your back. ‘Maybe I read it hurriedly. What the hell is forfaiting anyway?’
Bret was like those High Court judges who lean over and ask what is a male chauvinist, or a mainframe computer. They know what they think these things are, but they want them defined by mutual agreement and written into the court record.
‘Volkmann raises cash for West German companies so they can be paid promptly after exporting goods to East Germany.’
‘How does he do that?’ said Bret, looking down and fiddling with some papers on his desk.
‘There’s a hell of a lot of complicated paperwork,’ I said. ‘But the essential part of it is that they send details of the shipment and the prices to an East German bank. They sign them and rubber-stamp them and agree that it’s all okay with the East German importers. They also agree on the dates of the payments. Volkmann goes to a bank, or a syndicate of banks, or any other source of cash in the West, and uses that “aval” to discount the cash that pays for the goods.’