Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  ‘George is being such a fool, Bernard. I mean, he knows that I’ve been tempted by other men.’

  She paused. ‘Ummm,’ I said. I nodded and admired her choice of words. Only a woman could describe such a long succession of reckless love affairs as being tempted, without any clear admission that she’d submitted to the temptations.

  ‘I didn’t go to great trouble to hide it from him. You know that, Bernard. So he’s left it a bit late, hasn’t he? You’d have thought he would have said something before deciding to go off with other women. It’s not like him.’

  ‘Was it one particular relationship that might have made George angry?’

  ‘Oh, Bernard,’ she said. Her voice was loud, louder than she intended perhaps, for she looked round, wondering if the nanny had heard but the nanny’s room was at the top of the house next to the children. ‘Bernard, really. You are exasperating.’ She drank. ‘That’s good,’ she said.

  I hated to annoy anyone without understanding why. ‘What have I done, Tessa?’ I asked.

  ‘Surely it’s obvious. Even to a thick-headed idiot like you it must be evident.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Evident that I adore you, Bernard. It’s you that George is always making such a fuss about.’

  ‘But we’ve…I mean I never.’

  She gave a short, sardonic chuckle. ‘You’ve gone red, darling. I didn’t know I could make you blush. You’re always so damned cool. That’s what makes you so adorable.’

  ‘Now stop all this nonsense, Tessa. What is it all about?’

  ‘It’s George. He’s convinced that we’re having a red-hot love affair, and nothing I tell him makes any difference.’

  ‘Oh, really. I’ll have to talk to him.’

  ‘I wish you luck, darling. He takes no notice of anything I tell him.’

  ‘And he knows you’re here now?’

  ‘Well, of course he does. That’s what really got him steamed up. He called me some horrible names, Bernard. If you were really my lover you’d go round there and punch him on the nose. I told him that.’

  ‘You told him what?’

  ‘I said, if Bernard was really my lover he’d come round here and give you a good thrashing.’

  ‘Oh my God, Tessa. Whatever made you say that?’

  ‘I was angry.’ She laughed as she remembered the scene with her husband. But I didn’t join in the laughter. ‘I told him you had lots of women. I told him you don’t need me.’

  ‘I haven’t got lots of women.’ I didn’t want her spreading such stories. ‘I haven’t got any women, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Now don’t overdo it, Bernard. No one expects you to live the life of a hermit. And that Secret de Vénus in the bathroom is not something you got from the supermarket to make you smell lovely.’

  ‘Secret of what?’

  ‘Bath oil from Weil of Paris. It costs an absolute fortune and I know Fi never used it.’

  ‘I let someone from the office change here.’

  ‘Gorgeous Gloria. I know all about her from Daphné Cruyer. She left it here, did she? Her mind was on other things in store. You are a quiet one, Bernard. How many others are there?’

  My inclination was to rebut her charges but, knowing that was exactly what she wanted, I let it go. ‘Poor George,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to straighten it out.’

  ‘He won’t believe you. We may as well go straight upstairs, jump into bed, and make all his suspicions come true.’

  ‘Don’t joke about it,’ I said.

  ‘Come over here on the sofa and I’ll show you if I’m joking or not.’ She inched back the hem of her dressing gown to expose her thigh. It was a jokey gesture, the sort of antic she’d probably copied from some ancient film, but I could see she was naked under the dressing gown. I took a deep breath and devoted all my attention to the drink. That ‘sweet disorder in the dress’ made it difficult to concentrate on anything but Tessa; she was disturbingly attractive.

  I gulped my drink and got to my feet. ‘I’ll go up to the children,’ I said. ‘We’ll all have breakfast together.’

  Tessa smiled.

  ‘And I’ll talk to George. I’ll phone him this morning.’

  ‘I’m sure you have more important things to do,’ she said. She stood up too. ‘Do you want me to clear out?’

  ‘I thought you wanted to go back to George.’

  ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she said. ‘I need time to think.’

  ‘You don’t need time to think,’ I said. ‘You must either go back to George or leave him and make a clean break. You’ll both be miserable if you let things go on like this. You have to decide whether you love him or not. That’s all that really matters.’

  ‘Is it? Are you still in love with Fiona?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And I never was.’

  ‘You can’t just wipe out the past, Bernard. I know how happy Fi was when you asked her to marry you. She adored you, you both were happy. I don’t know what happened but don’t say you never loved her.’

  ‘That Fiona I knew was only part of a person, an actress who never let me see the real person. She lived a lie and I’m glad she’s gone to where she wanted to be.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter. George could say the same thing about me. He could say that I have never truly given him my real self.’

  ‘I can’t help you make up your mind, Tessa.’

  ‘Don’t kick me out, Bernard. I’ll look after the children and I’ll keep out of your way. While you’ve been away I’ve been sitting upstairs watching nanny’s television with her, and I use her little kitchen to make breakfast and we eat it in the nursery. We hardly ever come down here. I won’t be in the way when you bring people home.’

  ‘I have no plans for bringing people home, if by that you mean women.’

  ‘Are you going into the office this morning?’

  ‘Eventually,’ I said. We stood close together. Neither of us had anything to say but we didn’t want to move. We were lonely, I suppose.

  She said, ‘I can hear the bath-water running for the children. Why don’t you go and say hello to them? They will be so excited to see you.’

  ‘I’ll have to have a talk with George,’ I warned her.

  ‘But not right at this moment,’ she pleaded.

  ‘I’ll phone him when I get to the office,’ I said. ‘I hate misunderstandings.’

  When I got upstairs the children greeted me vociferously. I told them that Tessa was going to take them away to the country.

  ‘Nanny too?’ Billy asked.

  Nanny gave a shy smile. Billy was in love with his nanny I think. ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Auntie Tessa lets us drink champagne,’ said Sally. Billy glared at her because she was revealing a secret. They had never asked me about their mother. I wondered what they thought about her sudden disappearance but it seemed better to let it go until they asked questions.

  Pinned up on their board there was a coloured drawing of a red-faced man sitting on a pointed box strumming a guitar. Across the vivid blue sky it said ‘Wellcom Daddy’ in big letters. ‘Is that me?’ I said.

  ‘We copied it from a picture of Mick Jagger,’ Billy told me. ‘And then we drew your glasses on afterwards. I did the outline and Sally filled in the colours.’

  ‘And that’s a pyramid in Mexico,’ said Sally. ‘We copied it from the encyclopedia.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘Can I keep it?’

  ‘No,’ said Billy. ‘Sally wants to take it to school.’

  I went into the little room where I keep my typewriter, books and unpaid bills. I looked up ‘fink’ in my dictionary of American slang.

  fink n. 1 A company spy, secret informer or strike breaker. (Orig. Pink, contraction of Pinkerton man.)

  I wondered how Pavel Moskvin fitted to that definition and what else Paul Biedermann had been about to tell me about it.

  21

  I knew what to expect. That was why I lingered over breakfast, spent
a little extra time with the children and chose a dark suit and sober tie. Bret Rensselaer chose to see me in the number 3 conference room. It was a small top-floor room that was normally used when the top brass wanted to have a cozy chat far away from the noise of the typewriters, the smell of copying machines and the sight of the workers drinking tea from cups without saucers.

  There was a coffin-shaped table there and Bret was in the chairman’s seat at the head of it. I was at the other end. The rest of them – Dicky Cruyer and his friend Henry Tiptree, together with Frank Harrington and a man named Morgan, who was general factotum and hatchet man for the D-G – were placed so that they were subject to Bret’s authority. Quite apart from anything that might happen to me, Bret was going to stage-manage things to get maximum credit and importance. Bret was a ‘department head’ looking for a department, and there was no more dangerous animal than that stalking through the corridors of Whitehall. He was wearing a black worsted suit – only a man as trim as Bret could have chosen a fabric that would show every spot of dust and hair – and a white shirt with stiff collar and the old-fashioned doubledback cuffs that require cuff-links. Bret’s cuff-links were large and made from antique gold coins, and his blue-and-white tie was of a pattern sold only to Concorde passengers.

  ‘I’ve listened,’ said Bret. ‘You can’t say I haven’t listened. I’m not sure I’m able to understand much of it but I’ve listened to you.’ He looked at his watch and noted the time in the notebook in front of him. Bret had gone to great pains to point out to me how informal it all was; no stenographer, no recording and no signed statements. But this way was better for Bret, for there would be no record of what had been said except what Bret wrote down. ‘I’ve got a hell of a lot of questions still to ask you,’ he said. I recognized the fact that Bret was ready for any sort of showdown; ‘loaded for bear’ was Bret’s elegant phrase for it.

  I was trying to give up smoking but I reached for the silver-plated cigarette box that was a permanent feature of top-floor conference rooms, and helped myself. No one else wanted a cigarette. They didn’t want to be associated with me by thought, theory or action. I had the feeling that if I’d declared abstinence they’d all have rushed out to get drunk. I lit up and smiled and told Bret that I’d be glad to do things any way he wanted.

  There were no other smiles. Frank Harrington was fiddling with his gold wrist-watch, pushing a button to see what time it was in Timbuctoo. Henry Tiptree, having written something that was too private to say, was now showing it to Morgan. Bret seemed to have hidden away the little notepads and pencils that were always put at each place on the table. That had effectively prevented note-taking except for the freckle-faced Tiptree, who’d brought his own notepad. Dicky Cruyer was wearing his blue-denim outfit and a sea-island cotton sports shirt open enough to reveal a glimpse of gold chain. Now it was obvious that Dicky had known all along that Henry Tiptree was an Internal Security officer. I’d never forgive him for not warning me back in Mexico City when Tiptree first came sniffing around.

  Bret Rensselaer took off the big, wire-frame, speedcop-style glasses that he required for reading and said, ‘Suppose I suggested that you were determined that Stinnes would never be enrolled? Suppose I suggested that everything you’ve done from the time you went to Mexico City – and maybe before that, even – has been done to ensure that Stinnes stays loyal to the KGB?’ He raised a hand in the air and waved it around as though he was trying to get someone to bid for it. ‘This is just a hypothesis, you understand.’

  I took my time answering. ‘You mean I threatened him? Are you “suggesting” that I told him that I worked for the KGB and that I’d make sure that any attempt to defect would end in disaster for him?’

  ‘Oh, no. You’d be far too clever for a crude approach like that. If it was you, you wouldn’t tell Stinnes anything about your job with the KGB. You’d just handle the whole thing in an incompetent fumbling way that would ensure that Stinnes got scared. You’d make sure he was too damned jumpy to make any move at all.’

  I said, ‘Is that the way you think it was handled, Bret? In an incompetent fumbling way?’ No hypothesis now, I noticed. The incompetence was neatly folded in.

  Mexico City had been Dicky’s operation and Dicky was quick to see that Bret was out to sink him. ‘I don’t think you have all the necessary information yet,’ Dicky told Bret. Dicky wasn’t going to be sunk, even if it meant keeping me afloat.

  ‘We were taking it slowly, Bret,’ I said. ‘The brief implied that London wanted Stinnes gung-ho, and ready to talk. We didn’t want to push hard. And you said London Debriefing Centre wouldn’t want to find themselves dragging every word out of him. Frank will remember that.’

  Bret realized that he could get caught in the fallout. Defensively he said, ‘I didn’t say that. What the hell would I know about what the Debriefing Centre want?’

  Dicky leaned forward to see Bret and said, ‘Words to that effect, Bret. You definitely said that Bernard was to use his own judgement. He decided to do things slowly.’

  ‘Maybe I did,’ said Bret and, having pacified Dicky, turned the heat back on to me. ‘But how slow is slow? We don’t want Stinnes to die of old age while you’re enrolling him. We want to speed things up a little.’

  I said, ‘You wanted to speed things up. So you applied the magic speed-up solution, didn’t you? You offered Stinnes a quarter of a million dollars to help him make up his mind. And you did it without even informing me, despite the fact that I am the enroller. I’m going to make an official objection to that piece of clumsy meddling.’ I turned to the D-G’s personal assistant and said, ‘Have you got that, Morgan? I object to that interference with my operation.’

  Morgan was a white-faced Welshman whose only qualifications for being in the department were an honours degree in biology and an uncle in the Foreign Office. He looked at me as if I were an insect floating in his drink. His expression didn’t change and he didn’t answer. On the day I leave the department I’m going to punch Morgan in the nose. It is a celebration I’ve been promising myself for a long time.

  Bret continued hurriedly, as if to cover up for the way I’d made a fool of myself. ‘We were in a hurry to debrief Stinnes for reasons that must be all too clear to you.’

  ‘To question him about Fiona’s defection?’ I said. ‘Would you push that ashtray down the table, please?’

  ‘It wasn’t a defection, buddy. To defect means to leave without permission. Your wife was a KGB agent passing secret information to Moscow.’ He slid the heavy glass ashtray along the polished table with that violent aplomb with which bartenders shove bourbon bottles in cowboy films.

  I took the ashtray, tapped ash into it and said, ‘Whatever it was she did, you wanted to question Stinnes about it?’

  ‘We wanted to question him about your role in that move. There are people downstairs who’ve always thought that you and your wife were working together as a team.’ I saw Frank edge his chair back an inch from the table, his subconscious prompting him to dissociate himself from anyone who thought that.

  I said, ‘But when she ran I was already there. I was in East Berlin. Why would I come back here to put my head in a noose?’

  Bret held one of his cuff-links and twisted his wrist in the starched white cuff. His eyes were fixed on me. He said, ‘That was the cunning of it. What guilty man would come running back to the department he betrayed? The fact that you came back was the most ingenious defence you could have contrived. What’s more, Bernard, it’s very you.’

  ‘I say, Bret. Steady on,’ said Frank Harrington. Bret looked at Frank for long enough to remind him who’d given him his present posting and who could no doubt get him a staff job in Iceland if he felt inclined. Frank turned his objection into a cough and Bret looked down the table to me.

  ‘Very me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bret. ‘It’s exactly the kind of double-bluff that you excel at. And you are one of the few people who could swing it. You are cool; very
cool.’

  I inhaled on my cigarette and tried to be as cool as he said I was. I knew Bret; he worked on observation. It was his standard method to throw his weight around and then see how people reacted to him. He even did it with the office clerks. ‘You can invent some exciting yarns, Bret,’ I said. ‘But this particular parable leaves out one vitally important event. It leaves out the fact that I was the one who flushed Fiona out. It was my phone call to her that made her run.’

  ‘That’s your version of events,’ said Bret. ‘But it conveniently overlooks the fact that she got away. I’d say that your phone call warned her in time for her to get away safely.’

  ‘But I told Dicky too.’

  ‘Only because you wanted him to stop her taking your children.’

  ‘Leaving my motivation aside,’ I said, ‘the fact is that I stampeded her into immediate flight. Even the report says that she seems to have taken no papers or anything of importance with her.’

  ‘She took nothing because she was determined to be clean for Customs and immigration. The way the British law stands, there were no legal grounds for preventing her leaving the country with or without a passport. She knew that if she had nothing incriminating with her we would have had to wave goodbye with a smile on our faces when she took off.’

  ‘I don’t want to be side-tracked into a discussion about the British subject’s rights of exit and re-entry,’ I said primly, as if Bret was trying to evade the subject of discussion. ‘I’m just telling you that she was unprepared. With proper warning she could have dealt us a bad blow.’

  Bret was all ready for that one. ‘She was a burned-out case, Bernard, and she’d run her course. The evidence that would incriminate her was there. If you hadn’t stampeded her, the next agent in would have done. But, by having you do it, Moscow were going to make you a golden boy here in London. That’s what chess players call a gambit, isn’t it? A piece is sacrificed to gain a better position from which to attack.’

  ‘I don’t know much about chess,’ I said.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ said Bret. ‘I would have thought you’d be good at it. But you’ll remember that next time you’re playing – about losing a piece to get into a better position – won’t you?’