Mexico Set
Page 40
Well, even Tiptree should be able to deal with those ‘dangerous agents’. But how he’d deal with the police was something I didn’t intend to stay long enough to find out.
‘You’re right,’ said Tiptree, with a sudden smile. Luckily the adrenalin was marring his judgement and his self-esteem did the rest. ‘I’ll take care of this. Tell London that my report will follow in due course.’
‘I’ll tell them,’ I said.
I went downstairs and out into the backyard, climbing over a tall stack of beer-crates to surmount a wall and from there jumping down into the alley, just in case Moskvin had another friend waiting in the bar. Stinnes was waiting in a cab on the corner. He opened the door for me and I slid in beside him. I was expecting him to ask immediately where Zena was but he said, ‘What was the delay?’ He leaned forward to the driver. ‘Airport,’ he told him. The driver started the engine.
‘Freight side,’ I said. I dropped the box of money on to Stinnes’s knees but, after taking a moment to recognize what it was, he put it aside without opening it.
‘I don’t want the money,’ he said, as if he’d been thinking about it for a long time. ‘I didn’t do it for the money.’
‘I know you didn’t,’ I said. ‘But take it anyway. You’ll have no trouble getting rid of it.’
The taxi pulled away from the curb, slowly at first to avoid hitting the strolling musicians and the revellers. Stinnes sank back into his seat. To think that I’d been getting ready to prevent him at pistol point from racing up there to his beloved Zena.
‘Freight side,’ said Stinnes. ‘Another change of plan. And when we get to the airport freight-yard, what new idea then? A bus to Los Angeles?’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘You’re late,’ he said, looking at his watch.
‘Your man Moskvin turned up. Apparently he couldn’t bear to be parted from you.’
‘Moskvin,’ said Stinnes. ‘Yesterday I found him rifling through my desk. He found nothing, of course, but I should have told you about him.’
‘Your lady friend was reporting everything back to Moskvin. Everything.’
‘She was talking to Moskvin?’
‘How else did she come to be there?’ There were other answers to that question but Stinnes didn’t know them. And this wasn’t the right time to tell him that Zena had risked her life to save him.
He was silent as we drove through Garibaldi Square. At the intersection he leaned aside and ducked his head to see the ‘bank’. Perhaps he needed to see the building, and the lights behind the drawn blinds, to come to terms with Zena’s treachery. ‘You were right about her,’ he said sadly. ‘I could tell from your face when you said what a fool I was. You made me see sense.’
There was heavy traffic, but I’d allowed for some delay; I’d even allowed time for the traffic jam. The traffic slowed and then came to a complete standstill. The fire-eater was still at work. He blew a fierce tongue of flame into the air. It was darker now and the flame lit up all the cars, rippled in the paintwork and shone in all the windows. ‘It’s fantastic the things some people do for a living,’ said Stinnes. He wound down the car window and gave the child collecting the money 200 pesos.
When the traffic had started moving again, he got a small black cheroot from his pocket and put it in his mouth. When he searched his pockets for a light I watched him carefully, but it was only matches that he brought from his pocket.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘as well as the boy with the message, did you also send that old woman?’ I appreciated such extreme caution. It was what any real pro would do.
He lit the little cigar with the studied care a man might lavish upon a fine double Corona. ‘Yes, I sent the old woman too.’ He blew smoke, and the car filled with a strong smell of the over-fermented tobacco leaf that Stinnes seemed to like. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I wanted to know what was happening. I had no intention of going up there all on my own. The blinds were down; narrow stairs, crowded bar. It didn’t look healthy. What happened?’
‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘Moskvin’s a desk man, is he?’
‘Yes,’ said Stinnes. ‘And I hate desk men.’
‘So do I,’ I said feelingly. ‘They’re bloody dangerous.’
LONDON MATCH
Len Deighton
‘The poet of the spy story’ Sunday Times
The spy who’s in the clear doesn’t exist…
Bernard Samson hoped they’d put Elvira Miller behind bars. She said she had been stupid, but it didn’t cut any ice with Bernard. She was a KGB-trained agent and stupidity was no excuse.
There was one troubling thing about Mrs Miller’s confession – something about two codewords where there should have been one. The finger of suspicion pointed straight back to London.
And that was where defector Erich Stinnes was locked up, refusing to say anything.
Bernard had got him to London; now he had to get him to talk…
London Match is the final book in the international best-selling Game, Set & Match trilogy.
‘Deighton is back in his original milieu, the bleak spy world of betrayers and betrayed’
Observer
‘A master of fictional espionage’
Daily Mail
‘Once again Deighton has woven an intricate and satisfying plot, peopled it with convincing characters and even managed to give a new twist or two to the spy story. But then he is a master of the form’
Washington Post
About the Author
Mexico Set
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
By Len Deighton
FICTION
The Ipcress File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Declarations of War
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-FICTION
Action Cook Book
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle o
f Britain
Airshipwreck
French Cooking for Men
Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk
ABC of French Food
Blood, Tears and Folly
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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This paperback edition 2010
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1984
Copyright © Len Deighton 1984
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Thanks are due to the following for permission to quote lines from ‘Bye-Bye Blackbird’: The Remick Music Corporation, New York and Detroit, and EMI Music Publishing Limited, London. Copyright © 1926, 1948.
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-38719-9
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