Hope

by Len Deighton

  ‘Better if we go through the German authorities, Herr Samson.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Lida.’

  ‘Better the army remove everything also,’ said Lida. ‘The Military Police and the Medical Corps… But we should have a Berlin police officer at the door to answer questions…’ Her voice trailed away but I knew her mind was racing on.

  ‘Good, Lida,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait here until you phone back or come here. Tell the Night Duty Officer that we have a “number one alert”. No need to tell London yet.’

  ‘I’ll go to the office. There are things I can only do from there, Herr Samson. Then I will come immediately to you.’

  ‘Thanks, Lida. And I think we should get Miss Kent back to London. Will you ask the RAF if they have anything tonight? Ask them to hold if necessary. Don’t say it’s top priority unless you need to.’

  ‘Yes, Herr Samson.’

  I hung up.

  ‘What will they do?’ Gloria asked.

  ‘They will pretend that it’s a British soldier who suffered a heart attack. Some smart-arse will spread the word that it happened in bed with a girl, and that will be the end of it.’

  ‘Was that Frank’s secretary?’

  ‘Yes, Lida. I don’t know where Frank found her but she’s worth her weight in gold.’

  Gloria went and looked at the kid again. I didn’t stop her. If they’d put Semtex charges under the body they would be tremblers, not timed charges.

  ‘They did it for you,’ said Gloria, and when I didn’t reply added: ‘They brought the body up here so that you would find it.’

  ‘The room was booked in the name of Bret Rensselaer,’ I reminded her. ‘The body was put there as a warning to Bret.’

  ‘You can’t fool me, Bernard. You don’t want me to worry but they did it to get at you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Those people don’t bring a body up the service stairs to a third-floor room without watching to see who is using the room. They must have seen me check in. They must have seen you arrive. Then they brought the body.’

  ‘They’d have to be bloody quick. I didn’t know I was coming here myself until half an hour before I arrived.’

  ‘Didn’t you really, Bernard? How you do deceive yourself. They guessed you’d show up here, don’t you see that?’

  ‘How could they have guessed?’ I said, allowing my irritation to show.

  ‘I guessed you’d come here,’ said Gloria sadly. ‘It wouldn’t be beyond others to do the same.’

  She was right. No matter about how and what they’d guessed: they’d put him there for my benefit. I’d killed one of their hoodlums by accident; a shot on a dark night in Magdeburg. It went a trifle low and took the top of his head off. And I suppose they thought the bomb under the pastor’s Trabbie was my doing. Oh well, I couldn’t take a full-page advert in the Herald Tribune to deny it.

  I gently pulled her away from the connecting door. It was giving me the creeps to see her standing there looking at the corpse as if she still couldn’t believe he was dead. Even after I’d closed the door, she leaned against it as if on the point of fainting. I raided the minibar. ‘Have another drink,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, I feel sick.’

  ‘It’s better you go back to London,’ I said. ‘I’ll get someone to drive you over to the airport. Was there anything for you still to do here?’

  ‘Nothing that can’t be done on the fax. But I’d rather stay. Why don’t I move into another apartment here? I know they are only half full.’

  ‘No, not here. They know their way around in this place. They probably have contacts and their own people working inside. Let’s not take chances on them trying another little joke. Go back to London: it’s what Bret would advise.’

  ‘They thought you’d take me to bed. You see that don’t you? We would have gone in there… maybe in the dark. It was a macabre little joke.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. They are not noted for their jokes: even little macabre ones.’

  I poured another little drink and had hardly started on it before Lida knocked at the door. She was wearing a short fur coat and shiny high-boots. With her she had Picard the army doctor, an Engineer major with his corporal assistant, a couple of men without badges and two military policemen. They were all in uniform. So Lida was playing it like that: the high-profile way.

  ‘I told you to stay in bed,’ said Picard.

  ‘I had a bad dream,’ I said, ‘and this was it.’ He went towards the bedroom. ‘Better let the bomb squad go first, Doc,’ I said. ‘This one’s not going to respond to aspirin, vitamin C and glucose.’

  Picard gave a grim little smile and we watched the Engineer officer and his soldier assistant flick a metal detector quickly around the bed. Knowing we were watching him he turned round and said: ‘You’d better go back into the drawing-room. The next bit is very technical.’

  We withdrew a pace and he tied a ball of twine to the corners of the bedclothes and stood well away from the bed while pulling the covers back inch by inch, watching all the while to see if there were wires or any attachments. It was a damned dangerous way of checking for booby traps, but I suppose you become instinctive after a long time with the bomb squad: instinctive or suicidal, or dead.

  ‘Nothing there,’ said the Engineer officer and laughed. His corporal smiled dutifully.

  The kid had been dead for a long time. His upper body was bare and obviously unharmed, so that only the softness of it proclaimed that life was extinct. He was still wearing his trousers but they were crumpled; the upper part of them stiff and shiny like plastic. It was dried blood – he must have lost gallons of it. But now it was completely dry, so that it had left a dusty reddish-brown powder all across the starched white sheets.

  ‘I suppose you want a time of death?’ said Dr Picard.

  ‘I’m not the investigator,’ I said. ‘I’m just a passer-by.’

  ‘Over twenty-four hours. We’ll do a post-mortem first thing in the morning, and have something for your office by midday tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks, Doc.’

  ‘One of your boys, was it?’

  ‘I knew him.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Picard. ‘But at least the family will have him to bury. That means a lot to parents. I can tell you that from personal experience with next-of-kin.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘A word in your ear,’ said Picard lowering his voice. ‘This one has been eviscerated.’

  ‘Literally?’ The bleeding of victims was an old Mafia device, done to make the disposal of bodies easier, neater and tidier. But this was a new one for our pals across the Wall.

  ‘It would increase a cadaver’s shelf-life,’ said Picard. ‘They could have stored him indefinitely and plonked him anywhere at any time.’

  I nodded my thanks to the doctor and plucked at Lida’s sleeve. ‘Lida. Was there a plane tonight?’

  ‘Yes, and London want you to go there too. Something has happened at the other end.’

  ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘They said you should take any warm winter clothing you have here with you. You are going on somewhere after the briefing. Mr Harrington is cutting short his stay and coming back here.’

  ‘Just as we were getting to know each other, Lida.’

  ‘Mind your back, Herr Samson. Here they come.’ The kid was zipped into a body-bag and manoeuvred out into the corridor on a stretcher. No worries now about his career after fifty.

  The RAF plane that took me and Gloria to England that night did not provide an opportunity for intimate chat. Travelling with us there was an RAF football team returning after winning a friendly game against a Berlin police team. They were exhilarated, a condition helped by the hour’s delay they’d suffered waiting for us to arrive. The time had been spent drinking, and having exhausted their celebrations and recollections of the football match they settled down and began singing: ‘Home on the Range’.

  The flight crew provided a seat for Gloria
up front, with a door between her and the noise. But I was seated between the football team’s captain, a physical training instructor, and an elderly civilian meteorologist who was going to see his seriously sick daughter. In my pocket I found the large shiny pills that Picard said contained only glucose, vitamin and aspirin: whatever they contained I needed them. I swallowed a couple without water. They left a bitter taste in my mouth; I suppose they were cutting back on the glucose.

  From under the cloth-covered freight behind my seat there came regular sniffing and scratching noises. I suspected that someone was smuggling a pet dog back to England and avoiding the quarantine laws. I wondered if this animal’s proximity to me was so that I could take the blame for it if the customs men found it. ‘Do you play football?’ the man beside me asked, but I closed my eyes and pretended I was already sleeping. The gusty winds we met over the North Sea made the plane lurch and slew, picking off the singing footballers one by one until all were quiet.

  At the other end, separate cars were waiting for us. Gloria went directly home. I helped her with her bag, and when she said goodbye she gave me a kiss. ‘Stay well,’ she said. If Gloria had been looking for a way of gently breaking the news to me that our love affair was finally over, then that kiss did the trick. So did the way she sank thankfully into the back seat of the car and smiled her sad goodbye. She didn’t lower the window.

  Stay well? As Gloria’s car moved forwards the bus carrying the football team rolled past, gathering speed. They were once more joined in jovial song: ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain’.

  ‘Mr Samson?’ It was my driver. Despite the lateness of the hour I was due at Dicky’s home for a meeting with Dicky and one of our SIS people from the Warsaw embassy.

  ‘Had a good trip?’ said the driver.

  ‘Not too bad,’ I said. At least I didn’t get accused of smuggling the pooch.

  When Dicky first got planning permission to build the extra room above his garage, the girls in the office were whispering that it was because Daphne was pregnant again. They said the new room would be ready in time to make a warm little nursery, or into a self-contained unit for a live-in children’s nurse.

  But those who knew Dicky better were less ready to make such assumptions. Daphne wasn’t pregnant – just overweight – and the new extension became what Dicky called his ‘den’. Into this room, with its commanding view of the next-door neighbour’s garden shed and frostbitten vegetable patch, Dicky had brought everything he needed for comfortable seclusion. The family’s biggest TV and the newest stereo VCR, and the only hi-fi he had that could be operated by a remote control. As Dicky explained, once you get stretched out in a big recliner, you don’t want to be jumping up and down adjusting the graphic-equalizer. The den’s wallpaper was a pink and mauve Liberty pattern, although there wasn’t much wall to be seen since Dicky had become smitten by Baron von Richthofen.

  Looking back, I can see that Dicky and the Baron were made for each other. What I had mistaken for a Polish proletarian theme was a tribute to Snoopy’s other half. But I still wasn’t ready for the devotion and dedication that Dicky had brought to this new interest of his. On the walls he had large beautifully framed reproductions of aviation art. The detail in the paintings was remarkable: the fields and trees, the fluffy clouds, and even the dents in the engine cowling, all faithfully recorded. The scarlet three-winged job I recognized immediately, but here on Dicky’s wall, the leather-helmeted Baron was also to be seen at the controls of three other brightly coloured planes. Apparently the Baron, while jealously keeping the triplane for his own exclusive use, felt free to borrow any of the planes belonging to subordinates assigned to his squadrons, or even visitors just passing through. In this respect he reflected something of Dicky’s attitude to the Departmental motor cars.

  I arrived little short of midnight, and Bret was there already. He’d just flown back from Washington and had stopped off only long enough to change into his official undress uniform. The Savile Row outfit, obligatory in the halls of power, had been exchanged for what Bret liked to think was ‘leisure wear’: tailored grey flannel pants, silk kerchief escaping from an open-neck white tennis shirt and a dark blue blazer. It made him look like he’d been washed ashore from some long-ago summer’s Jazz Festival. On his knees he was balancing a lovingly framed section of weather-worn fabric bearing the national emblem of Imperial Germany.

  ‘Part of the tailplane from von Richthofen’s Albatross,’ explained Dicky, tapping it so energetically that it almost slipped from Bret’s grasp. ‘Should be in a museum really.’ He glanced up at me and waved a greeting.

  ‘I can see that,’ said Bret.

  I dumped my coat on the chair. The house was silent – I suppose Daphne had long since gone up to bed. ‘All right if I help myself to a drink?’ I knew that Bret and Dicky both thought I drank too much. Had I been born with half of Dicky’s natural guile, I would have spent the meeting sipping Perrier water, looking alert and dependable, and leaning forward poised to laugh at the jokes. But I could never resist reinforcing their stupid prejudices: ‘I really need one.’

  ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Dicky enquired as he noticed my bruises.

  ‘I fell downstairs.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ said Dicky, rebuffed by what he thought a flippant reply. For a moment I thought he was going to insist upon taking my temperature, a device he had more than once wielded on office staff to exercise his tiresome sense of humour. ‘But hurry, Bernard. We’ve been waiting for you.’ He was dressed in khaki gabardine pants and a forest-green British army style woollen sweater, its elbows and shoulders reinforced with leather patches.

  ‘Yes,’ I said and, malt whisky bottle in hand, raised an eyebrow at Bret.

  Bret shook his head sternly and reached out to the side-table, covering his Pepsi, to indicate that he didn’t want any. It was not a good omen.

  So I smiled at Rupert – a malt whisky drinker if I’ve ever seen one – and he smiled in return. He used a finger and thumb to indicate a moderate refill and I gave him a dash of booze.

  Rupert Copper, ‘our man from the Warsaw embassy’, was the only other person at our meeting. He was about forty, a constipated stuffed-shirt but a very able linguist. As well as Polish he had a good grasp of those Balkan languages which I’d seen defeat some of the brightest and most ambitious of our Foreign Office colleagues. He was particularly up to date on the intricate details of Greek political extremists. He wasn’t a close friend: we’d chatted together at dull conferences and meetings. He’d started off with the diplomatic people and then transferred to SIS as a way of staying in Warsaw. Married with two teenage children, he was the subject of persistent rumours that his real love affair with Poland came in the shape of a middle-aged Polish countess who’d been seen in close attendance on him for at least ten years.

  Rupert was elegantly perched, legs crossed, on the chair where the Cruyers’ cat was usually curled up asleep. Rupert had just been taken out of his box: dark blue suit, crisp striped shirt, Wykehamist tie and polished black brogues. He had dark deep-set eyes, thin bloodless lips and a hairline moustache that looked as if it had been applied with an eyebrow pencil. Even more than other FO employees, he had the sleek and shiny look of a prosperous pimp. But it had to be said that he was competent, cautious and precise; qualifications so rarely found among employees of the Foreign Office that I was reassured by his presence.

  After sampling the whisky I added an extra measure and settled down on the sofa alongside a brightly lit glass case containing model aircraft. Dicky was still explaining something about Richthofen’s military funeral to Bret. Rupert caught my eye but his face was expressionless. He upended his whisky and the ice-cubes slid down and hit his nose. Hiding any surprise he might have felt, he took a monogrammed handkerchief from his cuff and dabbed his face. Then he put his glass on the sideboard as if distancing himself from further temptations.

  ‘Well, let’s get down to business,’ said Bret eventual
ly. He rested the framed section of fabric down on the carpet while Dicky went and sat in his recliner, pulling the lever tight so that he didn’t slide into the horizontal position.

  ‘You heard what happened?’ Bret asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. No is my default reply. There’s nothing to be gained from saying yes to such questions.

  ‘George Kosinski has been sighted,’ said Bret. ‘In Poland.’

  ‘Oh, in Poland,’ I said, and turned to look at Rupert, who nodded to confirm this entirely unsurprising item of information.

  ‘Just when we were all quite certain he was dead,’ prompted Dicky.

  ‘He certainly keeps us on our toes,’ I said, in order not to disturb the mood of heightened expectancy.

  I thought I’d been summoned to London on account of the murder of the kid in Berlin. Alternatively I thought they might have unravelled the material that the monitoring service had shown to Gloria. But neither of these subjects was brought up, and my instinct for self-preservation told me I shouldn’t mention either matter myself.

  ‘Rupert says there is another Kosinski house,’ said Dicky, motioning for Rupert to join in the conversation.

  Rupert said: ‘They have a guest-house out there. It’s a couple of miles away from the family home; maybe more. Used to be a hunting lodge back in the old days. Nazis, such as Field Marshal Göring, liked to go there to hunt wild game when that region was part of Germany. The lodge was badly damaged by the war but they have spent a bit of money doing it up.’

  ‘That’s where they were hiding him,’ said Dicky. ‘The bastards had us dangling on a string.’

  ‘They are family,’ I said mildly.

  ‘He’s on some damned vendetta,’ said Dicky angrily, but a warning look from Bret calmed him.

  ‘Why is he there, Bernard?’ Bret asked me.

  ‘He’s been moving heaven and earth to find out how his wife died,’ I said. ‘He’s upset; he’s not entirely rational.’

  ‘But why are the Stasi and the Bezpieca playing along with him?’

  ‘Are they doing that?’