by Len Deighton
‘Well, it’s not like you, George.’
He grinned ruefully. ‘I suppose not, but it’s the way I feel about him.’
‘Let’s go and look at my new car,’ I said. But he didn’t move from behind the table.
‘Posh Harry said you’re in trouble. Is that right, Bernard?’
‘Posh Harry makes his living by selling snippets of information. What he doesn’t know he guesses, what he can’t guess he invents.’
‘Money trouble? Woman trouble? Trouble at work? If it’s money I might be able to help, Bernard. You’d be better borrowing from me than from a High Street bank. I know you don’t want to move from the house. Tessa explained all that to me.’
‘Thanks, George. I think I’m going to manage the money end. Looks like they’re going to give me some special allowance to help with the kids and the nanny and so on.’
‘Couldn’t you take the children away for a bit? Get a leave of absence and have a rest? You look damned tired these days.’
‘I can’t afford it,’ I said. ‘You’re rich, George. You can do whatever you fancy doing. I can’t.’
‘I’m not rich enough to do anything I want to do. But I know what you mean; I’m rich enough to avoid doing the things I don’t want to do.’ George took off his heavy spectacles. ‘I asked Posh Harry what he had to see you about. He didn’t want to tell me, but I pressed him. He has to keep in with me, I do him a lot of favours one way and the other. And he wouldn’t find many people who’d wait so patiently to be paid. I said, “What do you want with Bernard?” He said, “I’m helping him; he’s in trouble.” “What kind of trouble?” I said. “His people think he’s working for the other side,” said Harry. “If they prove it, he’ll go to jail for about thirty years; they can’t let him walk the streets; he knows too damned much about the way his people work.’” George stopped for a moment.
‘“Bernard Samson wouldn’t work for the Russians,” I said. “I know him well enough to know that, and if the people he works for can’t see that they must be stupid.”’ George scratched his neck as he decided how to go on with his story. ‘“Well, his wife worked for them,” said Harry, “and if he’s not working for them too, the Russians are not going to leave him alone either.” “What do you mean?” I asked Posh Harry. “That’s the bind he’s in,” said Posh Harry, “that’s why he needs help. Either the Brits will jail him for thirty years or the Russians will send a hit team to waste him.”’ George put his glasses on again and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time.
‘Posh Harry earns a living selling stories like that, George. It’s good dramatic stuff, isn’t it? It’s like the films on TV.’
‘Not when you know one of the cast,’ said George. Another train rolled slowly across the viaduct, its noise enough to prevent any conversation. ‘Bloody trains,’ said George after the sound had died away. ‘We had trains making that kind of a racket right alongside the house where I grew up. I swore I’d never have to endure that kind of thing again once I made enough money…and here I am.’ He looked round his squalid little office as if seeing it through the eyes of a visitor. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’
‘Let’s go and look at my car,’ I suggested again.
‘Bernard,’ said George, fixing me with a serious stare. ‘Do you know a man named Richard Cruyer?’
‘Yes,’ I said, vaguely enough to suddenly deny it if that became necessary.
‘You work with him, don’t you?’
I tried to remember if George and Tessa had ever had dinner at my home with the Cruyers as fellow guests. ‘Yes, I work with him. Why?’
‘Tessa has had to see him a couple of times. She says it was in connection with this children’s charity she’s doing so much work for.’
‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t see. I’d never heard Tessa mention any sort of charity she was doing any work for and I couldn’t imagine what role Dicky Cruyer would play in any charity that wasn’t devoting its energies to his own well-being.
‘I can’t help being suspicious, Bernard. I’ve forgiven her and removed from my mind a lot of the bad feeling that was poisoning our relationship. But I still get suspicious, Bernard. I’m only human.’
‘And what do you want to know?’ I asked, although what he wanted to know was only too evident. He wanted to know if Dicky Cruyer was the sort of man who would have an affair with Tessa. And the only truthful answer was an unequivocal ‘Yes’.
‘What’s going on. I want to know what’s going on.’
‘Have you asked Tessa?’
‘It would mean a flare-up, Bernard. It would destroy all the work we’ve both done trying to put the marriage together. But I’ve got to know. It’s racking me; I’m desperate. Will you find out for me? Please?’
‘I’ll do what I can, George,’ I promised.
9
I identified with Stinnes. He was a cold fish and yet I thought of him as someone like myself. His father had been a Russian soldier with the occupation forces in Berlin and he’d been brought up like a German, just as I had. And I felt close to him because of the way our paths had overlapped since that day he had me arrested in East Berlin. I’d talked him into coming over to us; I’d reassured him about his treatment, and I’d personally escorted him to London from Mexico City. I respected his professionalism, and that coloured all my thoughts and my actions. But I didn’t really like him, and that affected my judgement too. I couldn’t completely understand the undoubted success he enjoyed with women. What the devil did they see in him? Women were always attracted by purposeful masculine strength, organizing ability, and the sort of self-confidence that leaves everything unsaid. Stinnes had all that in abundance. But there were none of the other things one usually saw in womanizers: no fun, no flamboyance, no amusing stories, none of the gesturing or physical movements by which women so often remember the ones they had once loved. He had none of those warm human characteristics that make a love affair so easy to get into and so hard to escape, no self-mockery, no admitted failings; just the cold eyes, calculating mind and inscrutable face. He seemed especially cold-blooded about the work he did. Perhaps that was something to do with it. For the womanizer is destructive, the rock upon which desperate women dash themselves to pieces.
But there was no denying the dynamic energy that was evident in that seemingly inert body. Stinnes had an actor’s skill, an almost hypnotic will that is turned on like a laser beam. Such heartless dedication is to be seen in the great Hollywood stars, in certain very idealistic politicians, and even more often as a brutal streak in comedians who frighten their audience into laughing at their inadequate jokes.
I didn’t feel like that about Bret Rensselaer, who was an entirely different personality. Bret wasn’t the hard-eyed pro that Stinnes was. Quite apart from his inadequate German, Bret could never have been a field agent; he would never have been able to endure the squalor and discomfort. And Bret could never have been a good field agent for the same reason that so many other Americans failed in that role: Bret liked to be seen. Bret was a social animal who wanted to be noticed. The self-effacing furtiveness that all Europeans have been taught, in a society still essentially feudal, does not come readily to Americans.
Bret seemed to have had endless women since his wife left him, but his ability to charm was easy to understand, even for those who were impervious to it. Despite his age, he was physically attractive, and he was generous with money and was amusing company. He liked food and wine, music and movies. And he did all those things that rich people always know how to do: he could ski and shoot and sail and ride a horse; and get served in crowded restaurants. I’d had my share of differences with Bret; I’d suffered his insulting outbursts and grudgingly admired his stubbornness, but he was not a heartless apparatchik. If you got him at the right moment, he could be informal and approachable in a way that none of the other senior staff were. Most important of all, Bret had the uniquely American talent of flexibility, the willingness to try anything likely to get t
he job done. Yet Bret got jobs done, and for that I gave him due credit; it was on that account that I trod warily when I first began to wonder about his loyalties.
Bret Rensselaer had the jutting chin and the rugged ageless features of a strip-cartoon hero. Like most Americans Bret was concerned with his weight and his health and his clothes to an extent that his English colleagues regarded as unacceptably foreign. The public-school senior staff at London Central spent just as much money on their Savile Row suits and handmade shirts and Jermyn Street shoes, but they wore them with a careless scruffiness that was a vital part of their snobbery. A real English gentleman never tries; that was the article of faith. And Bret Rensselaer tried. But Bret had a family that went back as far as the Revolutionary War, and what’s more, Bret had money, lots of it. And with any kind of snob, money is the trump card if you play it right.
Bret was already in his office when I arrived. He always started work very early – that was another of his American characteristics. His early arrival and punctuality at meetings were universally admired, though I can’t say he started a trend. This morning a meeting had been arranged between me, Dicky Cruyer, Morgan – the D-G’s stooge – and Bret Rensselaer in Bret’s office. But when I arrived on time – growing up in Germany produces in people a quite unnatural determination to be punctual – Morgan was not there and Dicky had not even arrived in his office, let alone in Bret’s office.
Bret Rensselaer’s office accommodated him on the top floor along with all the other men who mattered at London Central. From his desk there was a view across that section of London where the parks are: St James’s Park, Green Park, the garden of Buckingham Palace, and Hyde Park were all lined up to make a continuous green carpet. In the summer it was a wonderful view. Even now, in winter, with a haze of smoke from the chimneys and the trees bare, it was better than looking at the dented filing cabinets in my room.
Bret was working. He was sitting at his desk, reading his paperwork and trying to make the world conform to it. The jacket of his suit, complete with starched white linen handkerchief in his top pocket, was placed carefully across the back of a chair that Bret seemed to keep for no other purpose. He wore a grey-silk bow tie and a white shirt with a monogram placed so that it could be seen even when he wore his waistcoat. The waistcoat – ‘vest’, he called it, of course – was unbuttoned and his sleeves rolled back.
He’d had his office furnished to his own taste – that was one of the perquisites of senior rank – and I remember the fuss there’d been when Bret brought in his own interior decorator. A lot of the obstructive arguments about it had come from someone in Internal Security who thought interior decorators were large teams of men in white overalls with steam hammers, scaffolding and pots of paint. In the event it was a delicate bearded man, wearing a denim jacket embroidered with flower patterns over a ‘No Nukes’ sweatshirt. It took a long time to get him past the doorman.
But the result was worth it. The centrepiece of the office was a huge, chrome, black-leather-and-glass desk, specially ordered from Denmark. The carpet was dark grey and the walls were in two shades of grey too. There was a long black chesterfield for visitors to sit on while Bret swivelled and rocked in a big chair that matched the chrome and leather of the desk. The theory was that the clothes of the occupants of the room provided all the necessary colour. And as long as the colourful bearded designer was in the room, it worked. But Bret was a monochrome figure and he blended into the decor as a chameleon matches its natural habitat, except that chameleons only match their surroundings when they’re frightened.
‘I’m taking over Stinnes,’ he announced when I went into the room.
‘I heard they were trying to hang that on you!’ I said.
He grinned to acknowledge my attempt to put him down. ‘No one hung it on me, buddy. I’m very happy to handle this end of the Stinnes debriefing.’
‘Well, that’s just great then,’ I said. I looked at my watch. ‘Have I arrived too early?’
We both knew that I was just poisoning the well for Dicky Cruyer and Morgan, but Bret went along with it. ‘The others are late,’ he said. ‘They’re always goddamned late.’
‘Shall we start?’ I said. ‘Or shall I go and have a cup of coffee?’
‘You sit where you are, smart ass. If you need coffee so urgently, I’ll get some brought here.’ He pressed a button on his white phone and spoke into a box while staring at the far side of the room with his eyes unfocused.
They sent coffee for four and Bret got to his feet and poured out all four cups so that Cruyer’s coffee and Morgan’s coffee were getting cold. It seemed a childish revenge, but perhaps it was the only one Bret could think of. While I drank my coffee Bret looked out of his window and then looked at things on his desk and tidied it up. He was a restless man who, despite an injured knee, liked to duck and weave and swing like a punch-drunk boxer. He came round and sat on the edge of his desk to drink his coffee; it was a contrived pose of executive informality, the kind that chairmen of big companies adopt when they’re being photographed for Forbes magazine.
Even after Bret and I had been sitting there for ten minutes drinking in silence the other two had still not turned up. ‘I saw Stinnes yesterday,’ Bret finally volunteered. ‘I don’t know what they do to people at that damned Debriefing Centre, but he was in a lousy uncooperative mood.’
‘Where have they put him, Berwick House?’
‘Yes. Do you know that the so-called London Debriefing Centre has premises as far away as Birmingham?’
‘They were using a place in Scotland until last year, when the D-G said we couldn’t spare the travelling time for our staff going backwards and forwards.’
‘Well, Stinnes isn’t having a ball. He did nothing but complain. He said he’s given us all he’s going to give us until he gets a few concessions. The first concession is to go somewhere else. The Governor – the one you don’t like: Potter – says Stinnes has threatened to escape.’
‘How would you feel, restricted to Berwick House for week after week? It’s furnished like a flophouse and the only outdoor entertainment is walking around the garden close to the walls to see how many alarms you can trigger before they order you back inside again.’
‘It sounds as if you’ve been locked up there,’ said Bret.
‘Not there, Bret, but places very like it.’
‘So you wouldn’t have put him there?’
‘Put him there?’ I couldn’t help smiling, it was so bloody ridiculous. ‘Have you taken a look at the staff of the London Debriefing Centre lately?’ I asked. ‘Do you know where they recruit those people? Most of them are redundant exemployees of Her Majesty’s famous Customs and Excise Department. That fat one who is now officially designated the Governor – stop me if you’re laughing so much it hurts – came from the Income Tax office in West Hartlepool. No, Bret, I wouldn’t have put the poor bastard into Berwick House. I wouldn’t have put Stalin there either.’
‘So let’s have it,’ said Bret with studied patience. He slid off the edge of the desk and stretched his back as if he was getting stiff.
‘I haven’t given it a lot of thought, Bret. But if I wanted anyone to cooperate, I’d put him somewhere where he felt good. I’d put him into the Oliver Messel suite at the Dorchester Hotel.’
‘You would, eh?’ He knew I was trying to needle him.
‘And do you know something, Bret? The Dorchester would cost only a fraction of what it’s costing the taxpayer to hold him at Berwick House. How many guards and clerks do they have there nowadays?’
‘And what’s to stop him walking out of the Dorchester?’
‘Well, Bret, maybe he wouldn’t want to escape from the Dorchester the way he wants to get out of Berwick House.’
Bret leaned forward as if trying to see me better. ‘I listen to everything you say, but I’m never quite sure how much of this crap you believe,’ he said. I didn’t reply. Then Bret said, ‘I don’t remember hearing any of these theories when
Giles Trent was being held in Berwick House. You’re the one who said he mustn’t be allowed to smoke and arranged for him to have small-size pyjamas with buttons missing and a patched cotton dressing gown without a cord.’
‘That’s all standard drill for people we’re interrogating. Jesus, Bret, you know the score, it’s to make them feel inadequate. It wasn’t my idea; it’s old hat.’
‘Stinnes gets the Oliver Messel suite and Trent didn’t even get buttons for his “pj”s? What are you giving me?’
‘Stinnes isn’t a prisoner. He’s come over to us voluntarily. We should be flattering him and making him feel good. We should be getting him into a mood so that he wants to give us one hundred per cent.’
‘Maybe.’
‘And Stinnes is a pro…he’s an ex-field agent, not a pen pusher like Trent. And Stinnes knows his job from top to bottom. He knows that we’re not going to rip out his fingernails or give him the live electrodes where it hurts most. He’s sitting pretty, and until we play ball with him he’ll remain stumm.’
‘Have you discussed this with Dicky?’ asked Bret.
I shrugged. Bret knew that Dicky didn’t want to hear about Stinnes; he’d made that clear to everyone. ‘No sense in letting the rest of the coffee get cold,’ I said. ‘Mind if I take Dicky’s cup?’
He pushed the coffee towards me and looking at the door again said, ‘It wouldn’t have to be a great idea to be an improvement on what’s happening at present.’
‘Isn’t he talking at all?’
‘The first two weeks were okay. The senior interrogator – Ladbrook, the ex-cop – knows what he’s doing. But he doesn’t know much about our end of the business. He got out of his depth and since the Berlin arrest Stinnes’s become very difficult. He is very disillusioned, Bernard. He’s been through the honeymoon and now he is in that post-honeymoon gloom.’