by Len Deighton
I had never faced an official enquiry, but Bret had tried to make me admit that I’d been in league with my wife to betray the Department’s secrets. Some traces of the mud he’d thrown had stuck to me. That would be a damned smart way to cover his own tracks. No one had ever accused Bret of being a co-conspirator with Fiona. No one had even suspected that they were having a love affair. No one, that is, except me. I had always been able to see how attractive he’d be for her. He was the sort of man I’d had as rivals when I’d first met her; mature, successful men, not Oxbridge graduates trying to hack a career in a merchant bank, but men much older than Fiona, men with servants and big shiny cars who paid for everything by just signing their name on the bill.
It was very dark in the room now and there was a growl of thunder. Then more thunder. I could see the clock’s brass pendulum catching the light as it swung backwards and forwards. Bret’s voice came out of the gloom. ‘Or is it sadness? Anger or sadness – what’s bugging you, Samson?’
I didn’t want to play his silly undergraduate games, or sophisticated jet-set games, or whatever they were. ‘What time is this poor bastard arriving?’ I said.
‘No fixed time. He’ll be here for tea.’
‘That’s great,’ I said. Tea! Earl Grey no doubt, and I suppose Bret’s housekeeper would be serving it in a silver teapot with muffins and those very thin cucumber sandwiches without crusts.
‘You talked to Lange,’ he said. ‘And he bad-mouthed me the way he always does? Is that it? What did he say this time?’
‘He was talking about the time you went to Berlin and made him dismantle his networks.’
‘He’s such a crook. He’s still resenting that after all these years?’
‘He thinks you dealt a blow to a good system.’
‘The “Berlin System”, the famous “Berlin System” that Lange always regarded as his personal creation. It was Lange who ruined it by bringing it into such discredit that London Central sent me there to salvage what I could from it.’
‘Why you?’ I said. ‘You were very young.’
‘The world was very young,’ said Bret. ‘Britain and the US had won the war. We were going to be arm in arm together while we won the peace too.’
‘Because you were American?’
‘Right. An American could look at what was going on in Berlin and be impartial about it. I was to be the one who went there and unified the Limeys and the Yanks and made them into a team again. That was the theory; the fact was that the only unification came from the way they all hated and despised me. The Berlin intelligence community got together just to baffle and bamboozle me. They led me a merry dance, Bernard; they made sure that I couldn’t get to the people I wanted, get the documents I wanted, or get competent office help. I didn’t even have a proper office, did you know that? Did Lange tell you how he made sure that no German would work for me?’
‘The way I heard it, they gave you a big apartment and two servants.’
‘Is that the way Lange tells it? By now he probably even believes it. And what about the Russian princess?’
‘He mentioned her.’
‘The real story is that those bastards made sure the only office space I had was shared with a clerk who went through my files every day and told them what I was doing. When I tried to get other accommodation they blocked every move I made. Finally I contacted a friend of my mother’s. She wasn’t young, she wasn’t a princess, and she had never been in Russia, although her mother was distantly related to White Russian aristocracy. She had a big apartment in Heerstrasse, and by offering half of it to me she was able to prevent it being commandeered for use by some other Allied military outfit. I used that place as an office and I got her neighbour to do my typing.’
‘Lange said she was a Nazi, your friend.’
‘She’d lived in Berlin right through the war and her folks had been murdered by the Bolsheviks, so I guess she didn’t go around waving any red flags. But she had close friends among the July twentieth conspirators. When Hitler was blown up in 1944 she was taken in for questioning by the SD. She spent three nights in the cells at Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It was touch and go whether they sent her to a camp, but there were so many suspected persons to be detained that they grew short of cells to hold them, so they let her go.’
‘There was a row about Lange’s brother-in-law,’ I said.
‘Damn right there was. If Lange had learned how to keep his head down and his mouth shut, maybe it wouldn’t have blown up like that. But Lange has to be the big man on campus. And he particularly resented me because I was a fellow American. He wanted the exclusive title of tame Yank, and he’d got a lot of leeway playing that role. The office let him get away with all kinds of tricks because they thought it was just another example of good old Yankee know-how and the unconventional American way of tackling things.’
‘So he resigned?’
‘It was tough for him, but he’d been told enough times about that woman he married. There was no way I could ignore an SS man living in Lange’s parlour while I was lowering the boom on guys who’d done nothing more than joining the party to save their school-teaching jobs.’
I didn’t answer. I tried to reconcile Bret’s version of these events with Lange’s burning hatred. ‘They were not good times,’ I said.
‘Did you ever hear of CROWCASS?’ said Bret.
‘Vaguely. What is it?’
‘Right after the fighting ended, SHAEF started building a file of suspected war criminals. CROWCASS was the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Maybe it was a muddle, the way everyone said it was afterwards, but at the time CROWCASS was gospel, and Lange’s brother-in-law had his name on that registry.’
‘Did Lange know that?’
‘Sure he did.’
‘When did he find out?’
‘I don’t know when he found out, but he knew about the brother-in-law having served in the Waffen-SS before he got married. I know that because I found in the file a copy of the letter he’d been sent warning him not to go ahead. And all ex-members of the SS and Waffen-SS were automatically arrested unless they’d already faced an enquiry and been cleared. But Lange didn’t care about any of that. He was playing the American card again. He let the British think he’d got special dispensation from the Americans and vice versa. He’s a slippery one; I guess you know that.’
‘Didn’t you know it?’ I said.
‘I know that, and I knew it then. But everyone was telling me what a wonderful network he was running. They wouldn’t let me see anything he was producing, of course – security wouldn’t permit. So I just had to take their word for it.’
‘He brought us some good people. He’d been in Berlin before the war. He knew everybody. He still does.’
‘So what was I to do?’ said Bret defensively. ‘His goddamned brother-in-law was running around with a Kennkarte that identified him as a payroll clerk with a building company. It had a denazification stamp. He liked to tell everyone he’d been a Navy medic. He was picked up brawling in a bar in Wedding. He was stinking drunk and still fighting when they took him downtown and threw him into the drunk tank. They put these drunks under the cold showers to cool them off, and a cop who’d got hit on the nose began wondering how this Navy medic came to have an SS blood-group tattoo under his arm.’
Outside, the river and the fields beyond were obliterated by grey mist and rain was beating against the window. Bret was lost in the shadows and his voice was impersonal, like a recording machine delivering some computer judgement.
‘I couldn’t ignore it,’ he said. ‘It was a police report. It was delivered to the office, but no one there wanted a hot potato like that on their desk. They sent it right along to me. It was probably the only piece of paperwork that they forwarded to me in the proper way.’ I said nothing. Bret realized that his explanation was convincing and he pursued it. ‘Lange thought himself indispensable,’ said Bret. ‘It’s tempting to think that at any time, but it was e
specially tempting for someone heading up several networks – good networks, by all accounts. But no one is indispensable. The Berlin System managed without Lange. Your dad put the pieces together.’
‘Lange thinks my father would have helped him. He thinks my father was deliberately moved out of Berlin so that you could go in there and get rid of him.’
‘That’s crap and Lange knows it. Your dad had done very well in Berlin. Silas Gaunt was his boss and when Silas got a promotion in London he brought your father back to London with him. Nothing was ever written on paper, but it was understood that your dad would go up the ladder with Silas. He had a fine career waiting for him in London Central.’
‘So what happened?’ I said.
‘When Lange got sore, he tried to sell all his networks to the US Army. They wouldn’t touch him, of course.’
‘He had good networks,’ I said.
‘Very good, but even if they’d been twice as good, I doubt if he could have sold the Counter Intelligence Corps on the idea of taking them over.’
‘Why?’
‘The CIC weren’t concerned with what was happening in the Russian Zone. Their task was security. They were looking for Nazis, neo-Nazi groups, and Communist subversives operating in the West.’
‘So why not pass Lange on to some other department?’
‘In those days the US had no organization spying on the Russians. Congress wanted America to play Mr Nice Guy. There were a few retreads from the old OSS and they were working for something that called itself the War Department Detachment, which in turn was a part of something called the Central Intelligence Group. But this was amateur stuff; the Russians were laughing at it. Lange tried everywhere, but no one wanted his networks.’
‘It sounds like a meat market.’
‘And that’s the way the field agents saw it when the news filtered through to them. They were demoralized, and Lange wasn’t very popular.’
‘So my father came back to Berlin to sort it out?’
‘Yes, your dad volunteered to come back and sort it out even though he knew he’d lose his seniority in London. Meanwhile Lange was sent to Hamburg to cool off.’
‘But he didn’t cool off?’
‘He got madder and madder. And when your dad wouldn’t take him back unless he completely separated himself from his Waffen-SS brother-in-law, Lange resigned.’
‘Are you saying my dad sacked Lange?’
‘Look in the records. It’s not top secret.’
‘Lange blames you,’ I said.
‘To you he blames me,’ said Bret.
‘He blames my father?’
‘In the course of the years Lange has blamed everyone from the records clerk to President Truman. The only one Lange never blames is himself.’
‘It was a tough decision,’ I said. ‘SS man or no SS man, I admire the way Lange stood by him. Maybe he did the right thing. Turning his brother-in-law out onto the street would have wrecked his marriage, and that marriage still works.’
‘The reason Lange wouldn’t turn his brother-in-law out was because that brother-in-law was making anything up to a thousand dollars a week in the black market.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘That fateful night the cops picked him up in Wedding, he had nearly a thousand US dollars in his pocket and another thousand bucks in military scrip. That’s what got the cops so excited. That’s why I had to do something about it. It’s in the police report; take a look at it.’
‘You know I can’t take a look at it. They never put those old files onto the computer, and no one can find anything that old down in Registry.’
‘Well, ask anyone who was there. Sure, Lange was on the take from his brother-in-law. Some people said Lange was setting up some of his deals for him.’
‘How?’ I said, but the answer was obvious.
‘I don’t know. But I can guess. Lange hears about a black-market deal through one of his agents. Instead of busting them, he cuts his brother-in-law into the deal.’
‘He’d never survive if he pulled tricks like that.’
‘Don’t play the innocent, Samson, it doesn’t suit you. You know what the city was like during those days. You know how it worked. Lange would just say that he wanted the black-market deal to continue because one of the dealers was an important Soviet agent. His brother-in-law would play the role of Lange’s stoolie. They’d all make money with no chance of arrest. It’s a foolproof system. No one could touch him.’
There was a ring at the front door. I heard the housekeeper going down the hall.
‘This will be our man for the break-in tonight,’ said Bret. ‘It will be like old times for you, Bernard.’
And then through the door walked Ted Riley.
15
‘Why did you get yourself into this crock?’ I asked Ted Riley for what must have been the hundredth time. For the hundredth time he failed to give me any proper explanation. He was in no hurry. He was drinking Powers Irish whiskey, and it was having an effect upon him, for when he spoke his voice had the lilt of Kerry, a brogue that makes everything into a song. I remembered that voice from my childhood, and it brought back to me all Ted’s stories.
There was the one about his grandfather piling his freshly cut peat into ‘stooks’ and how, ‘in the soft pink light of each and every morning’, he found that some of his peat had been stolen. The thefts continued for years until one day Grandfather Riley tucked gunpowder into the turf and a neighbour’s cottage burned to the ground. It was to avoid the violent retribution threatened by the injured man’s relatives that the Rileys moved to County Kerry where Ted was born. How many of Ted’s stories were true, how many embroidered, and how many invented just to amuse a wide-eyed little boy, I’ll never know. But Ted was a part of my childhood, like climbing Berlin’s rubble piles and ice skating on the Muggelsee.
‘Ahhhh.’ Ted’s yawn was a symptom of anxiety. For all God’s creatures, fear brings a drowsiness, a self-preserving urge to snuggle down somewhere out of sight and go to sleep.
We were sitting in the sort of room in which I seem to have spent half my adult life. It was a hotel room in Cambridge, but this was not the Cambridge of Gothic spires or cloistered dons, this was a shopping street on the wrong side of town, a shabby hotel with cracked lino on the floor, a bathroom a long way down the hall, and a sink where a dripping tap had resisted all my efforts to silence it.
It was late evening, but we’d kept the room lights switched off. The curtain remained open and the room’s only light came from the street lamps, the bilious yellow sodium glow reflected from the rain-wet road to make patterns on the ceiling. I could make out the shape of Ted Riley slumped on the bed, still wearing his damp raincoat. His hat was pulled down to cover his face. He only moved it back when he drank.
I was standing near the window, looking through the net curtain at the premises across the street. It was an old fourstorey building, its fascia stained and in places broken. According to the brass plates alongside the front door, it housed a firm of architects and an industrial designer as well as the solicitor’s office we were to break into. On the top floor was the flat for the caretaker, but tonight according to Ted’s research the caretaker was away visiting his son’s family in London. The whole building was dark.
‘Ah, now…! You know…!’ Ted said, and raised his glass to me. That was supposed to answer all my questions.
Ted Riley was trying to tell me that no matter how carefully he tried to explain things, I’d not understand. We were a generation apart, and what was more important, Ted’s generation had fought a war while my generation had not. Ted was a friend of my father and everything in Ted’s gesture told me that my father would have never asked him that question; my father would have known the answer. That’s why Ted didn’t reply. It was a convenient thing for Ted to believe.
I poured myself some more whiskey and took the bottle across to the bed. Ted held up his glass to me without removing the hat from his face. I poured him
another good measure. He’d need it.
‘Thanks, my boy,’ he said.
No matter how close I felt to Ted Riley, he saw me as the little boy who’d made good. Those who got their feet under a desk at London Central were regarded as a race apart by the men and women who had done the real work in those lonely places where the real work was done.
‘When your man makes a suggestion, I’m in no position to turn it down,’ said Ted. ‘I’m employed on sufferance. The Department has told me so in those very words.’ He meant Bret, of course, and Bret was ‘my man’ because I’d accompanied him to Berwick House in his big car.
I stepped back to the window to watch the street. I didn’t have to move far; the room was no bigger than a large cupboard. ‘That was a long time ago,’ I heard myself saying, just as everyone kept saying it to me when they thought I needed reassurance about my past. Time used to be the panacea for everything, but nowadays our sins are remembered on computers, and random-accessed memories do not fade.
A police car passed. Not quite slowly enough to be observing our target but not quite fast enough to be merely passing by. I decided not to mention it to Ted; he was jumpy enough already.
‘There’s no statute of limitations on blackmail,’ said Ted with no special bitterness in his voice. ‘It’s written down somewhere in some secret file, to be used against me whenever I’m anything less than exemplary.’
For a moment I thought there was some double meaning there. I thought he was telling me that I was in the same position. But that wasn’t the Department’s style. How can you blackmail anyone about something that has become common knowledge? No, just as Ted Riley’s disgrace had been so assiduously concealed, so would any lingering suspicion about me be kept buried deep in the boneyard. I said, ‘For God’s sake, Ted. Hams or cheese or booze or something…it’s too long ago for anyone to care about it.’