London Match

by Len Deighton

  Although Bret was disconcerted to the point of drying up, he resumed his pitch rather than let Morgan take over. But he now kept things very vague. ‘Don’t worry about Bony,’ said the D-G, indicating the stranger. ‘He was with me in the war. He’s vetted.’

  ‘It’s rather delicate, sir,’ said Bret.

  ‘I’ll be gone in three minutes,’ said Bony, a short man in a tight-fitting grey worsted three-piece suit. He hung a partly made jacket onto the D-G and, apparently oblivious of us all, stood back to inspect the D-G’s appearance. Then he made some chalk marks on the jacket and began to rip pieces off it the way tailors do.

  ‘The lapels were rather wide on the last one,’ said the D-G.

  ‘They are wide nowadays,’ said Bony. He wrote something into his notebook and, without looking up or interrupting his note taking, he said, ‘I’ve kept yours very narrow compared with what most people are wearing.’

  ‘I like them narrow,’ said the D-G, standing upright as if on parade.

  ‘It’s just a matter of your okay, Sir Henry,’ said Bret, in an effort to squeeze an approval from the old man while he was occupied with the details of his new suit.

  ‘Two pairs of trousers?’ said Bony. He put some pins between his lips while he tugged with both hands at the jacket.

  ‘Yes,’ said the D-G.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit old hat, Sir Henry?’ said Frank Harrington, speaking for the first time. Frank was very close to the old man. They’d trained together at some now defunct wartime establishment, and this was a mysterious bond they shared. It gave Frank the right to speak to Sir Henry in a way that no one else in the building dared, not even the Deputy.

  ‘No, always do. Always did, always do,’ said the old man, stroking his sleeve.

  ‘Gets damned hot, doesn’t it?’ said Frank, persisting with his ancient joke. ‘Wearing two pairs of trousers.’

  The D-G laughed dutifully, a deep resonant sound that might have been a bad cough.

  ‘I feel we must continue,’ said Bret, trying now to press the meeting forward without saying anything that Bony might understand. ‘We’ve had a bad start, but we must go on and get something out of it.’

  ‘I’m coming under a great deal of pressure,’ said the old man, plucking at his shoulder seam. ‘I’ll need more room under there, Bony.’ He pushed his fist under his arm to show where he wanted it and then stretched an arm high into the air to show that it constricted his movement.

  Bony smoothed the material and sniffed. ‘You’re not supposed to play golf in it, Sir Henry. It’s a lounge suit.’

  ‘If we stop now, I fear we’ll come out of it badly,’ said Bret. ‘The trouble we ran into was simply a matter of bad luck. There was no actual operational failure.’ The operation was a success but the patient died.

  Bony was behind the D-G now, tugging at the remnants of the half-made garment. ‘Keep still, sir!’ he ordered fiercely, in a voice that shocked us all. Not Bret nor even Frank Harrington would have spoken to the D-G like that.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bony,’ said the D-G.

  Bony did not graciously accept the apology. ‘If we get it wrong, you’ll blame me,’ he said, with the righteous indignation of the self-employed artisan.

  ‘Have you brought the fabrics?’ said the D-G. ‘You promised to bring the swatches.’ There was a retaliatory petulance in the D-G’s voice, as if the swatches were something that Bony had failed to bring more than once in the past.

  ‘I wouldn’t advise the synthetics,’ said Bony. ‘They’re shiny. That wouldn’t suit a man of your position, Sir Henry. People would think it was a suit bought off the peg.’ Bony did all but shudder at the idea of Sir Henry Clevemore wearing a shiny synthetic ready-made suit.

  Bret said, ‘We have excellent prospects, Sir Henry. It would be criminal to throw away a chance like this.’

  ‘How long do you want?’ said the D-G.

  Bony looked at him to see if he was asking about the delivery time of the suit, decided it wasn’t a question for him, and said, ‘I want you to look at the wool, Sir Henry. This is the sort of thing for you.’ He waved samples of cloth in the air. They all seemed virtually identical to the material of the suit the D-G was wearing when we came in; virtually identical to the fabrics the D-G always wore.

  ‘Two weeks,’ said Bret.

  ‘You like it to go quickly,’ said the D-G.

  Both Bony and Bret denied this, although it appeared that the D-G was addressing this accusation to Bony, for he added, ‘If everyone insisted on hard-wearing cloth, it would put you all out of business.’

  Bony must have been more indignant than Bret, for he got his rebuttal in first and loudest. ‘Now that’s nonsense, Sir Henry, and you know it. You have suits you had from me twenty years ago, and they’re still good. My reputation depends upon my customers looking their best. If I thought a synthetic material would be best for you, I’d happily supply it.’

  ‘Even one week might be enough,’ said Bret, sensing that his first bid was unacceptable.

  ‘If synthetic material was the most expensive, you’d be selling that to me with the same kind of enthusiasm,’ said the D-G. He waggled a finger at the tailor like a little child discovering a parent in an untruth.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Bony. The D-G delivered all his lines as if he’d said them many times before, but Bony responded with a fresh and earnest tone that was near to anger. The D-G seemed to enjoy the exchanges; perhaps this sort of sparring was what made the D-G order his suits from the indomitable Bony.

  ‘I’ll hold the barbarians at bay for a week,’ conceded the D-G. He didn’t have to explain to Bret that the barbarians were at the Home Office or that after a week Bret’s head might be handed over to them.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Bret, and wisely ended the discussion.

  But the D-G was not wholly concerned with the swatches of cloth that he was now fingering close by the window. ‘Who are you briefing for this job?’ he asked without looking up.

  Bony handed him a second batch of materials.

  ‘I’m not very keen on that,’ said the D-G. He was still looking at the cloth and there were a few moments of silence while Bony and Bret tried to decide to which of them the remark was addressed. ‘But you are in charge so I suppose I’ll have to let you decide.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you,’ said Bret.

  ‘If you want a shiny cloth, what about that?’ said Bony, tapping one of the samples.

  ‘I’ve no special desire for a shiny cloth,’ said the D-G testily. ‘But I do want to try one of the synthetic mixtures.’

  Bret was edging towards the door.

  Bony said, ‘They look good in the samples, but some of them don’t make up very well.’

  ‘One wool and one mixture. I told you that at the beginning…the first fitting.’ He looked up to see Bret getting away and added, ‘You’ll have to take…’ He nodded his head at me. He knew me well enough. On occasion I’d even had lunch with him. He’d seen me virtually every day at London Central for about six years, but still he couldn’t remember my name. It was the same for most of the staff at London Central, yet still I found it irritating.

  ‘Samson,’ supplied Bret Rensselaer.

  ‘Samson. Yes.’ He smiled at me. ‘Take him with you. He knows how these things are done,’ said the D-G. The implication was that no one else present did know how such things are done, and he fixed me with a look as if to underline that that’s exactly what he meant. He probably liked me; I had, after all, survived quite a few complaints from various members of the senior staff. Or perhaps he was just good at this thing they call management.

  But now I wanted to protest. I looked at Bret and saw that he wanted to protest too. But there was no point in saying anything more. The D-G’s audience had ended. Seeing us hesitating he waved his cloth sample at us to shoo us away. ‘And keep in touch with Morgan,’ added the D-G. My heart fell and Bret’s jaw tightened in rage. We both knew what that meant; it would give th
e pasty-faced Morgan carte blanche to mastermind the operation while using the name of the D-G as his authority.

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Bret.

  And so I found myself inextricably linked to Bret Rensselaer’s amateur attempt to infiltrate the Cambridge net. And I was the only person who suspected him of treason. For assistance we’d have Stinnes, whose name Bret had craftily kept out of the discussion – the only other person I couldn’t trust.

  17

  ‘I’m sick to death of hearing what a wonderful man your father was,’ said Bret suddenly. He hadn’t spoken for a long time. The anger had been brewing up inside him so that even without a cue he had to let me have it.

  What had I said about my father that had touched a nerve in him? Only that he hadn’t left me any money – hardly a remark to produce such a passionate response.

  We were in an all-night launderette. I was pretending to read a newspaper that was resting on my knees. It was 2.30 a.m., and outside the street was very dark. But there was not much to be seen through the windows, for this small shop was a cube of bright blue light suspended in the dark suburban streets of Hampstead. From the loudspeaker fixed in the ceiling came the soft scratchy sounds of pop music too subdued to be recognizable. A dozen big washing machines lined one wall. Their white enamel was chipped and scarred with the initials of the cleaner type of vandal. Detergent was spilled across the floor like yellow snow and there was the pungent smell of boiled coffee from a dispensing machine in the corner. We were sitting at the far end of a line of chairs facing the washing machines. Side by side Bret and I stared at the big cyclops where some dirty linen churned in suds. Customers came and went, so that most of the machines were working. Every few moments the mechanisms made loud clicking noises and sometimes the humming noises modulated to a scream as one of the drums spun.

  ‘My father was a lush,’ said Bret. ‘His two brothers forced him off the board after he’d punched one of the bank’s best customers. I was about ten years old. After that I was the only one to look after him.’

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘You have to have an infinity of compassion to look after a drunkard,’ said Bret. ‘My mother didn’t have that gift. And my brother Sheldon only cared about the old man’s money. He told me that. Sheldon worked in the bank with my uncles. He would lock his bedroom door and refuse to come out when my father was getting drunk.’

  ‘Didn’t he ever try to stop?’

  ‘He tried. He really tried. My mother would never believe he tried, but I knew him. He even went to a clinic in Maine. I went in the car with him. It was a grim-looking place. They wouldn’t let me past the entrance lodge. But a few weeks after he came back, he was drinking again…None of them tried to help him. Not Sheldon, not my mother, no one. I hated to leave him when I went into the Navy. He died before I even went to sea.’ Bret looked at his watch and at the only other person there: a well-dressed man who’d been sitting near the door reading Le Monde and drinking coffee from a paper cup.

  Now the man tossed the paper cup onto the floor, got to his feet, and opened the glass door to empty his machine and stuff his damp underwear into a plastic bag. He nodded to us before leaving. Bret looked at me, obviously wondering if that could be their first contact, but he didn’t voice this suspicion. He said, ‘Maybe they won’t buy it. We should have brought Stinnes inside here. Last year he made the cash delivery; that’s why he knows exactly how it’s done. They’d recognize him. That would be good.’

  I’d insisted that Stinnes remain in the second car. I said, ‘It’s better this way. I want Stinnes where he can be protected. If we need him, we can get him in two minutes. I put Craig in to mind him. Craig’s good.’

  ‘I still say we should have used Stinnes to maximum advantage.’

  ‘I don’t want him sitting in here under the lights; a target for anyone driving past. I don’t want him in here with a bodyguard. And we certainly don’t want to give Stinnes a gun.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘If they’re on the level, it will be okay.’

  ‘If they think we’re on the level, it will be okay,’ Bret corrected me. ‘But they’re bound to be edgy.’

  ‘They’re breaking the law and you aren’t; remember that. They’ll be nervous. Stay cool and it will go smoothly.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that; you’re just trying to convince yourself,’ said Bret. ‘You’ve argued against me all the way.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  Bret leaned forward to reach inside the bag of laundry that he’d placed between his feet. He was dressed in an old raincoat and a tweed cap. I can’t imagine where he’d found them; they weren’t the kind of thing Bret would normally consider wearing. It was his first attempt to handle any sort of operation and he couldn’t come to terms with the idea that we weren’t trying to look like genuine launderette customers; we were trying to look like KGB couriers trying to look like launderette customers.

  ‘Stinnes has been really good,’ said Bret. ‘The phone call went perfectly. He had the code words – they’ll call themselves “Bingo” – and amounts…four thousand dollars. They believed I was the regular contact coming through here a week early. No reason for them to be suspicious.’ He bent lower to reach deep enough in the bag to finger the money that was in a little parcel under the laundry. According to Stinnes, it was the way it was usually done.

  I said nothing.

  Bret straightened up and said, ‘You don’t get too suspicious of a guy who’s going to hand you four thousand bucks and no questions asked, right?’

  ‘And that’s what you’re going to do?’

  ‘It’s better that way. We give them the money and say hello. I want to build them up. Next meeting I’ll get closer to them.’

  ‘It’s very confidence-building, four thousand dollars,’ I said.

  Bret was too nervous to hear the sarcasm in my voice. He smiled and nodded and stared at the dirty laundry milling round in the machine.

  ‘He got violent, my father. Some guys can drink and just get happy; or amorous. But my father got fighting drunk or else morose. Sometimes, when I was just a child, he’d sit up half the night telling me that he’d ruined my life, ruined my mother’s life, and ruined his own life. “You’re the only one I’ve got, Bret,” he’d say. Then the next minute he’d be trying to fight me because I was stopping him having another drink. He took no account of my age; he always talked to me the way you’d talk to an adult.’

  A man came in through the door. He was young and slim, wearing jeans and a short, dark pea jacket. He had a bright-blue woollen ski mask on his head, the sort that completely hides the face except for eye slots and a hole for the mouth. The pea jacket was unbuttoned and from under it he brought out a sawn-off shotgun. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. He was excited and nervous. He waggled the gun at us and moved his head to show that he wanted us to get going.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Bret.

  ‘Bingo,’ said the man. ‘This is Bingo.’

  ‘I’ve got it here,’ said Bret. He seemed to be frozen into position, and because Bret wouldn’t move, the boy with the gun was becoming even more agitated.

  ‘Go! go! go!’ shouted the boy. His voice was high-pitched and anxious.

  Bret got to his feet with the laundry bag in his hand. Another man came in. He was similarly masked, but he was broader and, judging from his movements, older, perhaps forty. He was dressed in a short bulky black-leather overcoat. He stood in the doorway looking first at the man with the shotgun and then back over his shoulder; there must have been three of them. One hand was in his overcoat pocket, in his other hand he had a bouquet of coloured wires. ‘What’s the delay? I told you…’

  His words were lost in the muffled bang that made the shop window rattle. Outside in the street there was a blast of flame that for a moment went on burning bright. It was across the road. That could be only one thing; they’d blown up the car. The second man tossed the bundle
of coloured wires to the floor. My God! Stinnes was in that car. The bastards!

  Bret was standing when the car blew up. He was directly between me and the two men. The explosion gave me the moment’s distraction I needed, I leaned forward enough to see round Bret. My silenced pistol was on my lap wrapped in a newspaper. I fired twice at the youngest one. He didn’t go down, but he dropped the shotgun and slumped against the washing machines holding his chest. ‘Get down, Bret!’ I said, and pushed him to the floor before the other joker started firing. ‘Hold it right there,’ I shouted. Then I ran along the machines, and past the wounded man, kicking the shotgun back towards Bret as I went. I couldn’t wait around and play nursemaid to Bret, but if he was a KGB man he might pick up the shotgun and let me have it in the back.

  The older one didn’t wait to see what I wanted. He went through a door marked STAFF before I could shoot at him. I followed. It was an office – the least amount of office you could get: a small table, one chair, a cheap cashbox, a vacuum flask, a dirty cup and a copy of the Daily Mirror.

  I went through the next door and found myself at the bottom of a flight of stairs. The door banged behind me and it was suddenly dark. There was a corridor leading to a street door. He hadn’t had time to get out into the street that way, but he might have been waiting there in the darkness. Where was he? I remained still for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the dark.

  While I was trying to decide whether to explore the corridor, there was a sound of footsteps from the floor above. Then there was a loud bang. The flash lit the staircase, and lead shot rattled against the wallpaper. So this bastard had a shotgun too. The gun must have been under his buttoned coat; difficult to get at, that’s why he’d had to run for it. That shot was just a warning, of course – something to show what was waiting for me if I climbed the stairs.

  I wasn’t looking for a chance to be a hero, but I heard his feet going up the next flight and I went up the first flight of stairs two at a time. I had rubber-soled shoes. He was making so much noise that he probably couldn’t hear me. But as I halted at the next dark landing, his footsteps halted too. In the lexicon of hand-to-hand fighting, going up a dark staircase against a shotgun is high on the list of ‘don’tevers’.