London Match

by Len Deighton

  ‘No, it’s not true. Dicky told me that the committee had scheduled a time to hear evidence from me, but I said that I would need written orders.’

  ‘To go before the committee?’

  ‘I want written orders that specify what I can tell them.’

  ‘And Dicky won’t give you that?’

  ‘He wouldn’t even give Werner guidelines to what he could reveal.’

  ‘He refused?’

  ‘He dithered and changed the subject. You know what Dicky’s like. If I’d asked him one more time, he would have developed a head cold and been taken home on a stretcher.’

  ‘Everyone else is giving evidence. Aren’t you going rather far, darling?’

  ‘These are not our people on the committee.’

  ‘They are MI5.’

  ‘I am not authorized to tell MI5 anything and everything about our operations.’

  ‘You’re just being pigheaded.’ She laughed as if pleased I was giving someone else trouble rather than her.

  ‘It’s not just a matter of a combined committee: we’ve had those before, plenty of them. But it looks as if Bret has been shunted off onto that committee while they decide whether he should face an enquiry. If Bret is suspect…if Bret might turn out to be a KGB agent, why should I go over there and fill in the blanks for him?’

  ‘If Bret is really suspect, the people on that committee must know,’ said Gloria. ‘And in that case, they’ll make sure that you provide no evidence that would matter if it got back to the Russians.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ I said. ‘But they’re more devious than that. I suspect that the Stinnes committee wants to use me as a blunt instrument to beat Bret across the head. That’s the real reason I won’t go.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That committee isn’t called the “Stinnes committee” – it’s called the “Rensselaer committee”. Was that a Freudian slip? Anyway, it’s a good name because that committee isn’t primarily interested in Stinnes except as a source of evidence about Bret. And if they finally get me over there, they won’t want to know about how we enrolled Stinnes – they’ll be asking me questions that might trap Bret.’

  ‘If Bret is guilty, what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Let them provide their own evidence. They think I’ll play ball with anything they want. They think I’ll cooperate in order to prove that I’m whiter than the driven snow. Dicky more or less told me that. He said I should be pleased that suspicion has fallen on Bret because now they’d be less inclined to believe I was helping Fiona.’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean that,’ said Gloria.

  ‘He meant it.’

  ‘You’re determined to believe that the Department doesn’t trust you. But there are no restrictions on you, none at all. I bring the daily sheets up from Registry. If there was any restriction on what you could see, I would know about it.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said. ‘But there’s still an undercurrent of suspicion. Perhaps it’s just a way of keeping me under pressure, but I don’t like it. And I don’t like Dicky telling me that Bret’s being convicted will let me breathe easy.’

  ‘Do you think the committee was convened by the Director-General as a way to investigate Bret Rensselaer?’

  ‘The committee was the brainchild of someone higher up the ladder. The old man wouldn’t be arranging for MI5 to help us wash the dirty linen unless he was ordered to do it that way.’

  ‘Higher up the ladder?’

  ‘I see the hand of the Cabinet Office in this one. The Coordinator of Intelligence and Security is the only man who can tell both us and Five what he wants done. The D-G made it sound like his own idea so that the Department wouldn’t feel humiliated.’

  ‘Humiliated by having MI5 investigate one of our people?’

  ‘That’s my guess,’ I said.

  ‘If Bret is guilty, does it matter how they trap him?’

  ‘If he’s guilty. But there’s not enough solid evidence for that. Either Bret is a super-agent who never makes a bad mistake or he’s being victimized.’

  ‘Victimized by whom?’

  ‘You haven’t seen at close quarters the sort of panic that develops when there’s talk of an agent infiltrating the Department. There’s hysteria. The other day Dicky was remembering all sorts of amazing ramifications of a trip to Kiel he made with Bret. Dicky was turning Bret’s reaction to a KGB man into conclusive evidence against Bret. That’s how the hysteria builds up.’

  ‘They say that where Bret went wrong was in the launderette,’ said Gloria.

  ‘At first I thought so too. But now I’m inclined to see it as evidence in Bret’s favour. The kid who came through the door shouted “Go” to us. Why did he do that, unless he thought Bret was Stinnes? He was expecting someone to run off with them. Everyone is trying to believe that it was something Bret arranged to eliminate Stinnes, but that doesn’t make sense. It was planned as an escape; I see that now. And don’t forget that Bret could have picked up that shotgun and killed me.’

  ‘And the bomb under the car?’

  ‘Because they thought Bret was in the car.’

  ‘And you say that clears Bret?’

  ‘I told you, those hoods were trying to spring Stinnes.’

  ‘Or to kidnap him,’ said Gloria.

  ‘Not on a motorcycle. A back-seat passenger has to be willing to go along.’

  ‘If Bret is completely innocent, there’s so much else to explain. What about the Cabinet memo that Bret sent to Moscow?’

  ‘There’s evidence that Bret’s copy got to Moscow. But there was only one copy of that memo in the Department. Why shouldn’t Fiona have sent a photocopy to Moscow? She had access.’

  ‘And then used it to frame Bret?’

  ‘I’m only saying that all the evidence against Bret is circumstantial. We aren’t certain that Moscow ever got the report that followed the memo. There isn’t one really good piece of it that nails Bret beyond doubt.’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Bernard. You say they put the bomb under the car in which Stinnes was sitting because they thought Bret was inside it. Either Moscow is going to immense trouble to frame Bret or else they tried to kill him. But those two actions are incompatible.’

  ‘Both actions would benefit Moscow. If that bomb had killed Bret, the Department would be in an even worse state of panic. As it is now, they have Bret under observation, they have a measure of control over who he sees and what he does. Everyone feels that if Bret is guilty, he’ll fall prey to the interrogator, especially with Stinnes inventing some difficult questions for him. They’re comforting themselves with the idea that Bret will cooperate fully with the investigation to avoid a long jail sentence. But if Bret was dead, things wouldn’t look so rosy. There’d be no way to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. We’d have to be digging out all the material he’d handled, supervetting all Bret’s contacts, and doing the same sort of complicated double-thinking that we did when Fiona went over there.’

  ‘If a dead Bret is worse for us than a live Bret, why haven’t they tried again?’

  ‘They don’t have hit teams waiting in the Embassy, sweetheart. Such killings have to be planned and authorized. A hit team has to be briefed and provided with false documentation. It all went wrong for them at the launderette, so now there will probably be some KGB officials arguing against trying again. It will take time.’ What I didn’t say was that Fiona might be one of the people arguing against another attempt on Bret’s life, for I suspected that Bret’s life might depend upon what she decided.

  ‘Do you think Bret knows he’s in danger?’

  ‘This is just one theory, Gloria. It could be wrong; Bret might be the KGB mole that everyone thinks he is.’

  ‘Will they make you go before the committee?’

  ‘The D-G won’t want to go back to the Cabinet Office and say I’m being difficult, and yet the Coordinator is the only one who can order me to do it. I think the D-G will decide i
t’s better to delay things and hope the committee will decide it can manage without me. In any case, I’ve got a breathing space. You know what the Department is like; if the committee insists on me attending, they’ll have to put it in writing. Then I’ll put my objections in writing too. In any case, nothing will happen until I come back from Berlin.’

  ‘When are you going?’ said Gloria.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, Bernard. Couldn’t it wait a week? There’s so much I wanted to talk about with you.’

  ‘Is there?’ I said, fully alerted. There was something in her voice, a plaintive note I recognized. ‘Is it something to do with that suitcase?’

  ‘No,’ she said, quickly enough to indicate that she really meant yes.

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Clothes. I told you.’

  ‘More clothes? This house is full of your clothes now.’

  ‘It’s not.’ Her voice was harsh and she was angry. And then, more rueful: ‘I knew you’d be beastly.’

  ‘You remember what we agreed, Gloria. We are not going to make this a permanent arrangement.’

  ‘I’m just your weekend girl, aren’t I?’

  ‘If that’s the way you want to think about it. But there are no other girls, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘You don’t care about me.’

  ‘Of course I do, but I must have just a bit of wardrobe space. Couldn’t you take a few things back to your parents…and maybe rotate things as you need them?’

  ‘I should have known you didn’t love me.’

  ‘I do love you, but we can’t live together, not all the week.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are all sorts of reasons…the children and Nanny and…well, I’m just not ready for that sort of permanent domestic scene. I must have breathing space. It’s too soon after my wife left.’ The words came out in a torrent, none of them providing any real answer for her.

  ‘You’re frightened of the word “marriage”, aren’t you? That really frightens you.’

  ‘I’m not even divorced yet.’

  ‘You say you’re worried about your wife getting custody of the children. If we were married, the court would be more sympathetic to the idea of you keeping them.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right, but you can’t get married before you’re divorced, and the court will not look favourably upon a bigamist.’

  ‘Or look favourably upon a father living with his mistress. So that’s the reason?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You treat me like a child. I hate you.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it when I come back from Berlin. But there are other people involved in such a decision. Have you considered what your parents are likely to say to you if you moved in here?’

  ‘What they’d say to you, that’s what concerns you, isn’t it? You’re worried about what my parents are going to say to you.’

  ‘Yes, I am concerned about them.’

  She began to cry.

  ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ I said, although of course I knew what was wrong. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry about everything. You’re young.’

  ‘I’ve left my parents.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘All my things are in the suitcase – my books, my pictures, the rest of my clothes. I had a terrible row with my mother, and my father took her side. He had to, I suppose. I understand why he did it. Anyway, I’ve had enough of them both. I packed my things and left them. I’m never going back.’

  I felt sick.

  She went on: ‘I’m never going back to them. I told them that. My mother called me names. She said awful things about me, Bernard.’

  She was crying more seriously now, and her head fell onto my shoulder and I could feel the warm wet tears on my bare skin. ‘Go to sleep, sweetheart. We’ll talk about it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘The plane doesn’t leave until lunchtime.’

  ‘I’m not staying here. You don’t want me, you’ve told me that.’

  ‘For the time being…’

  ‘I’m not staying here. I have someone I can go to. Don’t worry, Bernard. By the time you come back from Berlin all my things will be out of here. At last I can see you as you really are.’

  She was still limp in my arms, still sobbing with a subdued and desolate weariness, but I could hear the determination in her voice. There was no way she was going to stay except on promise of marriage and that was something I couldn’t bring myself to give. She turned over to face away from me and hugged herself. She wouldn’t be comforted. I remained awake a long time, but she went on sobbing very quietly. I knew there was nothing I could do. There is no sadness to compare with the grief of the young.

  24

  Berlin is a sombre city of grey stone. It is an austere Protestant town; the flamboyant excesses of South German baroque never got as far as Prussia’s capital. The streets are as wide as the buildings are tall, so that the cityscape dwarfs people hurrying along the windswept streets, in a way that the skyscrapers of Manhattan do not overwhelm the human figure. Even Berlin’s modern buildings seem hewn from stone, their glass façades mirroring the grey sky, monolithic and forbidding.

  Inside Lisl Hennig’s hotel the furniture had the same massive proportions that characterized the city. Solid, stately, and uncompromising, the oak tables, the heavy mahogany wardrobes, and the elegant Biedermeier cupboards and china cabinets of peach and pear wood dominated the house. Even in my little room at the top of the house, the corner cabinet and the chest of drawers, the carved chair and the bed built high upon several mattresses left little space to move from window to door.

  I always slept in this room. It was the one I’d occupied as a child, when my family had the top floors assigned to them by the British Army of Occupation. From this window I’d floated my paper aeroplanes, blown soap bubbles, and dropped water bombs into the courtyard far below. Nowadays no one else wanted to use this dark cramped little box room so far from the bath. So the dark-brown floral patterned wallpaper remained, and over the tiny fireplace there still could be seen the framed engraving of medieval Dresden that Lisl Hennig had put there to hide the marks where Werner’s air gun had been fired at a drawing of Herr Storch, the fat mathematics teacher. Storch had been a dedicated Nazi, but he had somehow managed to evade the denazification procedures and get his job back after the war.

  I moved the picture to show Werner that the marks were still there. ‘Spat! spat! spat!’ said Werner, firing an imaginary pistol at the place where the drawing of Storch had once been.

  ‘You’ve got to hand it to him,’ I said without mentioning Storch by name. ‘He stuck to his views.’

  ‘He was a Nazi bastard,’ said Werner without rancour.

  ‘And he did little to hide it,’ I said. The sky was black with storm clouds and now the rain began, huge drops of water that hit the glass with loud noises and made patterns on the dirty windowsill.

  ‘Storch was cunning,’ said Werner. ‘He rephrased all his Nazi claptrap into anti-British and anti-American tirades. They could have put him inside for spreading Nazi ideas, but the British and the Americans kept telling everyone how much they believed in free speech. They couldn’t do much about Storch.’ Werner was standing by the fireplace, fidgeting with the china figure of William Tell that had been relegated to this room after a maid had dropped it into the sink while cleaning it. The pieces had been stuck together with a glue that had oozed to make brown ridges around the arms and legs.

  I’d been trying to find some suitable opportunity to tell Werner about Tessa’s meeting with my wife and about her request for the children, but the right moment didn’t come. ‘Do you ever see him? Herr Storch, do you ever see him?’

  ‘He got married again,’ said Werner. ‘He married a widow who had a watchmaker’s shop in Munich.’ Werner was dressed in a dark-grey worsted jacket and the corduroy trousers that the Germans call Manchesterhosen. His shirt was green and with it he wore a green polyester tie with little red hor
ses. On the hook behind the door he’d hung a tired old grey raincoat. I knew he had an appointment with some East Bloc bank officials that afternoon, but even if he hadn’t told me, I would have guessed he was going over to the East; he always wore such proletarian clothes when going there. His long black coat with its astrakhan collar and the kind of tailored wool suits he preferred, to say nothing of his taste in shoes, would have been too conspicuous in the streets of East Berlin.

  ‘Trust Storch to fall on his feet.’

  ‘He made your life hell,’ said Werner.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘All that extra homework, and always making you come out to the front of the class and do the geometry at the blackboard.’

  ‘It was good for me. I was top for mathematics two years running. My dad was amazed.’ There was a crash of thunder and a blue flash of lightning.

  ‘Even then, old Storch kept on at you.’

  ‘He hated the English. His son was killed fighting in the Libyan Desert. He told the boys in the top class that the English had shot all their prisoners.’

  ‘That was just propaganda,’ said Werner.

  ‘You don’t have to spare my feelings,’ I said. ‘There are bastards everywhere, Werner. We both know that.’

  ‘Storch didn’t have to take it out on you.’

  ‘I was the only Engländer he could get his hands on.’

  ‘I’ve never heard you say a bad word about old Storch.’

  ‘He was a tough-minded old bastard,’ I said. ‘He must have known that one word to my dad about him having been a stormtrooper would have got him kicked out of his job, but he didn’t seem to care.’

  ‘I would have squealed on him,’ said Werner.

  ‘You hated him more than I did.’

  ‘Don’t you remember all that poisonous stuff about Jewish profiteers, and the way he stared at me all the time?’

  ‘And you said, “Don’t look at me, sir, my father was a gravedigger.”’

  ‘That was when old Herr Grossmann was away on sick leave, and Storch did the history lessons.’ A long roll of thunder sounded as the storm moved over the city and headed for Poland, such a short drive down the road. Werner scowled. ‘All Storch knew about history was what he’d read in his Nazi propaganda – about how the Jewish profiteers had made Germany lose the war and ruined the economy. They should never have let a bigot like that take the history class.’