by Len Deighton
‘Your report is a masterpiece,’ said Frank, speaking as if this verdict was the result of long and deep reflection. He was sitting before the stove, stiff-backed on a small bentwood chair, wearing a smooth woollen herring-bone overcoat of such beautiful material and cut that, had I not known Frank so well, I might have suspected it as a reason for turning off the heat. ‘It will be incorporated into the lectures at the training school and some future Director-General will quote pages of it from memory.’ Such heavy sarcasm did not come naturally to Frank, who was avuncular, and by nature a healer of wounds rather than one to rub salt into them.
The ensuing silence was broken only by the sound of Dicky tapping his expensive fountain-pen against his still more expensive teeth. I recognized that look on his face: Dicky was thinking; lost in a world of dreams, plans and ambitions. Feeling that a reply was expected of me, and with Dicky’s recent promotion – albeit temporary – a living reminder that the Department was inclined to value effort above result, I said: ‘I spent a long time writing it.’
‘I’m certain of that,’ said Frank with a snort. ‘And I spent a long time reading it. The first time I read it, I marvelled. Here was a report seemingly reasoned, acute and reflective and informative.’
I said nothing. With a self-tormenting perversity that I suspected to be a product of his public school years, Frank, who was trying to give up smoking, was toying ceaselessly with the bright yellow oilskin pouch that contained his favourite tobacco and pipe.
‘I read it two or three more times,’ said Frank, as he stood up and dumped the pouch on the table. ‘To see the extent to which the whole thing is evasive, ambivalent and noncommittal.’
‘I try to be empirical,’ I said.
‘Imperious I would have said. Even when you meet a Lutheran pastor you call him “a man in clergyman’s clothes”. At what stage does cautious observation become evasion?’ Just because a large measure of Frank’s irascibility was due to the torment caused by his renunciation of tobacco, it didn’t make being the target of his bitter comments any more appealing. I looked at him with polite attention and said nothing.
Frank said: ‘Yes, I know you have been away. I know you feel you’ve been badly treated by the Department. That you resent not being told everything about the decision to send your wife across there as a double …’
‘Anything,’ I corrected him mildly. ‘I was not told anything.’
Dicky had been staring down into the garden and giving no sign of following Frank’s questioning or my responses. Now Frank paused long enough for Dicky to swing round and say: ‘For God’s sake! Need-to-know! That’s the essence of the business we’re in.’ He was wearing a short black leather overcoat, a double-breasted design complete with lots of buckles and buttons and shoulder straps. As he moved, the lining of bright red silk was revealed. It looked brand-new. I guessed he’d just bought it in one of those swanky men’s shops in the Ku-Damm; every visitor found time to visit them. ‘You’re supposed to be a secret agent, Bernard. How can you complain about the way secrets are guarded?’
I saw Frank make a paddling motion with a limp hand that was hanging at his side. It was a signal to Dicky to shut up and let him handle the situation. Frank said: ‘You are still judging us, Bernard. It’s not healthy.’
‘Not unless you would prefer being permanently behind a desk somewhere,’ drawled Dicky. Just in case I recognized that as the threat it was, he added: ‘You know what they are like in London,’ as if he had no say in postings and assignments.
‘I wish you would be a little more explicit,’ said Frank to me.
‘It was a set-up,’ I said.
‘Why not put you in the bag?’
‘Surely that’s what they were trying to do?’ I said.
‘The men in the car you fired the pistol at? Umm.’ Frank rubbed his chin as he thought about what I’d written. ‘Not a very serious effort unless you’ve missed something out.’
‘Oh, no? What could they have done to make their effort more serious?’ I asked, without letting my irritation show. Neither of these two desk men had ever heard a shot fired in anger, so I didn’t take easily to their dismissal of an action of the sort that, on the rare cases when it’s happened to other more senior men, has been marked by flowery commendations and promotions. I smiled.
‘The monitor service heard nothing: no orders to block off the Autobahn exits, no instructions to Berlin checkpoints, nothing.’
‘Their car slid back into a ditch,’ I said. ‘Maybe they ended up unconscious and were put into hospital.’
‘Perhaps that’s it,’ said Frank, in a tone that indicated that it was not high on his list of possible explanations. ‘But VERDI… why did they wait outside and shoot him through the window? Why not inside? Why not somewhere more private?’
‘I didn’t say they did shoot him through the window,’ I said.
‘I noticed that,’ said Frank. He let the pages of my report flutter in the warm draught that was coming from a fan heater that one of his servants had placed so that the air warmed his feet. ‘Why?’
‘The hole in the window wasn’t made by a bullet.’
‘Can you be sure?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s something you learn to recognize. I won’t go into the details.’
‘Go into the details,’ said Dicky, joining the conversation suddenly. ‘I’m interested in how you can be so categorical about it, and still leave it out of your report.’
I looked at Frank. Frank raised an eyebrow.
I said: ‘A high-velocity missile going through glass, a round from a hand-gun for instance, produces radial fractures and several concentric fractures. In this case there were none. Furthermore the hole made by a bullet produces a powdering of glass around the actual hole. A low-velocity missile, such as a stone, knocks a piece out of the glass leaving a neater smoother edge.’
‘Are you snowing me, Bernard?’ said Dicky, shaking his head to stress his disbelief. Frank looked from one to the other of us, adopting his favourite role of unbiased adjudicator. ‘Is this just your own theory or something out of a home-repairs manual?’
‘Surely, Dicky, every schoolboy knows that glass is a supercooled liquid which, under impact from a fast-moving missile, bends until it fractures in long cracks radiating from the point of impact. It continues bending for a long distance until eventually it makes a second series of cracks concentrically from the point of impact. Also a high-velocity missile makes a quite different type of hole. It fragments or powders the glass as it exits, and this reveals the direction of the missile. The degree of fragmentation usually gives a rough idea of the likely range from which the shot came; the closer the range the heavier the fragmentation.’
Frank smiled.
‘Okay, you clever shit,’ said Dicky. ‘So why didn’t you say the killer definitely was not waiting outside? You didn’t say they weren’t waiting outside did you?’
‘Because the killer might have fired through a hole in the glass that was already there,’ I said.
‘You didn’t say that either,’ he complained.
‘I can’t be sure what I said.’ If proof was needed to tell me I was slipping, my ill-timed lecture about fracturing glass was it. In the old days I would have taken more care when kicking the sand of science into the face of a prima donna like Dicky, especially doing it in the presence of Frank, an old-timer everyone respected, or claimed to. ‘The fact is that I didn’t stick around to find out.’
Dicky had been to Oxford University and come away with an undisputed reputation for cleverness. That reputation had stuck. Cleverness was not measured and quantified in the way that passing exams or rowing strenuously enough to become a blue was on record. Cleverness was a vague characteristic not universally respected by Englishmen of Dicky’s class; it suggested cunning and the sort of hard work and determination that marked the social climber. And so Dicky’s cleverness remained a threat ever present, but a promise still unfulfilled. He looked at me and gav
e a sour grin. ‘But why cut and run, Bernard? You had a good man with you.’
‘An inexperienced kid.’
‘Fearless,’ said Dicky. This suggested to me that the kid might be one of Dicky’s protégés, some amiable graduate he’d met on one of his frequent bibulous visits to his alma mater. ‘We’ve used him on a couple of previous jobs: utterly fearless.’
‘An utterly fearless man is more to be dreaded as a comrade than as an enemy,’ I said.
Frank laughed before Dicky had absorbed it. In Frank’s hand, along with my brief account of our unsuccessful mission, I could see the report the kid had submitted. In yellow marker I spotted a sentence about me firing the gun. There was some lengthy comment pencilled in the margin. They hadn’t mentioned the gun I collected from Andi. I still had that to come.
Dicky said: ‘This dead colonel – this VERDI – asked for you. What’s this about someone owing someone a favour? What favour did the poor bastard owe you?’
‘They always say that,’ I explained. ‘That’s the standard form when they are seeking a deal with the other side.’
‘When did you last see him?’ said Dicky.
‘I know nothing of him. His asking for me was just a gimmick.’
‘Try and remember,’ said Dicky in a voice that clearly said that he didn’t believe me. ‘He knows you all right.’
‘More to be dreaded as a comrade than as an enemy,’ said Frank, as if committing it to memory, and chuckled. ‘That’s a good one, Bernard. Well, if you can’t remember VERDI maybe we’ll leave it at that. You’ll want to get back to London and see your children. Your wife is joining you there I heard.’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
Dicky shot a glance at me. He didn’t like the way that Frank was letting me off the hook, and I thought for a moment he was going to mention Gloria, the woman I’d been living with during the time I believed my wife was a defector working for the East. ‘Then why is there a seat reserved for Samson on the flight to Zurich?’ Dicky asked.
I got to my feet. ‘Samson’s a common name, Dicky,’ I said, without getting excited.
‘Field agents are all devious.’ Frank smiled and waved a languid hand in the air. ‘It’s the job that does it. How could Bernard be so good at his job without being constantly wary?’
‘Who do you know in Zurich?’ Dicky asked, as if knowing someone in Zurich was in itself a sinister development.
‘My brother-in-law.’ Frank looked at Dicky as if expecting some reaction to this, but Dicky just nodded. ‘He moved there after his wife was killed. I will have to see him eventually … there are domestic affairs that will have to be settled. Tessa assigned property and her share of a trust to Fiona.’
Frank smiled. He knew why I was going to Zurich of course. He knew I would be cross-checking with Werner Volkmann everything the Department had told me. Dicky knew too. Neither of them liked the idea of me talking to Werner, but Frank was rather more subtle and able to hide his feelings.
Dicky had been pacing about and now he turned on his heel and left the room, saying he would be back in a moment.
‘He gave a little party last night at a new restaurant he found in Dahlem. Indian food apparently, and he suspects the bhindi bhaji has upset him,’ Frank confided when Dicky had gone. ‘Do you know what a bhindi bhaji is?’
‘No, I’m not quite sure I do, Frank.’
Frank nodded his approval, as if such knowledge would have alienated us. ‘Did Bret Rensselaer tell you to see Werner in Zurich?’
I hesitated, but the fact that Frank had waited for Dicky to exit encouraged me to confide in him. ‘No, Bret told me to stay away from Werner. But Werner gets to hear things on the grapevine long before we get to know them through our channels. He might say something useful.’
‘Dicky has staked a lot on having VERDI sitting in London spilling his guts to us. VERDI dead means all Dicky’s planning dies with him. He’ll be casting about for someone to blame; make sure it’s not you.’
‘I wasn’t there,’ I explained for what must have been the thousandth time. ‘He was dead when we got there.’
‘VERDI’s father was a famous Red Army veteran: one of the first into Berlin when the city fell.’
‘So everyone keeps telling me.’ I looked at him. ‘Who cares? That was over forty years ago and he was just one of thousands.’
‘No,’ said Frank. ‘VERDI’s father was the lieutenant commanding Red Banner No. 5.’
‘Now you’ve got me,’ I admitted.
‘Well, well! Berlin expert admits defeat,’ said Frank smugly. ‘Let me tell you the story. In mid-April 1945 – as they advanced on Berlin – the 79th Rifle Corps got orders from the Military Council of the Third Shock Army that a red flag was to be planted on top of the Reichstag. And Stalin had personally ordered that it should be in place by May Day. On April 30th, with the deadline ticking, our man and his team of infantry sergeants fought their way up inside the Reichstag building, from room to room, floor to floor, until they climbed up on to the roof and with only four of them still alive, completed their task with just seventy minutes to go before it was May Day.’
‘No, but I saw the movie,’ I said.
‘Make jokes if you like. For war babies like you it may mean nothing, but I guarantee that communists everywhere would have been devastated at the news that the son of such a man – a symbol of the highest peak of Stalinist achievement – would come over to us.’
‘Devastated enough to kill him to prevent it?’
‘That’s what we want to know, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll find out for you,’ I said flippantly.
‘Don’t go rushing off to Switzerland to ask Werner,’ said Frank. ‘You know Dicky; he is sure to have asked the Berne office to assign someone to meet the plane and discreetly find out where you go. Treat Dicky carefully, Bernard. You can’t afford to make more enemies.’
‘Thanks, Frank,’ I said and meant it warmly. But such assurances left Frank unsatisfied, and now he gave me a penetrating stare as if trying to see into my mind. Long ago he had promised my father that he would look after me, and he took that promise seriously, just as Frank took everything seriously, which was what made him so difficult to please. And like a father, Frank was apt to resent any sign that I could have a mind of my own and enjoy private thoughts that I did not share with him. I suppose all parents feel that anything less than unobstructed open-door access to all their offspring’s thoughts and emotions is tantamount to patricide.
Frank said: ‘As soon as Dicky knew that VERDI was dead he said someone must have talked.’
‘Dicky likes to think that people are plotting against him.’
‘Can’t you see the obvious?’ said Frank with an unusual display of exasperation. ‘They haven’t sent Dicky here as a messenger. Dicky is important nowadays. Whatever Dicky thinks will inevitably become the prevailing view in London.’
‘No one talked in London or anywhere else. It’s absurd. They’ll eventually discover their mistake.’
‘Oh no they won’t. The people in London never discover their mistakes. They don’t even admit them when others discover their mistakes. No, Bernard, they’ll make their theories come true whatever it costs in time and trouble and self-delusion.’
I pulled a face.
Frank said: ‘And that means that you’ll be put under the microscope … Unless of course you can take Dicky aside and gently persuade him that he’s wrong.’ He prodded his oilskin tobacco pouch as if resenting the torment it offered him. ‘Werner’s contract was ended and he was hounded for no real reason except that he seems to upset someone on high. From what little I hear he’s feeling damned bitter about it all. But he’s not working for us. Don’t let him persuade you he is.’
‘You know what us field agents are like,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure I’m getting through to you.’
‘Tell me again, Frank.’
He had the oilskin pouch in his hand. Now he swung it aroun
d. ‘Admit it. Someone talked, didn’t they? It wasn’t just a coincidence that you arrive in Magdeburg and there is a warm corpse waiting for you.’
‘About VERDI?’
‘Don’t be so stupid. Of course. They set him up and killed him. Had they squeezed him before killing him they might have got you too.’
‘And that’s what Dicky thinks?’
‘You have a different theory?’ He had the tobacco pouch in his hand, holding it up as if to admire its lines but also keeping it within olfactory range.
‘It’s one way of looking at it,’ I said grudgingly.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Frank, sniffing at the tobacco pouch. ‘Someone preferred VERDI dead, rather than alive and over here talking to us.’
‘Maybe.’
‘How long were you held up at that militia checkpoint outside Magdeburg?’
‘About half an hour.’
‘And would you say that when you arrived VERDI had been dead for about half an hour?’
‘What are you getting at? Are you suggesting that the delay was arranged so that VERDI could reach the rendezvous and be intercepted and killed before we got there?’
‘It all fits together doesn’t it?’ said Frank.
‘No.’ He looked at me and I yielded a little. ‘It’s possible. But there is no evidence whatsoever to support that theory. Unless you have some evidence to add.’
‘Or … looking at this business and pretending that we didn’t know the agents involved …’ Frank’s voice trailed off. ‘Do you see what I mean, Bernard?’
‘Yes, I see what you mean all right. You mean that if I and that kid invented the hold-up at the checkpoint we could have got there and killed VERDI ourselves.’
‘Using that pistol that came from nowhere,’ added Frank for good measure. ‘It could look bad if someone wanted to throw mud at you.’
‘Ask the kid. He’s Dicky’s man isn’t he?’
‘Very much Dicky’s man,’ agreed Frank amiably. ‘He wants to please Dicky; Dicky says there might eventually be a place for him in London.’