by Len Deighton
‘Wherever she is, I’ll find her and talk to her. I promise.’
‘She visits the children every week. Every week! She takes them presents and sends them cards. Sometimes her father goes too; the children call him “Uncle”.’
‘She goes to your father’s home to see them?’
‘Daddy won’t hear a word said against her,’ said Fiona. ‘She’s won him over completely.’
‘Well, well.’ Fiona’s father always became totally gaga in the presence of any nubile girl, but it was easy to understand why Fiona felt isolated.
‘Just tell her it’s all over. Thank her for looking after the children and all that. But make sure she knows it’s all over. You’re happily married. Married to me. And I don’t want her visiting my children.’
I nodded. Fiona’s stories about Tessa’s ghost may or may not have been passing delusions, but her feelings about Gloria were unmistakably heartfelt and chronic. ‘Tell me something, darling,’ I said. ‘When Tessa made her Will assigning this flat and its contents over to you, you were in Berlin working for the DDR. What would you have done with an apartment in London?’
‘Sold it, I suppose,’ said Fiona, eyeing me warily.
‘And thrown George out?’
‘Perhaps Tessa knew George wouldn’t want to remain here if anything happened to her. Perhaps they discussed it. Or perhaps some lawyer framed the terms of the Will. Anyway, who could have guessed Tessa would predecease George and me?’ Fiona offered me the fruit bowl. ‘The pears are ripe. Shall I give you a clean plate?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘So did you tell Tessa that your defection was all a stunt? Did you hint to her that eventually you hoped to return to normal duty and life in London?’
‘But didn’t tell you my secret? Is that what’s troubling you?’
‘Well, did you?’ Changing my mind, I took back my meat plate from where she had stacked it and took a pear and started to peel it with the knife I’d used for the veal.
‘You need a clean plate and a fruit knife.’ Having left two small plates ready, she now reached for them and gave me one, together with a fruit knife. She took the pear from my hand and put it on the clean plate, and then removed the meat plate. Fiona was a careful planner, and she stuck to her plans; whether it was pears on fruit plates or anything else. She looked at me. ‘Of course not. Almost no one knew. It was the closest-guarded secret the Department ever had. I wish you wouldn’t keep brooding about it.’
‘I’m not brooding on it – nor on anything else,’ I said, masterfully restraining myself from asking why I mustn’t keep brooding about her betrayal but she could keep brooding about its outcome.
‘Oh, there are some letters for you.’ She got them from a silver toast-rack on the sideboard which George had always used for mail.
‘Who knows this address?’
‘Don’t be so secretive.’
‘I’ve not given this address to anyone,’ I said.
‘Open your mail and perhaps you’ll find out,’ she said, and began to clear the table.
The letters were a collection of circulars and bills for telephone and gas, and a chatty letter from an uncle in Chicago. Unremarkable except that I had no uncle in Chicago.
‘Good news, darling?’ she asked as she took the dishes away to the kitchen and began filling the dish-washer.
‘Yes, they are going to cut off the phone.’
‘I paid,’ said Fiona’s voice from the kitchen.
I looked at the letter from Chicago. After two pages of banal chit-chat there were two lines of phone numbers. The handwriting was cramped and angular, to disguise the identity I suppose, but I had guessed what it was even before I’d got to the lists of numbers. ‘I think I’ll take a bath,’ I called. ‘Is the water hot?’
‘Help yourself. There are mountains of lovely new towels and I bought a razor and shaving cream for you in case you arrived without your bag.’
‘You think of everything.’
‘Uncle’ was of course Bret Rensselaer. The bogus phone numbers provided a message. He’d used the crudest code of all and yet, like so many crude devices – from home-made bombs to the three-card trick – it could be effective enough to defeat a great deal of sophisticated effort. The first number was the page, the second number the line and the third number showed which word it was. All you needed to read the message was the same edition of the same book that the sender had used. Since the code was based upon words, rather than letters, it provided no letter-frequency, which cracks most amateur codes wide open. In an age when there was an infinity of printed books available such codes were not easy to break. I had the right book: Bret’s Bible. I’d carried it with me just as Bret had urged me to do. I suppose some instinct had already told me it would be needed.
I felt somewhat foolish running my bath in a steam-filled bathroom while I counted my way through the tiny Bible with its thin, almost transparent, pages. I hadn’t decoded a coded message since I left the boy scouts. Or was it the training school: there’s not a lot of difference.
Each page of the ancient little Bible was in two columns, but I soon realized that Bret was using only the left-hand column. I flipped the pages and the words emerged one by one in a strange sequence, giving me the eerie feeling that Bret was speaking from beyond the grave: as if the words were a spiritual communication coming by Ouija board.
UNKNOWN DEAD NEVERTHELESS REVEALED 4 WIFE’S SERVANT
I imagined Bret scouring his Bible for the words he wanted. It would be a frustrating task, and the names of people and towns were unavailable. It was typical of Bret that, having lavished a ‘nevertheless’ upon his text, he eventually grew impatient enough to use a numeral instead of ‘for’.
‘Don’t phone me,’ my uncle said in his letter. ‘I won’t be home.’ But I rather thought that was a reminder that Bret’s phone was not completely private. Poor old Bret. The last of the old top-floor warriors, he’d never give up his hopes of getting back to active duty in London.
‘Is the water hot?’ Fiona yelled from the other side of the door.
‘Yes, and I’m in it,’ I said feelingly, and flushed Bret’s cryptic message down the toilet.
8
Dicky arrived at work only thirty minutes after I did. He’d been arriving earlier since getting temporary control of Operations. Which elements of his daily routine, of jogging across Hampstead Heath and returning home for breakfast, had been abandoned I don’t know, but he was steadily putting on weight. I suppose the early arrival was part of his campaign to get the Ops appointment made permanent.
‘Come in, Bernard,’ he said brusquely as he came into the ante-room, hurrying past his secretary while extending a hand to grab the batch of opened mail she held aloft for him.
He went into his office where his lion-skin rug was stretched, limbs extended, mane tangled and glass eyes glinting malevolently. Dicky avoided stepping on his lion, I’d noticed that before, and went around to stand behind the polished rosewood table he used instead of a desk.
Set close together, and occupying a large section of the wall behind him, there were neatly framed black and white photos in all of which a smiling Dicky was clasping hands with someone rich and important. On the other wall there stood a reproduction Chippendale glass-fronted case containing books which Dicky had bought because of their impressive leather bindings. He kept it locked because closer inspection revealed them to be such volumes as Glorious Days of Empire and incomplete histories of the Crimean War and of Vickers Armstrong. The only one I’d seen him open was a battered old copy of Who’s Who which he used in order to look up the antecedents of people he met at parties. ‘Ah ha!’ He shuffled quickly through his mail before dropping it into a tray. Then he pulled off his brown leather replica WW2 fighter pilot’s jacket, and tossed it across the room to the waiting arms of his assistant. He stood there while I admired his knitted sweater; the grass-green one with a pattern of life-size apples, oranges and bananas across its front.
&n
bsp; Arrayed before him on his bright red blotter there was a tumbler of water and half a dozen pills of various shapes and colours. Still on his feet, Dicky began picking up the pills one at a time, gulping each with a mouthful of water. ‘Do you take vitamins, Bernard?’
‘No,’ I said. He sounded a little short of breath but I didn’t remark on this.
‘I have to take vitamins at this time of the year.’ He popped a large red pill into his mouth.
‘What debilitation strikes you down at this time of year?’ I asked with genuine interest.
‘Social commitments, Bernard. Dinner parties, Whitehall ceremonies, banquets, official gatherings, staff booze-ups and so on. It’s very demanding.’ This time he popped a flecked orange cylinder on to his tongue. ‘B12,’ he explained.
‘It’s tough,’ I said. ‘I never realized what it was like at the top.’
‘It’s all part of the job,’ he said philosophically. ‘It’s the work behind the scenes that keeps this Department going.’ When the last pill had been swallowed he finished the water and shouted very loudly: ‘Coffee, slaves. Coffee!’ In the ante-room beyond the door I could hear the unfortunate girl who worked there beginning the frenzied business of making Dicky’s coffee. He forbade them to grind the coffee in advance; he said it lost the essential oils.
He sat down behind the table. ‘Take the weight off your feet, Bernard, and have some coffee.’ He seemed to be practising the charming smile and servile manner that he usually reserved for the Director-General. An invitation to join Dicky for coffee was not extended impulsively, so I knew he wanted something. ‘Have you brought your revised report?’
‘No,’ I said, and sat down in the Charles Eames chair. Now that Dicky had taken delivery of a remarkable new ‘posture’ chair he’d seen advertised in House and Garden, the Eames was relegated to seating visitors. I sank deep down into the soft armchair, and as he watched me settle he focused on my face. The bruises had lost their initial dark purple hues and were streaked with crimson and orange, like a sunset. ‘What in hell happened to you?’ he said in an awed voice that made me think my bruises were worse than they were.
‘A drunken idiot tried to rob me.’
‘Where?’
‘A stube in Kreuzberg.’
‘You should keep away from greasy spoons like that,’ said Dicky. And, with commendable concern for the affairs of the nation, added: ‘Suppose you’d been carrying Category One papers?’
‘I was,’ I said. ‘But I swallowed them.’
After a tight condescending smile he said: ‘Frank told me you’d withdrawn the previous dissertation and were bringing a replacement.’
‘I only got back late last night.’
‘Back from where, old chap?’ It was all mockery of course. He was showing me how good he was at keeping the lid on his anger while allowing a little of it to blow steam and dribble down the outside of the pot.
‘I went to Zurich.’
‘To Zurich. What pressing business took you there?’ I knew then that Dicky’s stringers in Berne had failed to locate me in Switzerland, and I got an infantile pleasure from having outwitted him and his snoopers.
‘I was talking to Werner.’
‘Werner? Werner Volkmann? I wish you hadn’t done that, Bernard, old sport.’
‘Why, Dicky?’
‘Your old sparring partner is persona non grata with us all at this moment in time.’ There was the sudden whine of a distant electric coffee-grinder. He looked at the door, raised an arm and screamed: ‘Coffee! Coffee for God’s sake!’ in the feigned rage that he claimed amused his staff.
‘It was a domestic matter,’ I said. ‘I took two days from the leave owing me, and paid my own fare. There were other things I had to attend to there.’
‘Your brother-in-law. Yes, I heard he’d become a tax exile.’ Then the coffee arrived. The drinking of coffee was a ritual that provided for Dicky one of his most treasured moments of the day. It was not just any old coffee; it was a choice import that was brought from the shop of Mr Higgins, the famous London coffee merchant. It was conveyed at high speed by one of our official motor-cycle messengers and ground in Dicky’s ante-room only minutes before brewing, using a special electric grinder Dicky had found in Berlin. It was all worth while of course. Dicky’s coffee was renowned. There was no question of him being reprimanded for using the messengers for his personal errands. All the top-floor staff, even the old D-G, would come hurrying along the corridor to share Dicky’s coffee. Now he put a strong cup of it before me and watched contemptuously as I poured cream into it. ‘Ruins it,’ he pronounced. ‘These are the finest coffee beans you can buy. The flavour is as delicate as a good claret. And do you know, I’m beginning to think I can distinguish from one plantation to another.’ After he’d poured his own coffee, he didn’t go back round the table; instead he propped himself against the table’s edge and looked down at me quizzically.
‘Amazing,’ I replied. ‘Even the plantation, eh?’
‘I’ve always had this delicate palate.’ He watched me. ‘Really fine coffee like this is completely spoiled by cream or sugar.’
‘Sugar. Yes, good. Have you got sugar?’
He reached behind his back and found the sugar on the tray without looking for it. He’d known what I was going to say. ‘Here you are, you barbarian.’ Perhaps I would have taken my coffee sugarless and black, as Dicky drank his, except that it would have deprived him of his chance to explain what a fine palate he had.
‘You’ll have to go back again, Bernard,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to go and see what’s happening.’
‘I’ve only just arrived in London,’ I complained. ‘There’s so much to do here.’
‘I’ve got no one else.’
‘What about that kid I took along?’
‘Not for this one.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll tell you why, Bernard. Because you aren’t telling me the whole truth, that’s why. You are playing games with me.’
‘Am I?’
‘Frank thinks you are reluctant to tell us what you really think happened last week. Who were those people in the car that chased you? I know you have a theory, Bernard. Share it with me. Let’s not waste time equivocating. Who were they?’
‘It’s possible that one of them was VERDI.’
‘In the car behind you!’ I knew my suggestion would ignite Dicky and I was not disappointed. He put down his coffee, his excitement causing him to spill some of it. Then he looked at me, gave a broad boyish smile, and smashed a fist into his open palm. ‘VERDI!’ Then he went to the window and looked out. ‘So the dead man was someone else?’
‘We should keep an open mind.’
‘Was it something you found in the pockets?’ he said hurriedly. ‘I noticed that you didn’t list what you found in the pockets of the dead man.’
‘There was nothing in his pockets.’
‘Nothing?’ All the fire puffing Dicky up cooled suddenly and he deflated, and began gnawing at the nail of his little finger for solace. ‘Nothing at all?’
‘That’s what I thought so damned odd,’ I said.
A couple of nods. ‘He was still warm but someone had found time enough to completely empty his pockets,’ he mused aloud.
‘Difficult to do that, Dicky,’ I said, guiding his thoughts gently. ‘More likely the mysterious someone made him empty his pockets first.’
‘Then shot him. Yes, of course.’
‘It’s all negative,’ I admitted, and tried to think of something else to please him. ‘But it troubled me at the time. It’s something I can’t remember before: there’s always something in an old suit … ticket stubs, a tiny coin, a pencil, a handkerchief …’
‘Unless someone has taken a lot of trouble to make sure there is nothing,’ growled Dicky, the flame in his heart now burning bright again. ‘Yes, indeedy. And the dudes in the car?’
‘They didn’t shoot back,’ I said.
‘Perhaps they weren’t armed?
’
I smiled. ‘You’ve never been over there, Dicky, or you wouldn’t seriously suggest that possibility.’
He frowned as he tried to think of some other explanation. ‘They don’t shoot; so it’s VERDI?’
‘It’s not conclusive, Dicky. Of course not. But you don’t shoot at the other side when you are negotiating to defect.’
He didn’t smile, but this line of thinking pleased him and he was ready to acknowledge that. ‘You’re not just a pretty face, Bernard.’
I wondered if perhaps I’d gone too far with my improvisation, although among London Central’s minions there was a theory that in bending reality to please one’s superiors you could never go too far. ‘This is only a hazy suspicion, Dicky. It’s not a theory we should act upon. That’s why I didn’t want to put it in writing.’
He was lost in his thoughts. ‘Yes, that’s why they shot him in the head. No identification. Then VERDI chases after you. You think he’s … and you shoot at him. It all fits together.’
I didn’t want to say No, it doesn’t all fit together, because that would have marred Dicky’s obvious satisfaction. But once anyone began tapping this fragile hypothesis with the fingertip of reasoning, it would fall into a thousand brittle fragments. But at present my theory was the only thing that was keeping that smile on Dicky’s face, and I needed his good will to get into the Data Centre. ‘We should keep this notion just between the two of us,’ I said. ‘If it does eventually prove to be flawed, we don’t want to be left with egg on our faces.’
‘Don’t worry, Bernard, old son,’ said Dicky, patting my shoulder in an uncharacteristic gesture of support, and chuckling at what he thought was the reason behind my apprehension: ‘I won’t steal all the credit for your theory.’
‘I wasn’t worrying about that, Dicky,’ I said. ‘You are welcome to the theory, but I think we should keep it to ourselves for the time being.’