by Len Deighton
‘Good enough,’ I said. Better than you, would have been a more precise assessment. Dicky’s German had been put together in assorted bits and pieces, and stuck on to a few basic elements of grammar he’d learned at school. Bret, with that directness of approach that is characteristically American, simply went and did an intensive course at London University. He did it in addition to his five-day week at the office, something it would be difficult to imagine any of the other senior staff tackling. But it had provided Bret with a background of knowledge – literary, historical, and contemporary – that had surprised me more than once. As an amusement during his studies, he’d translated Schikaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s Magic Flute into English. I still remembered some little gems that he uncovered. ‘Remember the Magic Flute he translated?’
‘No,’ said Dicky.
I reminded him:
‘Die Worte sind von hohem Sinn!
Allein, wie willst du diese finden?
Dich leitet Lieb’ und Tugend nicht,
Weil Tod und Rache dich entzünden.’
‘You’re gabbling much too fast,’ said Dicky. ‘You do that sometimes, Bernard. You must learn to enunciate more clearly. Tell me in English.’
‘Those words sound fine and brave, I know.
But say, how do you hope to find them?
For neither love nor truth is found
By men whose hate and vengeance blind them.’
‘Bravo,’ said Dicky. ‘You committed that to memory, did you? I wish I had time to go to the opera. It’s one of the things I miss.’
‘That wasn’t opera you were playing when I came in?’ I asked, as if it might well have been.
‘Elvis Presley,’ said Dicky, glad perhaps to confess it. ‘But you always hit the nail right on the head, Bernard old man. You have an uncanny way of picking out exactly the most crucial part of whatever comes up for discussion.’
‘Do I, Dicky?’ I said, knowing that sooner or later he would tell me what he was talking about.
‘What was it in that Magic Flute thing about truth and love? That’s the sort of broad cultural landscape that Bret likes to occupy. He is a philosopher, not a man of action. While Bret is talking about truth and love, I am sitting up here making the decisions that end in blood and snot. See what I mean, Bernard?’ He ran his fingers back through his unruly hair.
‘Up to a point, Dicky.’
‘Bret has always been appointed to positions where high-flown policy decisions were being hatched. He’s simply not right for our sort of work. He’s not an Operations man.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ I said in my usual cowardly way.
Dicky jumped in quickly. ‘In that case I shall expect you to support me.’
‘Doing what?’
‘We must keep Bret right out of Europe. Why couldn’t he have Hong Kong? That will be vacant at the end of the year.’ He moved the memo with its list of names. I could see there were pencilled ticks and crosses alongside some of them.
‘You couldn’t put someone in to run Hong Kong who’d never worked there,’ I said. ‘And you could hardly expect Bret to go there in some junior capacity.’
‘Umm,’ said Dicky, and started biting the nail of his little finger. There was no need to add that the same problem was true of all the stations outside Europe.
‘Bret wasn’t born in Britain,’ said Dicky. I’d heard him say that before. There was a strict rule that only British subjects born in Britain could be engaged to work here in the SIS office. There had been only two exceptions granted to that rule; one was Bret Rensselaer and the other was George Blake, the KGB mole who was eventually uncovered and sentenced to forty-two years for spying.
‘Bret was injured in action,’ I said. ‘He is a celebrated hero of the Department’s secret history. Don’t let’s forget that, Dicky. The Department is bound to feel indebted to him.’
Dicky frowned and bit greedily into his fingernail. Dicky would have done anything to have something like that said about him, but Dicky knew that going into the field, to find action, was the quickest and most certain way of disappearing from the promotion lists for ever. And if he ever forgot that basic fact of life in London Central, he had only to look at my career to be reminded of it.
A tap came at the door and one of Dicky’s young ladies poked her head round it and raised her eyebrows.
‘Yes,’ said Dicky. ‘Run along and get him.’ He made a mark on his sheet of names. When the door had closed again Dicky said: ‘Well, I’ll see you on Saturday evening, Bernard.’
I got to my feet. ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ I said. I could see now that the names on the piece of paper were Department employees. One by one they were being given a tick, a cross or a query. It was evidently part of an organized campaign to thwart the Rensselaer threat. I had been given a query.
Bret was the star of the show, of course. He had an instinct for drama, and had been keeping well away from the office up to the time he arrived at Dicky’s for dinner. There was a certain demonic air to his appearance: smooth white hair brushed close against his scalp, a beautifully tailored black worsted suit, a white starched dress-shirt with a neat bow tie of natural-coloured raw silk. He remained slim, he’d always been slim. It was difficult to imagine Bret plump at any stage of his life. The only notable change was that the big wire-frame speed-cop glasses that he’d required for reading were now worn all the time.
Bret walked around the Cruyers’ drawing-room as if he’d never been there before, admiring aloud their possessions in that accomplished way that only Americans can bring off.
‘Now I like that painting. Adam and Eve, isn’t it?’ Unerringly Bret’s eye had settled upon the Cruyers’ most cherished artifact.
‘We adore it,’ said Dicky. ‘And we got it for a song. Didn’t we, darling?’
It was a naïve painting: two emaciated nudes by some myopic admirer of Jan van Eyck who had chronically neglected life classes. But Daphne had been to an art school, and had spent the rest of her life trying to prove that her training there was not a waste of time. She’d bought the painting in Amsterdam, in a flea market on Waterlooplein, when she got lost looking for Rembrandt’s house round the corner. I liked Daphne. In one of her moments of candour she’d told me that on that same occasion she’d also bought three fake ship’s lanterns and a lot of reproduction Dutch tiles, for which she was grossly overcharged. I suppose that’s why antique dealers do so well; we boast about the bargains for ever and the swindles are conveniently forgotten.
Bret turned to Gloria and said: ‘Wouldn’t you just love a painting like that on your wall?’
‘Yes,’ said Gloria. She’d been upstairs admiring Daphne’s doll collection. At one time there had been only half a dozen or so, and they cohabited comfortably in the china cabinet in the drawing-room. Then, as they proliferated, they’d been arrayed up the staircase, and now they had demanded a room to themselves. There were china dolls and celluloid dolls, wooden dolls and ‘piano dolls’. There were dolls in elaborate velvet gowns, Barbie dolls in miniskirts and festival dolls in kimonos. Gloria loved them all, I could see that in her face. She must have been able to read my thoughts, for she glanced at me and grinned self-consciously.
Once the dolls had gone upstairs, Dicky had started to fill the china cabinet with old fountain-pens. It was his latest diversion, and like all Dicky’s diversions, the quantification of its growing value was a vital part of its interest for him. ‘What did you do with your collection of paintings?’ Dicky asked Bret.
‘Sold them at auction,’ said Bret, ‘… to satisfy the court. My wife wouldn’t accept my assessments of value, so finally I put them up for sale.’
I suppose we all desperately craved to know whether Bret’s assessments or his wife’s were verified by the prices made at auction, but being English none of us was bold enough to ask.
‘And this is your family home?’ Bret asked, pointing at a colour photo of an extensive neo-Gothic mansion, framed by oak trees
and with a well-kept front lawn.
‘No,’ said Dicky. ‘That’s my son’s boarding school.’
‘Is that so,’ said Bret, looking at it with even more interest. ‘Yes, I can see the kids now – quite a lot of them. Those at the back are standing on chairs, I guess. You must be proud of those little guys, Dicky.’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Dicky. ‘One of them will be going to Oxford next year. My old college.’
‘That’s just great,’ said Bret.
I glanced at Fiona, but she appeared to be studying Gloria’s shoes. I had the feeling that I had been here on a previous dinner, visiting Dicky, with Bret present. I was wondering whether Bret wasn’t going through an elaborate routine to irk Dicky, but that wasn’t Bret’s style. He worked hard to be Mr Nice Guy and he wasn’t likely to sacrifice all that hard work in exchange for a little joke at Dicky’s expense. Or was he?
Dicky was holding a couple of his most valuable old fountain-pens. He looked around the drawing-room to see if we were a suitable audience for him to explain how rare they were. He must have decided we weren’t, for he put them back in the glass-fronted cabinet and locked it. His wife Daphne was in the kitchen. Fiona, me, Bret and Gloria were all Department employees. In the interests of security Dicky had even decided to manage without the man-and-wife team he usually brought in to wait table and wash up. ‘Did you hear about the VERDI plan?’ Dicky asked.
‘I heard,’ said Bret. He drank some of his Martini cocktail as if fortifying himself against what was to come.
‘It will be Operation Prince all over again,’ said Dicky. Operation Prince was the tunnel dug under Berlin to tap into the Russian Army’s main telephone lines at Karlshorst.
‘Not exactly like it, I hope,’ said Bret drily, for Prince had been betrayed by Blake right from the start.
Dicky smiled. It was not a good beginning, and I could spy in Dicky’s tense face his determination to see Bret stationed far away from anywhere where he could influence policy. ‘No, we’ve learned a lot since then. This is the computer age that we’re living in.’
‘So I read in your report,’ said Bret.
‘You read it then?’
‘The D-G thought I should get up to date on what is going on.’
‘Yes, that’s wise,’ said Dicky. ‘There have been profound changes since you were working here, Bret. Let me see, how long ago was that?’
‘I left my Japanese pocket calculator in my other pants,’ said Bret with a good-natured grin.
Daphne came in at that moment. She was looking very worried and, although she was trying to signal something to Dicky by mouthing it silently, this only engaged everyone’s attention.
‘What is it, Daphne?’ said Dicky testily. ‘We were just talking office talk.’
‘It’s the microwave, Dicky,’ she said in a whisper, and then looked around to see if anyone had noticed her. Finding that everyone was looking at her, she gave a brief but all-embracing panoramic smile before looking at Dicky again.
‘Well, I don’t know about it,’ said Dicky.
‘The door’s stuck. Shall I phone and tell them?’
‘They’ve gone out to the theatre. Otherwise I should have had to invite them.’
‘Do you know anything about microwave ovens?’ Daphne asked Fiona.
‘Bernard’s awfully good with machines,’ Fiona replied.
‘Would you mind, Bernard?’
I picked up my glass of wine and followed Daphne into their newly refurbished kitchen. They were always changing it. On my previous visit it had been all cupboards, but now the doors of the cupboards had been removed so that the shelves, and the equipment on them, were exposed to view. Daphne must have seen the surprise in my face.
‘Dicky could never remember where the dishes and things were,’ she explained. ‘And he left the cupboard doors open sometimes, and cracked his head on them.’
‘Is this it?’ I asked as I approached the microwave.
‘I hope you don’t mind that we invited Gloria,’ said Daphne. ‘Bret had arranged to take her out to dinner tonight, but Dicky persuaded him to change his plans. Dicky was very keen to have you all together tonight.’
‘Bret’s coming back to the office,’ I explained. ‘Dicky wanted to see him unofficially beforehand.’
‘I knew it was something like that,’ said Daphne.
‘It’s a child-lock,’ I said.
‘Oh, you’ve opened it. How clever you are, Bernard.’
‘It’s a child-lock. That red lever has to be in the up position. Then it works normally.’
‘I couldn’t do it.’
‘You have to push the lever while you press the door button.’ I sipped some of my wine. Dicky had provided extra-special wine for this evening.
‘I don’t know why they put these child-locks on everything these days,’ said Daphne. ‘The children are the only ones who can work them.’
‘Smells good, Daphne.’
‘Roast chicken. Dicky likes to carve and that’s the only thing he carves really well. The microwave is only for reheating the sprouts. I cook them first and then warm them in butter. My neighbour insisted that I try their microwave, but I can’t get on with things like that.’
‘These Brussels sprouts look a bit overcooked, Daphne.’
‘The hell with the sprouts,’ she said, and in an uncharacteristically carefree movement dumped them into the waste-bin with hardly a glance at their going. ‘They can bloody well have tinned beans.’ She went to the shelf and selected a copper saucepan from a row of pans of varying sizes. Then she took a tin of baked beans, opened it with the electric machine, and tipped the contents into the pan. Some beans went astray. Not without some difficulty, she picked up each errant bean between thumb and finger until they were all in the pan. Then she smiled at me. ‘I suppose I should have come and asked you to look at it before, Bernard.’ She took a half-full bottle of wine and poured some into my glass and then carelessly slopped a lot into her own empty glass. She put the saucepan of beans back on the shelf with the other saucepans. Then she turned to me, lifted her glass – ‘Salud! Bernard. Salud y pesetas!’ – and drank.
‘Yes, good health and money,’ I agreed. ‘Were you going to put the beans on the stove to warm?’
‘Yes, I was.’ She retrieved the saucepan from the shelf, lit the gas and put it on to the stove. It slid to one side but she grabbed it and put it back more carefully. It was only then that I realized that Daphne was totally plastered. I felt sorry for her. She had never been much of a drinker, and I knew how nervous she always became when Dicky arranged one of these dinner parties.
Daphne tucked an errant lock of hair back into the velvet headband she was wearing and said: ‘I’m going to leave Dicky. You’ve always been nice, Bernard. Simpatico! That’s what you are: simpatico. You’re one of our best friends, I’ve always liked you. But he doesn’t deserve nice friends. He’s such a selfish bastard.’
‘I’m sure it will all come right, Daphne.’
‘He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.’
‘You’ve been through all this before, Daphne,’ I reminded her. Most recently she’d endured watching Dicky enjoying a brief affair with Tessa Kosinski. ‘He always comes back to you,’ I said. ‘You have your nice home, and he loves you.’
‘I’ve had enough of him.’ She finished her wine and poured more for herself. I covered my glass with my hand to show I didn’t want a refill.
‘And there are the children,’ I said.
She came close to me and tapped my tie. ‘All these years I’ve put up with him for their sake, Bernard. But now they are old enough to understand. I’ve had enough of him. I deserve a little happiness, don’t I?’
‘Yes, Daphne, of course you do. But is going off on your own a way to find it? You might be lonely.’
She laughed. ‘Dear old Bernard,’ she said, and reached out and patted me gently on the cheek. ‘Am I so very old and ugly?’
‘No, Daphne, no. But th
e right partner is hard to find.’
‘You’re telling me,’ she said and laughed again.
‘I’m sure he’ll come back to you. These things are just infatuations.’
‘Has Dicky got some new one in tow?’ she asked, her mood suddenly darkening. ‘Is that it?’
‘No. Isn’t that what you are telling me?’
‘No, I’m talking about me. I’m talking about the man I’ve found. My Mister Right. It took a long time, Bernard, but you find the right partner eventually. I went to Gloria’s fortune-teller and she told me I’d be happy, and that was ages ago.’
‘Mister Right?’
‘A young fellow in my Tuesday evening painting class. With Professor Belostok. Well, not too young; just right.’
Now I was stone-cold sober. Very casually I said: ‘What’s he do for a living?’
‘Journalist. Newspaper reporter actually. He used to work for an agency that files stories for foreign newspapers. He’s out of a job at present but he’ll get another. Next year he’s going to take a year off and write a novel. He’s going to South America and live as cheaply as he can, while he writes. I said I’d go with him. It’s the chance of a lifetime.’
‘It certainly is,’ I said. ‘Is he English?’
‘Czechoslovak. His father is a South African.’
The whole picture jumped into position. I had read it in a thousand case histories. ‘Daphne!’ In spite of trying to keep my voice down I said it much too loudly.
‘Yes, Bernard?’
Next door I could hear the murmur of voices. My inclination was to scream Jesus Christ, Daphne, are you out of your mind? Are you too stupid to see when you are being targeted by a foreign agent? But I remained very calm. I said: ‘Is he a good painter, Daphne?’