Faith

by Len Deighton

  ‘I got your message, Bret.’

  ‘I knew you’d figure it out. Did you tell Fiona?’

  ‘About Timmermann being dead? No.’

  ‘About the message? The Bible?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s good. He was working for her. And for her brother-in-law. He went over there trying to find Tessa.’

  ‘So I figured,’ I said.

  ‘She’s not even convinced that her sister is dead, do you know that?’

  ‘She needs more time.’

  ‘It was a good thing that I tumbled to what was going on. She was meeting Timmermann in Santa Monica on those afternoons she went to the beauty shop. You didn’t know that, did you?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘She’s obsessed; and Timmermann isn’t the type who turns money away.’

  ‘But why the Bible and the secret code, Bret? Wasn’t there a simpler way of keeping in touch with me?’

  ‘That wasn’t for you and me, Bernard. That was a hastily figured code for Timmermann to keep you informed.’

  ‘It was?’

  ‘That was the deal. I paid him even more than he was getting from Fiona. I bought him. We had to know what was going on, so I just paid what he asked.’

  ‘He earned every penny,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, you found him dead. That was tough.’

  ‘I thought it was VERDI.’

  ‘I know. Everyone did. Dicky was milling around out of control, and wailing to Frank about it. I couldn’t tell you, or him, what the real story was without showing my hand.’

  I looked at him. ‘Yeah,’ I said. Bret was the epitome of the desk man. Real stories were the ones written in ink, not blood.

  ‘I’m talking to the D-G tomorrow. A policy meeting. You want to be along there?’ Like all Americans, Bret dressed his orders up in the syntax of polite and tentative inquiries.

  ‘Tomorrow is Sunday,’ I reminded him. ‘Monday you mean?’

  ‘I mean Sunday, Bernard. Remember what it says on the first page of the indoctrination manual? The enemy never sleeps.’

  ‘But I do, Bret. And tomorrow I plan to visit my kids.’

  ‘Well, take a day off during the week instead. Would eleven o’clock be okay? That will give me an hour with the D-G before you arrive.’

  ‘Sure, Bret. I’ll be there.’

  ‘Fiona doesn’t give a hoot about the VERDI operation,’ he explained. ‘But she’s pushing it along for all she’s got, because she thinks it will tell her what the Soviets did to her sister.’

  ‘And will it?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Bernard. You were there.’

  ‘And you, Bret? How do you feel about the VERDI operation?’

  ‘Dicky would be very disappointed,’ he said, as if this was the very first time he’d thought about the consequences of cancelling it. ‘Making everyone sore as a boil would be a bad way to start my time as DD-G.’

  ‘It’s never stopped you before.’

  A wintry smile. ‘Resources are limited these days, Bernard. We can’t run an operation just to keep up Departmental morale.’

  ‘It must be worth a shot, Bret. Until we find what the Soviets are pumping along those landlines, we won’t know whether it’s worth having or not.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Bret. He slapped my arm. ‘You too, Bernard.’

  ‘Did you plan tonight’s foray?’ I asked him as I was about to open the car door. ‘Did you figure that by demolishing Dicky tonight, you’d have him over a barrel at the meeting tomorrow?’

  ‘Son of VERDI, you mean? I horse-trade him down, so we’ve got a cut-price type of landline-tapping scheme?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘With a mind like yours, Bernard, you are wasted as a field agent.’

  ‘Does that mean Yes, you did frag Dicky deliberately? Or that you didn’t?’

  ‘Dicky is not even going to be at tomorrow’s meeting, Bernard. Not Dicky, not Fiona, not Harry Strang nor Gus Stowe nor any of the other top-floor gorillas. Just you, me, the D-G and Werner Volkmann.’

  ‘For a policy meeting?’

  ‘We’re not putting together a poker game. The old man is giving me his blessing tomorrow, and you and Werner will be my number one project.’

  ‘Blessing to do what?’

  ‘I’m going to kick butt, Bernard,’ said Bret. ‘The whole damn Department needs a shake-out.’

  ‘Am I allowed an inkling about where the first kick might land?’

  ‘No, you’re not. But I’m bringing that bright Kent girl out of the Hungarian desk and giving her something more important to do.’ He saw the look in my eyes. ‘No, nothing like that, Bernard: strictly business. I’m going to make her my personal trouble-shooter. Anyone who doesn’t like that arrangement can go find another job.’

  ‘Okay, Bret,’ I said. ‘I’ll go upstairs right now and tell her.’ I thought he would reach out and stop me. I thought he would say, no, that wasn’t what he meant at all. But he didn’t; he just smiled and said goodnight.

  I slammed the car door in frustrated anger, but it just closed with a soft, cultured boom. I suppose it was coming from a rich family that made Bret feel that he was the only one in step.

  By the time I got up to the flat, Fiona was sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room engrossed in Buddenbrooks. It was still relatively early, Dicky’s dinner party having shuddered to a standstill after Bret delivered the bombshell of his new appointment.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ Fiona said as I came in and slumped down in an armchair with a deep sigh. ‘There’s not been the slightest warning, no rumours, nothing …’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said.

  ‘Is he just going to hang loose until a proper Deputy is appointed? Or is he going to take it seriously?’ said Fiona. I realized from her tone of voice that by going to sit in an armchair, rather than beside her on the sofa, I had failed the little test she’d set me.

  I switched on the TV. ‘Bret? Hang loose? Don’t make me laugh. Bret will turn the whole place upside-down.’

  ‘Are you going to watch TV?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s on,’ I said. ‘Will it disturb you reading?’

  ‘If it does I’ll go to bed.’

  I flipped through the channels. There were only four of them; a gangster movie, a brightly coloured Indian film with Hindi dialogue, a pop star being interviewed and an Open University lecture on the Binomial Theorem. I went back to the gangsters but kept the sound very low.

  Fiona closed Buddenbrooks. ‘Did Bret actually say that to you just now? That he was going to turn us upside-down?’

  ‘I’m going to kick butt, Bernard,’ I said in a passable imitation of his voice. ‘The whole damn Department needs a shake-out.’

  ‘You’re not serious?’ She clutched her book to her breast and hugged it.

  ‘I am, and so is Bret as far as I could see.’

  ‘I suppose it had to come,’ she said, putting her book on the side-table. ‘It’s crude of them to use Bret; he’ll get more flak on account of being American.’

  ‘Look, Fi, the butt-kicking starts right here: he wants me in the office tomorrow at eleven. I doubt if I’ll get away before two. You know how these things go on and on. And Bret’s not the sort of honcho who stops for Sunday lunch.’

  ‘Poor darling.’

  ‘It’s almost as if the gods want to prevent me seeing the children.’

  ‘How philosophical you’ve become these days,’ she said. ‘And they enjoy seeing you more than me.’

  ‘No, Fi, no.’ I pressed the button and wasted the gangsters.

  ‘It’s true, Bernard. They resent me. Children can be awfully unforgiving. When they are older, they’ll understand why I had to go away. For the present, they just tolerate me for the sake of seeing you.’

  ‘Don’t cry, darling. You did it for them. They will see that. They are very young.’ But she was right. They would never see it like that of course, and there was no way I could
contradict her and still sound sincere.

  She got to her feet hurriedly. ‘They hate me, Bernard.’

  ‘Now you’re being silly.’

  ‘They hate me. I can see it in their faces sometimes.’

  I got up and embraced her and kissed her tear-laden cheeks. ‘Go to bed, Fi. I have to make a phone call, then I’ll be with you.’ I kissed her again. ‘The children love you, you know they do. And so do I.’

  ‘Do you really, Bernard?’ she said in a sad and satisfied voice, as if she’d never heard me say it before.

  She picked up Buddenbrooks and looked at it as if wondering why she’d started reading it. And then after a long time, she said: ‘At least we know he loves England just as much as we do.’ She put the book back on the table as if abandoning it for ever. I decided this was not the right time to reveal that Bret had decided to appoint Gloria his personal assistant.

  ‘You’re right, Fiona. He loves England. He loves the idea of England – its history and its culture and its people – almost to the point of self-delusion. He won’t hear a word against it. But the people who love a country to such extremes are the ones most likely to commit bloody rotten crimes on its behalf.’

  The next morning we both sat down to breakfast at a few minutes before eight. Orange juice, coffee, cornflakes and three Sunday newspapers from which Fiona had taken the supplements. We had a bathroom each in our new home, and that had completely revised our morning schedule. By nine-thirty Fiona, taking advantage of empty roads on this winter Sunday morning, was nearing her parents’ home. I was sitting in Kar’s Club, in Soho, with a man named Duncan Churcher.

  ‘Still going strong, Bernard?’ He was a man much given to meaningless greetings of that sort.

  ‘Yes, I’m still going strong, Duncan,’ I said affably. ‘But only because I haven’t found anyone to pay me a living wage for going weak.’

  ‘Are you drinking?’

  ‘No. Neither of us is drinking.’

  ‘Bejays but you’re a hard man,’ he said in a stage Irish accent. ‘Two coffees,’ he called to Arkady the son of Jan Kar the proprie or. ‘The tea is shocking here,’ he added in a whisper.

  ‘Were you watching the chess game?’ I asked him. I had spotted him immediately. There are not too many 200-1b rugby footballers in Kar’s on a Sunday morning, even when there is a championship chess game. He’d been wearing that same grey double-breasted chalk-stripe suit at our first meeting a decade ago. The same tie too. Or did he just phone his tailor and say, same again? There were plenty of men in Whitehall who did exactly that.

  ‘Not seriously. The champion always wins. It’s the way the world is.’

  Duncan’s real name was not Churcher, it was Cwynar. His father was one of many Polish soldiers to marry local girls during their training in wartime Scotland. But Churcher’s father went off to the war before Duncan was born, and he never came back. Thanks to some Polish scholarship fund, Duncan Churcher eventually became one of those rare creatures, a public-school and university-trained policeman. Sometime, in response to the social pressures of school or profession, he’d become Churcher and risen to the rank of detective-sergeant in Leeds. Had he stayed there he would no doubt have become one of those very high-ranking policemen from provincial forces, with tailored uniforms, silver-wire badges and golden tongues, who appear on TV chat shows, to pontificate about legalizing hard drugs and criminalizing car-driving.

  The duties and working hours of a conscientious detective are incompatible with being a good husband, good father or good anything except good drinker. But Detective-Sergeant Duncan Churcher’s refined English accent, his talent for languages and convivial bar-room manner – plus an old school pal in Whitehall – found a job for him in London. He’d become an ‘arm’s-length’ operative, which is why I was talking to him in Kar’s Club.

  ‘It’s a simple little job, Duncan,’ I said. ‘But it’s very delicate.’ He nodded. It was the usual beginning I suppose; all his jobs were very delicate. ‘No paperwork. I will have to pay you under some separate pretext.’

  Duncan Churcher had only his work to occupy him. He was lonely and divorced, with a thirty-year-old daughter, an only child who’d wasted her life, and his money, in a futile obsession about becoming a champion ice-skater. Duncan’s only social life, as far as I could see, was the evenings he spent at the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  ‘It’s like that, is it?’ he said. There was no relish in his words. ‘No paperwork; just money.’ He wasn’t poor, neither was he venal. He had never been pushed to tout for work, or resort to the sort of domestic jobs that keep most of London’s little detective agencies afloat. Whitehall’s various arms of government always had an assignment for men like Churcher, men who could charm a witness, force an entry, bribe a clerk or rough up a suspect in four languages, and get results without fuss, and without letting reporters get word of it. Most importantly, Churcher had proved that his police service helped him elude the clutches of the law.

  ‘A shake-down,’ I said. I wanted to reassure him. ‘No more than that.’ He’d aged since our last meeting, or perhaps it was this bare-bulb light that emphasized his lined and wrinkled face, and spotted hands. And the healthy pink face that I’d always associated with his Saturday rugby club games was in fact a ruby legacy of the drinking that came after them.

  ‘No deductions required this time?’ he said as if deeply disappointed. ‘No Sherlock Holmes stuff?’

  I smiled without replying. We both knew that Duncan Churcher was not a detective in the strict sense of that word. His solutions came from dialogue with people, rather than deductive reasoning from premises to consequent conclusions. He kept to polite conversation as far as was possible, but I used him knowing he could be very rough.

  ‘I like this place,’ he said. Looking round it was hard to see why. The white-painted brickwork, schoolroom lights and uncomfortable little chairs and tables, each with their chess-board and box of pieces, would have been nothing without a magical ingredient, and that was Kar himself.

  Kar’s was one of the few such basement clubs that had survived in Soho. During the war there had been dozens, frequented by soldiers of all nationalities who, baffled and frustrated by the strange English laws about the drinking of alcohol, were driven to these ‘dubs’ where the freedom to get drunk was extended over longer hours.

  Jan Kar, a Polish veteran of some of the fiercest Italian fighting in 1944, opened his dilapidated little cellar for his Polish army friends. Chess soon became its primary function, but there were still plenty of Poles who came in just to exercise their native tongue. One of them had brought back from Monte Cassino a photo of the Polish memorial on Point 593. Those who peer at the fuzzy amateur photo that hangs behind the bar can just read the inscription;

  WE POLISH SOLDIERS

  FOR OUR FREEDOM AND YOURS

  HAVE GIVEN OUR SOULS TO GOD

  OUR BODIES TO THE SOIL OF ITALY

  AND OUR HEARTS TO POLAND.

  I watched Kar’s son Arkady as he poured the coffee. What did he make of it all, I wondered. Like Churcher, he’d never been to Monte Cassino, and never been to Poland either. Neither of them had any obvious connection to the land of their fathers. When the coffee arrived at our table, Churcher paid Arkady with a ten-pound note from a crocodile-leather wallet where he kept a silver pencil and his engraved visiting cards. He was like that.

  ‘I come here looking for my father,’ said Duncan, as if in reply to my unspoken question. ‘Don’t I, Arkady?’

  Arkady smiled.

  A little crowd had gathered in the next room to watch the champion defend his title. It wasn’t just the usual Sunday game, there was some sort of trophy at stake. We were sitting alone in the narrow lobby at the bottom of the stairs. I wanted to avoid the bar, which provided temptations to which Churcher was all too likely to succumb.

  ‘No paperwork. That’s perfectly all right, Bernard,’ he said in a deep round perfect voice, like a BBC announcer back
in the days when they spoke English. ‘Your word is always sufficient for me.’

  ‘Professor Belostok teaches drawing and painting from a private house in Hampstead. One of his students is a middle-aged woman …’ I thought of Daphne Cruyer. ‘Or make that youngish woman. A young fellow has joined the Tuesday evening class recently, not very talented … totally ham-fisted I suspect. Says he is Czech. South African father, that will be to cover his accent I expect.’

  ‘Whom should I be looking at?’

  ‘It’s a boy-meets-wife story,’ I said.

  ‘Someone we know?’

  ‘Wife of Dicky Cruyer … it might be nothing at all, Duncan,’ I added hastily. ‘Last night, when I first heard about it, I went bananas, but who knows?… I don’t like these situations at any time but, from a security point of view, this one may be completely okay.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The German Stations supremo?’

  ‘He’s Europe now.’

  ‘Cruyer is? I say! And he’s younger than you, isn’t he?’

  ‘Thanks, Duncan. I thought everything was going too smoothly for me this morning.’

  ‘Awfully sorry, Bernard. Very well: I’ll go and look at Romeo and avoid Juliet. Where do they meet? Regular assignations? Anywhere other than the painting class?’

  ‘I haven’t got the exact address but I can show you where it is. I gave Mrs Cruyer a lift there once.’ I took an A-Z Street Guide from my pocket and showed him the approximate position of the house where I’d taken Daphne to her class, one evening when Dicky had wrecked his own car and borrowed hers without asking.

  ‘May I ask what you plan?’ said Churcher.

  ‘I’d like to get rid of him. I want you to get rid of him. Scare him, I mean.’ From the chess room there came the concerted noise of a couple of dozen people reacting to an unexpected chess move without uttering a sound.