by Len Deighton
‘Wouldn’t they have melted when the body burned?’ I asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. Again he shuffled through the pages to find the appropriate reference. ‘There you are: forensic noted traces of metal from melted shot.’ In the bottom of the wallet he found a file card to which a small plastic pouch was stapled. Inside it there were half a dozen pellets of buckshot, VERDI looked at me. ‘No. 4 shot, I would guess,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. Jungle fighting during the Vietnam war persuaded the US Army that shotguns with No. 4 shot were the most lethal ammunition for use against human targets.
‘But who did it? And why?’ said Werner.
VERDI shrugged. He was leaving the easy ones to us. He went and sat down. He looked at us both and smiled. We all knew how it would go. Over the next few days VERDI would lay out his wares for us, like a peddler in an oriental market. We’d pick up each piece and inspect it closely and then we’d bargain.
‘Satisfied?’ VERDI asked.
‘It’s a start,’ I said.
He nodded and sipped some booze. ‘It’s not the Kosinski woman,’ he said softly. ‘It’s good, isn’t it? Very thorough. It is the woman killed at the Brandenburg Exit but it’s not Kosinski.’
I said nothing. I was watching VERDI very carefully. I knew then that I’d been wrong about him. I’d allowed my feelings to influence my judgement. VERDI had changed. He was no longer that stubborn thug I’d known in the old days; he was a resourceful and educated professional.
‘Who is it?’ said Werner.
‘It’s a female Stasi lieutenant. She was sent there that night when they heard that Fiona Samson was escaping down the Autobahn. Our duty officer phoned the Brandenburg office to go and get her back at any cost. That was the order: get her back at any cost. Brandenburg sent a three-person team from the duty watch. The woman was the senior rank.’
‘I was there on the Autobahn that night,’ I said.
‘Well, you know what a muddle it all was. Everything went wrong. The message was modified twice as Berlin collected the facts. The Brandenburg team had been told to bring back Fiona Samson, who was escaping in a Ford Transit van with diplomatic licence plates. They arrived at the road-works and identified the van. There was a woman in the back of it. They grabbed her and put her in the trunk of their car and drove away. Except that the Stasi lieutenant remained behind. She said she would delay things. It was pitch-dark. She said she would make them think she was Fiona Samson while her men got away. She was looking for a commendation, I suppose. Women always want to prove themselves, don’t they? She was armed and she was the senior person. The two men did as she told them.’
VERDI looked at me but I remained deadpan.
‘What happened then?’ said Werner.
‘Ask Mr Samson,’ said VERDI. ‘He was there. There was a lot of shooting. I never discovered how many were killed. The female lieutenant died. Samson survived. He got into the Ford van and drove away with his wife. Is that right, Samson?’
‘I’m listening,’ I said. I could guess what was coming next.
VERDI said: ‘Someone put the female lieutenant into a car and torched it. I went out there first thing the next morning. It was a scene of devastation. I gave orders that the burned corpse should not be identified as the Stasi lieutenant and put a seventy-two-hour security clamp on the whole business. The security clamp was extended and still remains in force.’
‘What happened to the Kosinski woman?’ said Werner.
‘I had her put into solitary confinement at Normannenstrasse. She wouldn’t say a word to anyone. I’d never met Fiona Samson so she was fingerprinted and photographed as Fiona Samson. That’s what helped sort out the mistake, but it took a couple of days before we could get Fiona Samson’s papers sent to us. I knew Fiona Samson was a hot potato so there was no question of interrogation until I got it okayed from above. Eventually the prisoner was identified as the sister, Kosinski.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘She was moved to the high-security prison in Leipzig. They are waiting for a political decision about her disposal.’
‘She’s alive?’ asked Werner.
‘She’s fit and well. I suppose that in due time she will be traded for one of our people.’
‘Is that what you’ve come here for?’ said Werner.
‘Partly,’ said VERDI. He turned to me and said: ‘You’ve said nothing, Samson.’
‘We’ll go through it again in the morning,’ I said. I would need a recorder and a video too if this was all going to be a part of the official record.
It was only a few minutes after that when the phone rang with a call from Duncan Churcher. At first his tone was supercilious. ‘Pull up your trousers and tell her goodnight. I’m at the Praed Street address. Meet me where the cabs drive in to Paddington Station in thirty minutes. I take it you have some magic wand that will let you leave your car there without it being towed away. Okay?’
He was about to ring off. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I can get away.’
His frolicsome manner changed. ‘Whatever you’re doing, Bernard, it’s not more urgent than this. And I can’t hold the lid on this one for more than an hour.’
‘What’s happened?’
There was a long pause as he carefully decided how to phrase it. ‘You’ll need the clean-up team. Perhaps you’ll want to alert them before coming over here.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘Where the cabs drop their fares. I’m wearing a white trenchcoat.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Perhaps I sounded doubtful. I suppose he wanted to reconfirm the arrangement. He said: ‘Are you far away? I went through three different numbers. Doesn’t even your secretary know where you are?’
‘Did you try my wife?’
‘Touché, Bernard. No, I should have thought of her.’
‘Have you been drinking, Duncan?’
‘Honest to God, Bernard. No, I swear it. Not for weeks.’
‘Then don’t start now.’ I rang off without saying goodbye.
Werner was looking at me. I said: ‘Werner – I’ve got to go out. Look after his nibs. I’ll be back within the hour.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going out,’ I said.
‘If Dicky or Bret want to know?’
‘Say I fell down the stairs, and I’ve gone out to buy Band-Aids.’
‘Do you need a gun?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘It sounds like it’s too late for noisy explosions.’
It was a mean little room in an old creaky building smelling of decay. The sort of seedy little hotel that the neighbourhoods near rail terminals and bus stations spawn. Such buildings, with only a short lease available before their demolition was due, were the favoured investment of predatory landlords. I followed Churcher up the stairs. Leading us there was a man with a bunch of keys, a stubbly chin and gin-flavoured breath that I suspected Churcher might have arranged. He was a lean fellow, the result no doubt of heaving his enormous bunch of keys up and down the stairs with frequent grabs at the stair-rail so that he did not lose his balance.
Poverty brings lack of choice, and thus urban poverty has a monotonous and melancholy quality that is common to cheap accommodation from one end of the world to the other. Vomit stains, cigarette butts and empty bottles: these cramped rooms could have been in a New York tenement, a Mexico City rooming house or a Berlin squat. The metal bed with its chipped paintwork and sagging springs, the dirty windows, the mattress old and stained and smelly, two kitchen chairs and a few bent implements alongside an ancient cooking ring to justify the ‘apartments to rent’ sign that overlooked the street.
‘Come and look at him,’ said Churcher, walking through the first room into the dingy little bedroom that adjoined it.
Leaning forward in a jack-knifed position with the grubby blanket kicked aside was the scrawny body of a man of some indeterminate age between twenty and thirty. He had long wavy hai
r to his shoulders and was wearing a grubby undervest and striped boxer shorts. Like an anatomical diagram, the injection sores followed the patterns of his veins along arms and legs. Against the bed-head there were a couple of pillows propped, where he’d been sitting up in bed until he’d taken a bottle of pills, retched – but not retched enough – and died. ‘Is this what you brought me here for?’ I said.
‘I wanted you to see him,’ said Churcher.
‘Why?’
His face tightened with concern. ‘Oh, no. I don’t mean that, Bernard. You’ve nothing to reproach yourself about. Nothing at all.’
‘Why then?’
‘It was the quickest and most effective way of showing you that he couldn’t possibly be what you thought.’
‘Daphne Cruyer’s lover, you mean?’
‘A KGB probe … or Daphne Cruyer’s lover. You can see. He wasn’t anything, Bernard. He was just a fragment of big-city flotsam.’
‘When did this happen?’
I watched Churcher as he pulled the body back into the sitting position for long enough for me to see the cadaver’s white drawn face and staring eyes. As he let go, the weight of the skull overcame the stiffness in the neck muscles, and the head rolled forward as if coming alive. ‘Several hours ago, judging by the rigor.’
‘Have you searched?’
‘I did that while I was waiting for you.’
‘I wouldn’t like an intimate diary to turn up in the coroner’s court, and Daphne Cruyer feature in its pages.’
‘Nothing like that. I talked to him at length on Wednesday afternoon. No pressure, Bernard, I swear it. No need. He’d just shot up. He was quite lucid and rational but there was nothing behind his eyes, Bernard.’
‘So why not Daphne Cruyer’s fancy man?’
‘Look at him! Look at the sores and the veins. Would any woman with half a brain in her head get into bed with him?’ He twitched his nose as if smelling the air for the first rime. ‘I met Daphne Cruyer once or twice, a couple of years back. I remember her at a cocktail party at the German Institute, or one of those freebie get-togethers. She was dressed in a long floral dress with beads and bangles and ballet shoes. Very artistic, isn’t she?’
‘I believe she is,’ I agreed.
The body had continued to move and now, suddenly, it slid all the way to reassume its doubled-up position, like a man trying to touch his toes. Churcher saw it but didn’t pause in his conversation. ‘A very creative woman, I thought. Very imaginative.’
‘She didn’t make it up, Duncan.’
‘I think she did, Bernard. A fantasy that she had to express, that’s what I think. It helped her control her anger towards her husband perhaps. She didn’t think you’d ever see him, did she?’ When I didn’t respond to this he said: ‘Was she drunk? Was she angry? Was she jealous?’
‘All three,’ I admitted. ‘Cause of death?’
‘Take your pick, Bernard. He’s got enough pills here to start a pharmacy. Half those bottles are empty; for all I know, he swallowed them all in one go. He was on crack and all kinds of filth. Even if he’d checked into a health farm yesterday morning, his life expectation wasn’t more than a year.’
‘So why didn’t you tell me this when you first saw him?’
‘I was checking his medical record, and that’s a slow business. He walked out of a mental hospital about three months ago. You know how it is these days, no one wants to sign a commitment order and hold anyone. You could slice up some old lady with a chainsaw, and they’d still not put you under lock and key.’ He looked around. ‘Not that this one would ever do anything like that. He was polite and considerate and gentle with everyone. Doctors, patients, even the people living in this rat-trap said the same thing. The poor sod had just had all he could take.’
‘They’ll bring in a suicide verdict?’
‘Suicide? Where do you draw the line, Bernard? In Russia they call alcoholics “partial suicides” and that’s it, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Then you are lucky.’ He looked at his watch. ‘If you don’t want your clean-up boys called in, I’d better get the law soon, Bernard. Have you seen enough?’
‘So there was nothing in it, Duncan?’
‘He went to the art classes. He didn’t pay and it was warm and light: better an evening there than an evening here. Perhaps he wanted to meet people … I don’t know. He was lonely and broke and desperate. When I talked with him the other afternoon, he didn’t even remember who Daphne Cruyer was. I asked him to tell me who was in the class with him; he could only remember three other students out of the twelve, and Daphne Cruyer wasn’t one of them.’
‘Poor Daphne,’ I said.
‘Perhaps she’s lonely too, Bernard. You can’t always tell by the way people seem from the outside. Loneliness is love spelled backwards, if you know what I mean. That same energy and power and passion that sends you sky-high into the rarefied stratosphere of love, when you are lonely drags you down to the sea-bed, and holds you there under a heavy rock until your lungs burst with misery.’
‘Have you been on the booze?’
‘No, I swear it.’
‘Okay, bring the law in. I must get back to work. What about Hitler downstairs?’
‘He’ll be all right. I’ll give the police a statement and he’ll breathe gin all over them. They’ll listen to what I tell them because I can save them a lot of work. Leave it to me. This is what I do for a living.’
‘Any next of kin?’
‘No one. The hospital tried to find the parents when he was first admitted, but he has no one, no relatives at all.’
‘No worries on that score then,’ I said.
‘When I was tiny, I used to pray every night, asking God to make sure I died before my parents died. I just couldn’t face the thought of being alive without them, you see.’ Churcher was identifying with the dead youngster and it wasn’t helping things.
‘What about Belostok?’ I said. ‘Should he be told?’
‘Don’t blame yourself, Bernard. What you asked me to do made no difference. It would have happened like this even if Daphne Cruyer had never been born.’
‘Belostok will be expecting him on Tuesday. Maybe Daphne Cruyer will be alarmed.’
‘Bugger off, Bernard. This is what you’re paying me to do and I’m bloody good at it. I’m not over the hill yet, no matter what they are saying about me.’
When I got back to Notting Hill Gate, VERDI and Werner were sitting in the dark. The curtains were wide open and they were drinking watery whisky and looking across London and watching the sluggish movement of the traffic along Bayswater Road.
There was enough light to see that VERDI was wearing a white roll-neck, and Werner was almost lost in the gloom wearing a black knitted shirt. They both looked as if they had adjusted to the idea of a long stay here. I was clinging to the hope that Dicky would find somewhere more suited to VERDI’s incarceration so that I could escape from my role as jailer.
‘One of us should turn in, Werner,’ I said.
‘Are you going to guard me?’ VERDI asked with amusement.
‘You sleep first, Bernie,’ said Werner. ‘You look worn out.’
He went into the kitchen and called: ‘I’m making a sandwich and coffee. Anyone else?’
‘No,’ I said, but VERDI said he’d join Werner in the late-night snack.
Werner was still in the kitchen when it happened. I was in the front room with VERDI. I was kneeling on the carpet rummaging through my overnight bag to find my toothpaste.
The sound was no more than the sharp crack of breaking glass and a strangled cry from VERDI, the sort of gargling sound that is made by a man using mouthwash. I knew what it was. The glass was the window and the gargling the sound made as a man’s heart explodes and he swallows several pints of his own blood.
Werner heard the glass break and recognized it too. He came rushing in from the kitchen. ‘He’s shot,’ Werner said.
�
��Down! Stay still, Werner. Freeze. They’ll be watching for movement.’
I was crouched over my zipper bag in the part of the room away from the window, and I remained down. ‘Get right down. Don’t try to look out of the window, Werner. Come to this side of the room and watch the door. Be very careful.’ I waited while he did it, and then I scambled across the room on my hands and knees to look at VERDI.
‘Is he dead?’ said Werner from across the room.
‘Yes,’ I said. One look at his face was enough.
‘He’s moving.’
‘Yes, but he’s dead. It went right through the chest. Shit!’ I said. I was putting my hand along his back to find the exit wound, and found a terrible gaping hole and a lot of blood still pumping out. His roll-neck sweater was saturated in it and it now covered my hands too.
‘Could you see where it came from?’
‘Don’t go near the window.’ I got my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my hands. It didn’t help much.
‘But it’s too dark to see.’
‘A sniper,’ I said. ‘My fault. I should have thought of that. Someone out there on the rooftops with hand-loaded rounds, a sniper rifle on a bipod, and an infra-red nightscope.’
‘You can’t be sure how it was done.’
‘It wasn’t a lucky shot, Werner.’
‘But you’ve been near that window. I’ve been near that window. But when they pull the trigger, they hit him. They must be able to distinguish him.’
‘Yes. You don’t set up that kind of hit and then leave it to chance which of the three men you get.’
‘A nightscope.’
‘This is a very expensive professional hit, Werner. Chest hit, with a round that strikes the heart and severs the spine. You couldn’t do better than that if a surgeon had him on an operation table in the theatre.’
‘I should have closed the curtains,’ said Werner.