by Len Deighton
They were catching the boat,' he said from behind me. 'You wouldn't think it would pay a Polish meat-canning firm to send truck and drivers all the way here and return empty, but I suppose they know what they are doing.'
'Maybe it's a nationalized industry,' I said. It was a long Polish name with an address in London Wall.
'You didn't drink the tea,' he said again.
'I'm trying to give it up,' I said.
'Stick with the tea,' he advised. 'Give up playing copper.'
Chapter Eleven
Intelligence and espionage (in plus and minus categories) are programmed according to Section 9 of the stucen Programming Manual. Commanders are solely responsible for information, false or otherwise, collected outside game time, i.e. in off-duty hours.
RULES. ALL GAMES. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON
I WAS half inclined to give the sedated Miss Shaw a miss, but it would only give Ferdy another excuse for a long whine. The Terrine du Chef was a converted shop in Marylebone. 'Restaurant Franchise' had been gilt-lettered across the old. shop window and the interior obscured with a large net curtain.
A menu was jammed into an illuminated holder in the doorway. It was handwritten, in the crabbed calligraphy that the English believe to be a hallmark of the French restaurateur. There was a 'Closed' sign behind the glass panel in the door but I pushed and the door swung open. I reached up to catch the sprung bell before it announced my arrival.
It was a cramped place. An odd collection of bentwood chairs were dancing on the table-tops. The dining-room had been dressed to look like a Paris bistro of the 'thirties, with enamel Suze adverts, marble-topped tables and fancy mirrors on every wall. A debris of corks, paper napkins and cigarette ends had been swept to a neat pile in the corner under the serving hatch. On the counter there was an array of cutlery, a line-up of old bottles stuck with coloured candles and a pile of freshly laundered red check tablecloths. There was a smell of burned garlic, ancient cigars and freshly peeled potatoes. I walked through to the kitchen. From a tiny dark yard beyond it I could hear a young man's voice singing softly and the noises of buckets and metal lids.
Down two stone steps from the kitchen there was a large pantry. A freezer was humming to a tin hip-bath, full of peeled potatoes. Alongside there was a large plastic sack containing dry ice, its smoke moving around inside the clear plastic like a restless grey cobra trying to escape. A scrubbed table had been cleared to provide room for an electric sewing machine plugged into the overhead light socket. Hanging over the back of the kitchen chair there was a man's dark jacket. But it wasn't the jacket that caught my attention: it was a manilla file. It had been pushed under a folded length of lining material, but not pushed far enough to conceal it completely. I pulled it clear and flipped it open. On top there was a drawing of a splay-armed figure, its measurements noted in neat red ink. The rest of the contents were photographs.
There were a dozen photos, and this time they shook me more than the ones in my flat. It was the same man that I'd seen pictured with my car, and with my parents, but these were better photographs and I could see his face in greater detail than before. He was more than five, perhaps even fifteen years, older than me, a barrel-chested man with a full mop of hair and large stubby-fingered hands.
There were no other papers in the file, nothing to tell me about his job or his family or what he liked for lunch. Nothing to tell me why someone had chosen to sit lüm in my car wearing my clothes, or pose him with my parents or frame the prints and position them carefully in my old flat. But these picture:) revealed something about the people who had arranged this business. For the first time I realized that I was up against someone of consider-able power and wealth. And it had all the clumsy power of a security department: a Russian security department for example. For reasons that I was unable to fathom, they had gone to all the trouble of dressing my Doppelgänger in the uniform of a rear-admiral of the Soviet Navy before having these photos taken. In the background on one of them there was a blurred but unmistakable flush-deck profile of a Tallinn Class destroyer. Was the photo taken on a sunny day at some British port, or could I recognize the waterfront of Alexandria or Malta's Grand Harbour?
There were footsteps on the creaking wooden stairs. The sound of a cold room door and the clatter of footsteps on tiles. I closed the file and pushed it back under the lining material where I'd found it. Then I stepped quickly back through the door but grasped the edge, and peek-a-booed round it in what I hoped was the manner of a salesman.
'Who are you?' She was standing in the other doorway. Beyond her there was a food store. Through the open door I could see the entrance to the cold room. There was a rack of vegetables and a marble slab upon which, some charcuterie had been sliced and arranged on plates and garnished with twigs of parsley. The movement of air activated the cold room thermostat, and the refrigeration system started. It was a loud vibrating sound. She closed the door.
'Who are you?' I said. It was the unsedated, fully dressed Mss Shaw, and I had made the right decision. She was a shapely blonde in her middle twenties. Her long hair was parted in the middle so that it fell forward framing her face. Her skin was tanned, and she needed no makeup and knew it.
She was so unexpected that I hesitated for a moment while I looked at her in detail. 'It's about the accident,' I said.
'Who let you in?'
'The door was open,' I told her. A willowy man in flared denims came to the top of the stairs and paused for a moment. He was out of her sight but she knew he was there. 'Did you leave the door open, Sylvester?'
'No, Miss Shaw. The fellow with the frozen pork loins.'
That explains it,' I said. 'These guys with frozen loins…' I gave her a smile that I'd kept unused for a year or more.
'The accident,' she nodded. 'Go and make sure it's closed now, Sylvester.' A yellow tape measure hung around her neck and in her hand there was the dark-blue sleeve of a uniform jacket. She rolled the sleeve into a ball.
'Yes, the police sergeant phoned,' she said. She was slim, but not so slim that she'd slip through your fingers, and she had this incredible pale-blue cashmere sweater that exactly matched her eyes. She wore a carefully fitted dark tweed skirt, and strap-across low-heeled shoes that were suitable for long walks in the country. 'He said to throw you out, if you were a nuisance.' I was expecting a high voice but it was soft and gentle.
'He spoke to you like that?'
'Policemen are so much younger these days.'
'And stronger, too.'
'I don't seem to get many chances to find out,' she sighed. Then she put the blue uniform sleeve aside with far too much casualness, and she raised a hand to shoo me back into the kitchen. All the time she was giving me back my super smile, returning it tooth for tooth, chewed thirty times just like nanny had told her.
In the kitchen she took two chairs and placed them to face each other. She sat in the one that faced the door. I sat down. She smiled, crossed her legs and smoothed the hem of her skirt, just to be sure that I didn't get a glimpse of her knickers. 'And you are from the insurance?' She embraced herself as if suddenly cold.
I reached for a small black notebook and creased the pages open with my thumb as I'd seen my insurance man do.
'And that's the little book in which you write it all down?'
'It's really the one I use for pressing wild flowers, bxit my wrist-watch tape recorder is on the blink.'1'
'How amusing,' she said.
The blond man came back into the kitchen. From a 1 took behind the door he took a bright pink apron: and put it on carefully, so as not to disarrange his hair. He began to place pieces of limp lettuce in wooden bowls. 'Leave that for now, Sylvester. We're talking. Do the wine.'
'I'll need warm water.'
'Just get the bottles up from the cellar. We won't be long.' Reluctantly he went out. His denims had bright red patches sewn on the behind. He went down the stairs slowly.
I said, 'What's he going to do with the hot water? Put Mouton
Rothschild labels on the Algerian?'
'What a good idea,' she said, in a voice calculated to prove that the cashmere had been chosen to match her blood.
'You were with Mr Toliver when the accident happened?'
'I was.'
'And you and he were…?'
'I am a friend.'
'A friend, yes.'
'One more wisecrack like that and you will leave.' But she gave me the inscrutable Snow-queen smile to keep me guessing.
'You'd been out to dinner?'
'With friends — business associates I should say — we were on the way back to my apartment. It was the North Circular Road where the accident happened — or so they told me later.'
I nodded. She wasn't the sort of girl who'd recognize the North. Circular Road and admit it.
'The lorry driver pulled over too soon. He misjudged the distance.'
'The police said the lorry was stopped at the lights.'
'Sergeant Davis is driving me down to collect the Bentley this afternoon. I'll clear it up then. He said it's only a routine thing — thirty minutes or so and he'll bring me back.'
Lucky old Sergeant Davis. If she'd been an old-age pensioner maybe he would have let her go down to collect the Bentley by bus.
'What colour was the lorry?'
'Maroon and beige.'
'And there were two lorry drivers?'
'Two, yes. Would you like some coffee?'
'That would be great, Miss Shaw.'
'Sara will do.' She unplugged a machine and poured two bowls of coffee. Then she put the jug under a large cosy. The kitchen I was a narrow place with many machines. All the dish towels were I printed with coloured pictures and recipes. On the wall there was a cross-reference chart that I thought was an analysis of the hydrogen atom but on closer inspection became herbs. She put croissants, butter and jam on the table beside me. Her hands were elegant, but not so well cared for that she might not have done her own washing-up and sweeping. I bit into one of the croissants while she warmed the milk and checked through a spikeful of bills. I couldn't decide whether she was wearing a bra.
'You don't seem too upset,' I said.
'Does that offend you? Ben was a friend of my father's. I saw him only two or three times a year. He felt it was a duty to see me eat a meal but we had very little to talk about except my parents.' She flicked some crumbs off her sweater, and gave a sigh of irritation. 'Messy sluts like me should always wear aprons.' She turned to me and held her hands up. 'Look at me, I've only been in the kitchen two minutes.' I looked at her. 'You don't have to look at me like that,' she said. A buzzer on the electric oven sounded and a red light switched on. 'You're not really in insurance, are you, Mr…' She put some ready-cooked pizzas into the oven and reset the timer.
'Armstrong. No, I'm a leg-man for Sergeant Davis.'1 She shook her head; she didn't believe that either.
'It was an accident, Mr Armstrong. And quite frankly it was Ben's fault. He was driving very slowly, he thought he could hear a whining noise in the engine.'
'People with Bentleys get that way about engines.'
She didn't encourage my generalizations about people with Bentleys. She probably knew more of them than I did.
She reached over me for a croissant. I watched her in that way she hadn't liked.
'The street was dry and the lighting good?'
She swallowed some coffee before answering. 'Yes to both.' She paused before adding, 'Do you always look so worried?'
'What worries me, Miss Shaw, is the way you are so certain about everything. Usually witnesses are full of maybes, thinks and abouts, but even in that sodium arc lighting you can tell that the truck was maroon. That's almost psychic'
'I am psychic, Mr Armstrong.'
'Then you'll know that I was at dinner last night with Mr Toliver. And unless you were hiding under the jelly, he seemed to be unaccompanied.'
She picked up her coffee and became very busy with the spoon, deciding how much sugar she needed. Without looking up she said, 'I hope you didn't tell the police that,'
I continued breakfast with a second croissant. She said, 'It's a complicated situation — oh, nothing like that. But Ben collected me last night from a friend of mine — a girl friend — I didn't want to get into all that with the police. I can't believe there's any need, is there?'
From time to lime she would embrace herself as though she was cold, or needed love or just to make sure her arms were still there. She did it now.
'There's probably no need,' I said.
'I knew you were nice,' she said. She took the silk cosy from the silver coffee pot and poured some for me. 'Things like that… I knew I'd be found out. Even when I was a child I could never tell a lie and get away with, it.'
'What did you do after the car stopped?'
'Oh, must we go into that?'
'I think we should. Miss Shaw.' This time she didn't tell me to call her Sara.
'I knew he was in a coma — he wasn't just dazed or semiconscious. We'd done first aid at school. He had almost no pulse, and there was the blood.'
'You sound pretty calm about it.'
'You feel happier with girls who jump on the table and pull their skirts up — '
'You bet!' I said tonelessly.
' — at the sight of a mouse.' I was hoping that if she got just a little more angry she'd tell me something worth hearing. She sat bade on the seat, kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet under her chair. She smiled. 'You push your way in here with some nonsense about insurance companies. You all but call me a liar. You tell me I'm not upset enough, and you litter the place with your second-rate jokes. And all the time I'm not expected to ask you who the hell you are and send you packing.'
'Ask me.'
'One of Mr Toliver's secret little helpers. I know who you are all right.'
I nodded.
'It's not as though you are good at it. No wonder it's, all such a mess.'
'What's all a mess?'
'No matter.' She gave a world-weary sigh.
From the cellar the blond man called, 'I can't find the rosé.'
'Bloody fairies,' she said. Then she regretted the lapse of composure. 'I'm coming, Sylvester. I'll just show my guest to the door.'
I poured a little more coffee for myself. 'Your coffee is so good,' I said. 'I just can't resist it.'
Her brow furrowed. It must be terrible to be so wellbred that you can't order a stranger out of your own restaurant.
'Isn't it on the bench?' she called.
'I've looked everywhere,' the boy insisted.
She got to her feet and hurried down the creaking steps. I heard her speak to the boy as I stepped across to the pantry door. I reached for the dark blue jacket and spread it open on the table. It was an officer's high-button working uniform. On the breast there was a large slab of ribbons and on its cuffs the rings that denote a kontr-admiral of the Soviet Navy. I flipped the jacket over and bundled it back into the comer. It took only a moment to be back in my seat again but the beautiful Miss Shaw was at the open door.
'You found it?' I asked politely.
'Yes,' she said. Her eyes bored into me and I remembered her little joke about being psychic. 'I almost forgot,' she said, 'will you buy a couple of tickets for our play?'
'What play?'
'We're all amateurs but the two leads are awfully good. It will only cost you fifty pence a ticket.'
'What are you doing!"
'I can't remember the title. It's about the Russian revolution — the battleship Potemkin — you must have seen the film. The play's less political — a love story, really.' She stood up to hint that I should go away now.
And when this girl hinted she did it with her every last: gene at the ready. She stood arms akimbo and tossed her head to throw back her loose blonde hair and provide for me the final proof that she was bra-less. 'I know you think I'm being evasive/ she said in a soft, gentle, sexy voice.
'You could say that,' I agreed.
'You'
re wrong,' she said, and ran her hand through her hair in a manner more that of a model than the proprietor of a restaurant. Her voice dropped even more as she said, 'It's just that I'm not used to being interrogated.' She came round close behind me but I didn't turn my head.
'You do very well for an amateur,' I said. I didn't moves from Bay chair.
She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder. I could feel her body as she moved against me. 'Please,' she said. How can I convey the sound of the word in her mouth?
'What are you thinking?' she said.
'You want to get me arrested?'
It wasn't simply her perfume that I could smell now, it was a whole pattern of events, the potatoes she'd peeled, the talc she'd used, the tweed skirt and her body under it. Some other time, some other motive, I might have proved a walkover for her.
I said, 'I went to a Paris fashion show once. You get in through a scrum of sharp-elbowed lady fashion experts, and they sit you on these toy-sized gilded chairs. From behind the velvet curtains we could all hear the screaming of the fashion models. They were swearing and fighting about mirrors, zips and hairbrushes. Suddenly the lights were lowered to the level of candlelight. There was the muted music of violins and someone pumped Chanel into the air. From the old biddies came only the refined sound made by petite hands in silken gloves.'
'I don't get you,' said Miss Shaw. She moved again.
'Well, it's mutual,' I said. 'And no one regrets it more than I do.'
'I mean this fashion show.'
'It taught me all I ever learned about women.'
'What's that?'
'I'm not sure.'
From the cellar Sylvester called, 'Will the Chablis do, Sara?'
'No it won't do, you bloody fairy queen,' she screamed. Sylvester was chalked on the casing, but the bomb-sight was set on me.
I said, 'I've still a lot more questions, I'm afraid.'
'It will have to wait. I must start the lunches.'
'Better get it over with.'