by Len Deighton
Curl looked out of the window to see what the President was watching. Seemingly endless wheatlands passed beneath the wings. From thirty thousand feet the ground shimmered like beaten gold. No matter about all those corn-belt gags, Curl thought, this was the heartland of America. Here lay its moral strength, or its moral weakness.
Curl waited until the President glanced up at him again. The old man was scrolling another Congressional headcount through his fingers. He’d be counting each vote and remembering each voter. Once his favourite tactic had been trading bridges, military bases, highways and airports for the votes he needed. Now he seemed to be losing the knack. He’d never beat the record set by Lyndon Johnson, who had had every Congressman visit the White House twice a year. Gruelling work, but it had paid off with 181 major measures passed out of 200 submitted.
Now the pundits were saying that without John Curl to arrange dramatic summits with world figures, and to artfully leak stories about the President’s secret diplomatic coups, the Administration would be in dire trouble. As it was, John Curl was always there; always ready to jump in and grab the hot coals.
‘That business in Spanish Guiana …’ said the President. ‘How do we stand now?’
‘No sweat; these things always work out.’
The President nodded. ‘Never hesitate to do nothing. Don’t I always tell you that?’ He was in a good mood. He liked to escape from Washington now and again. The badgering he was likely to get from his West Coast political opponents did not trouble him. He thrived on such combat.
Curl smiled soberly and wondered whether the President really believed it had all come out well; and that it had all done so without Curl’s frantic efforts behind the scenes. Perhaps the President’s remarks were just for the benefit of his secretary and the Air Force aide seated behind him.
The First Lady gently pushed her way past the bagman and the Secret Service man to get to the President. She was holding two whisky sours. Even a President’s wife needed some such excuse to get to him. Over the years Curl had learned to see beyond the confident smiles and warm exchanges, and now he worried at the way his chief downed half his drink in one appreciative swallow. The President looked at him as if reading his mind. Curl smiled in an attempt to hide his disapproval.
‘The last thing I wanted was any kind of confrontation between the MAMista and any identified US nationals,’ the President explained.
‘No way! Ramón is being helpful right down the line,’ Curl said. ‘As soon as Steve’s people give the okay, we’ll be helping Ramón destroy some of these coca plantations. From the air maybe.’ He waited to see if there was any reaction to the defoliation idea. This was the only way to do things: ideas had to be floated gently past the chief when he was in a good mood. ‘Burning that filth is the only way to get rid of it.’
‘Now about San Diego, John. Pressing the flesh is really important to me there. I don’t care if the cops have to strip everyone bare at the door but I want to be seen moving through that auditorium brushing shoulders with the rank and file. If the cameras see me crouching behind a sheet of bullet-proof glass, we’ll get some smart-ass saying I handle foreign policy that same way.’
‘Yes, Mr President. I’m watching that one.’
Curl looked out of the window again. Distorted by the Plexiglas – for not even the most powerful man in the world could get an airplane with windows you could see through clearly – he saw the other aircraft of the Presidential flight. Like this one, it had a lounge, a sitting-room, a colour TV, a stereo and a ton of communications equipment. In it there were reporters and Press aides, the masseur, four gallons of Curl’s special bran and beet vitamin cocktail, the Presidential seal and flag, a bullet-proof glass screen and a cueing machine; everything needed for a quick ‘Gallup through the boonies’. Curl watched the backup plane increasing speed to overtake them. That would get the staff and the White House Press pool to the airport in time to cover the President’s disembarkation.
‘Yes, Mr President. It all worked out okay.’ The hell with the explanations. Wasn’t it Reagan who had on the wall of the Oval Office a sign that said it was surprising how much you could get done if you didn’t care who got the credit for it?
But there was one part of Curl that wanted the President to know the trouble he’d gone to. He would like to have described the negotiations with Ramón. He would like to have explained some of the difficulties of keeping Admiral Benz sweet. Most of all he’d like to have had credit for getting Steve Steinbeck to buy helicopters and other California-built hardware. God knows squeezing a fistful of nickels and dimes from an oil company amounted in itself to a Medal of Honor achievement. Then there had been all the manoeuvring and secrecy involved in having the news of the contracts break at the right time of evening on a slow day: first came the blaring announcement followed by a delayed supplementary. That way they had grabbed the evening news headlines and had created a big explanatory splash in all the morning papers too.
The weather was bright and sunny in southern California. Don Arturo was sitting by the pool in the garden of his Beverly Hills mansion. He was reading MacArthur – Victory in the Pacific. His wife sat alongside him. She wore a white swimsuit and gold shoes that matched her ornate necklace and diamond-studded Rolex wrist-watch. The manservant had just brought them fresh drinks. She liked Piña Colada in the morning. He drank Bacardi with Diet Pepsi and always told her it was less fattening.
From the other side of the house he could hear the men working to uproot the Lombardy poplars. It was unfortunate. One of the poplars had some disease that turned them white, and when that happened there was no alternative but to destroy all of them.
The phone rang and Arturo snatched it up. He was waiting for a call. ‘Don Arturo?’ said a voice heavy with respect.
‘Who else is it going to be?’
‘It’s him, boss. No doubt about it.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m parked across the street from the hospital.’
‘You saw him?’
‘Sure. I took flowers. I said they were from his mother. Just like you said.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Nothing much. He seemed kind of surprised.’
Arturo chuckled. ‘I’ll bet he was.’
‘And you were right about the name. He’s calling himself Gerald Singer.’
‘Stay right where you are,’ Arturo said. ‘We’ll go public on this one.’
‘You’re coming over here?’
‘Did you think I’d gone soft?’
‘No, boss. Of course not.’
‘You got all your stuff? White jacket and whatever you need?’
‘Sure thing.’
‘I don’t want a lot of mess. I’m going to be wearing a suit.’
‘It’ll be just like you said.’
‘About an hour,’ Arturo promised. ‘Less maybe.’
‘No rush. He won’t be going anywhere.’
Angel Paz hated to be in bed. They had given him massive doses of vitamins and he felt much better. He was only here in the hospital for observation. The polite little CIA man from the Federal Building had insisted upon checking him in for a thorough examination. Doctors had taken blood tests and X-rays and scans and urine samples. Doctors being doctors, they had found all kinds of reasons why he should stay here.
But soon he would have to escape. On Wednesday some top CIA officials were coming to ask him questions. Unless they were totally stupid, they would know from the records that Singer was a middle-aged 200-pound black man, not a slim young Latin.
Angel Paz looked at the towering flower arrangement his visitor had said was from his mother. Every flower you could think of was there. It must have cost a fortune. But Angel Paz hated it; it reminded him of the jungle. So Singer had a mother. How was she going to react when she arrived to find Angel Paz here in place of her son?
The trouble was that he had no clothes. The filthy rags he’d worn in the jungle had been stripped off hi
m while he was still unconscious. To ask for more clothes would be to excite suspicion. The first thing to do would be to get a Los Angeles telephone book. There must be many people who would help him get out of here with no questions asked. Not his father. His father was away; this was the time when he always went to Madrid with Consuelo. They would rent an apartment there and go to parties with all their stupid, rich, ‘high-society’ friends.
He was still going through the list of possible allies when his visitors arrived.
‘Don Arturo!’ said Paz, trying to sound pleased.
There was another man with him. It was a doctor in a white coat. Then he recognized the ‘doctor’s’ face. It was the man who’d brought the flowers. He was suddenly alarmed. Very alarmed.
‘Just saying hello,’ Arturo said. He came to one side of the bed while the ‘doctor’ went to the other side. Arturo leaned close. ‘Just saying hello to a treacherous thief.’ From outside, through the plate glass, the hum of Los Angeles traffic filtered in. An ambulance, its siren expiring, stopped in the emergency slot below the window.
‘No, I can explain that,’ Angel Paz said nervously. But the man in the white coat had a hand pressed hard upon his chest, holding him down while the other hand plastered an evil-smelling pad across his mouth and nose. He couldn’t breathe, except to inhale this terrible smell. As the room softened and dribbled away, he felt a pin-prick in his arm.
‘Thief,’ Arturo said. ‘I warned you. Stinking little thief.’
On Air Force One, the communications-room staff was alerted by a red light on one of the wire-service Teletypes. A Signals Corps lieutenant got to his feet to watch it. The electric motor whined and the keys typed the coded prelims.
HOSPITAL SPOKESMAN SAYS DEATH DUE TO DEADLY POISON INJECTION STOP MAFIA-TYPE KILLING IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES HOSPITAL STOP AT NOON TODAY MALE PATIENT GERALD SINGER WAS KILLED BY UNKNOWN ASSAILANTS WHO…
The lieutenant tore the story off the machine and dumped it into the waste. His orders stated that the only news stories to be taken up front to John Curl were those that concerned international affairs. Murders in Los Angeles, no matter how bizarre the circumstances, did not come into that category.
It was in any case a bit late for anything to go upfront. The President and First Lady were both getting last-minute titivations from their respective hairdressers and make-up experts. The plane was approaching the landing pattern. The controllers had closed the airport to all traffic except Air Force One. Airport cops kept the cars moving round and round without stopping. TV trucks and news cars – special red-striped stickers on their windshields – were lined up along the apron. California was pregnant with elections. Campus speeches were getting front-page coverage and the utterances of aerospace trade union leaders were getting headlines. Like the next episode in a popular soap, the President’s arrival was exactly the story the media now needed.
The reporters had sharpened their pencils ready to stick them right through his heart. The Press here would have no easy questions for him: they had a reputation to maintain.
The Presidential Flight came into the landing pattern. The last of many microphones was clipped to a stand which now almost obscured a seat in the VIP room facing the empty chair, a firing squad of cameramen sighted along their film and video lenses. Flood-lights gave a harsh unflattering crosslight.
California was ready to welcome the President of the United States of America.
About the Author
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.
Other Books by Len Deighton
FICTION
The Ipcress File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Declarations of War
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-FICTION
Action Cook Book
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain
Airshipwreck
French Cooking for Men
Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk
ABC of French Food
Blood, Tears and Folly
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This paperback edition 2011
First published in Great Britain by Century in 1991
Copyright © Len Deighton 1991
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2011
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2011
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 0 00 738585 0
MAMISTA. Copyright © Len Deighton 1991. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-745085-5
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