by Len Deighton
So on Monday I went by car and Gloria went by train. She arrived ahead of me, of course. The office is only two or three minutes’ walk from Waterloo Station, while I had to drag through the traffic jams in Wimbledon.
I got into the office to find alarm and despondency spread right through the building. Dicky Cruyer was there already, a sure sign of a crisis. They must have phoned him at home and had him depart hurriedly from the leisurely breakfast he enjoys after jogging across Hampstead Heath. Even Sir Percy Babcock, the Deputy D-G, had dragged himself away from his law practice and found time to spare for an early morning session.
‘Number Two Conference Room,’ the girl waiting in the corridor said. She whispered in a way that revealed her pent-up excitement: as if this was the sort of day she’d been waiting for ever since beginning to type all those tedious reports for us. I suppose Dicky must have sent her to stand sentry outside my office. ‘Sir Percy is chairing the meeting. They said you should join them as soon as you arrived.’
‘Thanks, Mabel,’ I said and gave her my coat and a leather case of very unimportant non-classified paper-work that I hoped she’d mislay. She smiled dutifully. Her name wasn’t Mabel but I called them all Mabel and I suppose they’d got used to it.
Number Two was on the top floor, a narrow room that seated fourteen at a pinch and had a view right across to where the City’s ugly tower blocks underpinned the low grey cloud base.
‘Samson! Good,’ said the Deputy D-G when I went in. There was a notepad, a yellow pencil and a chair waiting for me and two more pristine pads and pencils that may or may not have been waiting for others who were arriving at work hoping their lateness would not be noticed. Bad luck.
‘Have you heard?’ Dicky asked.
I could see it was Dicky’s baby. This was a German Desk crisis. It wasn’t a routine briefing for the Deputy, or a conference to decide about annual leave rosters, or more questions about where Central Funding might have put the odd few hundred thousand pounds that Jim Prettyman authorized for Bret Rensselaer and Bret Rensselaer never got. This was serious. ‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Bizet,’ said Dicky, and went back to chewing his fingernail.
I knew the group; at least I knew them as well as a deskman sitting in London can know the people who do the real nasty dangerous work. Somewhere near Frankfurt an der Oder, right over there on East Germany’s border with Poland. ‘Poles,’ I said, ‘or that’s how it started. Poles working in some sort of heavy industry.’
‘That’s right,’ said Dicky judiciously. He had a folder and was looking at it to check how well my memory was working.
‘What’s happened?’
‘It looks nasty,’ said Dicky, unvanquished master of the nebulous answer on almost any subject except the gastronomic merits of expensive restaurants.
Billingsly, a bald-headed youngster from the Data Centre, tapped the palm of his hand with his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and said, ‘We seem to have lost more than one of them. That’s always a bad sign.’
So even in the Data Centre they knew that. Things were looking up. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s always a bad sign.’
Billingsly looked at me as if I’d slapped his face. Uncordial now, he said, ‘If you know anything else we can do…’
‘Have you put out a contact string?’ I asked.
Billingsly seemed to be unsure what a contact string – a roll-call for survivors – was. But eventually Harry Strang, an elderly gorilla from Operations, stopped scratching his cheek with the eraser end of his brand-new yellow pencil for enough time to answer me. ‘Early yesterday morning.’
‘It’s too soon.’
‘That’s what I told the Deputy,’ said Dicky Cruyer, nodding deferentially to Sir Percy. Dicky was looking more tired and ill every minute. He usually came down with something totally incapacitating in this sort of situation. It was the thought of making a decision, and signing it for all to see, that affected him.
‘Mass,’ said Harry Strang.
‘They see each other at Sunday morning Mass,’ explained Dicky Cruyer.
‘No out-of-contact signals?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Strang. ‘That’s what makes it worrying.’
‘Damn right,’ I said. ‘What else?’
There was a moment’s silence. If I’d been paranoid I could easily have suspected that they wanted to keep me ignorant of the confirmation.
‘Odds and ends,’ said Billingsly.
Strang said, ‘We have something from inside. Two men picked up for interrogation in the Frankfurt area.’
‘Berlin.’
‘Berlin? No Frankfurt,’ said Billingsly.
I’d had enough of Billingsly by that time. They were all like him in the Data Centre: they thought we all needed a couple of megabytes of random access memory to get level with them.
‘Don’t act the bloody fool,’ I told Strang. ‘Is your information from Berlin or from Frankfurt?’
‘Berlin,’ said Strang. ‘Normannenstrasse.’ That was the big grey stone block in Berlin-Lichtenberg from which East Germany’s Stasi – State Security Service – intimidated their world and poked their fingers into ours.
‘Over a weekend,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t sound good. If Frankfurt Stasi put that on the teleprinter they must think they have something worthwhile.’
‘The question we’re discussing,’ said the Deputy with the gentle courtesy that barristers show when leading a nervous defendant into an irreversible admission of guilt, ‘is whether to follow up.’ He looked at me and tilted his head to one side as if seeing me better like that.
I stared back at him. He was a funny bright-eyed plump little man with a shiny pink face and hair brushed close against his skull. Black jacket, a waistcoat full of ancient pens and pencils, pinstripe trousers and the tie of some obscure public school held in place by a jewelled pin. A lawyer. If you saw him on the street you’d have thought him a down-at-heel solicitor or a barrister’s clerk. In real life – which is to say outside this building – he ran one of the most successful law firms in London. Why he persevered with this unrewarding job I couldn’t fathom, but he was only one step away from running the whole Department. The D-G was, after all, on his last legs. I said, ‘You mean, should you put someone in to follow up?’
‘Precisely,’ said the Deputy. ‘I think we’d all like to hear your views, Samson.’
I played for time. ‘From Berlin Field Unit?’ I said. ‘Or from somewhere else?’
‘I don’t think BFU should come into this,’ said Strang hastily. That was the voice of Operations.
He was right of course. Sending someone from West Berlin into such a situation would be madness. In a region like that any kind of stranger is immediately scrutinized by every damned secret policeman on duty and a few that aren’t. ‘You’re probably right,’ I said as if conceding something.
Strang said, ‘They’d have him in the slammer before the ink was dry on the hotel register.’
‘We have people nearer,’ said the Deputy.
They were all looking at me now. This is why they’d waited for me to join them. They knew what the answer was going to be but they were going to make sure that it was me, an ex-Field Man, who would say it out loud. Then they could get on with their work, or their lunch, or doze off until the next crisis.
‘We can’t just leave them to it,’ I said.
They all nodded. We had to agree the wrong answer first, that was the ethic of the Department.
‘We’ve had good stuff from them,’ Dicky said. ‘Nothing big of course, they are only foundry workers, but they’ve never let us down.’
‘I’d like to hear what Samson thinks,’ said the Deputy. He had a slim gold pencil in his hand. He was leaning back in his chair, arm extended to his notepad. He looked up from whatever he was writing, stared at me and smiled encouragement.
‘We’ll have to let it go,’ I said finally.
‘Speak up,’ said the Deputy in his housemaster voi
ce.
I cleared my throat. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ I said rather louder. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’
They all turned to see the Deputy’s reaction. ‘I think that’s sound,’ he said at last. Dicky Cruyer smiled with relief at someone else making the decision. Especially a decision to do nothing. He wriggled about and ran his hand back through his curly hair, looking round the room and nodding. Then he looked over to where a clerk was keeping an account of what was said, to be sure he was writing it down.
Well I’d earned my wages for the day. I’d told them exactly what they wanted to hear. Now nothing would happen for a day or so, apart from a group of Polish workers having their fingernails torn out under hygienic conditions with a shorthand writer in attendance.
There was a knock at the door and a tray with tea and biscuits arrived. Billingsly, perhaps because he was the youngest and least arthritic of us, or because he wanted to impress the Deputy, distributed the cups and saucers and passed the milk and teapot along the polished table top.
‘Chocolate oatmeal!’ said Harry Strang. I looked up at him and he winked. Harry knew what it was all about. Harry had spent enough time at the sharp end to know what I was thinking.
Harry poured tea for me. I took it and drank some. It turned to acid in my stomach. The Deputy was leaning towards Billingsly to ask him something about the excessive ‘down time’ the computers in the Yellow Submarine were suffering lately. Billingsly said that you had to expect some trouble with these ‘electronic toys’. The Deputy said not when you paid two million pounds for them you didn’t.
‘Biscuit?’ said Harry Strang.
‘No thanks.’
‘You used to like chocolate oatmeal as I remember,’ he said sardonically.
I leaned over to see what the Deputy had written on his notepad but it was just a pattern: a hundred wobbly concentric circles with a big dot in the middle. No escape; no solution; no nothing. It was the answer he wanted to his question, I suppose, and I had given it to him. Ten marks out of ten, Samson. Advance to Go and collect two hundred pounds.
It was only when the Deputy had finished his tea that protocol permitted even the busiest of us to take our leave. Just when the Deputy was moving towards the door, Morgan – the D-G’s most obsequious acolyte – came in flush-faced and complete with Melton overcoat carrying, like an altar candle, one of those short unfolding umbrellas. He said, in his singsong Welsh accent, ‘Sorry I’m late, sir. I had the most awful and unexpected trouble with the motorcar.’ He bit his lip. Exertion and anxiety had made his face even paler than usual.
The Deputy was annoyed but allowed no more than a trace of it to show. ‘We managed without you, Morgan,’ he said.
As the Deputy marched out Morgan looked at me with a deep hatred that he made no attempt to hide. Perhaps he thought his humiliation was all my fault or perhaps he blamed me for being there when it happened. Either way, if the Department ever needed someone to bury me Morgan would be an enthusiastic volunteer. Perhaps he was already working on it.
I went downstairs, relieved to get out of that meeting even if it meant sitting in my cramped little office and trying to see over the top of the uncompleted paper-work. I stared at the cluttered table near the window, and more specifically at two boxes in beautiful Christmas wrappings, one marked ‘Billy’ and the other ‘Sally’. They’d been delivered by the Harrods van together with the cards that said ‘With dearest love from Mummy’ but not in Fiona’s hand-writing. I should have given them to the children before Christmas but I’d left them there and tried not to look at them. She’d sent presents on previous Christmases and I’d put them under the tree. The children had read the cards without comment. But this year we’d spent Christmas in our new little home and somehow I didn’t want Fiona to intrude into it. The move had given me a chance to get rid of Fiona’s clothes and personal things. I wanted to start again, but that didn’t make it any easier to confront those two bright boxes waiting for me every time I went into my office.
My desk was a mess. My secretary, Brenda, had been covering for two filing clerks who were sick or pregnant or some damned thing, so I tried to sort out a week of muddle that had accumulated on my desk in my absence.
The first things I came across were the red-labelled ‘urgent’ messages about Prettyman. My God, last Thursday there must have been new messages, requests, assignments and words of advice landing on my desk every half hour. Thank heavens Brenda had enough sense not to forward it all to Washington. Well, now I was back in London, and they could get someone else to go and bully Jim Prettyman into coming back here to be roasted by a committee of time-serving old flower-pots from Central Funding who were desperately looking for some unfortunate upon whom to dump the blame for their own inadequacies.
I was putting it all into the classified waste when I noticed the signature. Billingsly. Billingsly! It was damned odd that Billingsly hadn’t mentioned it to me this morning in Number Two Conference Room. He hadn’t even asked me what happened. His passion, if not to say obsession, for getting Prettyman here had undergone some abrupt traumatic change. That was the way it went with people like Billingsly – and many others in the Department – who alternated displays of panic and amnesia with disconcerting suddenness.
I threw the notes into the basket and forgot about it. There was no point in stirring trouble for Jim Prettyman. In my opinion he was a fool to suddenly get on his high horse about something so mundane. He could have testified and been the golden boy: he could have declined without upsetting them. But I think he liked confrontation. I decided to smooth things over as much as I could. When it came to writing the report I wouldn’t say he’d refused point-blank: I’d say he was thinking about it. Until they asked for the report, I’d say nothing at all.
I didn’t see Gloria until we had lunch together in the restaurant. Her fluent Hungarian had recently brought her a job downstairs: promotion, more pay and much more responsibility. I suppose they thought that it would be enough to make her forget the promises they’d made about paying her wages while she was at Cambridge. Her new job meant that I saw much less of her and so lunch had become the time when our domestic questions were settled: would it look too pushy to invite the Cruyers for dinner? Who had the receipt for the dry-cleaning? Why had I opened a new tin of cat-food for Muffin when the last one was still half-full?
I asked her if anything more had been said about her resignation, secretly hoping, I suppose, that she might have changed her mind. She hadn’t. When I broached the subject over the ‘mushroom quiche with winter salad’ she told me that she’d had an answer from a friend of hers about some comfortable rooms in Cambridge that she could probably rent.
‘What am I going to do with the house?’
‘Not so loud, darling,’ she said. We kept up this absurd pretence that our co-workers – or such of them as might be interested – didn’t know we were living together. ‘I’ll keep paying half the rent. I told you that.’
‘It’s nothing to do with the rent,’ I said. ‘It’s simply that I wouldn’t have taken on a place out in the sticks so I could sit there every night on my own, watching TV and saving up my laundry until I’ve got enough to make a full load for the washing machine.’
That produced the flicker of a grin. She leaned closer to me and said, ‘After you find out how much dirty laundry the children have every day, you won’t be worrying about filling up the machine: you’ll be looking for a place where you can get washing powder wholesale.’ She sipped some apple juice with added vitamin C. ‘You’ve got a nanny for the children. You’ll have that nice Mrs Palmer coming in every day to tidy round. I’ll be back every weekend: I don’t know what you are worrying about.’
‘I wish you’d be a little more realistic. Cambridge is a damned long way away from Balaklava Road. The weekend traffic will be horrendous, the railway service is even worse and in any case you’ll have your studying to do.’
‘I wish I could make you stop worrying,
’ she said. ‘Are you ill? You haven’t been yourself since coming back from Washington. Did something go wrong there?’
‘If I’d known what you were going to do I would have made different plans.’
‘I told you. I told you over and over.’ She looked down and continued to eat her winter salad as if there was no more to be said. In a way she was right. She had told me time and time again. She’d been telling me for years that she was going to go to Cambridge and get this honours degree in PPE that she’d set her heart on. She’d told me so many times that I’d long since ceased to give it any credence. When she told me that she’d actually resigned I was astounded.
‘I thought it would be next year,’ I said lamely.
‘You thought it would be never,’ she said curtly. Then she looked up and gave me a wonderful smile. One thing about this damned business of going to Cambridge. It had put her into an incomparably sunny mood. Or was that simply the result of seeing me discomfited?
3
It was Gloria’s evening for visiting parents. Tuesday she had an evening class in mathematics, Wednesday economics and Thursday evening she visited her parents. She apportioned time for such things, so that I sometimes wondered if I was one of her duties, or time off.
I stayed working for an extra hour or so until there was a phone call from Mr Gaskell, a recently retired artillery sergeant-major who’d taken over security duties at reception. ‘There is a lady here. Asking for you by name. Mr Samson.’ The security man’s hoarse whisper was confidential to the point of being conspiratorial. I wondered if this was in deference to my professional or social obligations.