by Len Deighton
It was during one of these abrupt pauses in the conversation that he suddenly extended his fist so it was only a few inches from my nose. I stared at him and made no move. Click! There was the handle of a flick-knife concealed in his hand and now its blade snapped forward so that its shiny point was almost touching my eye.
‘Dodo!’ Gloria yelled in alarm.
Slowly he drew his knife back and folded the blade back into the handle. ‘Ha ha. I wanted to see what this fellow had in him,’ he said and sounded disappointed that I’d been able to conceal my alarm.
‘I don’t like that sort of joke,’ she said.
Gloria had bought two bottles of Hine brandy in the duty-free shop, and Dodo had got the cork out of the first one before we were far through his front door. I stuck to the local rosé wine, a light and refreshing drink, but Dodo favoured the Hine through the black olives, the chicken and vegetable stew, the goat cheese and the bowl of apples and oranges that followed. By the end of the meal, he was uncorking the second bottle and when we went out on his patio to see the view, he was talking loud enough to be heard in Nice. The sky was clear and every star in the sky was gathering over his house but it was damned cold and the chilly air had no discernible effect upon his ebullience. ‘It’s cold,’ I said. ‘Damned cold.’
‘One hundred and fifty years,’ he answered and wiped drink from his chin. ‘And the walls are a metre thick, darling.’
Gloria laughed. ‘Shall we go back inside?’ she said. I suppose she was used to him.
He held tight to the balcony to get back in through the sliding door. Even so, he collided with the fly screen and banged his head on the door’s edge.
Despite all his shouting about it not being necessary, Gloria went in to the kitchen to wash the dishes. In an attempt to show him what a good-hearted and inoffensive fellow I was, I tried to follow her but he pulled me aside with a rough tug at my sleeve.
‘Leave her alone, darling,’ he said gruffly. ‘She’ll do what she wants to do. Zu has always been like that.’ He poured more wine for me and topped up his tumbler of brandy. ‘She’s a wonderful girl.’
‘Yes, she is,’ I said.
‘You’re a lucky man: do you know that?’ His voice was soft but his eyes were hard. I was on my guard all the time and he knew that, and seemed to enjoy it.
‘Yes, I do.’
He went suddenly quiet. He was staring out through the glass door at the lights that wound up into the hills: orange lights and blue lights and sometimes the headlights of cars that shone suddenly and then disappeared like fireflies on a summer’s evening. The wonderful view seemed to wreak some profound change upon him. Perhaps it has that effect upon people who spend most of their working days studying the same landscape, its colours, patterns and contradictions. When he spoke again his voice was soft and sober. ‘Make the most of every minute,’ he said. ‘You’ll lose her, you know.’
‘Will I?’ I kept my voice level.
He sipped his brandy and smiled sadly. ‘She adores you of course. Any fool could see that. I could see it in her eyes as soon as you walked into the house. Never takes her eyes off you. But she’s just a child. She has a life ahead of her. How old are you…over forty. Right?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘She’s determined on this university business. You’ll not persuade her otherwise. She’ll go to college. And there she’ll meet brilliant people of her own age, and because they are at college they’ll all end up sharing the same appalling tastes and the same half-baked opinions. We’re old fossils. We’re part of another world. A world of dinosaurs.’ He swigged his brandy and poured more. There was a lot of spite in him. His friendly advice was really a way of hurting me. And it was a method difficult to counter.
I said, ‘Yes, thanks a lot, Dodo. But the way I see it, you are indisputably an old tyrannosaurus but I’m a young dynamic brilliant individual in the prime of life, and Gloria is an immature youngster.’
He laughed loudly enough to rupture my eardrums and he grabbed my shoulder to save himself from falling over.
‘Zu, darling!’ he shouted gleefully and loud enough for her to hear him from the kitchen. ‘Where did you find this lunatic?’
She came from the kitchen wiping her hands on a tea-towel decorated with a picture of the Mona Lisa smoking a big cigar. ‘Are you on some sort of diet, Dodo?’ she asked. ‘How can you eat three dozen eggs?’
For a moment words did not come but then he stammered and said that they were the finest eggs he’d ever eaten and a nearby farmer supplied him but he had to take a lot at a time. ‘Have some,’ he offered.
‘I’m not that fond of eggs,’ said Gloria. ‘They are bad for you.’
‘Rubbish, darling. Arrant rubbish. A newly laid soft-boiled egg is the most easily digested protein food I know. I love eggs. And there are so many delicious ways of cooking them.’
‘They won’t be so newly laid by the time you get through three dozen of them,’ said Gloria with devastating feminine logic. She smiled. ‘We must be leaving you, Dodo.’
‘Sit down for a moment longer, darling,’ he pleaded. ‘I have so few visitors nowadays and you haven’t told me the latest news of your parents and all our friends in London.’
For the next ten minutes or so they talked of the family. Small-talk of Gloria’s father’s dental practice and her mother’s charity committees. Dodo listened politely and with ever more glazed eyes.
At 10.25 exactly – I looked at my watch to see the time – Dodo threw himself up to his full height, drank to the health of ‘Zu and her lunatic’ and having upended his glass, bent and fell full-length on to the floor with a horrifying crash. The tumbler broke, and there was a flare from the log fire as brandy splashed on the embers.
Gloria looked at me, expecting me to revive him, but I just shrugged at her. He groaned and moved enough to reassure her that he wasn’t dead. Having stretched himself across the carpet before the fire, he began to snore heavily. Gloria’s attempts to wake him failed.
‘I shouldn’t have brought the brandy for him,’ Gloria said. ‘He has liver trouble.’
‘And I can understand why,’ I said.
‘We must try and get him on to his bed,’ she said. ‘We can lift him between us.’
‘He looks comfortable enough,’ I said.
‘You’re a callous swine,’ said Gloria. So I got his boots off and carried him into his bedroom and dumped him on to his bed.
In his tiny bedroom one more surprise awaited us. A table had been hidden in here. It was laden with pots of colour, a kitchen measuring spoon, a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of linseed oil. Balanced on a jug there was a muslin strainer through which raw beaten egg had been poured, and in the rubbish bin under the table there were half a dozen broken egg shells. Propped against the wall there was another panel, unpainted but smooth and shiny with its beautifully prepared chalk gesso ground.
‘What the hell is this?’ I said, looking at the half-finished painting leaning against the table. It was quite different to anything we’d seen in the living room or the studio: a Renaissance street scene – a procession – painted on a large wooden panel about five feet long. The colours were weird but the drawings were exact. ‘What strange colouring,’ I said.
‘It’s just the underpainting,’ explained Gloria. ‘He’ll put coloured glazes over that to create deep luminous colours.’
‘You seem to know all about it.’
‘I was an au pair girl in Nice. I used to come up here on my afternoons off. Sometimes I helped him. He’s a sweet man. Do you know what it is?’ Gloria asked.
‘Egg tempera painting, I suppose. But why on long panels?’
‘Renaissance marriage chests.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘He paints forgeries. He sells them through a dealer in Munich.’
‘And buyers are fooled?’
‘They are authenticated by international art experts. Often famous museums buy them.’
‘
And he gets away with that?’
‘Now it’s new…unfinished. It will be stained and varnished and damaged so that it looks very old.’
‘And fool museums?’ I persisted.
‘Museum directors are not saints, Bernard.’
‘And there goes another illusion! So Dodo’s rich?’
‘No, they take him a long time to do, and the dealers won’t pay much: there are other forgers ready and willing to supply them.’
‘So why…?’
‘Does he do it?’ she finished the question for me. ‘The deception…the fraud, the deceit is what amuses him. He can be cruel. When you get to know him better, perhaps you’ll see what makes him do it.’
The old man groaned and seemed about to wake up but he turned over and went back to sleep breathing heavily. Gloria bent over and stroked his head affectionately. ‘The dealers make the big profits. Poor Dodo.’
‘You knew all along? You were teasing him about the eggs in his refrigerator?’
She nodded. ‘Dodo is notorious. He claims to have painted a wonderful “School of Uccello” marriage chest that ended up in the Louvre. Dodo bought dozens of coloured postcards of it, and used them as Christmas cards last year. I thought he’d end up in prison, but no one knows whether that was just Dodo’s idea of a joke. Hungarians have all got a strange sense of humour.’
‘I wondered about that,’ I said.
‘He knows about chemistry. It amuses him to reproduce the pigments, and age the wood and the other materials. He’s awfully clever.’
The old man stirred again and put a hand to his head where he’d banged it in falling. ‘Oh my God!’ he groaned.
‘You’re all right,’ I told him.
‘He can’t hear you; he’s talking in his sleep,’ said Gloria. ‘You do that sometimes.’
‘Oh yes,’ I scoffed at the suggestion.
‘Last week you woke up. You were calling out crazy things.’ She put an arm round me in a protective gesture.
‘What things?’
‘They’re killing him; they’re killing him.’
‘I never talk in my sleep,’ I said.
‘Have it your own way,’ said Gloria. But she was right. Three nights in a row I’d woken up after a nightmare about Jim Prettyman. ‘They’re killing Jim!’ is what I’d shouted. I remember it only too well. In the dream, no matter how urgently I shouted at the passers-by, none of them would take any notice of me.
‘Look at these photos,’ said Gloria, unrolling some old prints that had been curled up on a cluttered side-table. ‘Wasn’t he a handsome young brute?’
A slim youthful athletic Dodo was in a group with half a dozen such youngsters and an older man whose face I knew well. Three of them were seated on wicker chairs in front of a garden hut. A man in the front row had a foot upon a board that said ‘The Prussians’.
‘Probably a tennis tournament,’ explained Gloria. ‘He was a wonderful tennis player.’
‘Something like that,’ I said, although I knew in fact that it was nothing of the kind. The older man was an old Berlin hand named John ‘Lange’ Koby – a contemporary of my father – and his ‘Prussians’ were the intelligence teams that he ran into the Russian zone of Germany. So Dodo had been an agent.
‘Did Dodo ever work with your father?’ I asked her.
‘In Hungary?’ I nodded. ‘Intelligence gathering?’ She had such a delicate way of putting things. ‘Not as far as I know.’ She took the photo from me. ‘Is that a team?’
‘That’s the American: Lange Koby,’ I said.
She looked at the photo with renewed interest now that she knew that they were field agents. ‘Yes, he’s much older than the others. He’s still alive isn’t he?’
‘Lives in Berlin. Sometimes I run into him. My father detested Lange. But Lange was all right.’
‘Why?’
‘He detested all those Americans who Lange ran. He used to say, “German Americans are American Germans.” He had an obsession about them.’
‘I’ve never heard you criticize your father before,’ said Gloria.
‘Maybe he had his reasons,’ I said defensively. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Are you sure Dodo will be all right?’
‘He’ll be all right,’ I said.
‘You do like him, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
At that first meeting I did like him: I must have been raving mad.
10
‘It went well, I thought,’ Dicky Cruyer said with a hint of modest pride. He was carrying illustration boards and now he put them on the floor and leaned them against the leg of his fine rosewood table.
I came into the room still trying to read the notes I’d scribbled during the babble, indignation and dismay that were always the hallmark of Tuesday mornings. I wasn’t giving my whole attention to Dicky and that was the sort of thing he noticed. I looked up and grunted.
‘I said,’ Dicky repeated slowly, having given me a good-natured smile, ‘that I thought it all went very well.’ I must have looked puzzled. ‘In the departmental get-together.’ He tapped the brass barometer that he’d lately added to the furnishings of his working space. Or maybe he was tapping the temperature, or the time in New York City.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Very well indeed.’
Well, why wouldn’t it go to his satisfaction? What Dicky Cruyer, my immediate boss, called a ‘departmental get-together’ took place in one of the conference rooms every Tuesday morning. At one time it took place in Dicky’s office, but the German Station Controller’s empire had grown since then: we needed a larger room nowadays because Tuesday morning had become a chance for Dicky to rehearse the lectures he gave to the indefatigable mandarins of the Foreign Office. It was usually a mad scramble of last-minute paper-work but today he’d used satellite photos and had pretty coloured diagrams – pie-charts, stacked bars and line-graphs – prepared in the new ‘art department’ and an ‘operator’ came and put them on the projector. Dicky prodded the screen with a telescopic rod and looked round the darkened room in case anyone had lit a cigarette.
The get-together was also the opportunity for Dicky to allocate work to his subordinates, arbitrate between them and start thinking about the monthly report that would have to be on the Director-General’s desk first thing on Friday morning. That is to say he got me to start thinking about it because I always had to write it.
‘It’s simply a matter of motivating them all,’ said Dicky, sitting at his rosewood table and straightening out a wire paper-clip. ‘I want them to feel…’
‘Part of a team,’ I supplied.
‘That’s right,’ he said. Then, detecting what he thought might be a note of sarcasm in my voice, he frowned. ‘You have a lot to learn about being part of a team, Bernard,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I think the school I went to didn’t emphasize the team spirit nearly enough.’
‘That lousy school in Berlin,’ he said. ‘I never understood why your father let you go to a little local school like that. There were schools for the sons of British officers weren’t there?’
‘He said it would be good for my German.’
‘And it was,’ conceded Dicky. ‘But you must have been the only English child there. It made you into a loner, Bernard.’
‘I suppose it did.’
‘And you’re proud of that, I know. But a loner is a misfit, Bernard. I wish I could make you see that.’
‘I’ll need your notes, Dicky.’
‘Notes?’
‘To do the D-G’s report.’
‘Not much in the way of notes today, Bernard,’ he said proudly. ‘I’m getting the hang of these Tuesday morning talks nowadays. I improvise as I go along.’
Oh my God! I should have listened to what he was saying. ‘Any rough notes will do.’
‘Just write it the way I delivered it.’
‘It’s a matter of emphasis, Dicky.’
He threw the straightened wire clip into his
large glass ashtray and looked at me sharply. ‘A matter of emphasis’ was Dicky’s roundabout way of admitting total ignorance. Hurriedly I added, ‘It’s so technical.’
Dicky softened somewhat. He liked being ‘technical’. Until recently Dicky’s lectures had been a simple résumé of the everyday work of the office. But now he’d decided that the way ahead was the path of hi-tech. So he’d become a minor expert – and a major bore – on such subjects as ‘photo-interpretation of intelligence obtained by unmanned vehicles’ and ‘optical cameras, line-scan and radar sensors that provide monochrome, colour, false-colour and infra-red imagery’.
‘I think I explained it all carefully,’ Dicky said.
‘Yes, you did,’ I said and bent over far enough to flip through the cardboard-mounted pictures he’d used, in the hope that they would all be suitably captioned. To some extent they were: ‘SLRR sideways-looking reconnaissance radar’ the first one said, and there was a neat red arrow to show which way was up. And ‘IRLS infra-red line scan photo showing various radiometric temperatures of target area at noon. Notice buildings occupied by personnel, and the transport vehicles at bottom right of photo. Compare with photo of same area at midnight.’
‘Don’t take that material away with you,’ Dicky warned. ‘I’ll need those pictures tomorrow, and I promised the people at Joint Air Reconnaissance that they’d have them back in perfect condition: no fingerprints or bent corners.’
‘No, I won’t take them,’ I promised and slid the illustrations back in place. I was hopeless at understanding such things. I began to wonder which one of Dicky’s staff, present at this morning’s meeting, might have remembered his discourse well enough to recapitulate and explain it to me. But I couldn’t think of anyone who gave Dicky their undivided attention during the Tuesday morning meetings. Our most assiduous note-taker, Charlie Billingsly, was now in Hong Kong and Harry Strang, with his prodigious memory, had artfully contrived an urgent phone call that granted him escape just five minutes into Dicky’s dissertation. I said, ‘But you used to be strongly opposed to all this stuff from JARIC, and the satellite material too.’
‘We have to move with the times, Bernard.’ Dicky looked down at the appointments book that his secretary had left open for him. ‘Oh, by the bye,’ he said casually. Too casually. ‘You keep mentioning that fellow Prettyman…’