by Len Deighton
‘It’s my fault,’ I said and bent over and kissed her.
She lifted her face to me but her expression was unchanging. ‘It’s no one’s fault,’ she said sadly. ‘You try. I know you do.’
I sat on the bed and touched her bare arm. ‘Living together is not easy,’ I said. ‘It takes time to adjust.’
For a few moments neither of us spoke. I was tempted to suggest that we sent Doris off to cooking classes. But a man who lives in a house with two women knows better than to sprinkle even a mote of dust upon the delicate balance of power.
‘It’s your wife,’ said Gloria suddenly.
‘Fiona? What do you mean?’
‘She was the right one for you.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense.’
‘She was beautiful and clever.’ Gloria wiped her nose. ‘When you were with Fiona everything was always perfect. I know it was.’
For a moment I said nothing. I could take all this admiration of Fiona from everyone except Gloria. I didn’t want Gloria implying that I’d been a lucky fellow; I wanted her to say how fortunate Fiona had been to capture me. ‘We had more help,’ I said.
‘She was rich,’ said Gloria and the tears came to her eyes again.
‘It’s better the way we are.’
She seemed not to hear me. When she spoke her voice came from very far away. ‘When I first saw you I wanted you so much, Bernard.’ She sniffed. ‘I thought I’d be able to make you so happy. I so envied your wife.’
‘I didn’t know you ever met my wife.’
‘Of course I saw her about. Everyone admired her. They said she was one of the cleverest women to ever come and work in the Department. People said she would be the first woman Director General.’
‘Well, people were wrong.’
‘Yes, I was wrong too,’ said Gloria. ‘Wrong about everything. You’ll never be happy with me, Bernard. You’re too demanding.’
‘Demanding? What are you talking about?’ Too late I recognized that it had been my cue to say how happy I was with her.
‘That’s right; get angry.’
‘I’m not getting angry,’ I said very quietly.
‘It’s just as well that I’m going to Cambridge.’
She was determined to feel sorry for herself. There was nothing I could say. I gave her a kiss but she didn’t respond. Her grief was not to be assuaged.
‘Perhaps Doris could help more,’ I said very tentatively.
Gloria looked at me and gave a bitter smile. ‘Doris has given notice,’ she said.
‘Doris? Not Doris.’
‘She says it’s boring here in the suburbs.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘Of course it is. Why else does she think we came here?’
‘She had her friends in central London. She went to discos there.’
‘Doris had friends?’
‘Don’t be a pig.’
‘She can go up on the train.’
‘Once a week. It’s not much fun for her. She’s still young.’
‘We’re all still young!’ I said. ‘Do you think I don’t want to go with Doris’s friends to discos?’
‘Making jokes won’t help you,’ said Gloria doggedly. ‘We’ll be in a terrible mess when she goes. It won’t be easy to get someone who will get on well with the children.’ Outside the rain kept coming down, thrashing through the apple tree and banging on the windows, while the wind buffeted against the chimney stack and screamed through the TV antenna. ‘I’m going to see what the agency can offer, but we might have to pay more around here. The woman in the agency says this is a particularly high-wages area.’
‘I bet she did,’ I said.
Then the telephone rang on my side of the bed. I went to get it. It was Werner. ‘I’ve got to see you,’ he said. He sounded excited, or as near excited as the phlegmatic Werner ever got.
‘Where are you?’ I asked.
‘I’m in London. I’m in a little apartment in Ebury Street, near Victoria Station.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I flew to Gatwick.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘We must talk.’
‘We’ve got a spare room. Have you got wheels?’
‘Better you come here, Bernard.’
‘To Victoria? It will take half an hour. More perhaps.’ The idea of dragging up to central London again appalled me.
‘It’s serious,’ said Werner.
I capped the phone. ‘It’s Werner,’ I explained. ‘He says he’s got to see me. He wouldn’t say that unless it was really urgent.’
Gloria gave a little shrug and closed her eyes.
12
I didn’t realize what had happened to some of those little hotels in Ebury Street. It used to be a no-man’s-land, where the rucksack-laden hordes from the bus terminal met the smart set of Belgravia. In a curious juxtapositioning that is peculiarly English, Ebury Street provided Belgravia with its expensive little boutiques and chic restaurants and offered budget-conscious travellers cheap overnight lodging. But change was inevitable and Werner had found a small but luxuriously appointed suite ‘all major credit cards accepted’ with twenty-four-hour service and security, rubber plants in the lobby and Dom Pérignon in the refrigerator.
‘Have you eaten?’ said Werner as soon as he opened the door to me.
‘Not really.’
‘Good. I’ve booked a table for us. It’s just round the corner. I read a rave review of it in a flight magazine coming over.’ He said it in a distracted way, as if his mind was really on something entirely different.
‘Wonderful,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Werner. ‘I think it might really be good.’ He looked at his watch. He was agitated: I knew the signs. ‘The magazine said the fresh salmon mousse is very good,’ he said as if not totally convinced.
‘How did you find this hotel, Werner?’ He was my best friend, but I never really understood Werner in the way I understood other people I’d known for a long time. He was not just secretive; he masked his real feelings by assuming others. When he was happy, he looked sad. When he made a rib-tickling joke, he scowled as if resenting laughter. Winning, he looked like a loser. Was that because he was a Jew? Did he feel he had to conceal his true feelings from a hostile world?
‘It’s an apartment, a service apartment, not a hotel,’ he corrected me. The rich of course have more words than the rest of us, for they have more goods and services at their disposal. ‘A fellow I do business with at Kleinwort Benson keeps it as his London base. He said I could use it. Champagne? Whisky or anything?’
‘A glass of wine,’ I said.
He stepped into the tiny kitchen. It was just a fluorescent-lit box, designed to encourage the use of the ‘service’ rather than a place to do any proper cooking. He took a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, a Meursault; the bottle was full but uncorked as if he’d guessed what I would like to drink, and prepared for my arrival. He poured a good measure into a Waterford wineglass and put the bottle back again. The refrigerator’s machinery began to purr, setting off a soft rattle of vibrating bottles.
‘Happy days, Werner,’ I said before I drank.
He smiled soberly and picked up his wallet from a side-table and made sure his credit cards were all there before putting it in his pocket. Meursault: it was a luxury I particularly enjoyed. I suppose Werner could have guzzled it all day long if he’d had a mind to.
Most people were hurtled through life on a financial switchback, a roller-coaster that decided for them whether they must economize or splurge. Not Werner; Werner always had enough. He decided what he wanted – anything: whether it was a little place round the corner that did a good salmon mousse, or a splendid new car – and put his hand in his pocket and bought it. Mind you, Werner’s needs were modest: he didn’t hanker for yachts or private planes, keep mistresses, gamble or throw lots of extravagant parties. Werner simply had money more than sufficient for his needs. I envied his unbudgeted easygoing lifestyle
; he made me feel like a money-grubbing wage-slave because, I suppose, that’s exactly what I am.
I took my wine and sat down in one of the soft leather armchairs and waited for him to tell me what was distressing him so much that he would fly to London and drag me up here to talk with him. I looked around. So it was an apartment. Yes, I could see that now. It was not quite like a hotel suite; it looked lived in. Glenn Gould was playing Bach uncharacteristically softly on the CD player, and there were two big hideous modern paintings on the walls, instead of the tasteful lithographs that architects and interior designers bought wholesale.
It was a place used by men who were away from home. You could tell that from the books. As well as year after year of outdated restaurant guides, street maps and museum catalogues, there were the sort of books that help pass the time when all the work is done. Dog-eared detective stories of the sort that can be read over and over again without any feeling of repetition, very thin books by thin lady novelists who win prizes, and very thick ones by thick lady novelists who don’t. And a whole shelf full of biographies from Mother Teresa to Lord Olivier via ‘Streisand the Woman and the Legend’. Long long hours away from home.
Werner had responded to my toast by drinking some mineral water from a cut-glass tumbler. It had a lemon slice in it and ice too. It was as if he wanted to pretend it was a real drink. He sank down into an armchair and sighed. The black beard – now closely trimmed – suited him. He didn’t look like a hippie or an art teacher, it was more formal than that. But formality ended at the neck. His clothes were casual, a black long-sleeve woollen pullover, matching trousers, rainbow-striped silk shirt and shiny patent shoes. His hair was thick and dark, his pose relaxed: only his eyes were worried. ‘It’s Zena.’ He reached across to get a coaster from the shelf and moved my wineglass on to it so it would not mark the polished side-table. Werner was house-trained.
Oh, no, I thought. Not an evening of talking about that wife of his, it was more than even a best friend should be expected to endure. ‘What about Zena?’ I said, trying to make my voice warm and concerned.
‘More precisely, that damned Frank Harrington,’ said Werner bitterly. ‘I know what Frank means to you, Bernie, but he’s a bastard. He really is.’ He watched me to see if I would take offence on Frank’s behalf, and he pinched his nose as he often did when distressed.
‘Frank?’ Frank Harrington was an amazingly successful womanizer. Linking Frank and Zena’s names meant only one thing to me. Some years back, Frank and Zena had had a tempestuous affair. Like some nineteenth-century rake, he’d even set her up in a little house to await his visits. Then – the way I heard it – Zena got fed up with sitting waiting for Frank to find time for her. There was nothing of the nineteenth-century mistress about Zena. Since then I suspected that Zena had found other men, but always she returned to poor old Werner. In the long term he was the only one who would put up with her. ‘Frank and Zena?’
‘Not like that,’ said Werner hurriedly. ‘He’s using her for departmental work. It’s dangerous, Bernie. Bloody dangerous. She’s never done anything like that before.’
‘You’d better start at the beginning,’ I said.
‘Zena has relatives in the East. She takes them food and presents. You know…’
‘Yes, you told me.’ I reached for the little bowl of salted almonds but there were only a couple of broken pieces left buried under salt and bits of skin. I suppose Werner had eaten them while sitting here waiting for me and worrying.
‘She went over there last week.’ In German over there – ‘druben’ – meant only one thing, it meant the other side of the Wall. ‘Now I’ve discovered that that bloody Frank asked her to look up someone for him.’
‘One of our people?’ I said guardedly.
‘Of course. Who else would they be if Frank wants her to look them up for him?’
‘I suppose so,’ I conceded.
‘Frankfurt an der Oder,’ said Werner. ‘You know what we’re talking about, don’t you?’ Despite the level voice he was angry now: damned angry, and somewhere in the back of his mind he was implicating me in this development of which I knew nothing, and preferred to know nothing.
‘That’s just speculation,’ I said and waited to see if he’d say it wasn’t.
‘Why ask Zena?’ His face was distorted as he bit his lip with rage and anxiety. ‘He has his own people to do that kind of work.’
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘It’s Bizet. He’s trying to reopen a contact string.’
‘She’ll be all right, Werner,’ I said. I sympathized with Werner’s anger but I’d been at the sharp end of operations. From the field agent’s point of view it sometimes looked like good sense to send legitimate travellers such as Zena into these touchy situations. They are told nothing, so they know nothing. Usually they get away scot-free.
My apparent indifference to Zena’s plight made him angrier than ever but as usual he smiled. He leaned back on the sofa and stroked the house-phone as if it was a pet cat. From the street outside there was the growling sound of the long-distance buses that had to turn into a narrow sidestreet to get to the bus terminal. ‘I want you to do something,’ he said.
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Get her out,’ he said. His fingers were twitching on the phone. He reached for the handpiece, called reception and, without asking me what I wanted to eat, told them he wanted the restaurant dinner sent round for us. He spoke rapidly into the phone ordering two portions of the very good salmon mousse and a couple of fillet steaks – one rare and one well done – and whatever went with it. Then he put the phone down, turned and looked at me. ‘It’s getting late,’ he explained, ‘the kitchen will close soon.’
I said, ‘You don’t really want the Department to bring her out, do you? From what you’ve told me, there’s nothing to suggest she’s in any kind of danger. I imagine Frank just asked her to make a couple of phone calls, or knock at a door. If I go rushing in to the office demanding a full-scale rescue attempt, everyone will think I’ve taken leave of my senses. And, quite honestly, Werner, it might be putting Zena into a worse position than she is.’ What I didn’t add was that there was no chance at all that Dicky, or anyone in authority at the office, would countermand Frank’s actions on my say-so. It sounded as if Frank had been made ‘file officer’ and his word would be law.
‘How dare Frank ask Zena to help him?’ Was that the real focus of Werner’s rage: Frank Harrrington? They’d never seen eye to eye. Even before Frank stole Werner’s wife, he’d eased Werner out of the Berlin Field Unit. Now there was no way to convince Werner that Frank was what he was: a very experienced departmental administrator, and an archetypal ‘English gentleman’ who not only knew how to attract adventuresome young women but often fell prey to them.
And I could hardly tell Werner that his wife should have learned to stay away from Frank by now. So I said, ‘When is she due back?’
‘Monday.’ He touched his beard. Glenn Gould finished playing but after a couple of clicks Art Tatum started. Werner liked the piano. In the old days he used to play at all the most rowdy Berlin parties. Seeing him now it was difficult to believe the things we had done in Berlin back in those days when we were young.
‘She’ll be all right,’ I said.
Unconvinced by my reassurances he nodded without replying, and studied his glass of mineral water suspiciously before taking a sip of it. We sat for a moment in silence. Then he looked at me, gave me a little shrug and a smile and, noticing that my glass was empty, he got up and went to the refrigerator and brought more wine for me.
I watched him carefully. There was more to it – some other aspect to the story – but I didn’t press him for more details. His anger had peaked. It was better for him to simmer down.
There was a tap at the door and – like some sort of well rehearsed cabaret act – a uniformed man from the reception desk helped a restaurant waiter to set up two folding chairs, a folding table, and an
array of tableware. There were steaks and some spinach keeping warm on a chafing dish. The portions of fish mousse, which the waiter insisted upon showing us, were under the heavy dome-shaped silver covers that are always needed to keep microscopic portions of food from escaping.
It wasn’t until they’d gone and we were seated at the table eating the mousse that Werner mentioned Zena again. ‘I love her. I can’t help that, Bernie.’
‘I know, Werner.’ The salmon mousse was sinking into a puddle of bright green sauce; a pink, tilted slab with fragments of vegetable looking out of it, like passengers waiting for a rescue boat. I ate it quickly.
‘So I worry,’ said Werner, and he shrugged in a gesture of resignation. I felt sorry for him. It wasn’t easy to imagine being in love with Zena. That some man might murder her, or join the Foreign Legion to escape her, was simple to envisage. But love her: no. ‘She’s the only woman for me.’ He said it defensively, almost apologetically.
Sometimes I think he loved her because she was incapable of loving anyone. A friend of mine once explained the lifetime he’d given to the study of reptiles by saying that he was fascinated by their complete lack of any response to affection. And I think Werner’s relationship with Zena was like that. She seemed to have no real feelings about anyone alive or dead. People were all the same for her, and she dealt with them by means of a curious highly developed sense of self-imposed and carefully apportioned ‘justice’ that some of her critics had called ‘fascistic’.
But it was no use talking to Werner about Zena. For him she could do no wrong. I remember him falling in love with girls at school. His love was boundless; the respect he showed for them usually earned only their withering contempt, so that eventually Werner’s ardour faded and died. So I thought it would be when Zena came along. But Zena wasn’t so profligate with Werner’s love. She welcomed his affection, she encouraged him and knew how to handle Werner so that she could do almost anything with him.