by Len Deighton
I made a reckless guess: ‘Because you suspected him? Because you accused him of being a party to his wife’s death?’
‘Very good, Bernard.’ He said it gravely but with discernible admiration. ‘You’re very close. Go to the top of the class.’
‘And how did George react?’
‘React?’ A short sharp bitter laugh. ‘I just told you; he tried to kill me.’
‘I see.’ I was determined not to ask him how. I could see he was bursting to tell me.
‘That’s one of my walking-sticks,’ he said suddenly. Following his gaze I saw that out on the snowy lawn Billy was patching up the snowman with fresh snow and had removed the snowman’s walking-stick while doing it. I wondered if David was going to lay claim to the snowman’s hat too. ‘I didn’t know they wanted my stick for that damned snowman.’
Billy and Sally patted more snow on to the snowman’s belly. I suppose the thaw had slimmed it down a little.
Turning back to me, David said: ‘In Poland, I complained of a headache and George gave me some white pills. Pills from a Polish package. I didn’t use them of course.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’
‘I’m not a bloody fool. All written in Polish. Who knows what kind of muck they take … even their genuine aspirin … I’d sooner suffer the headache.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I brought them back with me. Not the packet, he’d thrown that away; or so he said.’
‘Back to England?’
‘See that little cherry tree? I buried Felix, our old tom-cat, under it. The poor old sod died from one of those tablets. I didn’t tell my lady wife, of course. And I don’t want Fiona to know.’
‘You think the tablet did it?’
‘Three tablets. Crushed up in warm milk.’
‘Did the cat eat them willingly, or did you dose it?’
‘What are you getting at?’ he said indignantly. ‘I didn’t choke the cat, if that’s what you mean. I was dosing farm animals before you were born.’ I’d forgotten how highly he cherished his credentials as a country gentleman.
‘If it was a very old cat …’
‘I don’t want you discussing this with my daughter or with anyone else,’ he ordered.
‘Was this what you wanted to ask me?’ I said. ‘The dead cat and whether to report it?’
‘It was one of the things,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘I wanted to ask you to take a note of it off the record. But since then I have decided that it’s better all forgotten. I don’t want you to repeat it to anyone.’
‘No,’ I said, although such a stricture hardly conformed to the way in which he identified me with the powers of government. I recognized this ‘confidential anecdote’ about his son-in-law’s homicidal inclinations as something he wanted me to take back to work and discuss with Dicky and the others. In fact I saw this little cameo as David’s way of hitting his son-in-law with yet another unanswerable question, while keeping himself out of it. The only hard fact I could infer from it was that David and George had fallen out. I wondered why.
‘Forget it,’ said David. ‘I said nothing, do you hear me?’
‘It’s just a family matter,’ I said, but my grim little joke went unnoticed. He was still standing in the window, and now he turned his head to look out at the garden again. Fiona and the children were heading back. Seeing David profiled, and in conjunction with the snowman at the bottom of the lawn, I wondered if the children had intended it to be a caricature of their grandfather. Now that the belly had been restored and the shoulders built up a little it had something of David’s build, and that old hat and walking-stick provided the finishing touches. It was something of a surprise to find that my little children were now judging the world around them with such keen eyes. I would have to watch myself.
‘They’re growing up,’ said David.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
He didn’t respond. I suppose he knew how I felt. It wasn’t that I liked them less as grown-ups than as children. It was simply that I liked myself so much more when I was being a childlike Dad with them, an equal, a playmate, occupying the whole of their horizon. Now they were concerned with their friends and their school, and I couldn’t get used to being such a small part of their lives.
‘I’ve got two suitcases belonging to that friend of yours.’ David meant Gloria of course. ‘When she brought the children over here to us, she left two suitcases with their clothes and toys and things. Expensive-looking cases. I don’t know where to contact her, apart from the office, and I know you people don’t like personal phone calls to your place of work. I thought perhaps you would be able to take them and give them back to her.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t go to the London office, I work in Berlin nowadays.’
‘I didn’t want to ask Fiona.’
He displayed characteristic delicacy in not wanting to ask Fiona about the whereabouts of my one-time mistress. He didn’t really care of course. The question about the suitcases that Gloria had left with him was just a warning shot across my bows. Now he got on to more important matters.
‘She’s still not well.’ He was looking at Fiona and the kids.
‘She’s tired,’ I said. ‘She works too hard.’
‘I’m not talking about being tired,’ said David. ‘We all work too hard. My goodness …’ He gave a short laugh. ‘…I’d hate to show you my appointments diary for next week. As I keep telling those trade union buggers, if I worked a forty-hour week I’d be finished by lunchtime Tuesday. I haven’t got even a lunch slot to spare for at least six weeks.’
‘Poor you,’ I said.
‘My little girl is sick.’ I’d never heard him speak of Fiona like that; his voice was strained and his manner intense. ‘It’s no good the pair of you telling each other that she’s just tired and that a relaxing holiday and a regime of vitamin tablets are going to make her fit and well again.’
‘No?’
‘No. Tonight we have a few people coming to dinner. One of the guests is a top Harley Street man, a psychiatrist. Not a psychologist, a psychiatrist. That means he’s a qualified medical man too.’
‘Does it?’ I said. ‘I must try and remember that.’
‘You’d do well to,’ he said gruffly, suspecting that I was being sarcastic but not quite certain. He moved away from the window and said: ‘He agrees with me; Fiona will never be fit enough to take charge of the children again. You know that, don’t you, Bernard?’
‘Has he examined Fiona?’
‘Of course not. But he’s met her several times. Fiona thinks he’s just a drinking chum of mine.’
‘But he’s been spying on her.’
‘I’m only saying this for your sake, and for the sake of Fiona and your wonderful children.’
‘David. If this is a prelude to your trying to get legal custody of the children, forget it.’
He sighed and pulled a long face. ‘She’s sick. Fiona is slowly coming round to face that truth, Bernard. I wish you would face it too. You could help me and help her.’
‘Don’t try any of your legal tricks with me, David.’ I was angry, and not as careful as I might have been.
With an insolent calm he said: ‘Dr Howard has already said he’d support me. And I play golf with a top-rate barrister. He says I would easily get custody if it came to it.’
‘It would break Fiona’s heart,’ I said, trying a different angle.
‘I don’t think so, Bernard. I think without the children to worry about she’d be relieved of a mighty weight.’
‘No.’
‘Why do you think she’s been putting it off so long? Having the children back with her, I mean. She could have come down here as soon as she returned from California. She could have taken the children up to the apartment in Mayfair – there are spare bedrooms, aren’t there? – and made all the necessary arrangements to send them to school and so on. So why didn’t she do that?’ There was a long pause. ‘Tell me, Bernar
d.’
‘She knew how much you both liked having the children with you,’ I said. ‘She did it for you.’
‘Rather than for you,’ he said, not bothering much to conceal his glee at my answer. ‘I would have thought that you would have liked having the children with you, and that she would have liked having the children with her.’
‘She loves being with them. Look at her now.’
‘No, Bernard. You can’t get round me with that one. She likes coming down here to see the children. She’s pleased to see them so happy and doing well at school. But she doesn’t want to take on the responsibility and the time-consuming drudgery of being a Mum again. She can’t take it on. She’s mentally not capable.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘I’m surprised to hear you say that. According to what Fiona tells me you yourself have said all these things to her …’ He waved a hand at my protest. ‘Not in as many words, but you’ve said it in one way or another. You’ve told her repeatedly that she’s trying to avoid having the children back home again.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I never said anything like that.’
He smiled. He knew I was lying.
David’s dinner party seemed as if it was going to last all night. He was wearing his new dinner suit with satin lapels, and his patent Gucci loafers with red silk socks that matched his pocket handkerchief, and he was in the mood for telling long stories about his club and his golf tournaments and his vintage Bentley. The guests were David’s friends: men who spent their working week in St James’s clubs and City bars but made money just the same. How they did it mystified me; it wasn’t a product of their charm.
By the time the dinner guests had departed, and the family had exchanged goodnights and gone upstairs to bed, I was pretty well beat, but I felt compelled to put a direct question to Fiona. Casually, while undressing, I said: ‘When do you plan to have the children living with us, darling?’
She was sitting at the dressing-table in her nightdress and brushing her hair. She always brushed her hair night and morning, I think it was something that they’d made her do at boarding school. Looking in the mirror to see me she said: ‘I knew you were going to ask me that.’
‘Did you?’
‘I could see it coming ever since we arrived here.’
‘And when do you think?’
‘Please, darling. The children’s future is hardly something to be settled at this time of night, when both of us are worn out.’
‘You can’t keep on avoiding it, Fi.’
‘I’m not avoiding it,’ she said, her voice raised a tone or so. ‘But this is not the time or the place, surely you can see that.’
It was obviously going to cause an argument if I pursued it further. I was angry. I washed and cleaned my teeth and went to bed without speaking to her other than a brusque goodnight.
‘Goodnight, darling,’ she said happily as I switched out the light. I shut my reddened eyes and knew no more until Fiona was hammering at me and shouting something I couldn’t comprehend.
‘What?’
‘The window! Someone is trying to force their way in!’
I jumped out of bed but I knew it was nothing. I was getting used to Fiona’s disturbed sleep. I went to the window, opened it and looked out. I froze in the cold country air. ‘Nothing here.’
‘It must have been the wind,’ said Fiona. She was fully awake now. And contrite. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’ She got out of bed and came to the window with a dispirited weariness that made me feel very sorry for her.
‘There’s nothing there,’ I said, and gave her a hug.
‘I think I must have eaten something that upset me.’
‘Yes,’ I said. She always blamed such awakenings on indigestion. She always said she couldn’t remember anything of the dream itself. So now I no longer asked her about them. Instead I played along with her explanations. I said: ‘The fennel sauce on the fish, it was very creamy.’
‘That must have been it,’ she said.
‘You’ve been working too hard. You should slow down a little.’
‘I can’t.’ She sank down at the dressing-table and brushed her hair in a mood of sad introspection. ‘I’m directly involved in all the exchanges between Bonn and the DDR. Enormous sums of money are being given to them. I wonder how much of it is being pocketed by Honecker and Co, and how much gets through. Sometimes I worry about it. And they become more and more demanding.’
I watched her. The doctor had given her some tablets. She said they were no more than pep pills – ‘a tonic’. She had them on the dressing-table and now she took two pills and drank some water to swallow them. She did it automatically. She always had the tablets with her. I had a feeling that she took them whenever she felt low, and that meant frequently. I said: ‘How do you pay them?’
‘Depends. It falls into four categories: Western currency payments to the East German State, Western currency payments to private individuals, trade credits guaranteed by Bonn, and a hotchpotch of trade deals that wouldn’t be done except that we – or more frequently Bonn – push them along. I don’t have much to do with that end of it. We are only really interested in the money that goes to the Church.’
‘Is the Department involved in any of the money transfers?’
‘It’s complicated. Our contact is a man named Stoppl. He’s a founder of “the Protestant Church in Socialism”, a committee of East German churchmen who negotiate with their regime’s leaders and do deals. Some deals involve the Western Churches too – there is a Church trust which arranges the money – or sometimes Bonn. All of these deals are very secret, things are done but never revealed. Sometimes we have Honecker and Stoppl negotiating one-to-one, out at Honecker’s Berlin home on the Wandlitzsee.’
‘So these deals must be common knowledge among the communist top brass?’ Honecker’s palatial dwelling was in the Politburo residential compound. The communist leaders had their luxury homes there, together with an abundance of capitalist luxuries from camcorders and laptops to soft toilet paper. The whole site was guarded by armed sentries and surrounded with a chain-link fence and razor wire. I knew that locale very well: it was an intimidating place to visit. The identity of visitors to the sanctum was carefully checked, and their names logged in a book held by the guard commander.
‘Oh yes. They all share in the spoils. Our official line is that they may steal a lot of the money but some gets through to Stoppl’s people and that money is vital.’
‘Vital. Yes.’
‘In church halls and vicarages, and church premises of all kinds, ordinary people talk about local social problems, about environmental pollution and injustice. They talk about peace and human rights issues.’
‘I get the idea, Fi.’
‘The underlying theme is Christian protest.’
‘You’re playing with fire,’ I told her.
‘Christian values.’
‘You sound just like your father,’ I said.
‘That’s what you always say when you lose an argument with me.’
‘I shouldn’t have said it.’
She laughed derisively. ‘Is that a retraction or just an apology?’ But Fiona was like her father, there was no denying it. Equally obviously she didn’t enjoy that resemblance. I think Fiona dearly loved her mother, but not her father. She was frightened of being too much like her mother; frightened of ending up bullied and silenced as her mother had been over the years. That determination to escape her parents was the key to Fiona’s complex personality. For she was also afraid of becoming like her father. At least that’s how I saw it, but I wasn’t a psychiatrist. I wasn’t even a psychologist. In fact I didn’t even have a proper contract for my pen-pushing job in Berlin.
‘And for how long will the West keep pumping money into Honecker’s bankrupt regime?’ I asked.
‘The communists are extremely good at wining and dining visiting press and TV people. The Leipzig Fair is their showcase. Ill-informed newspaper articles in the We
st consistently say Honecker’s economy is strong, and getting stronger. You must read the junk that newspaper feature writers produce in return for a first-class ticket and a couple of days of being feasted and flattered. Last month the World Bank had their resident half-wits putting out some crackpot statistics to prove that per capita income in the DDR was higher than in the UK. Yesterday I saw a glowing press cutting from some journalist in Dublin telling her readers that the West could learn a lot from what the East Germans are doing. That sort of bosh is translated and circulated in the East, and it keeps the lid on things back home in Honecker’s kingdom.’
‘Honecker is cunning. It’s a police State, but the East Germans are sheltered from crime, given apartments, cheap food and jobs – no unemployment in the workers’ State – cheap holidays, free education, free medical care. It’s no good saying it’s lousy medical care, or that the jobs are poorly paid, or that the workers are crowded into nasty little apartments. Or that thousands die from the filthy pollution in the air and the rivers and canals are frothing with poisonous scum and belly-up fishes. The citizens of this gigantic prison camp have what the Germans call Geborgenheit – security and shelter – and they are not going to fight in the streets to get rid of the regime.’
She sighed. She knew I was right.
‘The DDR is bankrupt. The West must chop off all payments without warning,’ I said. ‘It’s the only way to bring change. Let the regime collapse. Show the East Germans that they are living a lie; they are living on handouts from the West.’
‘But Washington and Bonn are afraid that Moscow will move in to prop Honecker up if we don’t support him,’ said Fiona.
‘Moscow? Don’t start thinking that Gorbachev is some kind of freedom-loving capitalist. He’s a dedicated comrade, making a few concessions to the West in order to preserve some semblance of what Lenin created. It will need a braver man than Gorby to reform the USSR. The whole Federation is on the slide. In a few years Moscow will be as bankrupt as Honecker.’