by Len Deighton
‘In a few years, yes. That’s why Britain, and the Americans, refused to give Honecker a State visit even when Belgium, France and Spain agreed. How could they do that? And then that silly man Kohl invites him to West Germany. Honecker is shaky, but how long will he last? With such stupid leaders in the West to help him, no one can be sure.’
‘If Moscow goes bust, will the West cut Honecker off without a pfennig? That will be worth waiting for.’
Fiona went over to the window. The sky was getting light now. When she spoke it was with a determination that she seldom revealed. ‘Yes, and the Honecker regime will collapse. And then the Church groups we’ve trained will be needed to hold things together.’
‘So that’s the scenario?’
‘It’s what I’ve given half my life to,’ she said, as if she was now counting the depth of her sacrifice rather than its duration.
Gently she pulled back the curtain to see the early morning sky. There was a band of mist stretched across the horizon. Dark clumps of treetops floated upon it to make tropical islands in a luminous ocean. I didn’t want to challenge her ideas, but every report we saw from agents on the ground said that the Stasi had increased in numbers, and increased in influence, month by month for the last five years. Maybe it was a reaction from a regime that was doomed, but that didn’t mean it was less dangerous. The Stasi were penetrating Fiona’s precious East German Church groups. In Allenstein bei Magdeburg the pastor was working for the Stasi until, just before Christmas, someone put a bomb under his car. And every month the Stasi – self-styled ‘shield and sword of socialism’ – tightened up security. They opposed all attempts to liberalize the regime. The Stasi stamped upon anyone who dared to ask for anything at all. Even Russian publications were banned as too liberal. Now, in what must surely be the ultimate echo of George Orwell’s predictions, East Germans had been forbidden to sing the lyrics of their own national anthem, because its words ‘Germany united fatherland’ might give loyal communists ideas about cooperating with West Germany.
Perhaps Fiona was thinking along the same sobering lines, for she didn’t pursue the matter. ‘We mustn’t leave it too late,’ she said without turning round. ‘I hate driving in the dark, nowadays. It’s a sign of growing old I suppose. And we’re dining with Dicky on Monday.’
‘Do you know how to work this gadget?’ I was turning all the knobs of the tea-making machine. David had installed them in all the guest bedrooms.
‘It’s easier to use the electric kettle,’ she said. She plugged it in and started it. She switched on the lights too. Then she went back to bed. ‘It’s too early to get up, darling.’
‘We’ll have tea in bed,’ I said.
‘Very well, but if I don’t answer your next question for a long while, I may be asleep.’
‘I was thinking of ducking out of Dicky’s dinner, but I can’t think of a convincing excuse.’
‘We’ll have to go, darling. Everyone will be there. It’s not social and it’s not optional. Dicky’s dinners are just Departmental meetings in disguise.’
‘I don’t feel strong enough for a whole evening of Dicky’s imbecile chit-chat.’
‘You don’t feel like it!’ said Fiona with a sudden burst of resentment. ‘How do you think I will enjoy sitting round the table with them all?’
I leaned across and kissed her on the ear. She didn’t have to draw a diagram for me. By everyone she meant that Gloria, my one-time lover, would be there. And everyone present would be watching with interest every glance, word and smile that the three of us exchanged. It was difficult for her; but it was no picnic for me either. Maybe Gloria would think of a convincing excuse.
I looked round the room, waiting for the kettle to boil. We’d been installed in the best of half a dozen guest bedrooms. This one was ‘the Mozart room’ and its walls were hung with framed music manuscripts and some early wooden musical instruments: a concertina, a violin and a mandolin. To save on space, each instrument had been cut in half and mounted on a mirror. It saved on musical instruments too, I suppose.
‘Suppose George did try to murder him?’ said Fiona calmly, as she sat propped up in bed watching me make the tea. It can’t be entirely ruled out, can it?’
‘For what purpose?’ I said, and for a moment regretted confiding the conversation to her. But I couldn’t see any way I could avoid reporting it all to the office, and that meant Fiona.
‘Does there have to be a purpose? You have always said that not every act has a purpose.’
Actually what I ‘always said’ was that people ‘go mad’ or rather act in irrational and inexplicable ways. There was no evidence to suggest that her father was mad. At least no madder than I’d always known him. ‘I suppose we could provide it to the interrogation team at Berwick House and see if they can spring it on George to any effect.’
‘Felix was very old,’ said Fiona.
‘Look, darling. If that had really been a lethal poison, the poor old tom-cat would have died in style.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It would have shown symptoms of poisoning.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I’ve never come across painless poisons,’ I said, ‘except in books.’ I made the tea and took the tray, with teapot and cups and milk jug, to Fiona’s bedside table. She was fussy about tea and liked to pour it herself.
‘Never?’
‘It would have to be from one of the major groups: arsenic, cyanide or strychnine. Any of those would have caused Felix spectacular symptoms.’
‘Daddy is not very observant.’
‘After feeding it what he suspected was poison intended for himself? He’d be watching every move of that damned cat, you know he would.’
‘I suppose you are right,’ she said. ‘All poisons?’
‘Cyanide brings on a desperate breathless choking spasm and convulsions. Strychnine brings even more violent convulsions. But the most likely poison would be arsenic, or one of the other metals. It’s the poisoner’s first choice.’
‘Yes, we had an arsenic case while I was in Berlin. I had to give evidence. It had no security dimension. It was a domestic quarrel – one of the clerks tried to murder his wife. One of the police pathologists told me that, of all the poisons, arsenic produces symptoms most like those of natural disease.’
‘Well that’s because pathologists don’t get to the scenes of crime until life is extinct. Next time you see him, tell him arsenic brings on vomiting, trembling and bloody diarrhoea. If your father had seen the cat succumbing to a lethal dose of arsenic he wouldn’t have waited until our next weekend visit to mention it to me.’
‘I suppose you’re right, you usually are.’ She meant of course that I was usually right about vulgar brutal matters that it was better not to know about. ‘The pathologist was a her,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘Your father didn’t really believe it was poison.’
‘Daddy’s not paranoid,’ said Fiona, deftly avoiding the question.
No, I thought, he’s just a megalomaniac. For people who think of themselves all the time, paranoia is simply a way of confirming how important they are. I said: ‘He only had to dig the cat up, and send it along to a laboratory.’
‘I think we should suspend judgement.’ Her slow smile revealed her true feelings: that my prejudice was unreasonable and unyielding. Of course she might have been implying that there were lots of painless poisons; exotic toxins that chemists concoct in secret government-financed laboratories. But that would have brought us into the world of officially authorized murder; and for the time being, neither of us wanted to believe George could ever have been a party to that kind of killing. ‘I’ll pour the tea, shall I?’
‘Lovely. What are you reading?’
She took her book from the table so that I could see its cover: Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie.
‘Good grief, Fi, you’ve been reading that same book for ages.’
‘Have I? What’s the hurr
y? Is that enough milk for you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, taking the tea from her hand. But in fact I don’t really like milk in tea; it was one of the many English ideas I never properly adjusted to. ‘So Billy got into the football team at school. Well, well, well. I never saw him as an athlete.’
‘Yes, that’s wonderful,’ said Fiona. She didn’t like sport of any kind but she tried to sound pleased.
‘There was no one trying to get in the window, Fi,’ I said.
‘It was just the sound of the wind,’ she affirmed. ‘I don’t know what came over me. Listen to it howl in the chimney.’
‘Yes,’ I said, although I couldn’t hear the wind in the chimney nor anywhere else. The night was almost unnaturally calm.
4
London: the Cruyers’ home
‘Now that Bernard has finally joined us,’ proclaimed Dicky Cruyer in a voice tinged with impatience, ‘we can proceed with the ceremony.’
Dicky was wearing a navy blue dinner suit. He’d bought it back in the days when everyone said dark blue photographed better on television. But Dicky had never been on television, and now his suit just looked unusual. In response to Dicky’s urgent hand signals someone reduced the volume of the hi-fi from which came Stan Getz playing the ‘One-Note Samba’.
I was the last to arrive only because Dicky had dumped a file upon my desk just two hours before and I had been working to complete it before leaving the office. I caught Fiona’s eye and she blew me a kiss.
Bret was there, wearing a new dinner suit. His slim figure looked good in black. Together with the white hair brushed tight against his skull, his angular face so carefully shaved and dusted with powder, he looked somewhat menacing: the sort of gangster figure that Hollywood invented when George Raft and Jimmy Cagney stopped doing musicals.
Resuming his brisk parade ground voice, Dicky said: ‘I know everyone here tonight will … give Bernard a glass, Daphne darling … will join me in offering Augustus my belated congratulations on becoming Operations supremo. Hurry, Daphne. We are all waiting.’
Daphne Cruyer was pouring measures of champagne from a magnum bottle of Pol Roger. Daphne became nervous at these occasions when her husband brought his colleagues home to a little dinner party. She should not have distributed the empty glasses to the guests before going round with the bottle. Now, as they held their glasses out, she was finding it difficult to pour from the big bottle without spilling some wine each time.
‘Thank you, Mrs Cruyer,’ said Augustus Stowe, as the champagne overfilled his glass and ran bubbling down his fingers to drip on to his shoe. Stowe had never visited the Cruyers before, and judging by the distracted look on his face was wondering what he was doing here now. He was an efficient, outspoken and extremely irritable Australian. As some of the messenger boys had demonstrated on the wall of the men’s toilet, Stowe was remarkably easy to caricature because of the hair that grew from his ears and nostrils, and the fact that his head was shiny, pink and completely bald.
It was of course a contrivance to call this dinner party a celebration of Stowe’s appointment. That had all been celebrated, debated and deplored many weeks before. Stowe was reassigned when Dicky was appointed to ‘Europe Supremo’. It was only a temporary arrangement. Augustus Stowe, who had held that Europe job for some time, was urgently needed to deal with one of the calamities that were a regular part of life in Operations. Stowe was still there but he wouldn’t last much longer. No one held on to Operations for very long. Firing the chief of Operations was the standard act of contrition that the Department offered to the Joint Intelligence Committee each time the politicos lobbed a salvo of complaints at us. And lately those salvos had become a cannonade.
But Dicky was the desk-man par excellence. By having my wife Fiona as his assistant, he’d kept a grip on both the German Desk and the Europe job too. This dinner party was a way of saying to Augustus Stowe – and the world in general – that Dicky was going to fight to hold on to the Europe Desk. It was a way of telling Stowe not to come back this way.
‘Now everyone has a glass, I think. So congratulations, Augustus!’ said Dicky, holding his glass aloft. With varying measures of enthusiasm and gestures of good will, the assembled company complimented Stowe and then sipped their drink and looked around.
‘That’s not a readymade bow tie, is it, Bernard?’ said Dicky as he pushed past me to see why the girl with the peanuts and olives was not distributing them quickly enough. She was talking to Gloria and they were comparing the heels of their shoes.
‘Come along,’ Dicky told the girl. ‘You should be doing the hot sausages by now.’
‘She forgot the mustard dip,’ Daphne told him. ‘We haven’t used these caterers before. They sent six packets of frozen bite-sized pizzas without asking if we had a microwave. I was hoping they would thaw but they are rock-hard.’
‘I can’t do the catering too, darling,’ Dicky told her in distant tones. ‘It’s not much to ask: just to make sure these catering people bring the right food. My God, we are paying them enough.’
‘It looks readymade,’ I said, ‘but that’s because I’m good at tying them.’
‘What was that, Bernard? Oh, yes. Well, be a good chap and take the olives round, would you?’ Then he turned back to Daphne and said: ‘Put the pizzas in a hot oven, darling. I’ll just keep on serving “shampoo” until they are ready.’
I found the table where Daphne had abandoned the magnum of champagne and poured myself another glass. Alongside the champagne there were two vases crammed with expensive cut flowers. I suppose the other guests had brought them as gifts. I felt guilty about not doing the same until I noticed that a tall bunch of dark red roses held a card saying ‘Fondest love from Bernard and Fiona’.
‘We love that painting of Adam and Eve,’ I heard Dicky saying behind me. I turned and found he was confiding his feelings to Bret Rensselaer and Gloria. I offered them all olives but only Gloria took one. She bit into it with her amazingly white teeth and then handed the pit back to me. There was a certain intimacy to this action and I think she thought so too. I smiled at her. It looked as if this might be the most intimate thing to happen between us for a very long time. Dicky was telling Bret how Daphne had bought the painting cheap in a flea market in Amsterdam. I had heard the story a thousand times, and I clearly remembered Bret standing here in the Cruyers’ drawing-room listening politely to Dicky’s rambling and rather dubious account of this purchase.
Augustus Stowe was standing by a glass case in the corner studying the contents: Dicky Cruyer’s valuable collection of antique fountain-pens. It seemed an appropriate collection for a man who had climbed so far in the world of bureaucrats. Stowe perhaps thought so too, for he pulled a face and moved on to join two people from his Operations section who were talking with Fiona. It didn’t really matter whether Augustus Stowe was the guest of honour or just an extra man. The evening had really been arranged so that Dicky could clarify his working relationship with Bret. This was a make-or-break evening. The work at the office might or might not be discussed, but by the time the evening ended these two men would have made their peace or declared war.
Dicky had found it difficult to adjust to the way in which Bret Rensselaer had unexpectedly arrived in London. Unrolled from the magic carpet and into the Deputy’s office like Cleopatra for a startled Caesar, he had seized control of the Department. His only real superior, the Director-General, seemed to be giving Bret a more or less free hand.
‘Europe can no longer be treated like an odd assortment of people with weird languages and funny costumes,’ Dicky was earnestly explaining to Bret. ‘Europe together musters more people, more talent and more wealth than the entire USA.’
Bret said nothing. And yet I knew from the long time I had spent with Bret in California that it was the sort of remark that usually produced an acid question about why Europe couldn’t afford armed services to defend itself without American military help. Bret was an Anglophile, but that didn’t mea
n he felt European. Bret’s infatuation with England and the English made him exceedingly sceptical about life lived by foreigners beyond the English Channel. He smiled at Dicky.
Dicky said: ‘Since moving into the Europe slot I have made it my business to visit every one of our European offices. I love Europe. In some ways I think of Paris as my real home.’
‘How are you managing to divide authority with Fiona?’ asked Bret.
‘She hasn’t been complaining?’
‘She’s so busy running around the globe that I seldom get the pleasure of talking with her.’
‘She supports me in everything I do,’ said Dicky. ‘I hardly know how …’ He paused and wet his lips. I suspect he’d been about to say that he didn’t know how he would manage without her but it came out: ‘…how I would replace her.’
‘No need to worry about replacing her, Dicky,’ said Bret.
‘No?’ said Dicky nervously and drank some champagne. It was at a previous gathering like this – in Dicky’s home – that Bret had announced that he was the newly appointed Deputy D-G. That traumatic experience had left Dicky nervous that Bret might choose this evening for another such bombshell.
But Bret didn’t add anything more to this verdict on Fiona’s security of tenure. Somewhat pointedly, he moved away from Dicky to speak with her. I heard him say: ‘You are looking ravishing tonight, Fiona.’ She was wearing a severely cut dark green dress with matching shoes. When Bret started talking to her she frowned and bent her head as if concentrating. Or perhaps she was looking at her silk shoes. She had told me many times that they were difficult to keep in good shape. She never wore them when driving, she slipped them off and operated the pedals in her stockings.
Everyone was in evening dress. Mine was creased in all the wrong places. I’d packed it carelessly when coming back from my weekend with my father-in-law and only got it out of my suitcase half an hour or so before arriving at Dicky’s.
As if to cover any confusion he’d suffered at Bret’s hands, Dicky turned to me and said: ‘Bret’s a bit nervous tonight. There was a personal security alert for all senior staff this afternoon. I told Bret he should be armed but he said it would spoil the line of his tuxedo.’ Dicky laughed in a way that made it difficult to know if he was scoffing at Bret’s foolishness, or memorizing the line for his own use.