by Len Deighton
‘That great Saab. Yes, you can see where the rally numbers used to be. And a car-phone antenna. It’s super. What tyres do you have?’
‘Go and get your coat and a scarf,’ I said. ‘And a sweater, it’s cold.’
I looked at Gloria. I didn’t have to say anything. It was clear that Billy had seen us arrive, and gone off to hide in the library. ‘Who cares if he’s in the football team?’ I said to Gloria.
‘He wants you to love him,’ she said. ‘He wants to do something to make you pleased.’
‘I do love him,’ I said testily. Was I such an ogre? It was one of those days when everyone was speaking in riddles.
‘And be proud of him.’
‘I hate football. I hate all games,’ I said, ‘even chess.’ Mr Hemingway’s hearing must have been remarkably acute, for I noticed him stiffen as I said this, although his back was towards me as he stood with other parents on the far side of the room.
‘Billy doesn’t really like Chinese food,’ said Gloria. ‘Insist we go to that place on the bypass, it’s called The Old Barn or The Manoir or something phoney like that. He can have hamburger and spaghetti and that dessert with apples that they set fire to at the table.’
‘So why did he say Chinese?’ I hissed. Perhaps I was speaking too loud; people were looking at us.
‘You said you liked Chinese one day in Islington when it was raining and we were looking for somewhere to eat lunch before going to a matinee of Hamlet. Billy was doing it at school. Remember?’
‘Oh, yes.’ What a memory she had. I would have given six months’ salary to have been able to remind her of what she was wearing on that lovely perfect happy day that I’d entirely forgotten.
‘If you two – you and Billy – would just stop trying to do nice things for each other, you …’
She never finished what she was about to say, for Billy had made a lightning change of clothes, and was now dressed in grey flannel uniform with the school’s Latin motto on the breast pocket. He was running down the stairs swinging his raincoat in his hand.
The fact that we took Billy for a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs did not deprive him of the chance to make jokes, and parade his learning, using the name of the new Chinese eating place. The jokes ranged from oodles of noodles to snub-nosed Pekingese poodles and on to Peking man, and if we didn’t laugh enough, Billy explained the reference to us. And he did it in exhaustive detail. He was, in many ways, very like me.
With every last strand of spaghetti devoured and every crêpe flamed, folded and eaten, with jokes all told and Saab tyres examined, Billy was delivered back to his school dormitory. Gloria drove me back to London. It was a perfect opportunity to have the serious talk with her that I had been putting off so long.
Perhaps I didn’t choose the most prudent way to begin: ‘I’m going to get him away from that bloody school. He’ll grow up to be a detestable little snob if he stays there. Did you notice that joke about the slow-witted policeman?’
‘Oh, Bernard! Whatever are you on about? You constantly make jokes about people – dim stockbrokers and greedy politicians. Don’t be so captious. Billy will never be a snob like that. He is lovely and full of fun.’
‘Sometimes I feel like running off with him,’ I said, putting a toe into the territory as lightly as I knew how. Gloria Kent, of Hungarian extraction, immediately sensed the danger: you don’t grow up a foreign girl in an English school without knowing there is a minefield on both sides of every English social exchange.
‘He would never go,’ she said.
‘You sound very certain.’
‘He’d be miserable. He doesn’t know you well enough, Bernard.’ I could tell from her tone that she was expecting a rush of objections from me, but I let it go and waited. ‘He loves you, and he knows that you love him, but you don’t know him really well.’
‘I know him.’
‘You know the child he used to be.’
I thought of Mr Hemingway. Billy had spoken of his house master several times over dinner. I don’t say Billy hero-worshipped Mr Hemingway, or even admired him, but any hint of praise from Mr Hemingway was an accolade that Billy was keen to share with us. ‘That would come,’ I said.
Gloria wasn’t so sure. ‘He has his friends and a set routine. You can tell that from everything he said tonight. You may regard that school as a factory producing Philistine pin-brained Englishmen of a sort you heartily despise, but it’s Billy’s only reality. And he likes it.’
‘Thanks, Gloria.’
‘Did you want me to baby you? You waited too long. Take him back to your fancy Mayfair apartment, but he’ll be a stranger. It will all take time, Bernard. Forget any idea about waving a magic wand. He’s a young man. He has a mind of his own.’
‘I suppose you are right,’ I said through gritted teeth.
‘Would your wife give her phone number to the school?’ said Gloria suddenly, as if she’d been thinking about it.
‘No,’ I said.
‘And not to some other parent?’
‘Especially not to some other parent.’
‘Then who phoned the office?’
‘And why?’ I added.
She controlled the car with a manic skill that never quite became frenzy. As we sped along the shiny suburban streets the neon lights made halos of bright pink and blue and green around her blonde hair and painted her face with savage patterns. It didn’t seem like the moment to ask Gloria if she’d like to run away with me. But in the event I didn’t have to; she read my mind. And she wasn’t going to let me out of the car without telling me how well she read it. ‘You are not in Berlin, Bernard,’ she said as we pulled up in front of my apartment. I reached for the door catch but not too strenuously. ‘You can’t handle two women in that psychotic way you run from one side of the Wall to the other.’
I didn’t answer. I could see she had something she had to say. ‘I know you love me, and I love you too,’ she said in the speedy perfunctory small-print way that advertisers deal out the mandatory health warnings. ‘But you already have a wife and children. Now you must let me alone, and let me make my own life.’
‘But Gloria …’
She tapped the accelerator just enough to make the engine growl. ‘Let me alone, Bernard,’ she implored frantically. ‘For God’s sake, let me alone.’
She stared straight ahead as I climbed out of the car. ‘Goodnight, Gloria,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
She didn’t turn her head and she didn’t answer; she just drove away.
5
Berwick House, England
I resented being sent to London Debriefing Centre to squeeze some reactions out of my brother-in-law George Kosinski. He was being detained on a warrant: which was the Department’s way of saying imprisoned without promise of trial. That he was held in a lovely old eighteenth-century manor house, and permitted to wander in its seven acres of lawns and woodland, to say nothing of its rose bushes, orchard and vegetable garden, did not alter the fact that Berwick House was surrounded by a high wall. Or change the fact that the innocuous-looking men working in the grounds were armed. My unease was of course compounded by the fact that I had personally brought George from Poland. And I had submitted a report that described his long-term service as an agent of its communist government. That had been acted upon immediately; my other suggestions were ignored. I’d put aside my personal feelings about George. My anger at his treachery and stupidity had abated. Of course he was small fry by some measures, but even a low-echelon agent such as George could, if handled skilfully, provide valuable information about contacts and safe houses and all the mumbo-jumbo of enemy activities here in Britain. George had not been handled skilfully: he’d been shelved. That was partly because any such vital information he gave us would have to be handed to ‘Five’, the Department’s rivals, and give them a chance to outshine us when the time came to boast to our political masters.
So I wasn’t in a happy frame of mind as I turned into the
gates of Berwick House. The tyres scrunched on the gravel path as I stopped for the identity check. I pulled my card from my wallet but I didn’t need it. The barrier was raised immediately and we went straight through. I suppose the two guards recognized the official car and driver, and one of them seemed to recognize me. He scowled.
There had been a drastic effort to clean the place up since my last visit. The ancient army huts, and their pervading smell of tar preservative, had disappeared from what once had been the croquet lawn. ‘Keep off the grass’ signs were staked into the mud, erected there in the hope that summer would bring grass enough to hide the huts’ broken concrete foundations which had resisted the drills and bulldozers.
The rain had stopped but water was dripping from the trees and there were deep puddles in the gravel drive. Two men in coveralls were fitting cables along the bed of the newly drained moat that surrounded the red-brick main building. The irises, lilies and bulrushes had been ripped out and stacked along the path, ready for the compost heap. As we went over the red-brick bridge to the courtyard, I could see the way the underwater alarms were being replaced with new technology. I wondered what it was costing. It didn’t seem as if the Foreign Office cashiers were betting on an early end to the cold war.
The dismal and draughty entrance hall provided more evidence of the many changes that Berwick House had undergone over the years. Its history was to be seen in the notices that defaced the lovely panelled walls. The earliest notice was poster-sized, protected by heavy glass and framed in oak. It declared Berwick House to be a ‘prohibited place’ by order of the Secretary of State (1911 Act, section three.) The typography was Victorian, its style like a sedate theatre playbill. Amended and supplemented by the Official Secrets Act of 1920 and 1939, it must have been fixed to the wall soon after Berwick House was taken over by the authorities in that week after war was declared. There were other notices, of varying age, dealing with everything from fire precautions to the playing of transistor radios and not smoking. Now that so many Home Office employees, security men and Special Branch officers were carrying hand-guns, there was a lock-up closet for guns, and bright new notices: ‘Strictly No Firearms Beyond This Point’. On one of my previous visits they mislaid the Walther PPK I was carrying and tried to give me a nickel-plated Spanish Astra in its place. It took me an hour to sort it out. Since then I had always made a point of saying I was unarmed.
Having signed the book, and noted that the previous visitor’s signature was dated four days earlier, I collected my ‘exit chit’ and was taken up to see George. I was pleased to find that he had been assigned relatively comfortable rooms. Number five suite was one of the best accommodations, after the staff offices and Governor’s apartment. It was large. Its position on a corner of the first floor provided two windows for the drawing-room and extensive views of the grounds. The room was exceptionally tidy; neurotically so. His red velvet slippers were placed alongside his chair, cushions plumped and exactly positioned, even the newspapers were neatly folded as if ready for resale. The book he was reading – The Last Grain Race by Newby – had a page marked with a slip of newspaper. The book, and a case for his spectacles, were positioned upon the newspapers with care.
George Kosinski was standing at the window, looking out at the bare trees and the high walls that surrounded the property. He took off his heavy spectacles as if to see me better. ‘Bernard. They said you were coming.’ His accent – the hard high pitch of London’s docklands – revealed his origins, despite his West End clothes.
George Kosinski was forty years old. A stocky, restless Londoner born of Polish parents, he had inherited all the moodiness and poetic melancholy of his forebears. He looked well but dispirited. He’d trimmed his moustache and cut his grey wavy hair shorter. Now, despite the well-cut pants, monogrammed shirt and soft Italian moccasin shoes, I did not see much of the flashy tycoon that I remembered from earlier days.
‘I was ordered to come,’ I told him. ‘I knew that if you wanted to see me, you would have sent a message.’
His quirky smile suggested that, should he ever find himself in need of help or sustenance, my name was not one that would naturally come to his mind.
‘Shall we take a walk?’ I said. He went across the room to get his coat. ‘Wrap up, it’s cold outside.’
‘I haven’t had a breath of fresh air for a week,’ he said. It was not true. I had asked that he should not be allowed his daily walk for the two days before I arrived simply because I wanted him to feel a bit cooped up. But I knew from the record that he normally spent an hour outside each day. I knew what he ate, and what he complained about. I even knew how many times a day he went to the toilet. Detainee reports are thorough in some respects. ‘I hate this place,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. He could hardly hate it more than I did. There was never anything enjoyable about coming down here to hear the contrived fictions of men who saw the error of their ways only after getting caught.
Yet the deeper reason I hated it so much was because of the odour of despair that visits here brought to my nostrils. Berwick House was the end of the trail for the men locked away here. Even those released without officially ordained punishment did not go unscathed. No one escapes the discontent that pitiless self-examination brings to those who try to serve two masters. Of the men I’d seen here, at least four eventually took their own life. Then there were the tragic cases, like Giles Trent, murdered in error when a disinformation plan went wrong. And Erich Stinnes, a KGB man I killed in a messy exchange of rounds that sent his arterial blood gushing into one of my recurring nightmares.
George put on his coat and looked in a mirror to arrange his hat and cashmere scarf. It always encouraged a detainee to be taken away from the rooms where microphones could be hidden. London Debriefing Centre’s handling of George had not been done properly. LDC staff never seemed to learn how important the preparation period was, and how much it affected the interrogation. George was not angry, he was not restless and he was not pacing up and down in frustration. It was too quiet and too comfortable here, and he had been given nothing to do. That gave him too much time to think. Thinking at night, when sleep is being lost, is good; but thinking in the daytime is bad. Opportunities for thinking were not desirable when you held a man such as George. Giving him time to reflect gave him time to reconsider, to invent cover stories, weave elaborate lies, suppress guilt and justify his treason. Furthermore I was not an experienced interrogator; I was just a member of George’s family.
‘I know why you came,’ he said. We had walked around the walled vegetable garden in silence, apart from George identifying the dead and dying herbs that had been planted in an elaborate cruciform pattern. ‘You want to know if Tessa was a part of it.’ He bent to pick some leaves.
‘Was she?’
‘You don’t care about me. It’s Tessa you are worried about. Tessa and what she might have been hearing from your wife over the years. What she might have told me and what I might have passed along the line.’
‘I can’t say I’ve worried about that angle a great deal,’ I told him.
‘No? Then you’d better start worrying about it. You can bet that’s the part of it your masters are worried about.’ He threw away the leaf and pushed his glasses into place with his forefinger. They were always slipping down his nose. I don’t know why he chose such heavy frames.
‘Is that what they’ve been asking you here?’ I said. I knew it wasn’t; I’d seen the transcripts.
He pulled a face. ‘Yes, and no. They go around and around. Yesterday we were talking about my school-days. One of them is a psychiatrist, complete with a slide show. And even a book of those damned ink-blot patterns. I thought those things were ancient history by now.’
‘Rorschach test patterns. Yes, well that’s normal routine,’ I said, in case George had formed some kind of paranoid resentment about it.
‘Tess was implicated right from the beginning,’ said George.
I didn’t res
pond.
‘Sorrel,’ said George reaching down to pluck a large green leaf, crushing it in his hand and then sniffing at it. ‘I suppose it grows all the year round. I didn’t know that. Not much aroma.’
‘Where were you at school, George? London I suppose, with an accent like yours. Was it a school in Poplar?’
He swung his head round to stare up at me, hardly able to believe that I was not going to follow up his tempting nugget about the treason of his wife Tessa, and the possible involvement of me and my wife too.
‘Yes, good old Poplar,’ he said, stressing his cockney accent. ‘You knew that of course. But they say a trial lawyer should never ask a question to which he doesn’t already know the answer.’
‘I’m not a lawyer,’ I said.
‘But you’ve done your homework, Bernard. And I admire the way you steer away from the subject of Tessa as if not interested.’
‘It’s not a matter of being interested, George. It’s simply that I recognize it as a bit of bloody nonsense. You’ll have to do better than that to get my undivided attention.’
‘Will I, Bernard? Well, you deny it. You’ll have plenty to deny by the time I’ve finishing spilling my guts to them.’
‘For instance?’ I said.
He was getting intense now. That was what I wanted. He pretended to be giving all his attention to the herbs. Upon his open hand he had laid out an array of them, some curled and brittle and blackened by frost, others hard and green and aromatic. He prodded at the leaves with a fingertip, as if giving them all his attention. ‘Mint. That one I don’t recognize. Marjoram. Bay … but its real name is Laurus nobilis. Sometimes cookery writers translate it as laurel, but laurel leaves are a deadly poison.’
‘And taste like hell,’ I said affably, as if I didn’t mind his absurd little herb recognition rigmarole.
He looked at me quizzically. ‘Like bitter almonds, at least that’s what I read somewhere. It’s the writers who make all the mistakes, Bernard. The people who worship little pieces of paper with writing on. The cooks and gardeners never get it wrong because they don’t care what it’s called.’