by Len Deighton
I grunted. I suppose it was a spontaneous and clumsy attempt to show me how wrong it was to categorize him as an enemy. The truth, as he no doubt saw it, was that decent old George had tried to play some sort of game that wouldn’t harm either side. I was able to guess the meaning underlying George’s allegory only because nearly everyone locked up here persuaded themselves that the truth was something along those lines.
‘“For instance,” you ask me,’ he said. ‘For instance, I could tell them about Tessa’s relationship with that fellow Trent, the communist agent. He was one of your people, wasn’t he? Then there was your meeting with that CIA maverick Posh Harry … a meeting you arranged in my offices in Southwark.’
‘That was years ago, George.’ I said it as calmly as I could. Locked up here and brooding upon the way I had brought him to book, George had lots of time, lots of motivation, and all the necessary ingenuity, to weave a thousand unconnected incidents into a web from which I wouldn’t escape. Perhaps his fabrications wouldn’t completely convince the interrogators, the D-G or the Appeals Board that I was a traitor, but the result might give them an excuse to discharge me as unreliable without feeling guilty about it.
‘These interrogators are not fools, George. They have come across spiteful nonsense before. Implicating friends and relatives – it’s not unusual in our sort of business.’
He threw the herbs away and rubbed his hands together and looked at me: ‘No? How often do you have a prisoner here revealing what he knows about relatives who have top jobs in your “sort of business”? His sister-in-law? His brother-in-law? His wife? Tell me how often, Bernard. Oh, they’ll listen. When I start talking, they’ll listen. You can bet on that.’
Now it was all coming out: overt threats delivered with malicious intensity. Concealed beneath George’s assumed calm there was a desperate drowning man, one whose flailing would pull down with him anyone he could clutch. ‘Not often,’ I said. ‘You’re a special case.’
He nodded and smiled grimly. ‘Yes, I am. So if it’s a servile confession you’ve come here for, forget it.’
‘I’m not your implacable enemy, George,’ I said. ‘Your wisest course is to tell the truth.’ I’d been sent here to Berwick House on Bret Rensselaer’s instructions. Bret had told me to start him talking. Well, in that respect my visit certainly seemed to have been a success. The trouble was that George seemed to have focused all his animosity on me.
‘You’re right, Bernard. It’s damned cold out here. Let’s go back into the warm.’
There was nothing to be gained from letting George use me as a punching bag for all his frustration and resentment. But while we were still in the garden and away from the microphones I tried to make my own position clear.
‘Listen to me carefully, George,’ I said. ‘I came here today because I was ordered to come. But before coming I put away as much of my personal feelings as I could possibly repress. With great difficulty, I’m still doing that. But you choose to make it personal and threaten me. You threaten me with your lousy rotten lies and fairy stories.’ George was looking at me with his eyes open. I think he had never seen me really angry before. ‘Listen to me carefully, George. When you face the interrogators you tell them the truth, the whole truth and any excuses you can invent.’ I grabbed his upper arm and squeezed as tight as I could. This hurt him I suppose, for he pulled a face but didn’t cry out. ‘But if you tell lies about me, I will beat you bloody. I won’t kill you or even cripple you but I will hurt you, George.’ I shook him so that his teeth rattled. I hoped there was no one watching us. ‘Even if it costs me my job, my pension or six months in the nick, I will beat the daylights out of you. And I’ll get to you even if I have to break down doors.’
As soon as I loosened my grip on his arm he stepped well back from me. My words had been mild enough, but he must have seen the rage that I felt brimming up inside me. He’d seen it in my eyes, and in my face, for now he stared at me as if he was frightened to look away lest I assaulted him. Behind his spectacle lenses his eyes were bright and his cheeks pinched and pallid. ‘You’re a madman,’ he said in a breathless voice. ‘You should be put away in psychiatric care, Bernard. What’s happened to you? I’m family; I’m family.’ He touched his face as if I had slapped him. It was as if the mere thought of the physical beating had brought him pain.
‘Don’t Bernard me, you bastard.’ I’d kept my anger under control for too long, and now I was on the verge of going wild. I took a deep breath and remained rooted there staring at him as I recovered my composure. I told myself that this wasn’t the time and place; and that George wasn’t really the enemy. George was a nothing, a delivery boy, a kid from the paddling pool who’d fallen into the deep end. George was a child on a visit to the zoo, prodding a finger through the bars of the cage to distinguish moth-eaten fur rug from bad-tempered gorilla. Now he knew. But it was too late to make much difference. I didn’t say anything else to him. I returned him to his room, got a ‘body receipt’ signature from the floor clerk, signed out, called for the car and went home.
I went directly back to London, apart from a brief stop off at a big hotel on London’s outskirts. It called itself an inn, and this deception was furthered by the way some architect, who had OD’d on Hollywood Westerns, had provided it with a shiny interior of fake Victorian advertising mirrors and plastic panelling. There were pin-tables too: like glass comic books and flashing and clicking furiously, the sound echoing around the place that was empty of customers other than the driver and me.
The driver stuck to orange juice but I needed a whisky. A large single malt: a Laphroaig. The barman could only find Glenfiddich, so I had two of those instead. Fortified with the smoky taste, I made a couple of calls from the public phone in the lobby. I liked public phones, they were more private than private ones, and the calls more or less untraceable. But none of the calls got any response at the other end. The Swede had not gone home. It made me angry to think he had taken my money and continued his drunken spree. God only knows where he was. His answering machine at his home in Sweden was switched off. There was no answer from the airfield he used, and his contact number in London was giving out the shrill sounds of a line that has been disconnected. I cursed my own stupidity. I’d heard rumours that the Swede went off on melancholy bouts of drunken roving, but I’d not believed them. For years our assignments together had found him a model of competence and sobriety. It was the big bundle of cash that had tempted him of course. But why did it have to be my money?
I hung up the telephone and went into the toilet. The door banged behind me and I looked up. Two men – dressed in leather jackets and jeans – had followed me. Both looked like manual workers, but there was a marked age disparity. The elder man was about thirty-five. He stopped and stood with his back against the door to make sure we were not interrupted. He was a strong man, taller than me, and with calloused hands and battered face. A boxer, judging by the stance he adopted. Boxers can never get out of the habit of standing with their toes turned in.
The younger man was about twenty, with wavy hair and long sideburns. I’d only glanced at them. Now I went to the sink and turned both taps and took liquid soap into my hand as if I was about to wash. Keeping my head down over the bowl, I watched in the mirror as the younger man came up behind me. He thought he had me cold, so he was careless. I turned and slapped the liquid soap into his face. He must have thought it was ammonia or something harmful, for he reared away with his eyes closed and mouth open in a splutter of anger. I hit him hard in the belly, and gave him a jab in the nose as he bent forward. He dropped the knuckle-duster he’d been holding and it landed on the tiles with a clatter. But the little guy was tough. He straightened up and shook his head and came at me again. He punched at me with the straight sort of blow that comes from a lot of time at the punching bag, and his fist connected with the side of my face as I ducked aside. It was lucky for me that he’d lost his brass knuckles, otherwise even that glancing blow would have sent me reel
ing. As it was, the pain of it rattled me. I grabbed at his jacket and held him as I tried to butt my head into his face, but the liquid soap I’d thrown at him was now all over the floor. I slipped on it and only kept my balance by hanging on to his jacket.
There was something absurd about the way we waltzed around the tiled floor, slipping and sliding and punching and clinching with neither of us able to land a decisive blow.
Under my coat, in a shoulder holster, I was carrying a sample of Heckler and Koch’s best hardware. I’d been wearing it since the personal security alert. I had taken no notice of Dicky’s taunts, figuring that the sort of hard men the other side were using lately might not accurately discern that I wasn’t senior staff.
As my feet found a drier piece of floor, I was steady enough to get a better hold on him. I slammed him backwards, pounding him into his partner with enough force to knock the breath out of both of them. As the younger one turned his upper body to avoid my blows, I kicked his knee. The toe of my shoe found the right place, so that his leg buckled and he dropped full-length to the floor. I kicked him again and his face went bloody. It was crude stuff but these were crude people.
It gave me enough time to open my coat and get to my gun. Holding it tight I brought it round to slap the elder man in the side of the face. He was a tough old bird but the gun was heavy steel, and I hit him hard enough to cut him. He gasped with surprise as much as with the pain. It gave me a chance to knee him hard in the balls. As he went down I slammed him again with the gun and took a pace backwards to wave it at them.
The old one put his hands high enough to change the light bulbs. A VP70 is customarily carried with a round in the chamber, and you don’t have to be Superman to fire off its eighteen rounds like a machine-gunner.
‘Keep still, old man,’ I told him. ‘I’ll waste you and laugh.’
He didn’t answer. I frisked him and then bent down to the youngster on the floor and made sure he didn’t have a gun. I took his knuckle-duster from where it had fallen and stuffed it up his nostrils. ‘Next time I’ll kill you,’ I promised cheerfully. ‘If not me, one of my friends will kill you. Either way, you wind up dead. You understand?’ Neither of them replied, but I could see they got the idea. ‘I should put a bullet into both of you. There is a drain here, and tiles, so it won’t make a mess.’ I let them think about it for a minute. ‘Scram – while I’m in a good mood.’
The old fellow bent and effortlessly lifted his chum to his feet. He said: ‘Let me explain, old pal.’
‘Shut up.’
‘It’s not you we are after. It’s the Swede.’
‘Get out of here before I change my mind.’
I wiped my face and straightened myself out. I put the gun into my coat pocket, so I could get to it quickly, and went back into the bar. I wasn’t going to be driving, so I quickly downed another whisky.
Outside it was cold. I checked the car park for strangers but the cars were all empty. My driver was already at the wheel and waiting for me. ‘Is there some kind of trouble?’ he asked when I got into the back seat of the car. I suppose I was trembling or hyped up or dishevelled. I’m not sure what it was.
‘You stupid bastard,’ I said. ‘You’d sit drinking your bloody orange juice while the opposition wasted me, wouldn’t you?’
‘What happened?’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Next time stick to Scotch; that citric acid you are drinking is eating up your brain.’ The driver was an ex-cop. He was supposed to be guarding the passengers he carried. That’s what he was paid to do.
Suddenly all the strength went out of me and I slumped back in my seat. Perhaps I had over-reacted to the two men. I often over-reacted. It was why I had stayed alive so long. But neither of the two had been armed, except for the knuckle-duster. I wondered what they intended to do and who might have sent them. If they were really looking for the Swede, what sort of racket were they in with him?
We reached outer London as darkness came. The outward-bound traffic lanes were jammed with commuters going home. I spotted a flower shop still open. On impulse I stopped the car, went in and had them send to Gloria a dozen long-stem red roses. On the greetings tag I wrote ‘How can I thank you enough?’ I didn’t sign it. At the time it seemed like a tender, restrained and appropriate way to say thanks.
The Department had a long-standing regulation about burglars. Any employee finding strange marks around the keyhole of their front door was obliged to call the Duty Officer before proceeding inside. Of course no one obeyed this inconvenient and draconian order. It had been drafted after a female typist left some official papers on the underground train, and invented a story about her apartment in Fulham being broken into. No one believed her story except a simpleton named Henry Tiptree, the investigating officer, who drafted the new regulation as a way to justify the time and money he wasted asking everyone working for London Underground a lot of stupid questions.
I didn’t do anything like that when I got back home and found the door was not double-locked. I turned the key very quietly and opened the door very slowly. Poking my head inside the door, I heard a movement upstairs. I closed the door behind me and then tiptoed up the stairs. I moved along the bedroom corridor.
‘Oh, you made me jump!’
‘Jesus, Fi! I thought you were a burglar!’
‘What a lovely greeting, darling. You always know the right thing to say.’ Fiona was standing in the doorway of the tiny dressing-room that had become a boxroom and storeroom too. She was holding up a black cocktail dress, as if trying to decide whether to consign it to Oxfam. Behind her, our largest suitcase was balanced on the roll-away bed where her sister had often slept after fighting with her husband George.
I put away my gun and went and kissed her. She smiled and kissed me back, but she did it without relinquishing her hold on the dress. ‘Are you all right, darling?’ she asked. ‘You look funny.’
‘I thought you were in Rome,’ I said.
‘I was. Now I’m off to Düsseldorf. Dicky can’t do the European Community Security Conference and Bret says someone has to be there to wave the flag.’ She leaned over her suitcase to count the packets of tights and added an extra one.
‘When do you have to be there?’
‘I came back to get more clothes. And I’m having my rough notes printed out and spiral-bound, to look impressive. I’m going to the office to pick them up …’ She looked at her watch. ‘My God! Is that the time? I’ll never catch the plane.’
‘Did you hear about the bus accident? Billy’s school? The football team.’
‘Yes. Billy sent me a fax, and the office sent it on to me. I had my girl phone the office and tell you. Why did you go rushing down there, darling? You had everyone at the office worried. And it’s bad for the children if you make a crisis out of every little thing.’
‘You phoned?’
‘No. I just told you: my girl phoned. I didn’t want you to worry.’
‘A fax?’
‘Billy sent Daddy a fax about the crash as soon as it happened. He often faxes them from the school office. Daddy fixed it up with the house master. And Daddy told Billy that unless he sent me a fax at least once a week he’d get no pocket-money. It’s worked wonders, I must say. Daddy’s awfully clever with the children.’ She picked up a cobalt-blue party dress and held it against her, and then did the same with a dark green one. ‘Which one do you think, darling?’
‘A bit formal, aren’t they?’
‘These European people always have a rather grand dinner and ball on the last night.’
‘The green one,’ I said. ‘You looked lovely in that at Dicky’s the other night.’
‘It is pretty, isn’t it? But the shoes that go with it are getting scuffed.’ She put the green dress back into the wardrobe and packed the blue dress in her suitcase. ‘When are you due back in Berlin?’
‘They want me here in London for that meeting tomorrow and another on Tuesday.’
‘Unless George says so
mething startling there will be very few items on the agenda,’ she said.
‘The D-G will be there, and Bret is chairing it. It’s a hot potato. I think they want to fix lead weights on it, and drop it into the archives. Dicky is encouraging the idea that the sooner the whole Polish fiasco is forgotten, the better it will be for everyone. And that means forgetting George’s activities too.’
‘You saw George? Will they release him?’
‘Even the D-G can’t make that decision alone, but yes I think they’ll let him go. “Five” may guess we’re holding him but they can’t be sure. In any case they probably won’t make difficulties, providing he comes clean and then goes straight back to Switzerland and keeps stumm.’
‘How can you be so confident that Five will agree?’
‘I asked around.’
‘You know people at Five that well?’ From her tone of voice it sounded as if Fiona disapproved of my having friends in the Security Service. I smiled and didn’t answer. ‘Don’t be disloyal to the Department, darling,’ she said in that throaty tone that I have always found so seductive. ‘Nothing is more important than that.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing is more important than that.’
‘I only asked,’ said Fiona quickly and defensively. ‘I’m not going to report you to the D-G, or Internal Security,’ she added sarcastically. ‘Why do they want you there? Doesn’t Frank usually come over for those policy meetings? Something bad?’
‘My role is to say yes to everything. Then, when it all goes wrong, Frank can say I never told him.’
‘And will it all go wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘And I don’t much care.’ I went into the bedroom where I had spotted a cup of coffee Fiona had abandoned. I sipped some of it. For the first time I could say ‘I don’t care’ with all my heart. I’d been suffering agonies of guilt about abandoning Fiona and taking the children with me, but now I shed those penitent feelings in a sudden joyful instant. I wouldn’t be here to concern myself with how the review committee disposed of George Kosinski, and swept under the carpet their foul-ups in Poland and elsewhere. I couldn’t any longer worry how Fiona, and her egoistic father, arranged their lives. I wouldn’t be a part of their lives any longer, and neither would my children.