by Len Deighton
Bret looked up at me and waited for this to sink in. I nodded and noted the way in which the Swede, who had risked his life for us countless times, had suddenly become a German renegade. I noted too that Bret had done his homework since last night, when Dicky had had to clarify the misnomer to him. ‘Well?’ he said, waiting for me to reply. The D-G sat staring into space, as if this exchange was nothing to do with him.
‘The Swede was desperately short of money,’ I said in his defence. There was a silence. It was of course the wrong thing to say.
‘A lot of our people are desperately short of money,’ said Bret, and let the implication go unspoken.
‘But he wasn’t exactly one of our people,’ I said. ‘Not exclusively. We didn’t give him enough money to get his exclusive services. He contracted. He was the best of all our arm’s-distance contractors. He was dependable. He never let us down.’
‘No,’ said Bret. ‘He let them down; that was the trouble. He tried to sell them what was rightfully theirs; they don’t like that kind of freebooting. That was why they wasted him.’
‘Could you explain that, Bret, please?’ the D-G said.
‘Killed him,’ explained Bret. ‘He betrayed the Soviets and they killed him.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the D-G.
Hearing his master’s voice, ‘C’ awakened and crawled along under the table until he brushed against my feet, sniffing and snorting. Making sure it was unobserved, I gave the dog a firm push with my shoe, and it retreated a few paces along the table as far as Bret. It sank down with a groan and went back to sleep. Bret guessed what I had done and fixed me with an accusing stare. I suppose he was unhappy to suddenly have the dog resting against his legs, but he didn’t complain about it.
I said: ‘Am I permitted to hear more detail about this?’
‘They brought in a hit man from Dresden,’ said Dicky proudly. ‘We have been monitoring the whole circus for days. Two local toughs were used. Then the fellow from Germany arrived on an early flight to brief them. He took a rented car to Wimbledon, paid off his two English thugs and was back in Berlin again before the Swede’s blood had dried.’
‘Two thugs?’ I said. ‘Where did they clean up?’ Squeaky’s reasoning had convinced me that it was too clumsy and messy for a contract killing.
‘They didn’t want it to look like a professional job,’ said Dicky. ‘That was specified in one of the messages we intercepted. It’s new, reformed Gorby-Russia these days. They don’t want anyone to know they are still doing the same nasty things they did in the bad old days.’
Then Bret’s words sank in. I said: ‘You monitored it? You’re telling me … you let them kill the Swede?’
‘We had to let them go through with it,’ said Bret. ‘We knew they were on the warpath. We thought it was a hit against one of our people from the way the messages sounded. Then we saw what it really was. To have acted on the information would have blown our source to fragments.’
‘And you knew all this too?’ I looked at Dicky to make it personal. ‘You knew last night when we were talking to Squeaky? You knew about the plan, let it happen, and then leaked it to Five so that they could find the body?’
‘I thought you guessed what it was all about,’ said Dicky evasively. ‘When you told Squeaky you weren’t convinced, I thought you must know something. I was thinking how well you handled it.’
‘No, that was the real me,’ I said. ‘Those two came looking for me. They were searching for the Swede. They wanted my help.’
‘What happened?’ said Dicky.
‘I said I’d call them back.’
‘You didn’t report that,’ said Bret very quickly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure who they were.’
‘Really?’ said Bret. I could tell from his face that the driver had reported my little fracas. ‘And yet by then you knew that the personal security alert was extended to all staff. And you knew the Swede was in town doing business. You had a meeting with him. A meeting in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road.’
Bret was trying to rattle me. ‘Routine,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so, Bernard,’ said Bret. ‘I think it was to discuss some job you wanted done. A flying job?’
I looked at him full in the eyes. ‘Tell me all about it,’ I said. Bret was in a combative mood but I felt able to take him on.
‘We’ve had you under observation, Bernard,’ said Bret. ‘It’s no good you playing the innocent. You are up to your old tricks. You might just as well level with us.’
‘I have nothing to tell you,’ I said. ‘What evidence do you have? What the hell am I supposed to have done? I fought off a couple of muggers, and I met with one of the people we use. So what?’
Bret remained cool. ‘That’s just the trouble,’ he said softly. ‘You’ve got the fixed idea that we are on trial – the Department. You carry on as if everyone here should be answerable to you.’
The D-G spoke. It was all a little charade acted out for him to watch of course. A play for which I had not rehearsed my role. The D-G said in his deep fruity voice: ‘Your brother-in-law is a mischief-maker. Everyone here knows that. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the accusations he brings against you.’
‘I didn’t know he had brought any accusations against me.’ I glanced at Dicky. He looked at me and smiled nervously.
‘No. Exactly. Because his wild accusations are not worth repeating,’ said the D-G calmly. ‘But what have you done to reassure us, Simmons? Very little. Admit it. Haven’t you been hinting that the Department had some sort of complicity – however slight, however tangential – in the death of Tessa Kosinski?’
He paused long enough to tempt me into replying. I said: ‘We let the Swede die. We knew he was going to be murdered and we just let it happen. Isn’t that what we have just heard?’
‘That’s quite different,’ said Bret. ‘There was no alternative. That’s a ridiculous comparison.’
The D-G ignored both my remark and Bret’s too. He said: ‘I have decided to extradite this American fellow Thurkettle.’ Sir Henry delivered this pronouncement in an august manner that made no reference to other men. Silas was not to be mentioned, let alone my conversation with Silas. ‘Any questions that may have formed in your mind,’ he said, staring at me, ‘will be answered at the Board of Inquiry. It’s the fair thing to do. Perhaps we should have done that last year, at the time it happened.’ The English have an obsession about fairness, and the D-G was very English.
‘Will the Americans extradite Thurkettle?’ I asked.
‘I have been given assurances at the highest level,’ said the D-G. ‘But once the process starts there is no telling where it will end. The Americans will protest if they think their man is being treated unfairly. Object on a point of principle.’ He sniffed. ‘We might end up in open court, with you giving evidence.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You saw the fatal shots fired, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did. Thurkettle killed her. I was there.’
‘If it came to a public trial you would be the vital witness – er …’ The D-G stared at me as if trying to recall my name. Dicky was looking at his raincoat hanging on the rack. I couldn’t see Bret’s face; still seated, he was bent over, reaching down to the carpet.
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. He was reminding me that after such a public display I could not be employed by the Department.
‘There is an axiom in Bengal,’ said the D-G. ‘The trackers say that by the time a hunter first sights his tiger, the tiger has seen him one hundred times.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But who can rely upon what a tiger claims?’ It was a warning of course. He was telling me that any time I thought I was two jumps ahead of him and the Department, they would be three jumps ahead of me.
Outside the window the sky became ever more sombre. All morning London had awaited the rain, but the threatened storm had never arrived.
‘Are we going to bury him?’ I said.
‘The Swede: what will happen now?’
Bret abandoned whatever he was bending down to fiddle with on the carpet, and sat up straight in his chair to face me. He had obviously considered the problem already. He rattled off his reply: ‘When the coroner releases the body, if the body isn’t claimed, the Department will provide a proper church burial, and a headstone … Somewhere quiet. We’ll find a village church in the sticks. We don’t let our people down, if that’s the thrust of your question.’
I grinned. For a moment I truly believed Bret must be trying out a deadpan joke. I thought it was only in the opening shots of TV movies that eager spooks staged pretty little country funerals to entice out the heavies of the KGB’s First Directorate. ‘Who’s choosing the hymns?’ I asked.
‘You may go, Simpson,’ said the D-G. I got up, glad to be offered an escape.
‘Samson,’ said Bret, once again bent over and hidden behind the table.
‘What’s that Bret? Speak up,’ said the D-G in the loud voice that is a symptom of deafness.
‘His name is Samson,’ said Bret, in a voice that revealed his bad mood. I guessed he was trying to brush the dog-hairs from his trouser legs.
‘Charity. Charity,’ called the D-G in the low firm tenor voice with which he always hailed his dog, taxi-drivers and anyone on the other end of a telephone. ‘Charity, come here.’
The dog groaned and shuffled towards its master. I’d always heard him call the dog ‘C’, and believed it to be named after the D-G’s august Departmental predecessors. It shows how easy it is to get things wrong.
7
Hennig Hotel, Berlin
Cindy Prettyman had grown older; we all had. The amusing, friendly and attractive girl I once knew was divorced, middle-aged and devoting all her energy to her career. This did not mean she was not still an attractive woman. In some ways the chic confidence she’d acquired with her responsibilities and her travelling had made her more interesting. The gloom of the hotel bar, lit only by a couple of tiny wall fittings, and the flickering light from the TV, flattered her.
Having greeted me, she assumed a pose. One hand held her fur-lined raincoat open to reveal her tailored outfit of black and white check. Pale fingers splayed on her hips, her nails long and red, a selection of rings and bracelets and a fashionable wrist-watch well in evidence. It was a joke, and I grinned to acknowledge it.
Cindy was the epitome of the hard-working and ambitious woman, fighting to survive in a man’s world. And her world was peopled by international finalists in the art of self-advancement. No doubt the ability to switch on a sexy provocative come-on was a valuable part of her repertoire.
‘Cindy! What a lovely surprise,’ I said.
Cindy Prettyman smiled at me and I recognized that expression. She was the indulgent Mother Superior and I was the unwashed choirboy. Her ex-husband had been infatuated with her, and I’d always tried to see her through his eyes. But romantic old Jim was nothing if not a pragmatist. He had gone to other places, other people and other things. Cindy had become a stranger.
The voice of Cindy Prettyman, or Cindy Matthews since she had reverted to her maiden name, had made me jump out of my skin. I was sitting alone in the bar of Lisl Hennig’s hotel where I lived, catching up with the German newspapers while waiting for the bartender to come on duty.
‘Hello, Bernard. I thought I might find you here.’ Big smile.
‘Yes,’ I said, though Cindy had no reason to think I was in the bar of the Hennig Hotel, or even in Berlin. But Cindy was like that: she combined the instinct of the hunter with the steady pulse of a marksman.
‘You haven’t changed, Bernard.’
Jim Prettyman had been a Departmental colleague and pal. He taught me to play snooker and billiards too. And helped me learn how to lose with good grace. We all used to play pool back in the old days: Fiona, Cindy and Jim and me. We were all Foreign Office low-life, with few responsibilities and even less money. We went to a snooker hall in south London every week. Usually we followed up with a spaghetti and steak dinner at Enzo’s in the Old Kent Road. The winner paid.
They were happy days but they didn’t last. Jim’s promotions took him up to the top floor, where he was soon rubbing shoulders with Bret Rensselaer on the Special Operations committee. Then he got a new job in America, changed his name from Jim to Jay, found a new wife and made enough money to have his teeth capped. Cindy – who was already becoming a resolute Whitehall apparatchik – also left England. She was offered a contract working for the European Community or the European Commission or European Parliament, or one of those well-paid jobs with first-class travel and other lush extras that every pen-pusher in the world dreams about. Meanwhile my wife Fiona had completed her caper in East Berlin, returned and got her name in flashing lights over the Department’s marquee. Of the four of us, I was the only one who hadn’t changed, the only one who could still be found in the same haunts that I was frequenting in the old days. And wearing the same suit.
She had got older but her salary seemed to be helping her keep time at bay. Her hair, her facial, her gold baubles, and the fashionable fur-lined raincoat that she threw on to a hanger and hung in the closet, told her story. And she had become French enough to believe that expensive out-fits, fine perfume and extravagant cosmetics were not worth spending money on unless they were kept well in evidence. She grinned. She was the picture of success. She pulled off her headscarf and shook her head to loosen dark hair that had been streaked and restyled. It was cut in a mannish no-nonsense style that meant a minimum of her valuable time spent with the crimpers.
‘I might be coming to Berlin regularly in future,’ she said.
‘Is that a threat or a penance?’
From her large crocodile handbag she got a silver cigarette case and a gold lighter. She’d been born in a region of England up there near the River Humber where the iron-ore fields stretched conveniently close to the coking coal and the limestone flux. Her father grew up in the time when good steel was precious, and Britain’s need for it seemed endless. But nothing lasts forever; not even battleships or empires. Cindy was quick to recognize that. She hadn’t entirely lost her accent. Or perhaps she assumed it for my sake, to show me that her achievements hadn’t made her forget that she was the same little lass with the beer-drinking left-wing Dad, and the Catholic Mum who worked in the laundry.
‘What would you like to drink?’ I asked her.
She lit the cigarette with an elegant flourish and, with the cigarette in her mouth, used both hands to close her handbag. She threw her head back and half-closed her eyes as the smoke crawled up her face. Then she removed the cigarette and said: ‘Would it be possible to have a glass of champagne?’ She wrinkled her nose in a way that Jim Prettyman once told me was cute.
On the TV screen over the bar two white-coated doctors argued in silence. ‘What about the house wine?’ I said. ‘Hungarian, but not bad. They lock up the best stuff in the chilling cabinet when the barman is off duty.’
I went behind the bar, helped myself to an opened bottle of wine, and returned with a glass for each of us. I poured it carefully, knowing that she was studying me to decide how much older I was looking. ‘Gesundheit!’ she said, and smiled before sipping her wine. Then, as if in reaction to the taste of it, she hunched her shoulders. ‘When does it get lively?’ she asked, looking around at the empty bar. The Hennig Hotel had seen some notably boisterous days and nights, but overall it was a place frequented by less-successful business travellers, tourists who didn’t mind going along the hall to find the bathroom, and mysterious men and women who, for reasons of their own, preferred the obscurity such unfashionable accommodation affords. Most abstemious of all there were the elderly long-term residents who eked out their fixed incomes by rationing their eating and drinking. All in all such clientele were not lively in the way that Cindy sought.
‘It varies a lot,’ I said, sinking down on the sofa next to her.
‘It would have to vary quite a lot before get
ting rowdy,’ said Cindy, and laughed, giving a hint of the sort of schoolgirl shrieks that I remembered from the old days.
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘Why are you always such a bastard?’ she said, without much change of demeanour. She leaned forward, slipped off her shoes and massaged her feet with delicate movements of her long fingers. Through the toe of her stocking I could see that her nails were painted gold.
‘Me?’ I said.
‘Let me see my husband,’ she demanded fiercely. ‘How can you be such a brute?’
‘Jim, you mean? Jim, your ex-husband?’
‘You came to Berlin with him. You brought him here. I know. Don’t deny it.’
I would have denied even that, but that would have brought more difficult questions, and it would have been bad security to tell her how I’d been hauled off the Moscow Express and locked up by the Polish secret police. ‘I was on the same train that he was on,’ I admitted. ‘But that was just a coincidence.’
‘Mother of God: don’t lie to old liars, Bernard.’ She touched her foot again. Far above us in the gloom, a muscular doctor went running athletically across a field and climbed into a helicopter with a red cross painted on it. The pilot was female and blonde and young.
‘I thought that was all over – you and Jim.’
‘It is. He bolted off with that American divorcée,’ she said with delicate distaste. ‘You don’t have to be so sensitive, Bernard. You won’t make me burst into girlish tears.’
‘No,’ I said. Envisaging Cindy bursting into girlish tears was something that challenged my imagination. ‘So why?’
She bounced to her feet in a manner that demonstrated a seemingly inexhaustible vitality. Still in her stockinged feet, she went to the bar counter and stretched right over it to grab the neck of a bottle of Scotch. She wrenched it from the rack while grabbing glass tumblers with the other hand. Then she got ice from the ice-maker and threw it into the tumblers, expertly, like a bartender. It shouldn’t have astounded me that she guessed where everything was kept, and put her hands on it so effortlessly. That’s how she’d always been.