Charity

by Len Deighton

  Frank filled up his pipe bowl with the dark brown muesli that he liked to burn. There came the sudden flare of a match as he set light to it while making little spluttering sounds. Once it was alight, he exhaled smoke, and with a contented smile asked: ‘Dicky? Servile grovelling? Or taking the blame?’

  ‘It’s no good Dicky trying to dump this one on to me, Frank,’ I said. ‘I submitted a report after being sent down to see George Kosinski. It’s on file. It recommends his immediate release. We won’t get anywhere with him by locking him up in Berwick House. You know George.’

  ‘No, I don’t know George. Tell me about him.’

  ‘Reflective, self-righteous, single-minded, and with more than a touch of the Old Testament.’

  ‘So why won’t locking him up and interrogating him get us anywhere?’

  ‘Because he’s sanctimonious. Devout. He goes to Mass early in the morning whatever the weather. Forgives his wife all her many sins. And goes on forgiving her when she sins relentlessly. He won’t become anxious or angry or repentant. He’ll see Berwick House as a chance to live the cloistered meditative life he’s always secretly hankered after.’

  ‘Is that really what you think?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘I don’t know George Kosinski. He’s almost family for you of course.’

  He was smoking happily now, poking at his pipe bowl with the blade of a penknife, and attending to every strand of burning tobacco with all the loving care of a locomotive engineer. Or a dedicated arsonist. He looked at me. ‘This is off the record, Bernard. Strictly sub rosa. You tell this to anyone and I’ll deny it.’

  ‘Okay, Frank.’

  ‘If you want my theory, it was George who arranged the killing of his wife.’

  ‘George? Had Tessa killed?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Bernard.’

  ‘I’m not upset. I just can’t follow your reasoning.’

  He nodded. ‘You are too close to it, of course. But George had the motive, the opportunity. And we know he had money enough.’

  ‘To pay a hit man?’

  ‘Of course. You told me, you saw her shot. You said it was some mad American who did it. A professional killer, wasn’t he? Or is it your theory that the American killed her for some personal reasons that we are not party to?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. For a moment I considered telling him about my conversation with Uncle Silas. But it was better kept to myself.

  ‘I’ve shaken you, I can see. I didn’t intend that, old lad.’

  ‘It was certainly a contract killing,’ I said doggedly. Then I admitted: ‘It could have been something between Tessa and the American. If they were having an affair. I think she might have been getting drugs from him. But …’ I couldn’t get my thoughts in order.

  ‘Come along, Bernard. Forget all those might-have-been excuses. When are you going to start looking soberly at the facts? She had betrayed her husband on a long-term basis. Lover after lover. You’ve told me this, and it was common knowledge. On the weekend of her death she was betraying her husband with another man, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She was sharing a Berlin hotel room with Dicky Cruyer,’ I said, to see how Frank responded.

  Frank ignored this reference to Dicky. He said: ‘How must George have felt? Ask yourself that. Humiliated beyond measure.’

  ‘George is a Catholic.’

  ‘That doesn’t make him a saint. It only makes him someone who can’t be released from a nightmare situation by means of divorce.’

  ‘No, not George.’ And yet … Could George have found a way of contacting Thurkettle and paid him to go a whole lot further than Silas wanted?

  ‘No, not good old decent George. Will you start using your brains, Bernard. Your brother-in-law has been deeply involved with Polish spy agencies for years. You saw the effortless way he made contact with that ex-CIA hoodlum Timmermann, and employed him to go prying into the KGB compound in Magdeburg. God knows how much money he paid him.’

  ‘We don’t know that George sent him there,’ I said, without putting much spirit into it.

  ‘All we know is that Tiny Timmermann died there. We also know that Timmermann was the sort of ruffian who will do anything for money, and we know that George admitted to paying him money …’ Frank paused. ‘You told me that, Bernard. George said he was employing him.’

  ‘Yes. To investigate. To find out what had happened to Tessa.’

  Frank took the pipe from his mouth and gave all his attention to the smouldering tobacco: ‘I wasn’t at the meeting between Timmermann and George. And neither were you, Bernard.’

  I didn’t answer. I sat there and let Frank blow tobacco smoke across the room at me.

  Finally Frank said: ‘Reflective, self-righteous, single-minded; and a touch of the Old Testament. Exactly right for someone who would plan a premeditated killing of an unfaithful wife by a third party. The killing to take place during the weekend she was sinning.’

  ‘Yes, Frank. You don’t have to draw a diagram for me. Very Old Testament. You are right. It is possible.’ I said it in a way that meant I thought it was extremely unlikely. He knew I was unconvinced, but my concession satisfied him.

  ‘Are you thinking of going there?’ Seeing my puzzlement, he added: ‘To this place, Schlema? For Dicky. The radium place?’

  He had put a finger on what was still pushed far into the back of my mind. Dicky was devious. It was only a short step from ‘What do you think about Schlema?’ to ‘Why don’t you step across and take a look at it, Bernard, old boy?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I wasn’t thinking of going there personally.’

  ‘It’s always bad luck to be good at something you don’t want to do.’ He looked out of the window. ‘Or to be good at something dangerous. My brother-in-law Alistair suffered like that. He was a pilot in Bomber Command in the war. Pathfinders; showered with medals. God knows how many bombing raids he did. He was the best, so they kept sending him. Again and again and again, long after he was worn out. He didn’t enjoy it.’

  ‘I don’t remember meeting your brother-in-law.’ I’d known Frank almost all my life, and yet I’d never heard about his brother-in-law until this moment. How strange it is that some intimate aspects of those we know so well remain a firmly closed book. And yet perhaps in this case not so strange. Spending your life here in Berlin with German friends would not encourage anyone to recount stories about close relatives who had excelled in bombing their cities to rubble. ‘Is that why your son wanted to fly?’ I asked. Against Frank’s advice his son had become an airline pilot. His promising career came to a sad and dismaying end some years later, when he failed his medical.

  ‘Yes. My boy lapped up all those flying yarns he read at school. It was my fault as much as anyone’s. I was always telling him stories about Alistair. Alistair was a lovely man. No, you never met him, Bernard. He bought it in that big raid on Nuremberg – March forty-four. A massacre for Bomber Command. My sister married again within the year: a man from the same squadron. She was only a child; she lived only for Alistair. When the telegram came she almost died of grief. I think she was trying to find some fragment of Alistair in the man she married. Perhaps she found it, I don’t know. They are still married.’

  ‘How can you be sure your brother-in-law didn’t enjoy his bombing? Some men enjoy being heroes.’

  ‘Not Alistair. He left a diary in a locker in his room. His batman had the key: he sent the diary to me. Thank God he didn’t send it to Emma. It was a chronicle of concealed torment. Not just for himself, but for the men he sent out each night. Poor Alistair. I burned it eventually.’

  ‘If someone has to go over there, it had better be me,’ I said as I reflected upon the alternatives. ‘At present there is no one else I’d feel happy to send.’

  ‘You’ll stay here,’ said Frank. ‘I’ll make that clear to Dicky, and anyone else in London who argues. You are more useful here. I don’t want you schlepping around their blo
ody uranium mines. It’s too dangerous and you’ve done your share – far more than your share – of those jobs.’

  ‘There is no one else to use. You know that.’

  ‘What did that wretched woman want?’

  ‘Woman?’

  ‘In the bar at Lisl’s last night. Come along. No one is spying on you. I just happened to be passing as she was coming out. She didn’t recognize me, thank God. I know everyone says she’s hard-working and amazingly efficient, but I simply can’t stand her.’

  ‘Mrs Prettyman?’ It was something of a relief to know that Cindy’s networking didn’t extend into Frank’s office.

  ‘She’s been sniffing around Berlin for almost a week. What is she up to, Bernard?’

  ‘She wants to talk to her husband.’

  ‘What husband? Ex-husband? If you mean that fellow Prettyman …’

  ‘Yes, she wants to talk to him. She says she has a box of papers belonging to him.’

  ‘I’d treat that with a certain amount of reserve. She has a reputation as a trouble-maker. And this is a domestic quarrel.’ He pursed his lips. ‘What the devil is she doing here?’

  ‘She said she was sent here to work,’ I said. ‘Only for a few days.’ I could see that Frank was getting worked up and I wanted to defuse his anger. I didn’t tell him she was staying with the Volkmanns. Werner had enough trouble fitting into Frank’s domain without that.

  ‘You know she went to the funeral of your pilot friend?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that,’ I said.

  ‘In England. She talked to everyone there. Asking questions and making a nuisance of herself. Dicky sent someone along to make a video of all the mourners … everyone who attended. She was the only surprise, Dicky said.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You persist in thinking that Dicky is a complete fool. You made a joke about him setting up a funeral to discover who would attend. But sometimes such obvious devices prove valuable.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling deflated.

  ‘What was her motive? What could be her interest? Was she close to the pilot? Is there a security aspect?’

  ‘As I say, she is very keen to make contact with her husband. I suppose she heard about the Swede’s funeral – she always seems to know what’s going on – and was hoping Prettyman would turn up there too.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of it. I don’t trust that woman. Find out what she’s up to.’

  ‘I’d rather go after the Radiumbad.’

  ‘Of course you would,’ said Frank. ‘So would anyone.’

  ‘What about the report for Dicky?’

  ‘Dicky’s uranium mine can go on hold for the time being. I’ll get Werner on to it. We have other tasks more urgent. I shall tell Dicky that.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘My son has decided to go and live in Melbourne.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Australia.’

  ‘Yes.’ I looked at Frank. He doted on his son. To be told he was planning to go to Australia must have been one of the worst things that had ever happened to him.

  ‘I’ll miss him.’ It was the ultimate understatement. Frank’s relationship with his wife had dwindled to a point where she was spending most of her time in England. He lived only for his son.

  ‘It’s a small world nowadays,’ I said. ‘People fly across the world, backwards and forwards all the time.’

  ‘My boy told me the same thing.’ Frank opened a brown file and looked down at the letters that were waiting to be signed.

  Thus dismissed, I went back to my office to check my incoming afternoon work. The dark skies of Berlin’s winter were oppressive. I switched on the desk lights, the overhead fluorescent lights and every other light I could find, including the ones in the corridor. My secretary watched me do this. If she was surprised she gave no sign of it.

  ‘Don’t you ever feel like going off to live some place where the sun burns the skin off you all year round?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no, Herr Samson. That would be carcinogenic.’

  She had opened everything already. When I sat down, she came and stood by my desk to make sure I didn’t toss the difficult ones into the pending box. She was very German.

  I went through it quickly. At the bottom of the tray there was a bulging brown manila envelope. It was not internal mail. It had been posted in London using a long strip of Christmas commemorative postage stamps. The cover was already slit open, so I tipped the contents out. A shower of rose petals fell upon my desk. They were crisp and brown and dead, and there was a brittle piece of stem and a curly leaf with charred edges. I looked inside the envelope. There was nothing else. Just the remains of my roses. They had not died a natural death; there hadn’t been time enough. These were petals from red roses that had been scorched, or perhaps rescued at the last moment from an open fire. I wondered what my German secretary thought of this tacit message. I looked at her but she gave no sign of what she was thinking.

  I dictated my way through the daily stuff from London. When we were finished I said: ‘Did we ever get the police reports I asked for? The ones for the night Mrs Tessa Kosinski died?’

  ‘I thought you had finished reading them.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘I will bring the file,’ she offered.

  ‘Don’t bother. There was almost nothing. I’d like to spread the net wider.’ I went to the map on the wall of my office. ‘Look at all these jurisdictions … The shooting took place here. Assume someone left the Autobahn at any one of these exits. Here, here or here.’

  ‘Each jurisdiction? Towns and villages too? Every one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I ask you what we seek?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Drunks. Dangerous driving. Trucks illegally parked. Accidents. Wrecks. Property lost and found on or near the highway. Anything unusual in even the smallest way.’

  She wrote it down.

  I thought about Thurkettle’s possible movements. ‘What would I have done had it been me?’

  ‘I don’t know, Herr Samson.’

  I had spoken aloud without realizing it. I wouldn’t drive eastwards, would I? It would be too dangerous to go East after a shoot-out that had wiped out a couple of important Stasi men. What fugitive would head towards a land brimming with cops, and endless demands for signed papers with rubber stamps? No, I would drive along the Autobahn westwards. It would be cold and dark. How do I feel? I feel lousy. I’m driving fast, but not fast enough to get a ticket or to get noticed by other road users. I’m hyped up but I feel lousy. I stink of fear and sweat and dirt and spilled blood. I need somewhere to hide for five minutes while I collect my wits. But there is no one I can trust. So I want an empty house, not an apartment, a house, an isolated house. Because I like to do the hard bits first, I would want to get across the border before stopping. I would choose a lonely spot just across the border in the Federal Republic and near an exit from the Autobahn. Why near an exit? Because I might choose to get back on the Autobahn. It’s night; I might decide to put as many miles behind me as I can. But then another thought came to me. If I was dirty and bloody and conspicuous I might want to have somewhere to clean up before going through the checkpoint.

  There would have to be a rendezvous with my paymaster. I will be paid off and change my clothes and my ID and pick up my tickets or whatever I needed. Hits were always like that. There was always someone waiting at a rendezvous. If not a someone, a somewhere, a place of refuge. I had never heard of a hit man working without back-up. And I’d never heard of a hit man being paid one hundred per cent in advance. Somewhere that night there had been a contact. And that meant the chance that some cop or nosy neighbour had seen it happen. There had to be some clue somewhere, but I had no idea what it might be.

  And then a likely solution came to me. ‘It’s got to be one of those camper vehicles,’ I told her. ‘That’s the sort of thing I’m looking for.’ That could be placed wherever it was wanted. He could use it
to wash and change. Then he could use it as a vehicle in which the journey could be resumed under a different name, and with all the necessary papers. ‘A camper,’ I said aloud. That’s why he used a motorcycle to get to and from the killing. His plan was beginning to make sense to me.

  ‘I will require a person to help.’

  ‘Parked overnight on some isolated stretch of road near one of the exits, but not on the Autobahn where a cop might stop and check it.’ Stopping on the DDR’s Autobahn was verboten. ‘Talk to all the West German cops who were riding in cars that night, riding anywhere in the vicinity of the exit ramps. Asking for written reports was the wrong way to do it. Talk on the phone. Talk to them in person.’ I would have to tackle the DDR side myself.

  ‘How near to the Autobahn? One kilometre? Five kilometres?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t want to extend it too far or it will give you too many cops to contact. Tell them we are after a serial killer, I don’t want them to think we are chasing up parking tickets.’

  ‘I will require help.’

  ‘Five kilometres. Start right away. It’s the nightshift cops you want. Take anyone you need … within reason,’ I added quickly in case she did something crazy, like demanding help from Frank’s secretary. Or Frank.

  8

  Horrido Club, Berlin-Tegel

  Tegel, West Berlin’s third airport, was built in a hurry. In a vindictive attempt to squeeze the Anglo-American armies out of the capitalist ‘island’ that defaced their communist domain, the Russians suddenly blocked the road links with the West. They cut off everything, even the long-standing delivery of Swedish Red Cross parcels for hungry Berlin children. The US Air Force, the RAF and a varied assortment of civilian fliers supplied the city by air. In that feverish climate of resentment and hatred a new airport was built. It materialized here on the flat land of Tegel on the edge of a sector of town that the Americans and British had given to the French so they could play conquerors. The airfield was operational after little more than eight weeks, built with American engineers directing German labourers, almost all of whom were female. Without notice, two Red Army radio masts in line with the approach were blown away. Angry Russian generals demanded an explanation. The French Commandant disarmingly replied that it was all done with dynamite.