by Len Deighton
I riffed quickly through it. I removed a green American passport in the name of Samantha Steel and twenty-two very new crisp 100 NF notes. I put the notes and the passport into my pocket.
‘I thought we had something special,’ said Samantha. She looked shorter than five foot ten now. She was All-American innocent, lost and betrayed in big bad Europe.
‘We still have it,’ I said. ‘But this is business—let’s not mix it with pleasure.’
‘I’ve had all the business I need for a century,’ said Samantha. ‘When do I see the pleasure?’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. I grinned and got a faint movement at the corner of her mouth.
‘I’d like you to know…’
‘Save it, Sam,’ I said. ‘I’m giving you a twentyfour carat deal when all I have to do, as far as my office is concerned, is lift the phone.’
She nodded and unzipped the side of her dress. She removed the dress unhurriedly like a Girl Guide at a medical. Her eyes were waterlogged. ‘It’s the smoke,’ she said. ‘I should never smoke when I’m tired. It wrecks my eye make-up.’ She smiled and planted three inches of unsmoked Camel into the Cinzano ashtray. She walked across the room in her black underwear, oblivious of my eyes. She carefully selected a red-striped wool dress from the wardrobe. ‘It does things for me, red,’ she said.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
She held the dress high above her head. ‘I may as well look my best.’ The dress dropped over her head like a candle-snuffer. Then suddenly she fought against the enveloping fabric in a sudden panic of constricted elbows until her hair shook itself nervously into the light again.
‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘I’m going to my room and I’ll fix both the bills.’
‘You’re a goddam cool ghoul,’ she said in neither admiration nor bitterness. She stared at her reflection while mauling her face around.
I had no baggage in my room. I waited downstairs to see if Samantha was taking the thing sensibly.
I stepped out on to the porch and looked down the road. There was no sign of any movement except for the patter of sand that the sea wind was driving into the doorway. I finished my cigarette on the porch while the freezing night air was purging the last heaviness of the wine from my head. I stared towards the headland that stretched along the western horizon; only a few yards beyond it was Spain. The crippled, stunted trees along the plage pointed there.
The cases went on to the back of the Mercedes 220 SE. I put the heater on and we both sat quietly listening to the noise of the fan. I started up and the car bumped down over the kerb. The plage was dark and, apart from the howl of the wind, silent. It wasn’t until we turned on to the main road that I switched on the lights. The speedometer changed colour as I put the accelerator down and chased after the long horns of yellow light.
‘Looks like you got the booby prize,’ said Samantha.
‘Looks like it,’ I agreed.
‘You really wanted Johnnie, didn’t you?’
‘If you say so,’ I said.
‘You are determined to be discreet, aren’t you?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. Then Sam snorted with bad temper and fished out her Camels.
‘Cigar lighter is the first one after the radio,’ I said, ‘but don’t be mad if your eye make-up runs.’ We drove in silence for a long time. Then Samantha said, ‘You’re cuter than Vulkan.’ She leaned across and gave me a perfunctory kiss on the ear lobe. ‘Personally,’ she went on, ‘I think you are a doll. Vulkan on the other hand…’ She was speaking slowly and quietly as though working out her attitude as she told me, ‘Vulkan is a thorough-going, dyed-in-the-wool, black-hearted, London-shrunk, copper-bottomed bastard.’ She didn’t raise her voice even slightly. ‘But Vulkan is a genius. Vulkan has a mind like a diamond while you have a mind like glass.’
‘Commerical diamond versus hand-cut crystal glass,’ I said. ‘So I am typecast as the loser?’
‘It’s a one-horse race,’ said Samantha with finality.
The greatest tribute you can pay to a secret agent is to take him for a moron. All he has to do is to make sure he doesn’t act too exactly like one. That was my concern now.
It’s about two hundred kilometres along the N10 to Bordeaux, but it’s a good road and in the early hours only the odd market truck, decked with a multitude of lights, and the slower long-distance stuff from San Sebastian across the frontier shared the road with us. Samantha slept for at least half the journey, which took about three and a half hours; there was no need to burn up any roadspeed records nor to get the man I was going to see out of bed. After Bayonne there is just good, sealed, wide road all the way through the great sullen Landes to Bordeaux. As far as the horizon the seedlings parade, the saplings posture, regiments of stumps march and countermarch. Oceans of standing timber await the executioner’s axe and the occasional scoured black desert of destruction marks the passage of a terrible fire. Behind Sam’s head the graticule of trees glowed with a fiery foliage, like a badly printed colour photo with the red block out of register.
Twig after twig shone red with the hoar frost of dawn until the sun’s corona mixed gold with lead and by some inverse alchemy made clear blue morning. I doused the headlights in the outer periphery of Bordeaux’s suburbs. We began to see lonely cyclists moving with the stiff precise arrogance that early risers acquire. The end walls of houses held gigantic faded advertisements for aperitifs, and a cat’s-cradle of wires caged the cobbled streets. I drove to the Gare St Jean and parked in front of it. The town had its head under a blanket of cloud.
I parked beyond the bus shelter. The cyclopean eye of the Gothic railway station showed 7 A.M. and outside the Hotel Faisan the cane chairs leaned drunkenly against the Formica tables. Workmen were darting into the Bar Brasserie and downing a glass of something warming on their way to work. The roar and clang of a slow-moving dust-cart could be heard from close by and an old woman in black was slopping pails of water across the pavement and scrubbing at it with a broom.
‘Wake up,’ I said, and almost before she was awake Sam was opening a small compact and watching herself dab colours and lotions on her skin.
Two black-clad police motor-cyclists who had been talking outside the Hotel Faisan pulled on their white gauntlets, eased their black leather belts, tugged down the hem of their jackets and in choreographic unison leaned lovingly across their machines, stabbed at the kick-starters and with a graceful jeté and plié moved forward. Gathering speed they leaned into the curve of the road and sped away past the vibrating wooden doors and shutters, leaving a trail of exhaust smoke in the cold air. Samantha shivered.
‘Can we have coffee?’ she said. I nodded.
The tiny bar was crowded. A dozen men in bleu de travail were drinking, talking and breathing garlic fumes and Gauloise smoke into the limited air space. Two of the men made room for us and someone near the door made a joke about him making a pass at the foreign girl. I asked for two coffees with milk in English. You can never despise the conversation of men who work in shipping, if eavesdropping is your stock-in-trade.
‘It’s not too late,’ I said to Samantha. ‘Even now.’
‘To work for you?’ she said. I nodded. She said,
‘On this date that he was slain Many a kind thought dies in Paine.’
I said, ‘Stone cold dead in the graveyard.’
‘I like the work I do already.’ She was fencing around, not sure how much I knew. It was a woman’s game and she began to enjoy it. ‘I couldn’t possibly give that up now,’ she said.
‘No one will suggest you do,’ I said archly.
Samantha gave a snort of rage that made conversation there cease for thirty seconds. ‘You are a cynical swine,’ she said.
I smiled and drank my coffee quietly. The sky was even darker. She smoked the usual half-inch of Camel before dropping it on to the floor and giving it the stiletto-heel treatment. ‘You can scram now,’ I said. I gave her her passport.
‘Give me my money, buddy boy.’
‘That’s not part of the deal,’ I said. ‘You’ve got your baggage. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, peach blossom. Take off.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Samantha said. ‘You bring me all this way before saying it.’
‘DST1 offices are not open in the middle of the night, but…’ I looked at my watch. ‘…my boyo will be in his office in seventeen minutes time.’
‘You sadist.’
‘You’ve got me all wrong,’ I said. ‘You’ve committed no crime against France. They are only going to treat you as an undesirable alien, stamp “nul” on your passport and heave you on to the first ship or plane pointing towards the North American continent. I could have had you picked up in London. They would give you a much tougher time.’
Samantha described me in one pithy indelicate word.
‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ I said. But Sam just repeated the same word in a paucity of invention.
‘Phone some friends—reversing the charges,’ I said. ‘You must have someone in the vicinity who will give you a helping hand.’ I leaned towards her and smiled gently. ‘But don’t put your pretty little head into this operation any more because Helena Rubinstein doesn’t make anything that will stick a head back on to shoulders.’
Samantha walked behind me to the car. I reached her baggage out of the rear seat and put it on the ground. The engine was still warm and the Bosch fuel injector forced me across the station yard in violent acceleration.
In the driving mirror I saw Samantha standing alone. Her big military-style greatcoat of olive mohair was buttoned high against the cold, and grey knitted socks came to just below the knee.
As I steered towards the Cours de la Marne two middle-aged men in belted raincoats came out of the Hotel Faisan and walked towards Samantha.
* * *
1 See Appendix 5.
Chapter 25
Corridor mate: when a king can only move
along an expected route, he can be trapped
by closing the corridor.
Tuesday, October 15th
She was an elderly woman dressed in the black dress that was obligatory in a French Government office. She wheeled an aged art-nouveau trolley in front of her. On the trolley were two dozen cups and saucers, metal filters, some spoons, an earthenware pot with a lid, a gas bottle and a huge stainless steel drum inside which the clear blue gas-flame could be glimpsed. As she carefully removed the lid from the earthenware jar, a strong smell of dark roasted coffee climbed out. She measured the expensive grains into the filters and placing one of each of our cups poured scalding water on to it. She placed two wrapped sugars alongside each cup and wheeled the tinkling clanking juggernaut through the door.
‘I don’t know that she works for West German Intelligence but what else can you suggest?’ I asked him.
Grenade opened the lid of his filter and grimaced at the pain. ‘Every day I burn my fingers.’ He dropped a sugar cube into his coffee, looked up and said, ‘I know your “plausible voice of the simple man” and I know that you are just using us for your own ends.’
‘So forget her,’ I said. ‘Forget I ever said anything about Vulkan, the girl or Louis Paul Broum.’
Grenade wrote something on his notepad.
‘And, as you well know, I can’t do that; no more than you could if we were sitting in your office with the roles reversed. Tell me.’ He lifted the lid again. ‘It’s ready now. Why did you take so much trouble with this girl and yet let the man go free?’
Through the French windows the sky was almost black. I looked around at Grenade’s office: the brown-stained wainscoting, the plaster walls discoloured in patches near the ceiling and the oldfashioned metal radiators under which a rash of cream-coloured pimples proclaimed the haste of a clumsy painter. On the wall a pendulum paced the glass confines of its cage.
‘We still need the man,’ I said. On Grenade’s desk was a wrought-metal device like a toy merry-go-round; the ‘riders’ were shiny bulbous rubber stamps. Grenade spun the merry-go-round. He laughed a soft little laugh. ‘Ask me,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear the suspense.’
‘Well naturally,’ I said, ‘we would like you to let him move freely at least for the next week or so, but I’d like you to take a look at him, tell me what he’s carrying, then let him go.’
Grenade shook his head and smiled; the first drops of rain smacked the window. ‘It’s not undeserved, you know, this reputation you Englishmen have gained.’
‘You can have the girl,’ I said indignantly. ‘She’ll show you the whole network if you play her right. All I want…’
Grenade waved a long bony hand at me. ‘It’s a bargain if you answer me one question.’ He didn’t wait to see if I agreed. ‘But the truth now, don’t try to deceive me or I shall be angry.’ It had begun to rain steadily and a complex rivulet of water was moving under the French window.
‘You’ll have the truth or silence,’ I said. The radiator made a noise like a machine gun. Grenade stretched out a long thin elegant leg and, steadying his hands on the desk, gave it a powerful kick. The noise stopped. Still looking at the painted metal radiator, Grenade said, ‘How did you know that we had Vulkan under surveillance?’
‘I knew that STASI1 knew where the girl was. In fact, they deliberately leaked the information to us. It seemed probable that if they had had a consort watch2 on this girl you would be watching the watchers and the watched.’ Grenade gave me a deep bow of mock dignity and mock gratitude. A fierce gust of wind made the glass of the French window move in its frame.
‘If they had told me that the girl was in Paris, I wouldn’t have jumped to any such conclusion. But Hendaye; if you dropped an “h” in your paternoster they’d know out as far as the three-mile limit.’
Grenade kicked the central heating again and said, ‘Sounds all right.’
I polished my spectacles and tried to look like the respectable type of Englishman. I wondered how much of it Grenade swallowed. It wasn’t too far from the truth but then no lie worth the name ever was. I had got the tip from East Germany even though it was from Red Army Command Security and not from STASI. He had said that Hendaye was the place, although he had talked of the man, not the girl. What about the girl? Working for West German Security certainly made it hang together better as far as Grenade was concerned. As for the girl, she had to start looking out for herself one day.
Grenade got up from his desk and walked across to a roll-front cabinet. Out of it he slid a drawer of a card file index. He took one card back to his desk. He read the card through and flipped it to scan the back. ‘Right then,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that for you.’ Like a man promising delivery on a vacuum cleaner.
I stood up abruptly and resting the flat of my palm upon his desk I leaned my face close to him. I noticed a small scar on his forehead and the way hair grew from only one nostril. ‘You’ll be thanking me for doing you a favour the next time you are in London,’ I said softly.
Grenade languidly spun the merry-go-round, selected a rubber stamp and printed the word ‘Nul’ on the back of my hand. ‘Don’t press your luck,’ he said, then he offered his thin hand across the desk and shook my hand firmly. ‘Take care,’ he said, ‘it’s a nasty vicious city.’
‘I’ll only be in Berlin a few more days,’ I said.
‘I meant London,’ he said drily. He rang a small bell on his desk and a slight young man with a haircut en brosse and rimless spectacles opened the door.
‘Albert will take you down,’ said Grenade. ‘It will save all sorts of complications at the door. We have gone terribly secret since the last time you were here.’ Grenade smiled again.
I followed Albert down the staircase that curved around the inside of the huge stair-well. Halfway down I heard Grenade’s voice. I looked up the great vertical tunnel into the glare of an overhead skylight. Grenade was leaning over the balcony. He looked minute in this great stone building, full of carefully penned archives and aged bureaucrats scratching quietly in a si
lence broken only by the clink of nib against inkwell. Grenade called again, almost whispering the words, ‘As a liar, my friend, you are incorrigible.’ The perspective of the great curves of balustrade repeated themselves as far as infinity, like the echoes of Grenade’s whisper. I saw his head prise a way through one of the smallest rings and smile.
‘The word,’ I said, ‘is professional.’ I started again down the staircase of this Caligarian cabinet. I knew that it would take ages to get that marking ink off my hand. I rubbed it self-consciously.
* * *
1 East German Intelligence Security Service.
2 Consort watch: knowing where someone is (eg by bribing a concierge) but not necessarily watching them all the time.
Chapter 26
The skilled player memorizes and uses the classic
sequences of the games of masters.
Tuesday, October 15th
Bordeaux occupies a special semantic importance in the minds of all Frenchmen (as Munich does to Britons). In 1871, in 1914 and in 1940 Bordeaux was the city to which the French Government fled, yelling ‘Stand firm!’ over their shoulder. Each large hotel knew the influx of folding chairs and filing cabinets, typewriters and armed sentries. As I drove past them I remembered June 1940; Bordeaux was the halfway house between Verdun and Vichy.
I pressed the accelerator; at this stage of the game, speed had acquired an importance. I moved the Mercedes Benz 220 SE through the gear box. The steering was sensitive at high speeds and the hydraulic damper on it made the controls quietly accurate. Most of the traffic was slow stuff setting out from Bordeaux and after half an hour the road was mine. I kept the speedometer at 150 kph for long stretches and told myself over and over it wasn’t a morning wasted.
I passed the Casino on Hendaye-plage and eased down the Boulevard de la Mer as unobtrusively as I knew how. I bumped up the kerb and parked in the exact position I had been before. Vulkan’s Cadillac Eldorado was in the same position too. There was no sign of movement anywhere even at 10.40 A.M. I pushed open the front door. From the kitchen there was the noise of a kettle being filled. I went up to my room. The ‘Do not disturb’ notice was still on the door-knob. I turned the key and pushed the door gently open, standing a little behind the door-frame. I went through everything they taught me at Guildford but there was no need—Vulkan was still miles away. I poured myself a stiff whisky from a bottle in my case. I set the alarm mechanism on my wristwatch for dinner time and went to bed. There was nothing more I could do for the time being. It was just a matter of letting matters simmer. When something came to the boil I would hear the rising steam.