by Len Deighton
I jumped down most of the short staircase, and stepped across the tiny room. Dean turned and raised his fist. He was a giant, and now he rose above me like the Statue of Liberty. I took the blow of his fist upon my arm. It hurt but it didn't prevent me wrenching the metal top from the stove. I stuck my right hand into the flames and found the stove filled with papers. There were bundles of paper tied so tight that they would not burn. I smelled paraffin, and, as I started to pull the great handfuls of paper from the stove, it all ignited. There was a 'woof of flame that licked up round the saucepans and utensils hanging inside the chimney piece. I dropped the flaming bundle, and beat at the flames that were coming from my sleeve.
'You stupid bastard, Hank! Why didn't you tell me?' It was Mann's voice. He switched on the electric light, to help us see the gun he was holding. I beat out the flames on my sleeve, and stamped upon the last remains of the burning papers.
'Don't worry about rescuing that stuff,' Mann said. 'This whole goddamned house is full of it.' I could see now what I was stamping upon. The floor was covered in paper money. There were French francs, Swiss francs, German marks, U.S. bills, sterling and even Lebanese and Australian money. Some of the notes were charred along the edges, some almost completely destroyed, some were crisp, new and undamaged, some were old and dog-eared But all of them were of high denomination. There must have been one hundred thousand dollars' worth of currency on the floor of that kitchen, and we found at least as much again when we took up the floorboards.
'Get nothing out of a guy within three hours and you'll get nothing for three weeks.'
'If there's anything to get.' I reminded him. It was early.
A couple of starlings were pecking at last night's breadcrumbs, and the cows in the next field were moving over to the gate ready to go to the milking shed.
'Do you believe the money arrived by parcel post two days ago?' Mann asked.
'Hank was poor — broke, in fact — naturally he'd try to hang on to it, and hope we'd go away.'
'I would have called C.I.A. Langley within the hour,' said Mann with simple truth.
'You're not natural, and neither am I. And that's why we're investigating Dean, instead of him investigating us.'
'Yeah, well I was wondering about that,' said Mann, and was able to smile at the absurdity of having principles that might cost so much.
'Don't worry,' I said. There's no one in Moscow planning to send us a quarter of a million dollars in used paper money.'
'I'm more worried by the chance that Hank Dean will…'
'Try to do a deal with the French,' I completed it.
'He wants to stay here,' said Mann. 'And he wants that desperately.'
'Not much in it for the French,''! said. 'A probe into our way of working, a bit of I told you so, but they'd have to give it to us in the end.'
'In the end,' said Mann. 'Yeah, that's the place they'd give it to us. What's it going to cost them — one French passport.'
'And American goodwill.'
Mann made his tobacco noise. 'I hate leaving him down there with those French cops talking to him.'
'Well, let's take another look round this place,' I said. I moved the corner cupboard that was filled with Hank Dean's classical gramophone records. 'The C.I.A. guy from the embassy should be here soon. Then we can go, and take Hank Dean with us, if that's the way you want to play it.'
Mann paced up and down. 'This is a guy who stays in all the time. We can guess that from the mileage clock in the car. He's not running round Europe like a courier.'
'At least not in that car,' I corrected him gently.
'Not in any car,' said Mann tartly. 'Look at him — face fungus, all that hair — he'd stand out like a sore thumb, any place he stopped.'
'I agree,' I said. Mann moved his thinking on a stage. 'So they come here. Same guy or different guy?'
'Same guy — no one knocking on doors asking for Dr Dean in a foreign accent late at night.'
'I buy that,' said Mann. He looked round the tiny room. 'You know something,' he said. 'This is just about the dirtiest, smelliest dump I've ever been in.' He looked at me to get my reaction.
'Well, you're always complaining about the crummy places you find yourself in,' I told him. 'If this is the worst, it must be something for the record books.'
Mann gave me a humourless little smile. 'Look at that frying-pan. It hasn't been cleaned in an age.'
'It's an omelette pan,' I explained. 'You never wash omelette pans, it spoils the surface for all time.'
'I should have known you'd find an excuse for filth,' said Mann. 'Now you're going to tell me the downstairs toilet never has to be cleaned, in case it spoils the surface for all time.'
'I don't spend as much time in the toilet as you do,' I said. 'I get in and get out again, I don't spend a lot of time looking around.'
'Yuck,' said Mann.
'But you start me thinking,' I said.
'You mean you're going to start using laundries and showers, and take a haircut from time to time?'
'Suppose Hank Dean's courier felt the same way about this place that you do.'
'He'd arrive after lunch and take off at tea-time,' said Mann.
'Complicated material,' I said. 'You said it would need six or seven hours of explanation.'
'Well, I'll stick by that,' said Mann.
'So suppose the courier checked in to the Hostellerie.'
'Hostellerie du Chateau?' said Mann. This flea-pit at the end of the alley?'
'No other,' I said.
'You don't imagine he left a forwarding address, do you?'
'I'll take a look if you don't mind, Major,' I said.
'I'll come with you. What have we got to lose.'
The roadway was surfaced in loose gravel. This back road did not even qualify for a French map numeral. Not many cars came along here. Outside the Hostellerie, a battered van was parked, and a mangy dog tried to break from its chain and, having failed to do so, snarled at us. There were two people in the bar, both dressed in greasy black suits. Behind the bar there was a fragile-looking man, in a threadbare shirt and denim trousers. His hair was wispy and grey, and he peered myopically from behind thick, rimless spectacles.
'Two beers,' I said.
He reached behind him, opened a wood-faced refrigerator, found two Alsace lagers and slammed them on the counter. The men in black suits ended their conversation abruptly. The barman rinsed two glasses under the tap and pushed them towards us. 'Visiting the doctor,' he said. It was not a question.
'That's right,' I said. I had already discovered that all the villagers called Hank Dean the doctor. It was probably the way he was referred to on his pension envelope.
'Not many visitors at this time of year,' said the barman. If he had seen the policemen arrive to collect Dean, he was not admitting it.
'I want to talk to you about that,' I said. There is one particular friend of the doctor whom we must get in touch with.'
'Oh,' said the barman.
'Came every few weeks,' I said.
'Perhaps,' said the barman.
'Did he stay here?' Mann put the question too hurriedly.
'Are you the police?' said the man.
'Yes,' I said, but Mann had already said no. The barman looked from one to the other of us, and allowed himself that vacuous smile which peasants reserve for government officials. 'A sort of police,' I continued. 'A sort of American police.'
'The F.B.I.?' offered one of the men in black.
'Exactly,' I said.
'What has the doctor done?' asked the barman.
I tried to see in his face whether he would prefer to see the doctor exonerated, pursuing criminals or taken away in a small black van. Unsure of myself I said, 'The doctor is accused of defrauding an American bank.' I turned to Mann and raised an eyebrow as if seeking his permission to take the old man further into our confidence. Mann, playing along with the game, nodded sagely. I leaned across the counter and said, 'Now we are beginning to think he
is innocent. We need to find this man who visited the house.'
'Why won't the doctor tell you?' the man asked.
It was a hell of a good question. 'That's a very good question,' I told him. 'But it's a rule of the underworld. Even when you can help yourself, you never help the police.'
'Of course,' said Mann hurriedly. 'That doesn't apply to citizens. It doesn't apply to people who obey the law, and suffer from the criminals. Especially,' he added archly, 'especially it doesn't apply to licensed innkeepers.'
'The man you seek is young and slim, with hair that covers his ears. He wears the sort of clothes they wear in the Riviera- fancy silk neckerchiefs, tightly tailored trousers that show everything, and cheap imitation-leather jackets of all shapes and sizes and colours.'
'Shut your mouth, you old fool.'
A young man had entered the bar from a door marked 'private'. He was about twenty years old, wearing a large black droopy moustache and dressed in a phoney U.C.L.A. sweat-shirt and faded jeans. Around his wrist he wore a studded leather support, of the sort that old prize-fighters sometimes need. Tell these people nothing,' he said. 'They are Americans, capitalist police spies…'
'Now hold it, son,' said Mann mildly.
I think it was the gentleness of Mann's tone that incensed the boy. Feeling that he was not being taken seriously, he called us pigs, reactionary oppressors and Gestapo. One of the old men at the other end of the bar smiled derisively. Perhaps he remembered the Gestapo.
The boy saw the old man smile. He grabbed my sleeve in an attempt to drag me from the bar. He was stronger than he looked, and I felt a seam give way under his grip.
'Pig, pig, pig,' said the boy as if the physical exertion had driven all reason, and vocabulary, from his head. All the while he was tearing at my coat, so that I must either move with him or watch it tear apart.
I hit him twice. The first punch did no more than position him, head down and off balance, for the hook that sent him flying across the room. It knocked the breath out of him, and he made that sort of whistling howl with which an express train acknowledges a country station. Two chairs toppled with him, and a table was dislodged, before the boy struck a pile of crates and collapsed to the floor.
'Paid cash,' said the barman continuing as if nothing had happened. 'Never cheque, or those fancy travellers' things; always money.'
'Stayed overnight?' I said. I straightened my clothes and sucked the blood off my grazed fist, which hurt like hell. The boy remained on the floor in the far corner. He was blinking and watching us and mouthing obscenities but he did not get to his feet.
'It varied,' said the barman. 'But he seldom had any baggage with him. Just shaving things.'
'Give me the car registration,' I said.
'I don't have that,' said the man.
'Come along,' I said. 'A hotelier who takes clients without baggage, and doesn't make a note of the car registration. I'm sure you'll find it somewhere. I'll pay you twenty francs for it."
The man reached below the bar to get a battered hotel register. It was a mess of illegible signatures and unlikely addresses. Its pages were creased and ringed with the marks of wine and beer, and goodness knows what else. Hank Dean's guest had not entered his name here but the barman was able to find his own scribbled note of the car registration. He read the number aloud, and I wrote it into my notebook and passed him the twenty francs. He smoothed the note carefully and inspected both sides of it before putting it into his bulging wallet.
'Thank you,' I said.
'There are more,' he said.
'More registration numbers?' I asked.
'Certainly there are.'
'Different ones?'
He nodded.
'Goddamn rental cars,' said Mann.
'Ten francs each,' I bargained.
'Twenty was the price you yourself set,' said the barman.
I looked at Mann. 'But no duplicates,' Mann warned him.
'We'll have the duplicates too,' I contradicted. 'But we must have the dates for each number.'
Page by page the man went through the book until we had a list of dates and numbers going back nearly two years. We finished our beers and drank two more.
'The same registration!' said Mann excitedly. 'That makes four times the same number.' He drained his beer, wiped his mouth and then pulled a face. 'It could be that it's a small rental company, or that he asks for that particular car.'
'I don't think so,' I said. 'Rental companies usually unload their cars every year or two. Those dates are too far apart. Here it is back at the beginning, soon after Dean moved here, and then again last August.'
'Always at holiday times,' said Mann.
'Yes,' I said. 'Always at a time when rental companies might not have had a car available. It must be his own car.'
'The first lucky break we've had,' said Mann.
'Mine host feels the same way about it,' I said as we watched the man tucking a small fortune into his wallet. The man looked up and smiled at us.
'Goodbye and thank you,' I said. 'I'm sorry about the boy.'
'My son had it coming to him,' said the barman. 'But there is eight francs to pay for your beers.'
Chapter Eleven
It took forty-eight hours to trace the car registration. It belonged to a very old four-door Fiat that for over eight years had been owned by Madame Lucie Simone Valentin, a nurse, born in Le Puy in the Haute-Loire, now residing in Paris, at Porte de la Villette, across the canal from one of the biggest abattoirs in Europe.
This particular part of north-east Paris is not noted for its historical monuments, cathedrals or fine restaurants. 'Madame Valentin's home was in a nineteenth-century slum, with echoing staircases, broken light-fittings and an all-pervading smell of stale food. It was just beginning to snow when we got there. Across the street two yellow monsters were eating walls and snorting brick-dust. Number ninety-four was at the very top. It was a garret. Painted up, crowded with antique furniture and sited so as to overlook Notre Dame, it would have been the sort of place that Hollywood set-designers call Paris. But this apartment had no such view. It faced another block, twice as tall and three times as gloomy. There was no chance that Gene Kelly would answer the door.
'Yes?' She had been beautiful once. She wore a handmade sweater that was less than perfectly knitted, and her hair was styled into the sort of permanent wave that you can do at home.
'We would like to talk to you about your car, Madame Valentin,' I said.
'I can explain about that,' she said. 'I thought it would need only new sparking plugs. By the end of the month it will all be paid.' She paused. From the floor below came the sound of tango music.
'We are not from the service station,' said Mann. 'We want to talk to you about Mr Henry Dean.'
'You are Americans?' She said it in good English.
'Cheri,' she called to someone behind her. 'Cheri, it is for you.' To us she said, 'Henry has to be at work at six o'clock.' She pronounced his name in the French manner: Henri.
The concierge had mentioned that a man lived with her. I had expected someone quite different to the pink-faced youngster who now smiled and offered his hand. He was dressed in a newly pressed set of working clothes, a Total badge sewn over the heart.
'I'm Major Mann, U.S. Army, Retired. I work for the State Department in Washington. I'd like to come in and speak with you.'
'I know all about you,' said the boy. 'Dad sent a message. He said he's being held in custody by the police. He said it was all a misunderstanding, but that you guys were straight and you'd do the right thing by him.'
'You're Hank Dean's son?' said Mann.
'Yes, sir, I certainly am,' said the boy. He grinned. 'Henry Hope Dean. Do you want to see my passport?'
'That won't be necessary,' said Mann.
'Come in, come in,' said the boy. 'Lucie darling, get the bottle of Scotch whisky that we were saving for my birthday.'
The room was very clean, and almost unnaturally tidy, like a holid
ay cottage prepared for new arrivals. And, like such rented places, this was sparsely furnished with cheap bamboo chairs and unpainted cupboards. There were some Impressionist reproductions tacked to the faded wallpaper and a lot of books piled on the floor in stacks.
The boy indicated which were the best chairs and got out his precious bottle of whisky. I sat down and wondered when I'd have enough strength to get up again. It was four nights since either of us had had a full night's sleep. I saw Mann sip his Scotch. I poured a lot of water into mine.
'Who would want to get your father into trouble?' Mann asked.
'Well, I don't know much about the work he once did for the Government,'
'We'll talk to other people about that,' said Mann. 'I mean, amongst the people you know, who would want to see your father in trouble, or in prison or even dead?'
'No one,' said the boy. 'You know Dad… he can be ex asperating at times, he can be pretty outspoken, and stubborn with it. I suppose I could imagine him getting into a brawl — but not this kind of scrape. Dad was swell company… is swell company. No one would go to all the trouble of planting a quarter of a million dollars in cash. Why, that's just impossible?'
'It's supposed to look impossible,' said Mann. 'You send a man a bundle of money so big he can't bear to turn it in — then you tell the cops he's got it.' I watched Mann's face, trying to decide whether he already pronounced Hank Dean innocent. He saw me watching him, and turned away.
'Gee, a quarter of a million bucks,' said the boy. 'You'd have to be really sore at someone to leave that kind of bread in his mail box.'
Lucie Valentin came into the room with coffee for us. The cheap crockery was brightly polished and there was a crisply starched linen tray-cover. She put it on the bamboo table, and then sat on the arm of the chair the boy occupied. She put her arm around him in a maternal gesture. 'Perhaps you should go and see your father, darling,' she said. 'You can take the car.'