Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 11

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Which one was trying to teach me about classical music? Which one had just teased me, however inadvertently, with the possibilities in his tale?

  Brahms’s Third is not one of those symphonies that ends with a clash of cymbals. It dwindles to nothing through the plaintive call of woodwind. I watched dust motes, jerked to life by two colossal bass speakers, dance in sunbeams. I looked at what I was certain was the detritus of several lives, as though Bentinck had less furnished the room than simply allowed stuff to gather around him.

  There is an old Tory tale . . . Fred Smith, MP, has the old blue-rinse bags in his constituency over for tea. He thinks it has gone well and that he, nouveau-riche and nouveau-Tory, regional accent dropped, suits newly tailored, past duly buried, has pulled off the stunt. As they are leaving, one dowager says to another, “But my dear, his furniture is bought!”

  In Toryland you do not buy furniture, you inherit it.

  It seemed to me that every item of furniture Bentinck had inherited was now stacked around him, leaving a small pool for his occupation in the centre.

  “Being a Yank I expect you’d like to ruin your scotch with half a pound of ice.”

  “Two cubes would do.”

  Bentinck went to the kitchen. After a bit of banging and smashing he returned with a pudding basin full of ice.

  Helpfully I held out my glass.

  “Not so fast, Sonny Jim.”

  He took the glass off me. Set it down on the table about eighteen inches away from the basin.

  Behind them at about the same distance stood a toy crane made of pressed steel in a flaky red, held together with brass screws. I’d spotted the crane way before. I just didn’t know what it was. Bentinck pointed to the battered cardboard lid of a toy box on the floor.

  Meccano No. 10 Kit. 12 years and over.

  Ah, the hobby listed in Who Gives a Fuck Who’s Who.

  Two boys in the pre-war garb of grey shorts and sleeveless pullovers were making a crane twice the size of Bentinck’s in the dim arc of a reading lamp, all watched over with loving care from the sidelines by a benign, pipe-smoking dad.

  “Indulge me.”

  He cranked levers, wound cable. The crane gently grabbed a couple of ice cubes, swung across the table and plonked them down in my Scotch.

  Bentinck was grinning, then he was laughing that explosive, wheezing laugh of his. Then I was laughing, too. It was so . . . so . . . so wonderfully silly.

  I felt it was the first time we’d actually been on the same wavelength.

  “Down the hatch, eh?”

  “Of course,” he said apropos of nothing. “We could go anywhere we liked in Berlin in ’46. International zone and all that. We could hang out in the caffs in the Russia sector, and they could simply whizz a jeep into any of the Allied sectors and kidnap who the hell they liked off the streets. If they nabbed one poor bugger that way they nabbed a thousand. People could simply vanish. They got Klaus on his own doorstep not 200 yards from the Tiergarten Station. Tortured him in their own sector, dumped him back in ours. I doubt there was much he could have told them. Such a bloody waste.”

  “He could,” I ventured, “have told them about you.”

  “Oh, they knew about me. They had a wall chart up with mugshots of every British Intelligence officer. As an Intelligence officer in Berlin you were marked. You could run a field agent. You couldn’t actually be one. Set foot in the Russian sector and you had a tail in less than a minute. I even had the buggers follow me to the gents. Come to think of it, that was a sure way to find out if you were being followed. Nip to the gents. He follows. Might just be coincidence. So next time nip to the ladies. No German male would ever dare follow me in there. And if the bugger was still outside when I came out, then I knew for certain. If I went into a bar they’d usually park their elbows a dozen blokes away. I’d pay the barman to send a beer down to whoever it was and raise my hat to him. All rather open. A waste of their time, not mine. The only mission I was on was to see how many tails I picked up in a night on the booze.”

  “Not exactly a secret, then?”

  “Oh there are secrets aplenty. Just not in Berlin in ’46. You’ll get your secrets all right. After all, it’s what you came for, isn’t it? It’s what you blokes want, isn’t it?”

  Was this the moment to remind him that it was he who had come to me?

  “Us blokes?”

  He ignored this.

  “I think I’ll spin the shellac again tomorrow. If you’re free, come back for Beethoven. The Seventh. Furtwängler, 1943. Recorded in Berlin while we bombed them to buggery. Not that you can hear the bombs, of course.”

  Could I be surprised that he had nothing better to do on a Friday night when I had nothing better myself?

  It was 3.30 p.m. again. There’s one every day. I was getting used to them. I met with Lucy Devlin, recently down from University College, Dublin, and the author of a “promising” first novel depicting her life and hard times growing up in a Dublin suburb – much of the dialogue rendered in a challenging phonetic transcription.

  Who was my favourite author?

  I felt I was on safe ground with Iris Murdoch, a Dubliner herself, and stuck with “Iris Murdoch”.

  She’d be in touch.

  Of course.

  Two days later I received a postcard saying she didn’t feel comfortable with a man as her agent.

  Well, that was me put in my place.

  It was not that Bentinck offered any explanation of music. There would have been little point if he had, and I think he subscribed to the same notion I did: either you get it or you don’t – or, as they said in my teens, “Can you dig it, man?” Telling me to listen out for a cadenza in Beethoven would have made as much sense to me as pointing out the engine manifold in Mozart.

  What he did – all he did – was create a space in which I was not fussing about anything else. No one was trying to talk; no one was doing anything other than sitting fairly still and listening. An all but impossible condition, unless imposed from without.

  It worked. Furtwängler’s Beethoven blew me away.

  “It was different in Berlin in ’63. Different world, different players. Same game.”

  “What made the difference?”

  “The Wall. Going East became . . . I dunno. More of a risk? Hardly. It was always a risk. They’d never snatch one of us off the streets of West Berlin. But we could always meet with contrived accidents. I suppose the difference was uniforms and side arms became cloaks and daggers. Now, isn’t that just what you wanted to hear? But . . . fifteen years on, fifteen years away from Berlin, fifteen years older, a bag full of fake identities . . . they didn’t know me anymore. I went East without a tail for the first time. I was Georg Feinmann from Charlottenburg, visiting his dear old auntie in Hellersdorf. I was Peter Grosz from Steglitz simply exercising my West Berliner’s right to a stroll in the East.

  “The last big run, the one that did for me, was in the autumn of ’65. The Russians used to have Warsaw Pact troops rehearse taking West Berlin. Every time they did it we didn’t know whether it would stop at the dress rehearsal or carry on for a first night and a curtain call. Would have been curtains for us. We couldn’t stop ’em, after all. Jack Kennedy had stood up in Berlin and declared himself a Berliner in public. In private he’d told Willy Brandt there was no way America would go to war over Berlin. So everything we could find out about their intentions was vital.

  “We had blokes in the East who’d deliver full details of the battle plan as such . . . everything down to the menu in the commissars’ canteen. That October they rumbled us. We were in Bernau . . . big Russian Tank Division HQ in Bernau. I was meeting my snitches. We walked into a trap. Bit of a shoot-out. Both my blokes go down. What they know dies with ’em. I kill three of theirs and run for it. Bernau’s only just east of Berlin, but going back via Berlin looked like suicide. I went south and west. Took eight days. But I’d used up eight of my nine lives. I wasn’t a lot of use to SIS after th
at. I was gracefully retired. Can’t complain. They were bloody decent about it and I knew I was blown. Blown to the point where any Soviet agent probably had a mandate to shoot me on sight their side of the Iron Curtain. Hence I am as you see me now.”

  As he was now was Bentinck in evening mode – and evening mode seemed to begin straight after lunch. Pissed as a fart with half a tin of Ambrosia creamed rice, cold from the tin, down his waistcoat. “As you see me now” had no tinge of regret to it. A remark that was not tongue in cheek. Not a hint of irony.

  “And is this a secret?”

  He snorted into his laughter mode.

  “Secret? Of course it’s a bloody secret!”

  Three-thirty. I met with Izzy Cowper, recently down from Girton, who had written a “promising” first novel depicting her life and hard times growing up in St John’s Wood.

  I switched my answer to Muriel Spark, feeling that Iris Murdoch was jinxing me. A bare-faced lie. I’d never read a book by Muriel Spark. I’d just seen the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with Maggie Smith.

  I liked Izzy. I could represent Izzy.

  Never heard from her again.

  I had sat through the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor. If Bentinck had said it was in Q major I would have believed him.

  “Adolf Busch and chums. Recorded in ’36, I think. Dunno where.”

  I had become his amanuensis as well as his student. He spun the shellac, but I got up and turned the records over. Up and down like a jack-in-the-box. No 78 would play longer than about five or six minutes, and even a relatively short piece of classical music would take up six sides.

  I never had any idea how long Bentinck would play for. When the music finished he usually had a can of something canned and a large shot of something bottled and began his performance after a couple of dessert spoons and one large slug.

  “Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Europe. Radio Free Fucking Europe . . . was a fraud from start to finish. You lot . . .”

  My lot? Ah, now I wasn’t a draft dodger anymore. I was just an American. A representative of my upstart nation.

  “. . . You lot encouraged rebellion, encouraged it in sixteen different languages. You broadcast support and reassurance to people willing to put their lives on the line and then you did nothing. Berlin: nothing. Hungary: nothing. Czechoslovakia: nothing. The promise was hollow . . . America was never going to go to war in Europe again. You could kill all the little yellow rice-munchers you liked in Laos and Vietnam, but you’d never fire a single shot at anyone wearing a Red Army uniform. People died for you.”

  If I’d had a flake of patriotism it might have surfaced at this moment, bobbing on the buoyant hypocrisy that is the moral scheme of your average human being. It didn’t. Why else was I in England? So as not to have to shoot little yellow rice-munchers. C’mon Jack. Tell the truth. I was in England so as not to have little yellow rice-munchers shoot at me.

  “It’s a betrayal beyond measure. You sold a promise, you sold an idea. And even after the great betrayal they cling to the idea.”

  “Mr Bentinck, what idea?”

  “That everyone in the world can be an American. You sold them the promise of the Lone Ranger, Perry Como, fridges, air-conditioning and takeaway pizza. Who the fuck needs ideology? That is your ideology. Of the pizza, by the pizza, for the pizza.”

  Can’t argue with him on that one. Indeed, I couldn’t. He’d passed out again. The custard tin slipped from his hand, the little yellow river started out across his chest on its long journey to the groin.

  After Brahms several days passed without any further invitation to drop by. I took my 400-odd in winnings from Newmarket and found a used hi-fi dealer in the Edgware Road. How much would it get me?

  It got me a pair of matching Quad 405 monoblocs, a 34 pre-amp, Rega turntable and a pair of rather battered Rogers BBC monitors. All British – it would pass any Bentinck test. And all gobbledegook to me, but the man in the shop helped me pile it all into a cab, assuring me I’d got a bargain. Either that or he just cleared all the crap out of his back room in one fell swoop to one fell idiot.

  All wired up on top of my desk – not piled high with all the manuscripts sent in by all the clients I didn’t have – I found one failing. No records. No vinyl and most certainly no 78s. I’d used the last album, Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens, as a frisbee on Primrose Hill. The golden retriever who caught it would not give it back. I should care.

  In Harold Moore’s shop in Great Marlborough Street I bought Schubert’s Death and the Maiden by the Busch Quartet that Bentinck had introduced me to. After that I was out of cash. I went home clutching a record I’d never heard to feed an addiction I’d just discovered.

  It was brilliant stuff. It was miserable stuff. After two consecutive playings I was suicidal. Death and the Dodger.

  Lunch with Syd. The Caprice in Arlington Street. A stone’s throw from the Guards Club.

  I had not taken on a single writer. I could be apologetic. If needs be. But I knew to let Syd make the first move. And if I was due for the sack, would he have taken me to a restaurant as classy as this?

  “I’m glad you’re not rushing into this. An agent needs no more than fifty clients. More than that is unmanageable. And at minimum they should be earning ten grand a year from their work. Make that fifteen, on second thoughts. Had one young chap a few years ago who’d taken on twenty-two writers in the first six weeks . . . most of ’em no-hopers. As I say, glad you’re not rushing into things.”

  The repetition told. Of course he was glad, glad and a little concerned. He knew I’d no clients. The Buckett woman would have told him that.

  “How are things moving along with Roger Bentinck?”

  “Well . . . he’s certainly kosher. Enough gung-ho tales to convince me of that.”

  “But?”

  “But he is a wreck of a man. I’m not sure he’ll ever write any of it down.”

  “But if he does?”

  “If he does . . . it’s as you said. One hell of a book. He was there . . . He appears to have been there . . . at most of the major incidents of the Cold War.”

  “Do you wonder why he wants to tell all?”

  “Yep. Can’t fault his patriotism. Thinks Margaret Thatcher is God’s representative on earth . . . takes the Telegraph every day just to see who’s died . . . and hates Americans. How patriotic can you get?”

  Syd mused on this one.

  “Well I’m sure he’ll come clean eventually. Something will . . . burst. Meanwhile, it’s getting a proposal out of him . . .”

  Mea culpa.

  “And when you do, and when you start pitching it, that’s when the shit will hit the fan.”

  We both paused. I knew what he meant, but I wanted to hear him state what we’d both known all along.

  “They won’t want him to do it, of course. But we don’t give up that easily do we? I just wanted to warn you. It could get a bit nasty if they set the Branch on to you. I want you to be prepared.”

  “Branch?”

  “Special Branch. Military Intelligence has no powers of search or arrest. A bit like the CIA not being supposed to operate within the USA. So, they have a squad of Scotland Yard bully boys at their disposal. They kick down doors, crack skulls, arrest people . . . and so on. You won’t like it if Inspector Plodder calls. They can make quite a mess, I gather.”

  “Why me? Why not Bentinck?”

  “No. I don’t think they’d do that. It’s you they’ll come after.”

  “Do you want me to drop it?”

  “No. I just want you to be ready.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Until you actually get a proposal out of him, keep no notes. Store it all in your head. When you get the proposal, keep it in the open where anyone can see it. Conceal nothing. Leave the folder on your desktop.”

  I got it, but I had one last question.

  “Syd. Why did you hire me?”

  “As opposed to whom?”

&nbs
p; “As opposed to an Englishman who might have grown up sharing your values and your tailor.”

  “Well you’ve seen ’em. The chaps Larry Greene stuck me with between old Ebenezer’s death and my taking over. Perfectly capable men. No reason to fire any of them. They do their job. But they’re stuffed shirts in three-piece suits. All Oxbridge educated. PPE and Greats and all that nonsense. But if brains were flint they couldn’t light a fart. No. It was time . . . time . . . to put a cat among the pigeons.”

  “Or an old tie-dye hippie among the stuffed shirts?”

  “I’ll need a translator for that one, I’m afraid. Anyway. I must dash. Stick the bill on the company card. And keep me posted.”

  “D’ye know that chippy by the Earl’s Court tube?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll find it. Cod, chips, mushy peas, easy on the vinegar and don’t forget the tartare sauce.”

  “What?”

  “Eight o’clock. My place. Get what you fancy for yourself, but no Coca-Cola. American muck. Disgusting smell. I’ll give you the ackers when you get here. Schumann tonight. Artur Schnabel at the joanna. Don’t be late.”

  He rang off.

  Thus ended ten days of silence.

  I had been summoned.

  Cod, chips and Schnabel.

  Just as well. I was wearing through the grooves on Schubert.

  As ever, Bentinck’s choice in music was impeccable. Schumann op. 44, a piano quintet. For all I knew the piano quintet. A decidedly vigorous work. We ate fish and chips with nothing more significant than his saying what a pleasant summer it had been so far. Food and music did not overlap. He listened without distraction.

  And after Schnabel.

  “Good fish was it?”

  “I guess . . .”

  “Would you care to guess why?”

  “What?”

  “Why did I send you out for fish and chips like a twelve-year-old running an errand?”