by Len Deighton
About Guildford the stewardess offered us the free alcohol that together with six extra inches of seat space makes the cost of a first-class ticket worth while, if you are on expenses. Gravel Gertie, of course, wanted something odd—‘A port and lemon.’ The hostess explained they didn’t have such a thing. He decided to ‘Leave it to you, love, I don’t do much travelling.’
Our drinks arrived. He passed me my glass of sherry and insisted upon bumping our glasses together like mating tortoises, and saying, ‘Cheerio, Chin-chin.’
I nodded coolly as the spilt sherry pioneered its sticky route down my ankle.
‘Over the teeth, over the gums, look out stomach, here she comes,’ he chanted, and was such a helpless roistering jelly of merriment at his own wit that only a small fraction of his drink did in fact complete the journey. I wrote ROUNDELAYS into the crossword. ‘I’m going to Rome,’ said Gertie. ‘Have you ever been there?’
I nodded without looking up.
‘I missed the 9.45 plane. That’s the one I should have been on, but I missed it. This one doesn’t always go to Rome, but that 9.45 goes direct to Rome.’
I crossed out ROUNDELAYS and wrote RONDOLETTO. He kept saying ‘I’ll go no more a-roaming,’ and laughing a little high-pitched laugh, his great floppy face crouching behind his pink-tinted rimless spectacles. I was into the competition page of the Statesman when the stewardess offered me a selection of pieces of toast as large as a penny garnished with smoke salmon and caviare. Fatso said, ‘What are we ’aving to eat, luv, spaghetti?’ A thought that drove him wild with hysterical mirth, in fact he repeated the word to me a couple of times and roared with laughter. A toy dinner came along on a trolley; I declined the fat man’s thick sausage sandwiches. I had frozen chicken, frozen pomme parisienne and frozen peas. I began to envy Fatso his sausage sandwiches. By the time we were crossing the suburbs of Paris the champagne appeared. I felt mollified. I crossed out RONDOLETTO and wrote in DITHYRAMBS which made twenty-one down AWE instead of EWE. It was beginning to shape up.
We skimmed our way into the clouds like a nose into beer froth. ‘We are approaching Rome—Fiumicino Airport. Transit time is forty-five minutes. Please do not leave small valuable articles in the aircraft. Passengers may remain aboard but smoking is not permitted during refuelling. Please remain seated after landing. Light refreshments will be available in the airport restaurant. Thank you.’
I accidentally knocked Fatso’s glasses out of his hand on to the floor, one pane suffered a crack but held together. While we apologized together we came in over the eternal city. The old Roman aqueducts were clearly visible, so was Fatso’s wallet, so I lifted it, offered him my seat—‘Your first view of Rome.’
‘When in Rome…’ he was saying as I took off to the forward toilet, I heard his high-pitched laugh. ‘Occupied.’ Damn. I stepped into the bright chromium galley. No one there. I leaned into the baggage recess. I flipped through Fatso’s wallet. A wad of fivers, some pressed leaves, two blank postcards with views of Marble Arch, a five-shilling book of stamps, some dirty Italian money and a Diner’s Club card in the name of HARRISON B J D and some photos. I had to be very quick. I saw the stewardess walking slowly down the aisle checking passengers’ seat belts, and the lights were up. ‘NO SMOKING, FASTEN SEAT BELTS.’ She was going to give me the rush. I pulled the photos out—three passport pictures of a dark-haired, smooth stockbroker type, full, profile and three-quarter. The photo was different but the man was my pin-up, too—the mysterious Raven. The other three photos were also passport style—full face, profile and three-quarter positions of a dark-haired, roundfaced character; deep sunk eyes with bags under horn-rimmed glasses, chin jutting and cleft. On the back of the photos was written ‘5ft 11in; muscular inclined to overweight. No visible scar tissue; hair dark brown, eyes blue’. I looked at the familiar face again. I knew the eyes were blue, even though the photograph was in black and white. I’d seen the face before; most mornings I shaved it. I realized who Fatso was. He was the fat man sitting at the bar in the strip-club when the cigarette girl told me to ‘Go home.’
I stuffed them back, palmed the wallet, said ‘OK’ to the protesting hostess. I got back to my seat as the flaps went down, the plane shuddered like Gordon Pirie running into a roomful of cotton wool. Fatso was back in his own seat; my cardigan had fallen to the floor over my brief-case. I sat down quickly, strapped in. I could see the Railway Junction now and as we levelled off for the approach the G glued me to the seat springs. I could see the south side of the perimeter as we came in, and beyond the bright yellow Shell Aviation bowsers I noticed a twin-engined shoulder wing Grumman S2F-3. It was painted white and the word ‘NAVY’ was written in square black letters aft of the American insignia.
The tyres touched tarmac. I leaped forward to pick up my mohair cardigan. As I did so I flipped Fatso’s wallet well under his seat. Now I saw the clean knife cut along the back of my new briefcase—still unopened. Not one of those long, amateur sorts of cuts, but a small, professional, ‘poultry-cleaning’ one. Just enough to investigate the contents. I leaned back. Fatso offered me a peppermint. ‘Do as the Romans do,’ he went on, eyes smiling through the cracked lens.
Fiumicino Airport, Rome, is one of those straight-sided ‘Contemporary Economy’ affairs. I went into the main entrance; to the left was the restaurant but up the stairs to the right a post office and money exchange. I was killing a minute with the paperbacks when I heard a soft voice say, ‘Hello, Harry.’
Now my name isn’t Harry, but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever had been. I turned to face the speaker—my driver from London. He had a hard bony skull, with hair painted across it in Brylcreem. His eyes were black and counter-sunk deep into his face like gun positions. His chin was blue and hardened by wind, rain and monsoon and forty years of shaving hard against the bone. He wore black tie and white shirt and navy blue raincoat with shoulder straps. If he was a crew member he had removed his shoulder badges and taken care to leave his uniform cap elsewhere. If he wasn’t, it was little wonder that he chose to wear the undress uniform of all the world’s airline crews.
His eyes moved in constant watchfulness over my shoulder. He ran the palm of his right hand hard across the side of his head to press down his already flattened hair. ‘Seat nineteen…’
‘Is trouble,’ I completed it in the phraseology of the department. He looked a little sheepish. ‘Now you tell me,’ I said peevishly. ‘He’s already shivved my hand baggage.’
‘As long as there is still a tin inside,’ he said.
‘There’s a tin inside,’ I told him.
He rubbed the side of his jaw pensively, and finally said, ‘Be last out at Beirut. Leave that,’ we both eyed the case, ‘for me to take through customs.’ He said good-bye then turned to go, but came back to cheer me up. ‘We’re doing seat nineteen’s hold baggage now,’ he said.
As I thanked him I heard the Italian voice on the loudspeaker saying, ‘British Overseas Airways Corporation denunca che departe dela Comet volo BA712 a Beirut, Bahrain, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, Jakarta, Darwin and Sydney a tutto passagere…’
The Colosseum—Rome’s rotten tooth—sank behind us, white, ghostly and sensational. I slept till Athens. Fatso hadn’t re-embarked. I felt tired and out-gambited. I slept again.
I woke for coffee as we crossed the brown coast of Lebanon. Thin streaks of white crests buffered in from the blue Med. I noticed that there were many tall white buildings built since my first visit here in the days of Medway II.* The circuit over the coast-side airport is generally a bumpy passage, for immediately after the airport the ground rises in blunt green mountains. Everything is hot, foreboding and very old.
Polite soldier-like officials in khaki uniforms did a line of backwards Arabic in immaculate penmanship across my passport and stamped it. I had cleared customs and immigration.
I dumped my wardrobe case into a Mercedes taxi—after letting two cabs go by—then gave the driver some Lebanese pounds
and told him to wait. He was a villainous-looking Moslem in brown woollen hat, bright red cardigan and tennis shoes. I hurried upstairs. Having coffee near the juke-box was the ‘driver’. He gave me my brief-case, a heavy brown packet, a heavy brown look, a heavy brown coffee. I dealt with each in silence. He gave me the address of my hotel in town.
The Mercedes touched seventy-five as we passed the dense wood of tall umbrella pines along the wide modern road to the town. Further away on the mountain slopes the cedar trees stood, national symbol and steady export for over 5,000 years. ‘Hew me cedar trees out of Lebanon,’ Solomon had commanded and from them built his temple. But my driver didn’t care.
* * *
*See Appendix: Medway II, p. 327.
Chapter 6
[Aquarius (Jan 20-Feb 19) Someone else’s forethought may enable you to surprise a rival.]
Peering between the slats of the wide venetian blind, the yellow and orange stucco buildings conspired to hide the sea. In the warmth of midday I see a black moustachioed villain hitting the horn of a pink Caddie; the cause of his annoyance a child leading a camel with a predilection for acacia trees. Across the road two fat men sit on rusty folding chairs drinking arak and laughing; a foot or so above their heads a coloured litho Nasser is not amused. In economy-sized cafés behind doors artfully contrived to preserve a décor of absolute darkness they are serving economy-sized coffees of similar darkness with exotic pastries of honeysmothered nuts and seeds. Clients—young Turks, Greeks dressed like left bank intellectuals—find their seats by the light of a juke-box inside which Yves Montand and Sarah Vaughan are crowded. Outside in the blinding sunlight, antiquated trams spew out agile targets for the Mercedes taxis. Darkskinned young men with long black hair parade along the water’s edge in bikinis almost big enough to conceal a comb. Below me in the street two young men on rusty cycles balancing a long tray of unleavened bread between them, are nearly brought down by a frenetic dog which yelps its fear and anger. In the souks men from the desert pass among money-changers—the carpet men and the sellers of saddles for horse, camel and bicycle. In Room 624 bars of sunlight lay heavily across the carpet. The hotel intercom hummed with old tapes of Sinatra, but he was losing a battle with the noise of the air-conditioning. Room 624, which the department had booked for me, came complete with private bath, private refrigerator, scales, magnifying mirrors, softened water, phones by bed, phones by bath. I poured another large cup of black coffee and decided to investigate my baggage. The blue wardrobe bag unzipped to reveal—a light-weight blue worsted suit, a seersucker jacket, a used overall with zip front and more pockets than I knew how to use. In the bag’s side pockets were some new white and plain-coloured cotton shirts, a couple of plain ties, one wool, one silk, a belt, a slim leather and Italian, and a pair of red braces; didn’t miss a trick that Alice. I was going to like working for WOOC(P). In the briefcase was a heavy tin. I looked at the label. It read ‘WD 310/213. Bomb. Sticky’. The heavy packet that the man in the blue raincoat had given me was an envelope inside which was a waterprooflined brown bag. It was the sort of thing you would find in the pocket of your seat when looking for matches on an aeroplane. It is also the sort of thing that aircrews, loaders, and engineers from Rangoon to Rio use for transporting their little ‘finds’. Cakes, chicken, ball-point pens, packs of cards, butter—the jetsam of the airlines. Inside this one was a hammerless Smith and Wesson, safety catch built into the grip, six chambers crowded with bullets. I tried to remember the rules about unfamiliar* pistols. In an accompanying box were twenty-five rounds, two spare chambers (greased to hold the shells in tight), and a cutaway holster. It covered little more than the barrel, having a small spring clip for rigidity. I strapped the belt across my shoulder. It fitted very well. I played with this in front of the mirror, making like Wagon Train, then drank the rest of my cold coffee. Orders would come soon enough: Orders for a last attempt to grab Raven the biochemist before he disappeared beyond our reach.
The road inland from Beirut winds up into the mountains; gritty little villages hold on tight to the olive trees. The red earth gives way to rock, and far below to the north lies St George’s Bay, where the dragon got his, way back, that was. Up here where the snow hangs around six months of the year the ground is dotted with little Alpine flowers and yellow broom, in some places wild liquorice grows. Once the heights are crossed the road drops suddenly and there is a route across the valley before the crossing of the next range—the Anti Lebanon, behind which lies 500 miles of nothing but sand till Persia. Much nearer than that, though, just along the road in fact, is Syria.
At many places the roadway cuts corners, and a shelf hangs almost over the road. A full grown man can, if he keeps very still, perch between two pieces of rock at one place I know. If while in this position he looks east he can see the road for over a hundred yards; if he looks towards Beirut he can see even farther—about three hundred yards, and what’s more, he can, through night glasses, watch the road crossing the mountain. If he has friends up the road in either direction and a small transreceiver he can talk to them. Although he shouldn’t do so indiscriminately in case the police radio accidentally monitors the call. Along about 3.30 A.M. a man in this position will have counted the stars, almost fallen off the rock easing his back-ache and be seeing double through the night glasses. The metal of the trans-receiver will be sending pains of cold through hand and ear, and he will have begun to compile a list of friends prepared to help him in the matter of finding some other type of employment, and I won’t blame him. It was 3.32 A.M. when I saw the headlights coming down the mountain road. Through the night glasses I could see it was wide and rolled like an American car. I switched in my set and saw the movement up the road as the radio man gave it to Dalby. ‘One motor, over a thousand yards. No traffic. Out.’ Dalby grunted.
I read off the ranges army style until finally the large grey Pontiac slid under me, headlights probing the soft sides of the road. The beams were way above Dalby’s head. I could imagine him, crouching there, perfectly still. In these sorts of situation Dalby sat back and let his subconscious take over; he didn’t have to think—he was a natural hooligan. The car had slowed as Dalby knew it must, and as it neared him he stood up and posed, like the statue of the discus thrower, aimed—then lobbed his parcel of trouble. It was a sticky bomb about as big as two cans of soup end to end; on impact its very small explosive charge spread a sort of napalm through tank visors. Burnt cars and contents don’t worry policemen the way blown-up shot-up ones do. The charge exploded. Dalby dropped almost flat, some flaming pieces of horror narrowly missed him, but mostly they hit radiator and tyre. The car hadn’t slackened speed, and now Dalby was on his feet and running behind it. We’d parked the old car from Beirut obliquely across the path; the man driving our target must have been dead from the first impact, for he made no attempt to collide side to side in sheer, but just ploughed into the old Simca carrying it about eight feet. By now Dalby was alongside. He had the door open and I heard pistol shots as he groped into the rear seat. My transreceiver made a click as someone switched in and said in a panicky voice, which forgot procedure, ‘What you doing, what you doing?’ For a fraction of a second I thought he was asking Dalby; then I saw it.
Below me on the road was another car. Maybe he had been following all the time with lights off, or perhaps he’d come down the other valley road from Baalbek and Homs. I looked down on this stretch of road which was as light as day now; the figures frozen like a photo in the intense light of the white hot flames. I could see Dalby’s radio man from the Embassy standing there in an anorak like a scoutmaster on holiday, his white horse-like face staring thunderstruck at me. Dalby’s feet were visible under the open door and I noticed that Simon was standing behind him instead of going around the other side of the car to help. In this second of time I so badly wanted it to be the duty of someone else to do it. Someone else for blaming when this little Nash turned round and roared away. But I had let it approach unseen, I had volunt
eered for the look-out so as not to do what Dalby was doing—lying on his belly over a red hot petrol tank among people with no reason to be friendly. So I did what I had to do. I did it quickly and I didn’t watch. I needn’t have used two sticky bombs; it had a flimsy roof.
Simon had got Dalby’s car out on to the roadway by the time I had scrambled down. In the back the radio man was sitting guarding our one captive—the smooth stockbroker whose picture both Fatso and I had carried. The man I had seen lying unconscious upon the gaming table. Dalby had gone to look at the Nash while I vomited as inconspicuously as possible. The heavy smell hung across the roadway and was worse than a brewed-up tank ever made. This smell was a special smell, an evil smell, and my lungs were heavy with it. The two burnt out cars still flickered and spat flames as something dripped on to the red glowing metal. We each of us had removed our overalls and thrown them into the flames. It was Simon’s job to make sure they burnt enough to be unrecognizable. I remember wondering if the zips would melt, but I said nothing.