Yesterday’s Spy
Yesterday’s Spy
Len Deighton
Sinister rumours link clandestine Arab arms dealing with the man who led the old anti-Nazi Guernica network. Time to reopen the master file on yesterday’s spy…Sinister rumours link clandestine Arab arms dealing with the man who led the old anti-Nazi Guernica network. Time to re-open the master file on yesterday’s spy…This new reissue includes a foreword from the cover designer, Oscar-winning filmmaker Arnold Schwartzman, and a brand new introduction by Len Deighton, which offers a fascinating insight into the writing of the story.
LEN DEIGHTON
Yesterday’s Spy
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1975
Copyright © Len Deighton 1975
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2012
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2012
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007458417
Version: 2017-05-23
All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u968f71db-0519-538a-948e-a705095bca47)
Copyright (#ub89fda3f-9bf4-561c-b103-1c2053b9d48c)
Introduction (#ud6f22271-97c3-5a1e-beb4-e4ff64bdb83c)
Chapter 1 (#uc2f4ad06-3849-58e8-9fa7-6f8ec57f6688)
Chapter 2 (#u75fa440c-b02f-5469-aba6-1632e4654bef)
Chapter 3 (#u107247dd-14e5-5f8e-88bb-a7c04a4502cb)
Chapter 4 (#ue5fd7d6f-f510-5bf9-a251-7e83a0a4c420)
Chapter 5 (#u5ba0f46f-8dc1-599f-9bb3-24551db1ac25)
Chapter 6 (#u0c4342ae-8129-554c-9e2c-f830791f1327)
Chapter 7 (#u58c06bba-ad40-54f4-8c1b-18a2d44000aa)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Cover designer’s note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Len Deighton (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction
They say that New York City is the place to enjoy when you are young and Paris is the city for those of mature years. Maybe it depends how much money you spend.
It is not true that I prefer to stay in broken-down dumps rather than grand hotels. I love grand hotels but I also find certain sorts of dumps, and the people who frequent them, intriguing. Back in the distant past I had a room in the Adlon in Communist East Berlin, or at least in that hotel’s ruined remains. It was so dilapidated that it seemed as if a violent sneeze would be enough to make it fall apart. But looking down from this back room I could see the East German border guards and their barrack rooms, their armoury, kennels and guard dogs. The noise from the dogs being brought out gave notice of some new drama at the nearby Wall. It was rather like standing in the wings for a Grand-Guignol show.
A quite different and more enjoyable time came when my family squeezed into the attic of a Gasthof not far from Munich. The discomfort was more than made up for by the friendliness of the Swabian couple who worked so hard and kept so cheerful and let us into the kitchen to learn some secrets of south German cooking. We stayed in that lakeside village for months. My two sons went to school nearby and my understanding of the German south and its people proved valuable for my book Winter, which I wrote there using one of the earliest laptop computers. We were all sorry to depart.
When Charlie Kasher, the executive producer of the film of The Ipcress File, visited me in the Hotel Chelsea – on West 23
Street NYC – he was appalled at what he described as its ‘squalour’. He dragged me away to somewhere he felt more salubrious: a small smart luxury hotel on Fifth Avenue. It was more convenient and more comfortable but only half the fun. In the fifties, in several tiny Japanese villages I found clean accommodation so cheap that my Japanese friends refused to believe the low prices I had paid and thought I didn’t understand the money. When I first booked into the famous Hotel Sacher in Vienna it had not fully recovered from its occupation by some of the more uncaring, and trigger-happy, elements of the Red Army infantry, and I looked in vain for the Schlagobers and Sachertorte.
As I see it, it is the task of a writer to seek the truth and truth is not to be found in the silky indulgence of grand hotels, which tend to be the same in all parts of the world. Truth is found where people work and suffer. As a base for my research for Yesterday’s Spy I rented a room in a flea-bitten little hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was an establishment that I have depicted realistically in this story. The Princess was much as I have described.
Why Villefranche? The bay of Villefranche has water deeper than any other such port anywhere in the Mediterranean. From 350 feet near the shore the ocean bed slopes away steeply to 1,700 feet of dark water. It was this unique deep-water anchorage that brought the US Sixth Fleet here regularly: carriers, cruisers and even big battleships such as the USS Missouri. In those frantic years of the Cold War, France was in love with its American protectors. Americans were subject to the draft and these little streets and alleys were packed with high-spirited young sailors on brief shore leave looking for action of one kind or another.
When the dollar was high, France fondly embraced all American visitors, but love affairs can cool and lovers prove unkind. France switched its affections to Teutonic neighbours brandishing Deutschmarks, and the Sixth Fleet found other spots to drop anchor. By the time I was researching this book Villefranche was going through a period of quiet. Visitors of any kind were not much in evidence and the whole place had a hushed spooky feeling, as if the lonely little town was waiting for the sailors to return.
The Savoy is one of the most attractive regions that I have ever known. I have returned to it time and time again. Eventually – and long after this book was written – it became home to my wife’s parents, and in a comfortable rented house nearby we made it our home too. My children went to the local village school, learned to speak French like the natives, enjoyed long-lasting friendships and, like us, count it among the happiest times of their lives. The inhabitants of the Savoy are unique for their welcoming ways, neighbourliness and love of food and cooking. During our time there I wrote much of a book later published as the ABC of French Food. Cooking provides the lingua franca of this region, and while the affable sociability is – like so many of the family names – Italian, the cooking is French. The winter hereabout is not always mild. The Alps and the River Rhone both bring winds and cold weather but that in turn means heartwarming food and roaring log fires. In summary it is an excellent place in which to settle back and write a book.
Writing books is like a spell on a battlefield. For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes. To construct Yesterday’s Spy I decided to use a second character and thus create a dual leading role. Conan Doyle had shown us how Dr Watson could be a useful tool for explaining facts and theories to the reader. I was right to believe that Yesterday’s Spy would benefit from assigning to ‘Harry Palmer’ a belligerent American boss, Schlegel, but I didn’t include in my calculations the intimacy that would come from sending Harry back to fraternize with his old friends from the Resistance. This intimacy battled against the closeness between Harry and his boss. Perhaps it is a minor matter, and only applied to this special circumstance of this story, but I soon became aware of the limitations this put upon the crisscross relationships.
Dividing the number of major characters into the size of your typescript tells you how much space you have for character development. Yesterday’s Spy has quite a lot of major characters and that meant wasting no time when it came to describing each of them. The idea of having a group of Second World War Resistance workers who, some long time later, have different allegiances and different enemies provided an interesting writing problem. It was so interesting that I felt afterwards that I should have made it a far longer book.
Len Deighton, 2012
1
‘The Guernica network!’ said Steve Champion, holding up his glass.
I hesitated. White’s Club – sanctus sanctorum of Establishment London – seemed an inappropriate place to indulge in revolutionary nostalgia.
‘Let’s just drink to Marius,’ I said.
‘Marius,’ said Champion. He drank, and wiped his blunt military-style moustache with the back of his glove. It was a gesture I’d noticed that time we’d first met – Villefranche, landing from a submarine, one night when the war was young. It was as wrong for him then as it was now. In those days Regular Army captains of the Welsh Guards did not wipe the froth off their faces with the back of their hand. But then Regular captains of the Brigade of Guards, sent to France to set up anti-Nazi Intelligence networks, were not expected to meet newly arriving agents with a girl on each arm and an open bottle of champagne.
‘Marius,’ I said. I drank too.
‘What a comical crew we were,’ said Champion. ‘Marius the revolutionary priest, you straight from training school, with your terrible accent and your pimple ointment, and me. Sometimes I thought we should have let the Nazis catch us, and watched them die of laughing.’
‘It was Marius who reconciled that network,’ I said, ‘the Communists and the deserters and the hot-heads and us professionals. It was Marius who held the network together. When he went, we all went.’
‘He was past his prime by then,’ said Champion. ‘He’d had too much of it. He wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. None of us would have.’
‘Marius was young,’ I said. ‘Almost as young as I was.’
‘Marius died in a torture chamber,’ said Champion. ‘He died within six hours of being arrested … it was incredibly brave and he deserved the medal … but he could have saved himself by giving them some useless information. He could have deciphered some ancient codes and given them the names of people who’d already gone back to London. He could have bought a few days, and in a few days we could have rescued him.’
I didn’t argue. Even after all this time it was difficult to be objective about the death of Marius. His energy and his optimism had kept us going at times when it seemed that all was lost. And his reckless bravery had more than once saved us.
For Champion it was even more difficult. He’d always blamed himself for the young priest’s death. Perhaps that was partly why he’d married Marius’s younger sister. And perhaps it was partly why the marriage had now fallen apart.
We both watched the far end of the room, where two Socialist Cabinet Ministers exchanged jokes about their golf handicaps and tips about the stock exchange. Champion reached into the waistcoat of his beautifully cut chalk-stripe suit. He flipped back the cover of the gold hunter that had belonged to his father and his grandfather, looked at the time, and then signalled a club servant to bring more drinks.
‘The divorce came through,’ he said. ‘Caty and me – it’s all over. Nowadays I live all the time in France.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Why?’ said Champion.
I shrugged. There was no point in telling him that I liked them both, and enjoyed what had once been their happy marriage. ‘Those weekends at the house in Wales,’ I said. ‘Where will I go now to get French cooking like Caty’s?’
‘Well, Caty still lives there,’ said Champion. ‘And she’d love to see you again, I’m sure.’
I looked at him. I would have expected him to invite me to his new house in France rather than to that of his ex-wife in Wales, but Steve Champion was always unpredictable. Even more so since he’d become a wealthy businessman. He lit a fresh cigarette from the dog-end of his old one. His hand trembled; he had to steady it with the one on which he always wore a glove – to hide the absence of the fingertips he’d left behind in an interview room of St Roch prison in wartime Nice.
‘You never thought of going back?’ he said.
‘To live in France?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘To the department.’
‘Hah! It’s a thought, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t, Steve, and I’ll tell you why.’ I leaned a little closer to him, and he glanced round the room with no more than a flicker of the eye.
I said, ‘Because the department never asked me to, Steve.’
He smiled soberly.
‘And I’ll tell you something else, Steve,’ I added. ‘There are people who say that you never left the department. Whenever we get together like this in London I wonder whether you are going to try recruiting me.’
‘Now you’re laughing at me, boyo,’ said Champion, in his stage Welsh accent. He reached into his pocket and produced a clear plastic envelope. Inside it were five picture postcards. Each depicted an airship or a balloon, and in the foreground were men in straw hats and women in leg-of-mutton-sleeved dresses, inhabitants of an innocent world that had not quite learned to fly. On the other sides of the cards was a tangle of greetings to long-forgotten addressees, and curious old postage stamps.
‘A philatelic auction in Bond Street,’ said Champion. ‘That’s why I came to London. I just couldn’t resist these.’
I looked at his purchases. By now Champion should have realized that I was a lost cause as far as his obsession with airmail stamps was concerned. ‘And Billy?’ I asked. I handed his airships back to him.
‘Yes, I’m seeing a lot of Billy this week,’ said Champion, as if visiting his young son was no more than an afterthought. ‘Caty has been very good about letting me see Billy.’
He went through the postcards one by one and then put them away with exaggerated care. ‘The night Billy was born,’ he said, ‘I was up to the neck in bank loans, promissory notes and mortgages. I was sure I’d done the wrong thing … did I ever tell you how I started: with the uncut diamonds?’
‘I’ve heard stories,’ I admitted.
He inhaled carefully on his cigarette. ‘Do you know Accra?’
‘No.’
‘The arse-hole of West Africa. I was flat broke, and working hard to buy a ticket home. I was translating export permits for cocoa traders and wangling customs forms for importers – all of them Arabs. My Arabic has always been good, but by the time I finished working with those jokers I could have done the sports reports for Radio Cairo. When I think of it!’ He clasped his hands tight as if to stretch the joints. ‘I took the bumpf down to the customs sheds one day – June, it was, and bloody steamy, even by Accra standards. I made the usual golden obeisance to the officials and loaded ten crates of Renault spares on to the truck I’d hired. But when I uncrated them back in the cocoa warehouse, I find I’m knee-deep in French MAS 38s, complete with cleaning kits, and spares and instruction booklets.’
‘Sub-machineguns,’ I said.
‘Go to the top of the class.’
‘But could you get the Long cartridge?’
‘Am I glad you weren’t involved, old boy! No, you couldn’t get them. But the kids who bought them were too young to remember the MAS 38, so they think they are MAT 49s, for which there is 9 mm stuff ready to be nicked from a local police or army unit. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘But I’m getting ahead of the story. Imagine me – the only man in Accra who’d sooner have Renault spares than sub-machineguns, sitting on ten cases of them. All of them customs cleared, rubber stamped and signed for. It was tempting.’
‘But you didn’t succumb?’
‘Oh, but I did.’ He took a drag on his cigarette and waved the smoke away. ‘Two hundred and thirty-five dollars each – American dollars – and I could have doubled it, had I sold them to the loudmouths with the fuzzy-wuzzy haircuts.’
‘Ten to a case?’ I said. ‘About ten thousand pounds profit.’
‘I had to stop my client going down to the customs and raising hell about his Renault spares. I owed a bit of money, I had to get an exit permit, and clearance from the tax office: it all costs money.’
‘You came home?’
‘I went to buy my air ticket from a crooked little Portuguese travel agent. I started bargaining with him, knowing that he could unload my US dollar bills at a big premium. To cut a long story short, I ended up giving him all my American money in exchange for a bag of uncut diamonds from Angola and a boat ticket to Marseille.’
‘You went to Marseille?’
‘Old man Tix had just died, his whole set-up was for sale. Caty’s sister told me about it. But the Algerian fighting was still on, and the Tix fruit and vegetable importing was no more than a ream of headed notepaper and a couple of fleabitten offices in Constantine.’
‘And the quarry was defunct.’
‘The quarry – yes.’ Champion smiled. We’d both hidden in the quarry during a big German round-up, when old man Tix had chased a German officer out of the house shouting ‘Sale Boche’ at him, crossing himself as he did so. ‘The quarry was finished. They’d mined, too, but it was costing so much to dig that the old boy did better on unemployment benefit.’
‘But you sold your diamonds and bought the Tix place from his widow?’
‘That was only a down payment,’ said Steve, ‘but Madame Tix wanted me to have it. She waited a long time for the rest of the money. It was a gamble for all concerned. We were betting on a peaceful settlement of the Algerian war.’
‘You were always a good guesser, Steve,’ I said.
‘The peace between France and Algeria meant immigrant labourers – that got the mine back into profit.’
‘Lower wages,’ I said.
‘But still higher than any they could get in their own country.’
‘But you closed the mine and the quarry – you sent the men home.’
Champion smiled. He said, ‘It was the idea of cheap labour in the mine. That’s what enabled me to get my capital. Avaricious little hairdressers with their hands in the till … contractors fiddling their tax, and hard-eyed old bastards from the merchant banks. They came to see my quarry and the Arabs sweating their guts out. They liked it – that was the kind of investment those little sods could understand. That was the way their grandfathers – and their friends’ grandfathers – had made a fortune in Africa a hundred years ago.’
‘And you put that money into the fruit and veg.’
‘Much more than money … soil analysis, a professor of botany, a programme of seeding techniques, long-term contracts for the farmers, minimum price guarantees for seasonal workers, refrigerated warehouses, refrigerated transport and contracted refrigerated shipping. I put a lot of money into the Arab countries.’
‘And now they have oil as well.’
‘Oil is a one-crop economy,’ said Champion.
‘A gilt-edged one,’ I said.
‘That’s what they said about coffee and tea and rubber,’ said Champion. ‘I truly believe that North Africa must trade with Europe, right across the board. The Arab countries must have a stake in Europe’s well-being. The economics must link, otherwise Africa will let Europe die of inflation.’
‘I never thought of you as a crusader, Steve.’
Champion seemed disconcerted at the idea. He picked up his glass to hide behind it.
Two men came downstairs: one was a famous poet, the other a peer of the realm. They were arguing quietly and eruditely about the lyrics of an obscene Eighth Army song about the extra-marital activities of King Farouk.
A club servant came to tell Champion that a lady was waiting at the entrance. ‘Come along,’ said Champion. ‘This is someone I’d like you to meet.’
A servant helped Champion into the lightweight vicuna coat, designed like a British warm, and handed him the bowler hat that made him look like a retired general. Someone unseen gave a perfunctory brush to the shoulder of my dirty raincoat.
The snow obliterated the view through the doorway, like static on an old TV. Outside in St James’s Street, London’s traffic was jammed tight. Champion’s girl gave no more than the nod and smile that manners demanded. Her eyes were devoted to Champion. She watched him with the kind of awe with which an orphan eyes a Christmas tree. It was always the same girl. This one had the same perfect skin that Caty had, and the same soft eyes with which Pina had looked at him. Except that decades had passed since Caty or Pina had been this kid’s age.
‘Melodie,’ said Champion. ‘It’s a nice name, isn’t it: Melodie Page.’
‘It’s a lovely name,’ I said, in my usual sycophantic way.
Champion looked at his watch. ‘It’s a long time since we jawed so much,’ he told me. ‘My God, but you would have been bored, Melodie. We must be getting old.’ He smiled. ‘Melodie and Billy are taking me to the theatre tonight. They are going to repair one of the gaps in my musical education.’
The girl hit his arm in mock anger.
‘Rock music and pirates,’ Champion told me.
‘A potent mixture,’ I said.
‘Billy will be glad I’ve seen you. You always remember his birthday, he told me.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That’s damned nice of you.’ Champion patted my arm.
At that moment, exactly on schedule, a black Daimler drew level with the entrance. A uniformed driver hurried across the pavement, opening an umbrella to shelter Champion and the girl from the weather. He opened the door, too. As the girl slid into the real leather seating, Champion looked back to where I was standing. The snow was beating about my ears. Champion raised his gloved hand in a regal salute. But when only three of your fingers are able to wave, such a gesture can look awfully like a very rude Anglo-Saxon sign.
2
I could see my report about Champion on Schlegel’s desk. Schlegel picked it up. He shook it gently, as if hoping that some new information might drop out of it. ‘No,’ said Schlegel. ‘No. No. No.’
I said nothing. Colonel Schlegel, US Marine Corps (Air Wing), Retired, cut a dapper figure in a lightweight houndstooth three-piece, fake club-tie and button-down cotton shirt. It was the kind of outfit they sell in those Los Angeles shops that have bow windows and plastic Tudor beams. He tapped my report. ‘Maybe you can shaft the rest of them with your inscrutable sarcasm and innocent questions, but me no likee – got it?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Champion was just seeing his kid, and buying stamps – there’s no other angle. He’s a rich man now: he’s not playing secret agents. Believe me, Colonel. There’s nothing there.’
Schlegel leaned forward to get a small cigar from a box decorated with an eagle trying to eat a scroll marked Semper Fidelis. He pushed the box to me, but I’m trying to give them up.
‘He’s in deep,’ said Schlegel. Puckered scar tissue made it difficult to distinguish his smiles from his scowls. He was a short muscular man with an enviable measure of self-confidence; the kind of personality that you hire to MC an Elks Club stag night.
I waited. The ‘need-to-know’ basis, upon which the department worked, meant that I’d been told only a part of it. Schlegel took his time getting his cigar well alight.
I said, ‘The story about the machineguns fits with everything I’ve been told. The whole story – the stuff about the uncut diamonds providing the money to start the mine, and then the fruit and vegetable imports – that’s all on non-classified file.’
‘Not all of it,’ said Schlegel. ‘Long after the file closes, Champion was still reporting back to this department.’
‘Was he!’
‘Long before my time, of course,’ said Schlegel, to emphasize that this was a British cock-up, less likely to happen now that we had him with us on secondment from Washington. ‘Yes,’ said Schlegel, ‘those machineguns were shipped to Accra on orders from this office. It was all part of the plan to buy Champion into control of the Tix set-up. Champion was our man.’
I remembered all those years when I’d been drinking and dining with the Champions, never suspecting that he was employed by this office.
Perhaps Schlegel mistook my silence for disbelief. ‘It was a good thing while it lasted,’ he said. ‘Champion was in and out of Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, arguing about his melons, carrots and potatoes, keeping his eyes open and dropping a few words to the right people, doing us all a power of good. And the way that Champion had scored – selling cannons to some freaky little terrorist outfit – all helped.’
‘So what was the fadeout?’
Schlegel blew a piece of tobacco off his lip, with enough force to make the bookcase rattle. ‘The feedback of information began to sag. Champion said the French were starting to lean on him, and it was getting too dangerous. It was a top-level decision to let him go. It was the right decision. You Brits are good at bowing out gracefully and you’d done all right out of Champion by that time.’
‘And now?’
‘A guy in German security trying to make a name for himself. He’s dug out some stuff about Champion’s financial affairs. They are asking questions about the guns at Accra.’
‘Bonn gets hysterical – and we have to join in the screaming?’
‘If the Champion business becomes a big scandal, they’ll say we were careless when we let him go.’
‘Perhaps it was a little careless,’ I suggested.
‘Well, maybe it was,’ said Schlegel. He picked up my report exonerating Champion. ‘But your whitewash job isn’t going to help matters.’
‘I’ll take another shot at it,’ I said.
He slid my report across the polished desk. Then from a drawer he got Perrier water and a tiny bottle of Underberg bitters. He shook the bitters into the mineral water and stirred it with a ballpoint pen to make it a delicate brown. ‘Want some?’
‘That’s just for hangovers,’ I said. ‘And even then it’s got to be a pretty damn bad hangover.’
‘I like it,’ said Schlegel, and drank it slowly, savouring each sip.
I took the report and stood up to leave. Schlegel said, ‘This is going to be a lousy rotten miserable bummer. I hate these jobs where we are shaking down our own. So you don’t have to give me a bad time, or give yourself a bad time for not covering up for him.’
‘I had that lecture at Indoctrine Four, when I went to the CIA Communications symposium in 1967,’ I said.
‘Champion saved your life,’ Schlegel reminded me. ‘If you can’t hack it, just say you want out.’
‘I know what kind of out I’d get,’ I said bitterly.
Schlegel nodded. ‘And I’d countersign it,’ he said. In a way, I preferred Schlegel’s New World directness: the others would have tried to persuade me that such a request would have had no effect on my career.
Schlegel stood up to look out of the window. It was still snowing. ‘This isn’t just some kind of fancy positive vetting job,’ he said. ‘This is a hot one.’ Schlegel scratched his behind, and reflected.
‘Someone across the street could lip-read you,’ I warned him.
He turned to look at me pityingly. It was Schlegel’s often expressed belief that we’d get more done here in London if we worried less about such details. ‘The Germans are sending one of their people down to Nice to investigate Champion,’ he said thoughtfully.
I didn’t respond.
‘Have you been taken suddenly drunk or something?’ said Schlegel.
‘I didn’t want to disturb your deductive processes,’ I said. I polished my spectacles and blinked at him.
‘Damned if I understand it,’ he said.
‘You’re in Europe now, Colonel,’ I said. ‘This German scandal has come just when the Bonn government are warming up for an election. When their security people discovered that Champion had once been a British agent it was the answer to all their problems. They wrote “Passed to British security” in the margin and fired it across here. Now the German Defence Minister can refuse to answer any questions about the scandal on the grounds that it would prejudice the security of their British ally. It will give them all they need to stall until the election is over. When they are elected again it will be “Minister requested” and that’s the last we’ll see of it. I’ve been through all this before, Colonel.’
‘Well, you know more about all this European Mickey Mouse than I’ll ever understand,’ said Schlegel. It was a double-edged compliment and he bared his teeth to let me know it. ‘We’ll hold it for the three-month cycle,’ he offered, as if trying to come to terms with me.
‘Don’t do me any favours,’ I told him. ‘I don’t give a good goddamn if you publish it as a whole-page ad in Variety. I’ve done what I was asked. But if the department expected me to return with the synopsis for World War Three, I’m sorry to disappoint. If you want to send me back to spend the rest of the year drinking with Champion at the department’s expense, I’ll be very happy to do so. But Champion is no dope. He’ll tumble what’s going on.’
‘Maybe he already did,’ Schlegel said slyly. ‘Maybe that’s why you got nothing out of him.’
‘You know what to do, then,’ I told him.
‘I already did it,’ he said. ‘A short dark kid. Looks ten years younger than she really is: Melodie Page. Been with the department nearly eight years!’
3
‘William, come to Mother, darling, and let me give you a kiss.’ Champion’s failed marriage was all there in that imperious command. An elegant French wife who persisted in calling their small son Billy ‘William’, and who gave him kisses, instead of asking for them.
She gave Billy the promised kiss, pulled a dead leaf off the front of his sweater and then waited until he’d left the room. She turned to me. ‘All I ask is that you don’t remind me how keen I was to marry him.’ She poured fresh hot water into the teapot, and then put the copper kettle back on the hob. It hummed gently with the heat from the blazing logs. There was a stainless-steel kitchen only a few steps along the carpeted corridor, but she had made the tea and toasted the bread on the open fire in the lounge. From here we could look out of the window and watch the wind ruffling the river and whipping the bare trees into a mad dance. The black Welsh hills wore a halo of gold that promised respite from the dark daylight.
‘I didn’t come down here to talk about Steve, or about the divorce,’ I protested.
She poured tea for me and gave me the last slice of toast. She spiked a fresh piece of bread on to the toasting fork. ‘Then it’s surprising how many times we seem to find ourselves talking about it.’ She turned to the hearth and busied herself with finding a hot place in the fire. ‘Steve has this wonderful knack,’ she continued bitterly, ‘this wonderful knack of falling on his feet … like a kitten.’
It was an affectionate analogy. The rejection had hurt, I could see that. I buttered my toast and put some of Caterina’s homemade jam on it. It was delicious and I ate it without speaking.
‘This damned house,’ she continued. ‘My sister wrote to tell me how much it would be worth if it was in France. But it’s not in France, it’s in Wales! And it costs a fortune to keep the slates on, and mend the boiler, and cut the lawn … and heating oil has nearly doubled in price just since the last delivery.’ The bread started to smoke. She cursed softly, broke the scorched piece off and threw it away into the flames before toasting the other side. Caterina could cope with things. That was her misfortune in a way. She wanted to be cosseted and looked after but she was ten times more efficient than any of the men who wanted to do it. ‘So Steve gets rid of the house, burdens me with all its problems and expenses, and everyone tells me to be grateful.’
‘You’re not exactly poor, Caty,’ I said.
She looked at me for a moment, deciding if I knew her well enough to make such a personal remark. But I did know her well enough.
‘You know what the arrangement was … If he’s going down to the river, I’ll kill the little devil.’
I followed her gaze to where her small son was dragging a toy cart across the lawn. As if sensing that he was being watched, he changed direction and started back up towards the smart new sauna again. Caterina went back to her tea and toast. ‘He’s changed a lot, you know … I swore to my father that Steve had come through the war unmarred, but it took ten years to take effect. And then the last few years have been hell … hell for both of us, and little William, too!’
‘He had a lousy war, Caty,’ I said.
‘So did a lot of other people.’
I remembered the day in 1944 when I went into Nice prison just a few hours after the Gestapo had moved out. I was with the forward elements of the American Army. There was another Englishman with me. We asked each other no personal questions. He was wearing Intelligence Corps badges, but he knew Steve Champion all right, and he was probably sent directly from London, as I had been. The Germans had destroyed all the documents. I suppose London were sure they would have done, or they would have sent someone more important than me to chase it.
‘Look at that,’ said this other officer, when we were kicking the cupboards of the interrogation room apart. It was a shabby room, with a smell of ether and carbolic, a framed engraving of Salzburg and some broken wine bottles in the fireplace. He pointed to a bottle on the shelf. ‘Steve Champion’s fingertips,’ said my companion. He took the bottle and swirled the brine around so that through the mottled glass I saw four shrunken pieces of dark brown organic matter that jostled together as they were pushed to the centre of the whirling fluid. I looked again and found that they were four olives, just as the label said, but for a moment I had shivered. And each time I remembered it I shivered again. ‘You’re right, Caty,’ I said. ‘A lot of people had it much worse.’
Overhead the clouds were low and puffy, like a dirty quilt pulled over the face of the countryside.
‘There was all that “we Celts” nonsense. I began to believe that Wales was little different from Brittany. Little did I know … My God!’ said Caterina. She was still watching Billy in the garden. ‘The banks of the river are so muddy this last week … the rain … one of the village boys was drowned there this time last year.’ She looked up at the carved wooden crucifix on the wall above the TV set.
‘He’ll be all right.’ I said it to calm her.
‘He never dares to go down as far as the paddock when Steve visits. But he just defies me!’
‘Do you want me to get him?’
She gave a despairing smile. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She tugged at her hair. I was a ‘friend of Steve’s’: she didn’t want me to get any kind of response from Billy that she had failed to get. ‘We’ll watch from here,’ she said.
‘That’s probably best,’ I agreed.
‘You English!’ she said. I got the full blast of her anxiety. ‘You’re probably a fully paid-up subscriber to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.’
‘That wouldn’t necessarily make me a child-beater,’ I said. ‘And it’s the Royal Society.’
‘No one can live with a man who is racked with guilt. And Steve is racked with guilt.’
‘You’re not talking about the war?’ I asked.
‘I’m talking about the marriage,’ she said.
‘Because Steve has no need to feel guilty about the war,’ I told her.
‘My mother told me about Englishmen,’ said Caterina. She raised her hand in a gesture more appropriate to an Italian market than to an English drawing-room. And now her voice, too, carried an inflection of her birth ties. ‘You don’t have to have something to feel guilty about!’ Her voice was high and almost shrill. ‘Don’t you understand that? Guilt is like pain – it hurts just the same whether it’s real or imagined!’
‘I’ll have to think about that,’ I said defensively.
‘You think about it, then. I’ll go and fetch William.’ She pushed the silk cosy down over the teapot to keep the tea warm while she was gone. But she did not go. She kept her hands round it and stared into the distance. Or perhaps she was staring at the silver-framed photo of her brother Marius, the young priest who’d died in that carbolic-smelling basement. Suddenly the sun stabbed into the room. It wasn’t real sun, there was no warmth in it, and precious little colour. It spilled over the embroidered traycloth like weak lemon tea, and made a rim round Caty’s hair.
They were both like their mother, these Baroni girls. Even as children they’d looked more like visiting townspeople than like village kids. Tall and slim, Caty had that sort of ease and confidence that belied the indecision she expressed.
‘I won’t stay here,’ she said, as if her thoughts had raced on far beyond our conversation. ‘My sister wants me to help with her boutique in Nice. With the money I get from the house, we could start another shop, perhaps.’
The sun’s cross-light scrawled a thousand wrinkles upon her face, and I was forced to see her as she was, instead of through the flattering haze of my memories. Perhaps she read my thoughts. ‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘Steve’s getting old, too, and so are you.’ She smoothed her hair, and touched the gold cross that she wore.
She was still attractive. Whatever kind of post-natal exercises she’d done after Billy’s birth had restored her figure to that of the trim young woman Steve had married. She used just sufficient make-up to compensate for the pale English winters she’d endured for so long. Her nails were manicured, and long enough to convince me that she didn’t spend much time at the sink, and her hair was styled in the fashion that requires frequent visits to the hairdresser.
She smoothed the striped silk pants across her knee. They were stylish and tailored. She looked like an illustration that American Vogue might run if they ever did an article about English crumpet. I wondered if she spent many elegant afternoons sitting by the log fire in her fine clothes, pouring herself lemon tea from a silver teapot.
‘Do you know what I think?’ she said.
I waited a long time and then I said, ‘What do you think, Caty?’
‘I don’t believe you just bumped into Steve. I think you were sent after him. I think you are still working for the Secret Service or something – just like in the war. I think you are after Steve.’
‘Why would anyone be after him, Caty?’
‘He’s changed,’ she said. ‘You must have noticed that yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised what he was mixed up in. He has this sort of schizophrenia and an obsession with secrecy. I don’t know if you get like that in the Secret Service, or whether the Secret Service choose that sort of man. But it’s hell to live with, I’ll tell you that.’
‘I think you still love him,’ I said.
‘You’ve always hero-worshipped him,’ she said. ‘He was your big brother, wasn’t he? You just can’t imagine that some boring little housewife like me would have the effrontery to be glad to get rid of your wonderful Steve Champion. Well, I am glad. I just hope like hell that I never see him again, ever.’
I don’t know how she expected me to react, but whatever she expected, I failed her. I saw a look of exasperation. She said, ‘I tried, believe me, I tried very hard. I even bought new things and wore false eyelashes.’
I nodded.
‘I thought Steve had sent you … to get William.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘He’ll stop at nothing to get him. He told me that. But I’ll fight him, Charles. You tell Steve that. He’ll never get William from me.’
She picked up Billy’s favourite toy rabbit and went to the door. She looked back at me as if I was a Solomon who would decide Billy’s future. ‘If I thought he would be happy with Steve, I wouldn’t mind so much. But William is not like his father – he’s a gentle child and easily hurt.’
‘I know he is, Caty.’
She stood there for a moment, thinking of things to say, and not saying them. Then she went out of the room.
I saw her as she passed the window. She was wearing a riding mac and a scarf over her head. She had Billy’s rabbit under her arm.
4
That Champion’s Master File had been brought from Central Registry was, in itself, a sign of the flap that was in progress. It was seldom that we handled anything other than the Action Abstracts and they were a three-hour task. This Master would have stacked up to a five-feet-tall pile of paperwork, had the Biog, Associative, Report, Vettings and year by year Summaries been put one upon the other.
The papers had yellowed with age, the photos were brittle and dog-eared. The yellow vetting sheets were now buff-coloured, and the bright-red Report dossier had faded to a brownish-pink.
There was little hope of discovering anything startling here. The continuing triple-A clearance, right up to the time that Champion stopped reporting to the department, was in itself a sign that men more jaundiced than I could ever be had given Champion a clean bill of health. Since then the department had shown little interest in him.
I looked at his Biographical entries. Champion’s father, a Welsh Catholic, had been a senior lecturer at the Abbasiyah Military Academy, Cairo. Young Champion came back to England to attend public school. From there he won a place at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. For a boy who grew up to table-talk of tactics, battles and ballistics, Sandhurst was a doddle. Champion became an under-officer, and a well-remembered one. And his scholarship matched his military expertise: modern history, four languages and a mathematics prize.
It was Champion’s French-language skills that earned for him a secondment to the French Army. He went the usual round of military colleges, the Paris Embassy, Maginot Line fortresses and Grand General HQ, with occasional glimpses of the legendary General Gamelin.
Champion had only been back with his regiment for a matter of weeks when a War Office directive automatically shortlisted him for a Secret Intelligence Service interview. He was selected, trained and back in France by 1939. He was just in time to watch General Gamelin’s defence system surrender to the Nazis. Champion fled south and became ‘net-officer’ for what was no more than a collection of odds and sods in the unoccupied zone. His orders were to stay clear of the enthusiastic amateurs that London called their Special Operations Executive, but inevitably the two networks became entangled.
It was Champion who greeted me in person that night when I landed from the submarine at Villefranche. I was assigned to SOE but Champion kidnapped me and got it made official afterwards. If I’d gone up to Nîmes as ordered, my war service would have ended two or three months later in Buchenwald.
But Champion used me to sort out his own network and I stayed with him right up to the time the network crumbled and Champion was taken prisoner. Eventually he escaped and was flown back to London. He got a DSO and a new job. Even before D-Day, Champion was assigned to peacetime network planning. He demanded choice of personnel, and got it. His first request was to have me as his senior assistant. It wasn’t easy for me now to look at Champion’s file with an objective eye.
When you read old files, you realize how the paperwork itself decides the progress of an inquiry. Schlegel gave Bonn’s report a twelve-week life cycle, so the coordinator decided not to give it a file number. He attached it as an appendix to Champion’s abstract. Then I had to do a written report, to glue it all together. With everyone satisfied, the file would have gone over to Current Storage and then gone sliding down the priorities until it ended in a tin archive box in Hendon.
But it didn’t.
It was activated by an alert slip that came from the officer who was ‘running’ Melodie Page. She failed to report for two cycles. This would normally have meant the opening of an orange Caution File with its own file number. But with Champion’s abstract signed out to me, it caused the girl’s alert slip to be pinned on to my desk diary.
Suddenly the Champion file was wearing red stickers in its hair, and everyone concerned was trying to think of a ‘Latest action’ to pin to it, in case the Minister wanted to read it himself.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Schlegel.
‘Perhaps she’s fallen for Champion,’ I said.
He looked at me to see whether I meant it. ‘That’s all I need,’ said Schlegel. ‘You coming in here inventing new things for me to worry about.’
‘And you want me to go to this flat that Champion is supposed to have kept as some kind of bolt-hole?’
‘It’s a ten-minute job. Special Branch will send Blantyre and one of the Special Branch break-in specialists. Just take a look round, and file a short report tomorrow. No sweat – it’s only to show we’re on our toes.’
‘Are you sure I’m experienced enough to handle something like this?’
‘Don’t go touchy on me, bubblebrain. I want a piece of paper: something recent, with a senior operative’s signature, to put in the file before it leaves here.’
‘You’re right,’ I said.
‘Goddamn! Of course I’m right,’ he said in exasperation. ‘And Mr Dawlish will be looking in there on his way back from his meeting in Chiswick.’
The top brass! They really expected questions in the House, if Dawlish was going to do an I-was-there piece for them.
Steve Champion’s hideaway, in Barons Court. Well, I don’t have to tell you what kind of house it was: Gothic horror comes to town! Depressing place, with no sign of any tenants, and a dented metal grille that asks you who you are, and buzzes when it opens the lock.
That bugger Blantyre was already there, chatting away merrily with his ‘break-in specialist’ who’d already splintered the paintwork on the outer door and left a wet footprint in the hall, and who, on closer inspection, turned out to be Blantyre’s old buddy Detective-Inspector Seymour.
There they were, striding all over the clues and pouring each other double portions of Champion’s booze.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ said Blantyre.
‘So I see.’
Blantyre held up his glass and looked at it, like one of those white-coated actors in TV commercials about indigestion. He said, ‘We were wondering whether to send samples to the lab.’
‘Send a whole bottle,’ I said. ‘Order a case from Harrods, and give them his Diner’s Card number.’
Blantyre’s face reddened, but whether in shame or anger I could not be sure. I said, ‘Good. Well, if I’m not disturbing you two, I’ll take a look round while there’s still some evidence left.’
Blantyre gave me both barrels of a sawn-off twelve-bore, sighed and left the room wearing a sardonic smile. His drinking companion followed him.
I’d hardly started having a look round when Dawlish arrived. If Schlegel was hoping to keep our break-in inconspicuous, I’d say that Dawlish screwed up any last chance, what with his official car and uniformed driver, and the bowler hat and Melton overcoat. To say nothing of the tightly rolled umbrella that Dawlish was waving. Plastic raincoats are de rigueur for the rainy season in Barons Court.
‘Not exactly a playboy pad,’ said Dawlish, demonstrating his mastery of the vernacular.
Even by Dawlish’s standards that was an understatement. It was a large gloomy apartment. The wallpaper and paintwork were in good condition and so was the cheap carpeting, but there were no pictures, no books, no ornaments, no personal touches. ‘A machine for living in,’ said Dawlish.
‘Le Corbusier at his purest,’ I said, anxious to show that I could recognize a cultural quote when I heard one.
It was like the barrack-room I’d had as a sergeant, waiting for Intelligence training. Iron bed, a tiny locker, plain black curtains at the window. On the windowsill there were some withered crumbs. I suppose no pigeon fancied them when just a short flight away the tourists would be throwing them croissants, and they could sit down and eat with a view of St James’s Park.
There was a school yard visible from the window. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. Swarms of children made random patterns as they sang, swung, jumped in puddles and punched each other with the same motiveless exuberance that, organized, becomes war. I closed the window and the shouting died. There were dark clouds; it would rain again.
‘Worth a search?’ said Dawlish.
I nodded. ‘There will be a gun. Sealed under wet plaster perhaps. He’s not the kind of man to use the cistern or the chimney: either tear it to pieces or forget it.’
‘It’s difficult, isn’t it,’ said Dawlish. ‘Don’t want to tear it to pieces just to find a gun. I’m interested in documents – stuff that he needs constant access to.’
‘There will be nothing like that here,’ I said.
Dawlish walked into the second bedroom. ‘No linen on the bed, you notice. No pillows, even.’
I opened the chest of drawers. There was plenty of linen there; all brand new, and still in its wrappings.
‘Good quality stuff,’ said Dawlish.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
Dawlish opened the kitchen cupboards and recited their contents. ‘Dozen tins of meat, dozen tins of peas, dozen bottles of beer, dozen tins of rice pudding. A package of candles, unused, a dozen boxes of matches.’ He closed the cupboard door and opened a kitchen drawer. We stared at the cutlery for a moment. It was all new and unused. He closed it again without comment.
‘No caretaker,’ I said. ‘No landlady, no doorman.’
‘Precisely,’ said Dawlish. ‘And I’ll wager that the rent is paid every quarter day, without fail, by some solicitor who has never come face to face with his client. No papers, eh?’
‘Cheap writing-pad and envelopes, a book of stamps, postcards with several different views of London – might be a code device – no, no papers in that sense.’
‘I look forward to meeting your friend Champion,’ said Dawlish. ‘A dozen tins of meat but three dozen bars of soap – that’s something for Freud, eh?’
I let the ‘your friend’ go unremarked. ‘Indeed it is, sir,’ I said.
‘None of it surprises you, of course,’ Dawlish said, with more than a trace of sarcasm.
‘Paranoia,’ I said. ‘It’s the occupational hazard of men who’ve worked the sort of territories that Champion has worked.’ Dawlish stared at me. I said, ‘Like anthrax for tannery workers, and silicosis for miners. You need somewhere … a place to go and hide for ever …’ I indicated the store cupboard, ‘… and you never shake it off.’
Dawlish walked through into the big bedroom. Blantyre and his sidekick made themselves scarce. Dawlish opened the drawers of the chest, starting from the bottom like a burglar so that he didn’t have to bother closing them. There were shirts in their original Cellophane bags, a couple of knitted ties, sweaters and plain black socks. Dawlish said, ‘So should I infer that you have a little bolt-hole like this, just in case the balloon goes up?’ Even after all these years together, Dawlish had to make sure his little jokes left a whiff of cordite.
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘But on the new salary scale I might be able to afford one – not in central London, though.’
Dawlish grunted, and opened the wardrobe. There were two dark suits, a tweed jacket, a blazer and three pairs of trousers. He twisted the blazer to see the inside pocket. There was no label there. He let it go and then took the tweed jacket off its hanger. He threw it on the bed.
‘What about that?’ said Dawlish.
I said, ‘High notch, slightly waisted, centre-vented, three-button jacket in a sixteen-ounce Cheviot. Austin Reed, Hector Powe, or one of those expensive mass-production tailors. Not made to measure – off the peg. Scarcely worn, two or three years old, perhaps.’
‘Have a look at it,’ said Dawlish testily.
‘Really have a look?’
‘You’re better at that sort of thing than I am.’ It was Dawlish’s genius never to tackle anything he couldn’t handle and always to have near by a slave who could.
Dawlish took out the sharp little ivory-handled penknife that he used to ream his pipe. He opened it and gave it to me, handle first. I spread the jacket on the bed and used the penknife to cut the stitches of the lining. There were no labels anywhere. Even the interior manufacturer’s codes had been removed. So I continued working my way along the buckram until I could reach under that too. There was still nothing.
‘Shoulder-pads?’ I said.
‘Might as well,’ said Dawlish. He watched me closely.
‘Nothing,’ I said finally. ‘Would you care to try the trousers, sir?’
‘Do the other jackets.’
I smiled. It wasn’t that Dawlish was obsessional. It was simply his policy to run his life as though he was already answering the Minister’s questions. You searched all the clothing? Yes, all the clothing. Not, no, just one jacket, selected at random.
I did the other jackets. Dawlish proved right. He always proves right. It was in the right-hand shoulder-pad of one of the dark suits that we found the paper money. There were fourteen bills: US dollars, Deutsche Marks and sterling – a total of about twelve thousand dollars at the exchange rate then current.
But it was in the other shoulder-pad that we found the sort of document Dawlish was looking for. It was a letter signed by the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United Arab Republic’s Embassy in London. It claimed that Stephen Champion had diplomatic status as a naturalized citizen of the United Arab Republic and listed member of the Diplomatic Corps.
Dawlish read it carefully and passed it across to me. ‘What do you think about that?’ he asked.
To tell you the truth, I thought Dawlish was asking me to confirm that it was a forgery, but you can never take anything for granted when dealing with Dawlish. I dealt him his cards off the top of the deck. ‘Champion is not on the London Diplomatic List,’ I said, ‘but that’s about the only thing I’m certain of.’
Dawlish looked at me and sniffed. ‘Can’t even be certain of that,’ he said. ‘All those Abduls and Ahmeds and Alis … suppose you were told that one of those was the name Champion had adopted when converted to the Muslim faith. What then … ?’
‘It would keep the lawyers arguing for months,’ I said.
‘And what about the Special Branch superintendent at London airport, holding up the aeroplane departing to Cairo? Would he hold a man who was using this as a travel document, and risk the sort of hullabaloo that might result if he put a diplomat in the bag?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Precisely,’ said Dawlish.
A gust of wind rattled the window panes and the sky grew dark. He said nothing more. I took my coat off and hung it up. It was no good pretending that I wouldn’t be here all day. There’s only one way to tackle those jobs: you do it stone by stone, and you do it yourself. Dawlish sent Blantyre and his associate away. Then he went down to the car and called the office. I began to get some idea of the priorities when he told me he’d cancelled everything for the rest of the day. He sat down on the kitchen chair and watched me work.
There was nothing conclusive, of course: no dismembered limbs or bloodstains, but clothes that I’d seen Melodie Page wearing were packed in plastic carrier-bags, sandwiched neatly between two sheets of plasterboard, sealed at every edge, and integrated beautifully into the kitchen ceiling.
The wallpaper near the bed had deep scratches, and a broken fragment of fingernail remained embedded there. There was the faintest smell of carbolic acid from the waste-trap under the sink, and from there I managed to get a curved piece of clear glass that was one part of a hypodermic syringe. Other than that, there was only evidence of removal of evidence.
‘It’s enough,’ said Dawlish.
From the school yard across the street came all the exuberant screams that the kids had been bottling up in class. It was pouring with rain now, but children don’t mind the rain.
5
Schlegel likes Southern California. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing he does like. You take Southern California by the inland corners, he says, jerk it, so that all the shrubbery and real-estate falls into a heap along the coast, and you know what you’ve got? And I say, yes, you’ve got the French Riviera, because I’ve heard him say it before.
Well, on Monday I’d got the French Riviera. Or, more precisely, I’d got Nice. I arrived in my usual neurotic way: ten hours before schedule, breaking my journey in Lyon and choosing the third cab in the line-up.
It was so easy to remember what Nice had looked like the first time I saw it. There had been a pier that stretched out to sea, and barbed wire along the promenade. Armed sentries had stood outside the sea-front hotels, and refugees from the north stood in line for work, or begged furtively outside the crowded cafés and restaurants. Inside, smiling Germans in ill-fitting civilian suits bought each other magnums of champagne and paid in mint-fresh military notes. And everywhere there was this smell of burning, as if everyone in the land had something in their possession that the Fascists would think incriminating.
Everyone’s fear is different. And because bravery is just the knack of suppressing signs of your own fear, bravery is different too. The trouble with being only nineteen is that you are frightened of all the wrong things; and brave about the wrong things. Champion had gone to Lyon. I was all alone, and of course then too stupid not to be thankful for it. No matter what the movies tell you, there was no resistance movement visible to the naked eye. Only Jews could be trusted not to turn you over to the Fascists. Men like Serge Frankel. He’d been the first person I’d contacted then, and he was the first one I went to now.
It was a sunny day, but the apartment building, which overlooked the vegetable market, was cold and dark. I went up the five flights of stone stairs. Only a glimmer of daylight penetrated the dirty windows on each landing. The brass plate at his door – ‘Philatelic Expert’ – was by now polished a little smoother, and there was a card tucked behind the bell that in three languages said ‘Buying and Selling by Appointment Only’.
The same heavy door that protected his stamps, and had given us perhaps groundless confidence in the old days, was still in place, and the peep-hole through which he’d met the eyes of the Gestapo now was used to survey me.
‘My boy! How wonderful to see you.’
‘Hello, Serge.’
‘And a chance to practise my English,’ he said. He reached forward with a white bony hand, and gripped me firmly enough for me to feel the two gold rings that he wore.
It was easy to imagine Serge Frankel as a youth: a frail-looking small-boned teenager with frizzy hair and a large forehead and the same style of gold-rimmed spectacles as he was wearing now.
We went into the study. It was a high-ceilinged room lined with books, their titles in a dozen or more languages. Not only stamp catalogues and reference books, but philosophy from Cicero to Ortega y Gasset.
He sat in the same button-back leather chair now as he had then. Smiling the same inscrutable and humourless smile, and brushing at the ash that spilled down the same sort of waistcoat, leaving there a grey smear like a mark of penitence. It was inevitable that we should talk of old times.
Serge Frankel was a Communist – student of Marx, devotee of Lenin and servant of Stalin. Born in Berlin, he’d been hunted from end to end of Hitler’s Third Reich, and had not seen his wife and children since the day he waved goodbye to them at Cologne railway station, wearing a new moustache and carrying papers that described him as an undertaker from Stettin.
During the Civil War in Spain, Frankel had been a political commissar with the International Brigade. During the tank assault on the Prado, Frankel had destroyed an Italian tank single-handed, using a wine bottle hastily filled with petrol.
‘Tea?’ said Frankel. I remembered him making tea then as he made it now: pouring boiling water from a dented electric kettle into an antique teapot with a chipped lid. Even this room was enigmatic. Was he a pauper, hoarding the cash value of the skeleton clock and the tiny Corot etching, or a Croesus, indifferent to his plastic teaspoons and museum postcards of Rouault?
‘And what can I do for you, young man?’ He rubbed his hands together, exactly as he had done the day I first visited him. Then, my briefing could hardly have been more simple: find Communists and give them money, they had told me. But most of life’s impossible tasks – from alchemy to squaring the circle – are similarly concise. At that time the British had virtually no networks in Western Europe. A kidnapping on the German–Dutch border in November 1939 had put both the European chief of SIS and his deputy into the hands of the Abwehr. A suitcase full of contact addresses captured in The Hague in May 1940, and the fall of France, had given the coup de grâce to the remainder. Champion and I were ‘blind’, as jargon has it, and halt and lame, too, if the truth be told. We had no contacts except Serge Frankel, who’d done the office a couple of favours in 1938 and 1939 and had never been contacted since.
‘Communists.’ I remembered the way that Frankel had said it, ‘Communists’, as though he’d not heard the word before. I had been posing as an American reporter, for America was still a neutral country. He looked again at the papers I had laid out on his writing table. There was a forged US passport sent hurriedly from the office in Berne, an accreditation to the New York Herald Tribune and a membership card of The American Rally for a Free Press, which the British Embassy in Washington recommended as the reddest of American organizations. Frankel had jabbed his finger on that card and pushed it to the end of the row, like a man playing patience. ‘Now that the Germans have an Abwehr office here, Communists are lying low, my friend.’ He had poured tea for us.
‘But Hitler and Stalin have signed the peace pact. In Lyon the Communists are even publishing a news-sheet.’
Frankel looked up at me, trying to see if I was being provocative. He said, ‘Some of them are even wearing the hammer and sickle again. Some are drinking with the German soldiers and calling them fellow workers, like the Party tells them to do. Some have resigned from the Party in disgust. Some have already faced firing squads. Some are reserving their opinion, waiting to see if the war is really finished. But which are which? Which are which?’ He sipped his tea and then said, ‘Will the English go on fighting?’
‘I know nothing about the English, I’m an American,’ I insisted. ‘My office wants a story about the French Communists and how they are reacting to the Germans.’
Frankel moved the US passport to the end of the row. It was as if he was tacitly dismissing my credentials, and my explanations, one by one. ‘The people you want to see are the ones still undecided.’
He looked up to see my reaction.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘The ones who have not signed a friendship treaty with the Boche, eh?’
I nodded.
‘We’ll meet again on Monday. What about the café in the arcade, at the Place Massena. Three in the afternoon.’
‘Thank you, Mr Frankel. Perhaps there’s something I can do for you in return. My office have let me have some real coffee …’
‘Let’s see what happens,’ said Frankel. But he took the tiny packet of coffee. Already it was becoming scarce.
I picked up the documents and put them into my pocket. Frankel watched me very closely. Making a mistake about me could send him to a concentration camp. We both knew that. If he had any doubts he’d do nothing at all. I buttoned up my coat and bowed him goodbye. He didn’t speak again until I reached the door. ‘If I am wearing a scarf or have my coat buttoned at the collar, do not approach me.’
‘Thank you, Mr Frankel,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch out for that.’
He smiled. ‘It seems like only yesterday,’ he said. He poured the tea. ‘You were too young to be a correspondent for an American newspaper, but I knew you were not working for the Germans.’
‘How did you know that?’
He passed the cup of tea to me, murmuring apologies about having neither milk nor lemon. He said, ‘They would have sent someone more suitable. The Germans had many men who’d lived in America long enough. They could have chosen someone in his thirties or forties with an authentic accent.’
‘But you went ahead,’ I reminded him.
‘I talked to Marius. We guessed you’d be bringing money. The first contact would have to bring money. We could do nothing without cash.’
‘You could have asked for it, or stolen it.’
‘All that came later – the bank hold-ups, the extortion, the loans. When you arrived we were very poor. We were offering only a franc for a rifle and we could only afford to buy the perfect Lebel pattern ones even then.’
‘Rifles the soldiers had thrown away?’ It was always the same conversation that we had, but I didn’t mind.
‘The ditches were full of them. It was that that started young Marius off – the bataillon Guernica was his choice of name – I thought it would have been better to have chosen a victory to celebrate, but young Marius liked the unequivocally anti-German connotation that the Guernica bombing gave us.’
‘But on the Monday you said no,’ I reminded him.
‘On the Monday I told you not to have high hopes,’ he corrected me. He ran his long bony fingers back into his fine white wispy hair.
‘I knew no one else, Serge.’
‘I felt sorry for you when you walked off towards the bus station, but young Marius wanted to look at you and make up his own mind. And that way it was safer for me, too. He decided to stop you in the street if you looked genuine.’
‘At the Casino tabac he stopped me. I wanted English cigarettes.’
‘Was that good security?’
‘I had the American passport. There was no point in trying to pretend I was French.’
‘And Marius said he might get some?’
‘He waited outside the tabac. We talked. He said he’d hide me in the church. And when Champion returned, he hid us both. It was a terrible risk to take for total strangers.’
‘Marius was like that,’ said Frankel.
‘Without you and Marius we might never have got started,’ I said.
‘Hardly,’ said Frankel. ‘You would have found others.’ But he smiled and was flattered to think of himself as the beginning of the whole network. ‘Sometimes I believe that Marius would have become important, had he lived.’
I nodded. They’d made a formidable partnership – the Jewish Communist and the anti-Fascist priest – and yet I remembered Frankel hearing the news of Marius’s death without showing a flicker of emotion. But Frankel had been younger then, and keen to show us what his time in Moscow had really taught him.
‘We made a lot of concessions to each other – me and Marius,’ Frankel said. ‘If he’d lived we might have achieved a great deal.’
‘Sure you would,’ I said. ‘He would be running the Mafia, and you would have been made Pope.’
Flippancy was not in the Moscow curriculum, and Frankel didn’t like it. ‘Have you seen Pina Baroni yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘I see her in the market here sometimes,’ said Frankel. ‘Her little boutique in the Rue de la Buffa is a flourishing concern, I’m told. She’s over the other business by now, and I’m glad …’
The ‘other business’ was a hand-grenade thrown into a café in Algiers in 1961. It killed her soldier husband and both her children. Pina escaped without a scratch, unless you looked inside her head. ‘Poor Pina,’ I said.
‘And Ercole …’ Frankel continued, as if he didn’t want to talk of Pina, ‘… his restaurant prospers – they say his grandson will inherit; and “the Princess” still dyes her hair red and gets raided by the social division.’
I nodded. The ‘social division’ was the delicate French term for vice squad.
‘And Claude l’avocat?’
‘It’s Champion you want to know about,’ said Frankel.
‘Then tell me about Champion.’
He smiled. ‘We were all taken in by him, weren’t we? And yet when you look back, he’s the same now as he was then. A charming sponger who could twist any woman round his little finger.’
‘Yes?’ I said doubtfully.
‘Old Tix’s widow, she could have sold out for a big lump sum, but Champion persuaded her to accept instalments. So Champion is living out there in the Tix mansion, with servants to wait on him hand and foot, while Madame Tix is in three rooms with an outdoor toilet, and inflation has devoured what little she does get.’
‘Is that so?’
‘And now that he sees the Arabs getting rich on the payments for oil, Champion is licking the boots of new masters. His domestic staff are all Arabs, they serve Arab food out there at the house, they talk Arabic all the time and when he visits anywhere in North Africa he gets VIP treatment.’
I nodded. ‘I saw him in London,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a fez and standing in line to see “A Night in Casablanca”.’
‘It’s not funny,’ said Frankel irritably.
‘It’s the one where Groucho is mistaken for the Nazi spy,’ I said, ‘but there’s not much singing.’
Frankel clattered the teapot and the cups as he stacked them on the tray. ‘Our Mister Champion is very proud of himself,’ he said.
‘And pride comes before a fall,’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean, Serge?’
‘You said that!’ said Frankel. ‘Just don’t put words into my mouth, it’s something you’re too damned fond of doing, my friend.’
I’d touched a nerve.
Serge Frankel lived in an old building at the far end of the vegetable market. When I left his apartment that Monday afternoon, I walked up through the old part of Nice. There was brilliant sunshine and the narrow alleys were crowded with Algerians. I picked my way between strings of shoes, chickens, dates and figs. There was a peppery aroma of merguez sausages frying, and tiny bars where light-skinned workers drank pastis and talked football, and dark-skinned men listened to Arab melodies and talked politics.
From the Place Rosetti came the tolling of a church bell. Its sound echoed through the alleys, and stony-faced men in black suits hurried towards the funeral. Now and again, kids on mopeds came roaring through the alleys, making the shoppers leap into doorways. Sometimes there came cars, inch by inch, the drivers eyeing the scarred walls where so many bright-coloured vehicles had left samples of their paint. I reached the boulevard Jean Jaurès, which used to be the moat of the fortified medieval town, and is now fast becoming the world’s largest car park. There I turned, to continue along the alleys that form the perimeter of the old town. Behind me a white BMW was threading through the piles of oranges and stalls of charcuterie with only a fraction to spare. Twice the driver hooted, and on the third time I turned to glare.
‘Claude!’ I said.
‘Charles!’ said the driver. ‘I knew it was you.’
Claude had become quite bald. His face had reddened, perhaps from the weather, the wine or blood pressure. Or perhaps all three. But there was no mistaking the man. He still had the same infectious grin and the same piercing blue eyes. He wound the window down. ‘How are you? How long have you been in Nice? It’s early for a holiday, isn’t it?’ He drove on slowly. At the corner it was wide enough for him to open the passenger door. I got into the car alongside him. ‘The legal business looks like it’s flourishing,’ I said. I was fishing, for I had no way of knowing if the cheerful law student whom we called Claude l’avocat was still connected with the legal profession.
‘The legal business has been very kind to me,’ said Claude. He rubbed his cheek and chuckled as he looked me up and down. ‘Four grandchildren, a loving wife and my collection of Delftware. Who could ask for more.’ He chuckled again, this time in self-mockery. But he smoothed the lapel of his pearl-grey suit and adjusted the Cardin kerchief so that I would notice that it matched his tie. Even in the old days, when knitted pullovers were the height of chic, Claude had been a dandy. ‘And now Steve Champion lives here, too,’ he said.
‘So I hear.’
He smiled. ‘It must be the sunshine and the cooking.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And it was Steve who …’ He stopped.
‘Saved my life?’ I said irritably. ‘Saved my life up at the quarry.’
‘Put the réseau together, after the arrests in May,’ said Claude. ‘That’s what I was going to say.’
‘Well, strictly between the two of us, Claude, I wish I’d spent the war knitting socks,’ I said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I wish I had never heard of the lousy réseau, the Guernica network and all the people in it.’
‘And Steve Champion?’
‘Steve Champion most of all,’ I said. ‘I wish I could just come down here on holiday and not be reminded of all that useless crappy idiocy!’
‘You don’t have to shout at me,’ Claude said. ‘I didn’t send for you, you came.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. I regretted losing my cool if only for a moment.
‘We all want to forget,’ Claude said gently. ‘No one wants to forget it more than I want to.’
The car was halted while two men unloaded cartons of instant couscous from a grey van. In the Place St François the fish market was busy, too. A decapitated tunny was being sliced into steaks alongside the fountain, and a woman in a rubber apron was sharpening a set of knives.
‘So Steve is here?’ I said.
‘Living here. He lives out at the Tix house near the quarry.’
‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘All of us here again.’
‘Is it?’ said Claude.
‘Well, it sounds like a coincidence, doesn’t it?’
The driver’s sun-shield was drooping and Claude smiled as he reached up and pushed it flat against the roof of the car. In that moment I saw a gun in a shoulder holster under his arm. It wasn’t an impress-the-girlfriend, or frightened-of-burglars kind of instrument. The leather holster was soft and shiny, and the underside of the magazine was scratched from years of use. A Walther PPK! Things must have got very rough in the legal business in the last few years.
He turned and smiled the big smile that I remembered from the old days. ‘I don’t believe in anything any more,’ he confessed. ‘But most of all I don’t believe in coincidences. That’s why I’m here.’ He smoothed his tie again. ‘Where can I drop you, Charles?’
6
Tuesday morning was cold and very still, as if the world was waiting for something to happen. The ocean shone like steel, and from it successive tidal waves of mist engulfed the promenade. The elaborate façades of the great hotels and the disc of the sun were no more than patterns embossed upon a monochrome world.
Trapped between the low pock-marked sky and the grey Mediterranean, two Mirage jets buzzed like flies in a bottle, the vibrations continuing long after they had disappeared out to sea. I walked past the seafood restaurants on the quai, where they were skimming the oil and slicing the frites. It was a long time until the tourist season but already there were a few Germans in the heated terraces, eating cream cakes and pointing with their forks, and a few British on the beach, with Thermos flasks of strong tea, and cucumber sandwiches wrapped up in The Observer.
I was on my way to Frankel’s apartment. As I came level with the market entrance I stopped at the traffic lights. A dune buggy with a broken silencer roared past, and then a black Mercedes flashed its main beams. I waited as it crawled past me, its driver gesturing. It was Steve Champion. He was looking for a place to park but all the meter spaces were filled. Just as I thought he’d have to give up the idea, he swerved and bumped over the kerb and on to the promenade. The police allowed tourists to park there, and Champion’s Mercedes had Swiss plates.
‘You crazy bastard!’ said Champion, with a smile. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Where are you staying?’ The flesh under his eye was scratched and swollen and his smile was hesitant and pained.
‘With the Princess,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘You’re a masochist, Charlie. That’s a filthy hole.’
‘She can do with the money,’ I said.
‘Don’t you believe it, Charlie. She’s probably a major shareholder in IBM or something. Look here – have you time for a drink?’
‘Why not?’
He turned up the collar of his dark-grey silk trench coat and tied the belt carelessly. He came round the car to me. ‘There’s a sort of club,’ he said.
‘For expatriates?’
‘For brothel proprietors and pimps.’
‘Let’s hope it’s not too crowded,’ I said.
Champion turned to have a better view of an Italian cruise-liner sailing past towards Marseille. It seemed almost close enough to touch, but the weather had discouraged all but the most intrepid passengers from venturing on deck. A man in oilskins waved. Champion waved back.
‘Fancy a walk?’ Champion asked me. He saw me looking at his bruised cheek and he touched it self-consciously.
‘Yes,’ I said. He locked the door of the car and pulled his scarf tight around his throat.
We walked north, through the old town, and through the back alleys that smelled of wood-smoke and shashlik, and past the dark bars where Arab workers drink beer and watch the slot-machine movies of blonde strippers.
But it was no cramped bar, with menu in Arabic, to which Champion took me. It was a fine mansion on the fringe of the ‘musicians’ quarter’. It stood well back from the street, screened by full-grown palm trees, and guarded by stone cherubs on the porch. A uniformed doorman saluted us, and a pretty girl took our coats. Steve put his hand on my shoulder and guided me through the hall and the bar, to a lounge that was furnished with black leather sofas and abstract paintings in stainless-steel frames. ‘The usual,’ he told the waiter.
On the low table in front of us there was an array of financial magazines. Champion toyed with them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said. ‘You let me make a fool of myself.’
It was Steve who’d taught me the value of such direct openings. To continue to deny that I worked for the department was almost an admission that I’d been assigned to seek him out. ‘True-life confessions? For those chance meetings once or twice a year? That wasn’t in the Steve Champion crash-course when I took it.’
He smiled and winced and, with only the tip of his finger, touched his bruised cheek. ‘You did it well, old son. Asking me if I was recruiting you. That was a subtle touch, Charlie.’ He was telling me that he now knew it had been no chance meeting that day in Piccadilly. And Steve was telling me that from now on there’d be no half-price admissions for boys under sixteen.
‘Tell me one thing,’ Steve said, as if he was going to ask nothing else, ‘did you volunteer to come out here after me?’
‘It’s better that it’s me,’ I said. A waiter brought a tray with silver coffee-pot, Limoges china and a sealed bottle of private-label cognac. It was that sort of club.
‘One day you might find out what it’s like,’ said Steve.
‘There was the girl, Steve.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘It’s a Kill File, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Melodie Page is dead.’
‘Death of an operative?’ He looked at me for a long time. He knew how the department felt about Kill File investigations. He spooned a lot of sugar into his coffee, and took his time in stirring it. ‘So they are playing rough,’ he said. ‘Have they applied for extradition?’
‘If the investigating officer decides …’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Steve angrily. ‘Don’t give me that Moriarty Police Law crap. Are you telling me that there is a murder investigation being conducted by C.1 at the Yard?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘There were complications.’
Champion screwed up his face and sucked his coffee spoon. ‘So Melodie was working for the department?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
Champion nodded. ‘Of course. What a clown I am. And she’s dead? You saw the body?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Level with me, Charlie,’ said Champion.
I said, ‘No, I didn’t see the body.’ Champion poured coffee, then he snapped the seal on the cognac and poured two large tots.
‘Neat. Effective. And not at all gaudy,’ said Champion eventually, with some measure of admiration. He waggled the coffee spoon at me.
It seemed a bit disloyal to the department to understand his meaning too quickly. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘You understand, old boy,’ said Champion. ‘You understand. But not as well as I bloody understand.’ He paused while a waiter brought the cigarettes he’d ordered. When the waiter departed, Steve said softly, ‘There’s no dead girl – or if there is, your people have killed her – this is just a stunt, a frame-up, to get me back to London.’ Champion moved his cigarettes and his gold Dunhill lighter about on the magazines in front of him, pushing them like a little train from The Financial Times and on to Forbes and Figaro.
‘They are pressing me,’ I said. ‘It’s a Minister-wants-to-know inquiry.’
‘Ministers never want to know,’ said Champion bitterly. ‘All Ministers want is answers to give.’ He sighed. ‘And someone decided that I was the right answer for this one.’
‘I wish you’d come back to London with me,’ I said.
‘Spend a month or more kicking my heels in Whitehall? And what could I get out of it? An apology, if I’m lucky, or fifteen years, if that suits them better. No, you’ll not get me going back with you.’
‘But suppose they extradite you – it’ll be worse then.’
‘So you say.’ He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. ‘But the more I think about it, the less frightened I am. The fact they’ve sent you down here is a tacit admission that they won’t pull an extradition order on me.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Well, that’s because you’re too damned naïve. The department don’t want me back in London, explaining to them all the details of the frame-up they themselves organized. This is all part of an elaborate game … a softening-up for something big.’
‘Something that London wants you to do for them?’ I asked. ‘Is that what you mean?’
‘Let’s stop beating around the bush, shall we? The department has given me jobs from time to time. They do that with pensioned-off operatives because it keeps them signing the Act, and also because their pensions make them the most needy – and so the cheapest – people around.’
‘Come back to London, Steve.’
‘Can’t you understand plain bloody King’s English, Charlie? Either the girl is not dead, and the department have put her on ice in order to finger me …’
‘Or?’
‘Or she’s dead and the department arranged it.’
‘No.’
‘How can you say no. Do they let you read the Daily Yellows?’
‘It’s no good, Steve,’ I said. ‘The department would never do it this way and both of us know it.’
‘The confidence you show in those bastards …’ said Champion. ‘We know only a fraction of what goes on up there. They’ve told you that Melodie was a departmental employee – have you ever heard of her or seen any documents?’
‘The documents of an operative in the field? Of course I haven’t.’
‘Exactly. Well, suppose I tell you that she was never an employee and the department have wanted her killed for the last three months. Suppose I told you that they ordered me to kill her, and that I refused. And that that was when the row blew up.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘The department made that contact for me. They said she was from the Palestinian terrorists. They told me that she was a nutty American student, the London contact for five hundred stolen Armalites and two tons of gelignite.’ Champion was excited now and smiling nervously, as I remembered him from the old days.
He sipped his drink. ‘They sent an American chap to see me. Is his name Schindler? Drinks that Underberg stuff, I remember. I wouldn’t believe he was from the department at first. Then they sent a Mutual down to confirm him as OK. Is it Schroder?’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘He mentioned the killing end. I didn’t take him seriously at first. I mean, they must still have special people for that game, surely. But he was in earnest. Ten thousand pounds, he said. He had it all set up, too. He’d organized a flat in Barons Court stacked up with beer and whisky and cans of beans and soup. I’m telling you, it was equipped like a fall-out shelter. And he showed me this hypodermic syringe, killing wire and rubber gloves. Talk about horror movies, I needed a couple of big whiskies when I got out of there.’ He drank some coffee. ‘And then I realized how I’d put my prints on everything he’d shown me.’ He sighed. ‘No fool like an old fool.’
‘Did they pay the bill for the tweed jacket we found there?’
‘There was no reason to be suspicious,’ said Champion. ‘They told me to order the suits, and they paid for them. It was only when they sent a funny little man round to my place to take the labels and manufacturers’ marks out of them that I began to worry. I mean … can you think of anything more damning than picking up some johnny and then finding he’s got no labels in his suits?’
‘There was money in the shoulder-pads,’ I told him. ‘And documents, too.’
‘Well, there you are. It’s the kind of thing a desk-man would dream up if he’d never been at the sharp end. Wouldn’t you say that, Charlie?’
I looked at Champion but I didn’t answer. I wanted to believe him innocent, but if I discounted his charm, and the nostalgia, I saw only an ingenious man improvising desperately in the hope of getting away with murder.
‘How long ago are we talking about?’ I said.
‘Just a couple of weeks before I ran into you … or rather you sought me out. That’s why I wasn’t suspicious that you were official. I mean, they could have found out whatever they needed to know through their normal contacts … but that girl, she wasn’t one of them, Charlie, believe me.’
‘Did you tell her?’
‘Like fun! This girl was trying to buy armaments – and not for the first time. She could take care of herself, believe me. She carried, too – she carried a big .38 in that crocodile handbag.’ He finished his coffee and tried to pour more, but the pot was empty. ‘Anyway, I’ve never killed anyone in cold blood and I wasn’t about to start, not for the department and not for money, either. But I reasoned that someone would do it. It might have been someone I liked a lot better than her. It might have been you.’
‘That was really considerate of you Steve,’ I said.
He turned his head to me. The swelling seemed to have grown worse in the last half hour. Perhaps that was because of Champion’s constant touches. The blue and red flesh had almost pushed his eye closed. ‘You don’t go through our kind of war, and come out the other end saying you’d never kill anyone, no matter what kind of pressure is applied.’
I looked at him for a long time. ‘The days of the entrepreneur are over, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Now it’s the organization man who gets the Christmas bonus and the mileage allowance. People like you are called “heroes”, and don’t mistake it for a compliment. It just means has-beens, who’d rather have a hunch than a computer output. You are yesterday’s spy, Steve.’
‘And you’d sooner believe those organization men than believe me?’
‘No good waving your arms, Steve,’ I said. ‘You’re standing on the rails and the express just blew its whistle.’
He stared at me. ‘Oooh, they’ve changed you, Charlie! Those little men who’ve promised you help with your mortgage, and full pension rights at sixty. Who would have thought they could have done that to the kid who fought the war with a copy of Wage Labour and Capital in his back pocket. To say nothing of that boring lecture you gave everyone about Mozart’s revolutionary symbolism in “The Marriage of Figaro”.’ He smiled, but I didn’t.
‘You’ve had your say, Steve. Don’t take the jury out into the back alley.’
‘I hope you listened carefully then,’ he said. He got to his feet and tossed some ten-franc notes on to the coffee tray. ‘Because if you are only half as naïve as you pretend to be … and if you have put your dabs all over some carefully chosen incriminating evidence …’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Then it could be that London are setting us both up for that big debriefing in the sky.’
‘You’ve picked up my matches,’ I said.
7
‘You’d sooner live in a dump than live in a nice home,’ said Schlegel accusingly.
‘No,’ I said, but without much conviction. I didn’t want to argue with him.
He opened the shutters so that he could see the charcuterie across the alley. The tiny shop-window was crammed with everything from shredded carrot to pig feet. Schlegel shuddered. ‘Yes, you would,’ he insisted. ‘Remember that fleapit you used to have in Soho. Look at that time we booked you into the St Regis, and you went into a cold-water walk-up in the Village. You like dumps!’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘If this place had some kind of charm, I’d understand. But it’s just a flophouse.’ For a long time he was silent. I walked across to the window and discovered that he was staring into the first-floor window across the alley. A fat woman in a frayed dressing-gown was using a sewing machine. She looked up at Schlegel, and when he did not look away she closed her shutters. Schlegel turned and looked round the room. I’d put asters, souci and cornflowers into a chipped tumbler from the washbasin. Schlegel flicked a finger at them and the petals fell. He went over to the tiny writing table that wobbled unless something was wedged under one leg. My Sony radio-recorder almost toppled as Schlegel tested the table for stability. I had turned the volume down as Schlegel had entered, but now the soft sounds of Helen Ward, and Goodman’s big band, tried to get out. Schlegel pushed the ‘off’ button, and the music ended with a loud click. ‘That phone work?’ he asked.
‘It did this morning.’
‘Can I give you a word of advice, fella?’
‘I wish you would,’ I told him.
For a moment I thought I’d offended him, but you don’t avoid Schlegel’s advice that easily. ‘Don’t stay in places like this, pal. I mean … sure, you save a few bucks when you hit the cashier’s office for the price of a hotel. But jeeze … is it worth it?’
‘I’m not hitting the cashier’s office for the price of anything more than I’m spending.’
His face twisted in a scowl as he tried to believe me. And then understanding dawned. ‘You came in here, in the sub, in the war. Right? I remember now: Villefranche – it’s a deep-water anchorage. Yeah. Sure. Me too. I came here once … a long time ago on a flat-top, with the Sixth Fleet. Nostalgia, eh?’
‘This is where I first met Champion.’
‘And the old doll downstairs.’ He nodded to himself. ‘She’s got to be a hundred years old … she was the radio operator … the Princess! Right?’
‘We just used this as a safe-house for people passing through.’
‘It’s a brothel!’ Schlegel accused.
‘Well, I don’t mind that so much,’ I told him. ‘The baker next door waves every morning when I leave. This morning, he winked.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather be in a hotel?’
‘Well, I’m going to ask the Princess if the girls could be a little quieter with the doors.’
‘Banging all night?’ said Schlegel archly.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘A cat house,’ mused Schlegel. ‘A natural for an escape chain. But the Nazis had them high on the check-out list.’
‘Well, we won the war,’ I said sharply. Schlegel would get in there, checking out the syntax of my dreams, if he knew the way.
‘I’ll call Paris,’ he said.
‘I’d better tell the Princess.’
‘Do we have to?’
‘We have to,’ I said. ‘Unless you want her interrupting you to tell you how much it’s costing, while you’re talking to the Elysée Palace.’
Schlegel scowled to let me know that sarcasm wasn’t going to help me find out who he was phoning. ‘Extension downstairs, huh?’
I went to the door and yelled down to the bar, at which the Princess was propped with Salut les Copains and a big Johnny Walker. ‘I’m calling Paris,’ I shouted.
‘You called Paris already today, chéri,’ she said.
‘And now we’re calling again, you old bag,’ growled Schlegel, but he took good care to keep his voice down. Already she’d made him apologize to one of the bar girls for saying goddamn.
‘That’s right,’ I told her.
‘Just as long as you don’t forget the money you’re spending, my darling.’
‘Darleeeng,’ growled Schlegel. ‘Will you believe that’s the first hearing-aid I’ve seen with sequins on it?’
He picked up his plastic case, put it on the bed and opened it. At first glance it might have been mistaken for a portable typewriter, permanently built into its case. It was the newest model of acoustic coupler. Schlegel began typing on the keys.
I said, ‘Anything fresh on the girl? Body been found, or anything?’
Schlegel looked up at me, sucked his teeth and said, ‘I’ll ask them what Missing Persons knows.’ When Schlegel finished typing his message he dialled the Paris number. He gave his real name. I suppose that was to save all the complications that would arise if he was phoning from a hotel that held his passport. Then he said, ‘Let’s scramble,’ and put the phone handpiece into the cradle switch inside the case. He pressed the ‘transmit’ button and the coupler put a coded version of what he’d typed through the phone cables at thirty or forty characters a second. There was a short delay, then the reply came back from the same sort of machine. This time Schlegel’s coupler decoded it and printed it on to tape in ‘plain English’. Schlegel read it, grunted, pushed the ‘memory erase’ button and rang off.
‘You ask those guys the time, and they’d tell you what trouble they’re having from the Records Office,’ he said. He burned the tape without showing it to me. It was exactly the way the textbook ordered but it didn’t make me want to open my heart to him about Champion’s version of the girl’s death.
But I told him everything Champion had said.
‘He’s right,’ said Schlegel. ‘He knows we wouldn’t be pussyfooting around if we had the evidence. Even if he enters the UK I doubt whether the department would let us hold him.’
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Len Deighton
Sinister rumours link clandestine Arab arms dealing with the man who led the old anti-Nazi Guernica network. Time to reopen the master file on yesterday’s spy…Sinister rumours link clandestine Arab arms dealing with the man who led the old anti-Nazi Guernica network. Time to re-open the master file on yesterday’s spy…This new reissue includes a foreword from the cover designer, Oscar-winning filmmaker Arnold Schwartzman, and a brand new introduction by Len Deighton, which offers a fascinating insight into the writing of the story.
LEN DEIGHTON
Yesterday’s Spy
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by
Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1975
Copyright © Len Deighton 1975
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2012
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2012
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007458417
Version: 2017-05-23
All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u968f71db-0519-538a-948e-a705095bca47)
Copyright (#ub89fda3f-9bf4-561c-b103-1c2053b9d48c)
Introduction (#ud6f22271-97c3-5a1e-beb4-e4ff64bdb83c)
Chapter 1 (#uc2f4ad06-3849-58e8-9fa7-6f8ec57f6688)
Chapter 2 (#u75fa440c-b02f-5469-aba6-1632e4654bef)
Chapter 3 (#u107247dd-14e5-5f8e-88bb-a7c04a4502cb)
Chapter 4 (#ue5fd7d6f-f510-5bf9-a251-7e83a0a4c420)
Chapter 5 (#u5ba0f46f-8dc1-599f-9bb3-24551db1ac25)
Chapter 6 (#u0c4342ae-8129-554c-9e2c-f830791f1327)
Chapter 7 (#u58c06bba-ad40-54f4-8c1b-18a2d44000aa)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Cover designer’s note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Len Deighton (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction
They say that New York City is the place to enjoy when you are young and Paris is the city for those of mature years. Maybe it depends how much money you spend.
It is not true that I prefer to stay in broken-down dumps rather than grand hotels. I love grand hotels but I also find certain sorts of dumps, and the people who frequent them, intriguing. Back in the distant past I had a room in the Adlon in Communist East Berlin, or at least in that hotel’s ruined remains. It was so dilapidated that it seemed as if a violent sneeze would be enough to make it fall apart. But looking down from this back room I could see the East German border guards and their barrack rooms, their armoury, kennels and guard dogs. The noise from the dogs being brought out gave notice of some new drama at the nearby Wall. It was rather like standing in the wings for a Grand-Guignol show.
A quite different and more enjoyable time came when my family squeezed into the attic of a Gasthof not far from Munich. The discomfort was more than made up for by the friendliness of the Swabian couple who worked so hard and kept so cheerful and let us into the kitchen to learn some secrets of south German cooking. We stayed in that lakeside village for months. My two sons went to school nearby and my understanding of the German south and its people proved valuable for my book Winter, which I wrote there using one of the earliest laptop computers. We were all sorry to depart.
When Charlie Kasher, the executive producer of the film of The Ipcress File, visited me in the Hotel Chelsea – on West 23
Street NYC – he was appalled at what he described as its ‘squalour’. He dragged me away to somewhere he felt more salubrious: a small smart luxury hotel on Fifth Avenue. It was more convenient and more comfortable but only half the fun. In the fifties, in several tiny Japanese villages I found clean accommodation so cheap that my Japanese friends refused to believe the low prices I had paid and thought I didn’t understand the money. When I first booked into the famous Hotel Sacher in Vienna it had not fully recovered from its occupation by some of the more uncaring, and trigger-happy, elements of the Red Army infantry, and I looked in vain for the Schlagobers and Sachertorte.
As I see it, it is the task of a writer to seek the truth and truth is not to be found in the silky indulgence of grand hotels, which tend to be the same in all parts of the world. Truth is found where people work and suffer. As a base for my research for Yesterday’s Spy I rented a room in a flea-bitten little hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was an establishment that I have depicted realistically in this story. The Princess was much as I have described.
Why Villefranche? The bay of Villefranche has water deeper than any other such port anywhere in the Mediterranean. From 350 feet near the shore the ocean bed slopes away steeply to 1,700 feet of dark water. It was this unique deep-water anchorage that brought the US Sixth Fleet here regularly: carriers, cruisers and even big battleships such as the USS Missouri. In those frantic years of the Cold War, France was in love with its American protectors. Americans were subject to the draft and these little streets and alleys were packed with high-spirited young sailors on brief shore leave looking for action of one kind or another.
When the dollar was high, France fondly embraced all American visitors, but love affairs can cool and lovers prove unkind. France switched its affections to Teutonic neighbours brandishing Deutschmarks, and the Sixth Fleet found other spots to drop anchor. By the time I was researching this book Villefranche was going through a period of quiet. Visitors of any kind were not much in evidence and the whole place had a hushed spooky feeling, as if the lonely little town was waiting for the sailors to return.
The Savoy is one of the most attractive regions that I have ever known. I have returned to it time and time again. Eventually – and long after this book was written – it became home to my wife’s parents, and in a comfortable rented house nearby we made it our home too. My children went to the local village school, learned to speak French like the natives, enjoyed long-lasting friendships and, like us, count it among the happiest times of their lives. The inhabitants of the Savoy are unique for their welcoming ways, neighbourliness and love of food and cooking. During our time there I wrote much of a book later published as the ABC of French Food. Cooking provides the lingua franca of this region, and while the affable sociability is – like so many of the family names – Italian, the cooking is French. The winter hereabout is not always mild. The Alps and the River Rhone both bring winds and cold weather but that in turn means heartwarming food and roaring log fires. In summary it is an excellent place in which to settle back and write a book.
Writing books is like a spell on a battlefield. For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes. To construct Yesterday’s Spy I decided to use a second character and thus create a dual leading role. Conan Doyle had shown us how Dr Watson could be a useful tool for explaining facts and theories to the reader. I was right to believe that Yesterday’s Spy would benefit from assigning to ‘Harry Palmer’ a belligerent American boss, Schlegel, but I didn’t include in my calculations the intimacy that would come from sending Harry back to fraternize with his old friends from the Resistance. This intimacy battled against the closeness between Harry and his boss. Perhaps it is a minor matter, and only applied to this special circumstance of this story, but I soon became aware of the limitations this put upon the crisscross relationships.
Dividing the number of major characters into the size of your typescript tells you how much space you have for character development. Yesterday’s Spy has quite a lot of major characters and that meant wasting no time when it came to describing each of them. The idea of having a group of Second World War Resistance workers who, some long time later, have different allegiances and different enemies provided an interesting writing problem. It was so interesting that I felt afterwards that I should have made it a far longer book.
Len Deighton, 2012
1
‘The Guernica network!’ said Steve Champion, holding up his glass.
I hesitated. White’s Club – sanctus sanctorum of Establishment London – seemed an inappropriate place to indulge in revolutionary nostalgia.
‘Let’s just drink to Marius,’ I said.
‘Marius,’ said Champion. He drank, and wiped his blunt military-style moustache with the back of his glove. It was a gesture I’d noticed that time we’d first met – Villefranche, landing from a submarine, one night when the war was young. It was as wrong for him then as it was now. In those days Regular Army captains of the Welsh Guards did not wipe the froth off their faces with the back of their hand. But then Regular captains of the Brigade of Guards, sent to France to set up anti-Nazi Intelligence networks, were not expected to meet newly arriving agents with a girl on each arm and an open bottle of champagne.
‘Marius,’ I said. I drank too.
‘What a comical crew we were,’ said Champion. ‘Marius the revolutionary priest, you straight from training school, with your terrible accent and your pimple ointment, and me. Sometimes I thought we should have let the Nazis catch us, and watched them die of laughing.’
‘It was Marius who reconciled that network,’ I said, ‘the Communists and the deserters and the hot-heads and us professionals. It was Marius who held the network together. When he went, we all went.’
‘He was past his prime by then,’ said Champion. ‘He’d had too much of it. He wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. None of us would have.’
‘Marius was young,’ I said. ‘Almost as young as I was.’
‘Marius died in a torture chamber,’ said Champion. ‘He died within six hours of being arrested … it was incredibly brave and he deserved the medal … but he could have saved himself by giving them some useless information. He could have deciphered some ancient codes and given them the names of people who’d already gone back to London. He could have bought a few days, and in a few days we could have rescued him.’
I didn’t argue. Even after all this time it was difficult to be objective about the death of Marius. His energy and his optimism had kept us going at times when it seemed that all was lost. And his reckless bravery had more than once saved us.
For Champion it was even more difficult. He’d always blamed himself for the young priest’s death. Perhaps that was partly why he’d married Marius’s younger sister. And perhaps it was partly why the marriage had now fallen apart.
We both watched the far end of the room, where two Socialist Cabinet Ministers exchanged jokes about their golf handicaps and tips about the stock exchange. Champion reached into the waistcoat of his beautifully cut chalk-stripe suit. He flipped back the cover of the gold hunter that had belonged to his father and his grandfather, looked at the time, and then signalled a club servant to bring more drinks.
‘The divorce came through,’ he said. ‘Caty and me – it’s all over. Nowadays I live all the time in France.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Why?’ said Champion.
I shrugged. There was no point in telling him that I liked them both, and enjoyed what had once been their happy marriage. ‘Those weekends at the house in Wales,’ I said. ‘Where will I go now to get French cooking like Caty’s?’
‘Well, Caty still lives there,’ said Champion. ‘And she’d love to see you again, I’m sure.’
I looked at him. I would have expected him to invite me to his new house in France rather than to that of his ex-wife in Wales, but Steve Champion was always unpredictable. Even more so since he’d become a wealthy businessman. He lit a fresh cigarette from the dog-end of his old one. His hand trembled; he had to steady it with the one on which he always wore a glove – to hide the absence of the fingertips he’d left behind in an interview room of St Roch prison in wartime Nice.
‘You never thought of going back?’ he said.
‘To live in France?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘To the department.’
‘Hah! It’s a thought, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t, Steve, and I’ll tell you why.’ I leaned a little closer to him, and he glanced round the room with no more than a flicker of the eye.
I said, ‘Because the department never asked me to, Steve.’
He smiled soberly.
‘And I’ll tell you something else, Steve,’ I added. ‘There are people who say that you never left the department. Whenever we get together like this in London I wonder whether you are going to try recruiting me.’
‘Now you’re laughing at me, boyo,’ said Champion, in his stage Welsh accent. He reached into his pocket and produced a clear plastic envelope. Inside it were five picture postcards. Each depicted an airship or a balloon, and in the foreground were men in straw hats and women in leg-of-mutton-sleeved dresses, inhabitants of an innocent world that had not quite learned to fly. On the other sides of the cards was a tangle of greetings to long-forgotten addressees, and curious old postage stamps.
‘A philatelic auction in Bond Street,’ said Champion. ‘That’s why I came to London. I just couldn’t resist these.’
I looked at his purchases. By now Champion should have realized that I was a lost cause as far as his obsession with airmail stamps was concerned. ‘And Billy?’ I asked. I handed his airships back to him.
‘Yes, I’m seeing a lot of Billy this week,’ said Champion, as if visiting his young son was no more than an afterthought. ‘Caty has been very good about letting me see Billy.’
He went through the postcards one by one and then put them away with exaggerated care. ‘The night Billy was born,’ he said, ‘I was up to the neck in bank loans, promissory notes and mortgages. I was sure I’d done the wrong thing … did I ever tell you how I started: with the uncut diamonds?’
‘I’ve heard stories,’ I admitted.
He inhaled carefully on his cigarette. ‘Do you know Accra?’
‘No.’
‘The arse-hole of West Africa. I was flat broke, and working hard to buy a ticket home. I was translating export permits for cocoa traders and wangling customs forms for importers – all of them Arabs. My Arabic has always been good, but by the time I finished working with those jokers I could have done the sports reports for Radio Cairo. When I think of it!’ He clasped his hands tight as if to stretch the joints. ‘I took the bumpf down to the customs sheds one day – June, it was, and bloody steamy, even by Accra standards. I made the usual golden obeisance to the officials and loaded ten crates of Renault spares on to the truck I’d hired. But when I uncrated them back in the cocoa warehouse, I find I’m knee-deep in French MAS 38s, complete with cleaning kits, and spares and instruction booklets.’
‘Sub-machineguns,’ I said.
‘Go to the top of the class.’
‘But could you get the Long cartridge?’
‘Am I glad you weren’t involved, old boy! No, you couldn’t get them. But the kids who bought them were too young to remember the MAS 38, so they think they are MAT 49s, for which there is 9 mm stuff ready to be nicked from a local police or army unit. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘But I’m getting ahead of the story. Imagine me – the only man in Accra who’d sooner have Renault spares than sub-machineguns, sitting on ten cases of them. All of them customs cleared, rubber stamped and signed for. It was tempting.’
‘But you didn’t succumb?’
‘Oh, but I did.’ He took a drag on his cigarette and waved the smoke away. ‘Two hundred and thirty-five dollars each – American dollars – and I could have doubled it, had I sold them to the loudmouths with the fuzzy-wuzzy haircuts.’
‘Ten to a case?’ I said. ‘About ten thousand pounds profit.’
‘I had to stop my client going down to the customs and raising hell about his Renault spares. I owed a bit of money, I had to get an exit permit, and clearance from the tax office: it all costs money.’
‘You came home?’
‘I went to buy my air ticket from a crooked little Portuguese travel agent. I started bargaining with him, knowing that he could unload my US dollar bills at a big premium. To cut a long story short, I ended up giving him all my American money in exchange for a bag of uncut diamonds from Angola and a boat ticket to Marseille.’
‘You went to Marseille?’
‘Old man Tix had just died, his whole set-up was for sale. Caty’s sister told me about it. But the Algerian fighting was still on, and the Tix fruit and vegetable importing was no more than a ream of headed notepaper and a couple of fleabitten offices in Constantine.’
‘And the quarry was defunct.’
‘The quarry – yes.’ Champion smiled. We’d both hidden in the quarry during a big German round-up, when old man Tix had chased a German officer out of the house shouting ‘Sale Boche’ at him, crossing himself as he did so. ‘The quarry was finished. They’d mined, too, but it was costing so much to dig that the old boy did better on unemployment benefit.’
‘But you sold your diamonds and bought the Tix place from his widow?’
‘That was only a down payment,’ said Steve, ‘but Madame Tix wanted me to have it. She waited a long time for the rest of the money. It was a gamble for all concerned. We were betting on a peaceful settlement of the Algerian war.’
‘You were always a good guesser, Steve,’ I said.
‘The peace between France and Algeria meant immigrant labourers – that got the mine back into profit.’
‘Lower wages,’ I said.
‘But still higher than any they could get in their own country.’
‘But you closed the mine and the quarry – you sent the men home.’
Champion smiled. He said, ‘It was the idea of cheap labour in the mine. That’s what enabled me to get my capital. Avaricious little hairdressers with their hands in the till … contractors fiddling their tax, and hard-eyed old bastards from the merchant banks. They came to see my quarry and the Arabs sweating their guts out. They liked it – that was the kind of investment those little sods could understand. That was the way their grandfathers – and their friends’ grandfathers – had made a fortune in Africa a hundred years ago.’
‘And you put that money into the fruit and veg.’
‘Much more than money … soil analysis, a professor of botany, a programme of seeding techniques, long-term contracts for the farmers, minimum price guarantees for seasonal workers, refrigerated warehouses, refrigerated transport and contracted refrigerated shipping. I put a lot of money into the Arab countries.’
‘And now they have oil as well.’
‘Oil is a one-crop economy,’ said Champion.
‘A gilt-edged one,’ I said.
‘That’s what they said about coffee and tea and rubber,’ said Champion. ‘I truly believe that North Africa must trade with Europe, right across the board. The Arab countries must have a stake in Europe’s well-being. The economics must link, otherwise Africa will let Europe die of inflation.’
‘I never thought of you as a crusader, Steve.’
Champion seemed disconcerted at the idea. He picked up his glass to hide behind it.
Two men came downstairs: one was a famous poet, the other a peer of the realm. They were arguing quietly and eruditely about the lyrics of an obscene Eighth Army song about the extra-marital activities of King Farouk.
A club servant came to tell Champion that a lady was waiting at the entrance. ‘Come along,’ said Champion. ‘This is someone I’d like you to meet.’
A servant helped Champion into the lightweight vicuna coat, designed like a British warm, and handed him the bowler hat that made him look like a retired general. Someone unseen gave a perfunctory brush to the shoulder of my dirty raincoat.
The snow obliterated the view through the doorway, like static on an old TV. Outside in St James’s Street, London’s traffic was jammed tight. Champion’s girl gave no more than the nod and smile that manners demanded. Her eyes were devoted to Champion. She watched him with the kind of awe with which an orphan eyes a Christmas tree. It was always the same girl. This one had the same perfect skin that Caty had, and the same soft eyes with which Pina had looked at him. Except that decades had passed since Caty or Pina had been this kid’s age.
‘Melodie,’ said Champion. ‘It’s a nice name, isn’t it: Melodie Page.’
‘It’s a lovely name,’ I said, in my usual sycophantic way.
Champion looked at his watch. ‘It’s a long time since we jawed so much,’ he told me. ‘My God, but you would have been bored, Melodie. We must be getting old.’ He smiled. ‘Melodie and Billy are taking me to the theatre tonight. They are going to repair one of the gaps in my musical education.’
The girl hit his arm in mock anger.
‘Rock music and pirates,’ Champion told me.
‘A potent mixture,’ I said.
‘Billy will be glad I’ve seen you. You always remember his birthday, he told me.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That’s damned nice of you.’ Champion patted my arm.
At that moment, exactly on schedule, a black Daimler drew level with the entrance. A uniformed driver hurried across the pavement, opening an umbrella to shelter Champion and the girl from the weather. He opened the door, too. As the girl slid into the real leather seating, Champion looked back to where I was standing. The snow was beating about my ears. Champion raised his gloved hand in a regal salute. But when only three of your fingers are able to wave, such a gesture can look awfully like a very rude Anglo-Saxon sign.
2
I could see my report about Champion on Schlegel’s desk. Schlegel picked it up. He shook it gently, as if hoping that some new information might drop out of it. ‘No,’ said Schlegel. ‘No. No. No.’
I said nothing. Colonel Schlegel, US Marine Corps (Air Wing), Retired, cut a dapper figure in a lightweight houndstooth three-piece, fake club-tie and button-down cotton shirt. It was the kind of outfit they sell in those Los Angeles shops that have bow windows and plastic Tudor beams. He tapped my report. ‘Maybe you can shaft the rest of them with your inscrutable sarcasm and innocent questions, but me no likee – got it?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Champion was just seeing his kid, and buying stamps – there’s no other angle. He’s a rich man now: he’s not playing secret agents. Believe me, Colonel. There’s nothing there.’
Schlegel leaned forward to get a small cigar from a box decorated with an eagle trying to eat a scroll marked Semper Fidelis. He pushed the box to me, but I’m trying to give them up.
‘He’s in deep,’ said Schlegel. Puckered scar tissue made it difficult to distinguish his smiles from his scowls. He was a short muscular man with an enviable measure of self-confidence; the kind of personality that you hire to MC an Elks Club stag night.
I waited. The ‘need-to-know’ basis, upon which the department worked, meant that I’d been told only a part of it. Schlegel took his time getting his cigar well alight.
I said, ‘The story about the machineguns fits with everything I’ve been told. The whole story – the stuff about the uncut diamonds providing the money to start the mine, and then the fruit and vegetable imports – that’s all on non-classified file.’
‘Not all of it,’ said Schlegel. ‘Long after the file closes, Champion was still reporting back to this department.’
‘Was he!’
‘Long before my time, of course,’ said Schlegel, to emphasize that this was a British cock-up, less likely to happen now that we had him with us on secondment from Washington. ‘Yes,’ said Schlegel, ‘those machineguns were shipped to Accra on orders from this office. It was all part of the plan to buy Champion into control of the Tix set-up. Champion was our man.’
I remembered all those years when I’d been drinking and dining with the Champions, never suspecting that he was employed by this office.
Perhaps Schlegel mistook my silence for disbelief. ‘It was a good thing while it lasted,’ he said. ‘Champion was in and out of Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, arguing about his melons, carrots and potatoes, keeping his eyes open and dropping a few words to the right people, doing us all a power of good. And the way that Champion had scored – selling cannons to some freaky little terrorist outfit – all helped.’
‘So what was the fadeout?’
Schlegel blew a piece of tobacco off his lip, with enough force to make the bookcase rattle. ‘The feedback of information began to sag. Champion said the French were starting to lean on him, and it was getting too dangerous. It was a top-level decision to let him go. It was the right decision. You Brits are good at bowing out gracefully and you’d done all right out of Champion by that time.’
‘And now?’
‘A guy in German security trying to make a name for himself. He’s dug out some stuff about Champion’s financial affairs. They are asking questions about the guns at Accra.’
‘Bonn gets hysterical – and we have to join in the screaming?’
‘If the Champion business becomes a big scandal, they’ll say we were careless when we let him go.’
‘Perhaps it was a little careless,’ I suggested.
‘Well, maybe it was,’ said Schlegel. He picked up my report exonerating Champion. ‘But your whitewash job isn’t going to help matters.’
‘I’ll take another shot at it,’ I said.
He slid my report across the polished desk. Then from a drawer he got Perrier water and a tiny bottle of Underberg bitters. He shook the bitters into the mineral water and stirred it with a ballpoint pen to make it a delicate brown. ‘Want some?’
‘That’s just for hangovers,’ I said. ‘And even then it’s got to be a pretty damn bad hangover.’
‘I like it,’ said Schlegel, and drank it slowly, savouring each sip.
I took the report and stood up to leave. Schlegel said, ‘This is going to be a lousy rotten miserable bummer. I hate these jobs where we are shaking down our own. So you don’t have to give me a bad time, or give yourself a bad time for not covering up for him.’
‘I had that lecture at Indoctrine Four, when I went to the CIA Communications symposium in 1967,’ I said.
‘Champion saved your life,’ Schlegel reminded me. ‘If you can’t hack it, just say you want out.’
‘I know what kind of out I’d get,’ I said bitterly.
Schlegel nodded. ‘And I’d countersign it,’ he said. In a way, I preferred Schlegel’s New World directness: the others would have tried to persuade me that such a request would have had no effect on my career.
Schlegel stood up to look out of the window. It was still snowing. ‘This isn’t just some kind of fancy positive vetting job,’ he said. ‘This is a hot one.’ Schlegel scratched his behind, and reflected.
‘Someone across the street could lip-read you,’ I warned him.
He turned to look at me pityingly. It was Schlegel’s often expressed belief that we’d get more done here in London if we worried less about such details. ‘The Germans are sending one of their people down to Nice to investigate Champion,’ he said thoughtfully.
I didn’t respond.
‘Have you been taken suddenly drunk or something?’ said Schlegel.
‘I didn’t want to disturb your deductive processes,’ I said. I polished my spectacles and blinked at him.
‘Damned if I understand it,’ he said.
‘You’re in Europe now, Colonel,’ I said. ‘This German scandal has come just when the Bonn government are warming up for an election. When their security people discovered that Champion had once been a British agent it was the answer to all their problems. They wrote “Passed to British security” in the margin and fired it across here. Now the German Defence Minister can refuse to answer any questions about the scandal on the grounds that it would prejudice the security of their British ally. It will give them all they need to stall until the election is over. When they are elected again it will be “Minister requested” and that’s the last we’ll see of it. I’ve been through all this before, Colonel.’
‘Well, you know more about all this European Mickey Mouse than I’ll ever understand,’ said Schlegel. It was a double-edged compliment and he bared his teeth to let me know it. ‘We’ll hold it for the three-month cycle,’ he offered, as if trying to come to terms with me.
‘Don’t do me any favours,’ I told him. ‘I don’t give a good goddamn if you publish it as a whole-page ad in Variety. I’ve done what I was asked. But if the department expected me to return with the synopsis for World War Three, I’m sorry to disappoint. If you want to send me back to spend the rest of the year drinking with Champion at the department’s expense, I’ll be very happy to do so. But Champion is no dope. He’ll tumble what’s going on.’
‘Maybe he already did,’ Schlegel said slyly. ‘Maybe that’s why you got nothing out of him.’
‘You know what to do, then,’ I told him.
‘I already did it,’ he said. ‘A short dark kid. Looks ten years younger than she really is: Melodie Page. Been with the department nearly eight years!’
3
‘William, come to Mother, darling, and let me give you a kiss.’ Champion’s failed marriage was all there in that imperious command. An elegant French wife who persisted in calling their small son Billy ‘William’, and who gave him kisses, instead of asking for them.
She gave Billy the promised kiss, pulled a dead leaf off the front of his sweater and then waited until he’d left the room. She turned to me. ‘All I ask is that you don’t remind me how keen I was to marry him.’ She poured fresh hot water into the teapot, and then put the copper kettle back on the hob. It hummed gently with the heat from the blazing logs. There was a stainless-steel kitchen only a few steps along the carpeted corridor, but she had made the tea and toasted the bread on the open fire in the lounge. From here we could look out of the window and watch the wind ruffling the river and whipping the bare trees into a mad dance. The black Welsh hills wore a halo of gold that promised respite from the dark daylight.
‘I didn’t come down here to talk about Steve, or about the divorce,’ I protested.
She poured tea for me and gave me the last slice of toast. She spiked a fresh piece of bread on to the toasting fork. ‘Then it’s surprising how many times we seem to find ourselves talking about it.’ She turned to the hearth and busied herself with finding a hot place in the fire. ‘Steve has this wonderful knack,’ she continued bitterly, ‘this wonderful knack of falling on his feet … like a kitten.’
It was an affectionate analogy. The rejection had hurt, I could see that. I buttered my toast and put some of Caterina’s homemade jam on it. It was delicious and I ate it without speaking.
‘This damned house,’ she continued. ‘My sister wrote to tell me how much it would be worth if it was in France. But it’s not in France, it’s in Wales! And it costs a fortune to keep the slates on, and mend the boiler, and cut the lawn … and heating oil has nearly doubled in price just since the last delivery.’ The bread started to smoke. She cursed softly, broke the scorched piece off and threw it away into the flames before toasting the other side. Caterina could cope with things. That was her misfortune in a way. She wanted to be cosseted and looked after but she was ten times more efficient than any of the men who wanted to do it. ‘So Steve gets rid of the house, burdens me with all its problems and expenses, and everyone tells me to be grateful.’
‘You’re not exactly poor, Caty,’ I said.
She looked at me for a moment, deciding if I knew her well enough to make such a personal remark. But I did know her well enough.
‘You know what the arrangement was … If he’s going down to the river, I’ll kill the little devil.’
I followed her gaze to where her small son was dragging a toy cart across the lawn. As if sensing that he was being watched, he changed direction and started back up towards the smart new sauna again. Caterina went back to her tea and toast. ‘He’s changed a lot, you know … I swore to my father that Steve had come through the war unmarred, but it took ten years to take effect. And then the last few years have been hell … hell for both of us, and little William, too!’
‘He had a lousy war, Caty,’ I said.
‘So did a lot of other people.’
I remembered the day in 1944 when I went into Nice prison just a few hours after the Gestapo had moved out. I was with the forward elements of the American Army. There was another Englishman with me. We asked each other no personal questions. He was wearing Intelligence Corps badges, but he knew Steve Champion all right, and he was probably sent directly from London, as I had been. The Germans had destroyed all the documents. I suppose London were sure they would have done, or they would have sent someone more important than me to chase it.
‘Look at that,’ said this other officer, when we were kicking the cupboards of the interrogation room apart. It was a shabby room, with a smell of ether and carbolic, a framed engraving of Salzburg and some broken wine bottles in the fireplace. He pointed to a bottle on the shelf. ‘Steve Champion’s fingertips,’ said my companion. He took the bottle and swirled the brine around so that through the mottled glass I saw four shrunken pieces of dark brown organic matter that jostled together as they were pushed to the centre of the whirling fluid. I looked again and found that they were four olives, just as the label said, but for a moment I had shivered. And each time I remembered it I shivered again. ‘You’re right, Caty,’ I said. ‘A lot of people had it much worse.’
Overhead the clouds were low and puffy, like a dirty quilt pulled over the face of the countryside.
‘There was all that “we Celts” nonsense. I began to believe that Wales was little different from Brittany. Little did I know … My God!’ said Caterina. She was still watching Billy in the garden. ‘The banks of the river are so muddy this last week … the rain … one of the village boys was drowned there this time last year.’ She looked up at the carved wooden crucifix on the wall above the TV set.
‘He’ll be all right.’ I said it to calm her.
‘He never dares to go down as far as the paddock when Steve visits. But he just defies me!’
‘Do you want me to get him?’
She gave a despairing smile. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She tugged at her hair. I was a ‘friend of Steve’s’: she didn’t want me to get any kind of response from Billy that she had failed to get. ‘We’ll watch from here,’ she said.
‘That’s probably best,’ I agreed.
‘You English!’ she said. I got the full blast of her anxiety. ‘You’re probably a fully paid-up subscriber to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.’
‘That wouldn’t necessarily make me a child-beater,’ I said. ‘And it’s the Royal Society.’
‘No one can live with a man who is racked with guilt. And Steve is racked with guilt.’
‘You’re not talking about the war?’ I asked.
‘I’m talking about the marriage,’ she said.
‘Because Steve has no need to feel guilty about the war,’ I told her.
‘My mother told me about Englishmen,’ said Caterina. She raised her hand in a gesture more appropriate to an Italian market than to an English drawing-room. And now her voice, too, carried an inflection of her birth ties. ‘You don’t have to have something to feel guilty about!’ Her voice was high and almost shrill. ‘Don’t you understand that? Guilt is like pain – it hurts just the same whether it’s real or imagined!’
‘I’ll have to think about that,’ I said defensively.
‘You think about it, then. I’ll go and fetch William.’ She pushed the silk cosy down over the teapot to keep the tea warm while she was gone. But she did not go. She kept her hands round it and stared into the distance. Or perhaps she was staring at the silver-framed photo of her brother Marius, the young priest who’d died in that carbolic-smelling basement. Suddenly the sun stabbed into the room. It wasn’t real sun, there was no warmth in it, and precious little colour. It spilled over the embroidered traycloth like weak lemon tea, and made a rim round Caty’s hair.
They were both like their mother, these Baroni girls. Even as children they’d looked more like visiting townspeople than like village kids. Tall and slim, Caty had that sort of ease and confidence that belied the indecision she expressed.
‘I won’t stay here,’ she said, as if her thoughts had raced on far beyond our conversation. ‘My sister wants me to help with her boutique in Nice. With the money I get from the house, we could start another shop, perhaps.’
The sun’s cross-light scrawled a thousand wrinkles upon her face, and I was forced to see her as she was, instead of through the flattering haze of my memories. Perhaps she read my thoughts. ‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘Steve’s getting old, too, and so are you.’ She smoothed her hair, and touched the gold cross that she wore.
She was still attractive. Whatever kind of post-natal exercises she’d done after Billy’s birth had restored her figure to that of the trim young woman Steve had married. She used just sufficient make-up to compensate for the pale English winters she’d endured for so long. Her nails were manicured, and long enough to convince me that she didn’t spend much time at the sink, and her hair was styled in the fashion that requires frequent visits to the hairdresser.
She smoothed the striped silk pants across her knee. They were stylish and tailored. She looked like an illustration that American Vogue might run if they ever did an article about English crumpet. I wondered if she spent many elegant afternoons sitting by the log fire in her fine clothes, pouring herself lemon tea from a silver teapot.
‘Do you know what I think?’ she said.
I waited a long time and then I said, ‘What do you think, Caty?’
‘I don’t believe you just bumped into Steve. I think you were sent after him. I think you are still working for the Secret Service or something – just like in the war. I think you are after Steve.’
‘Why would anyone be after him, Caty?’
‘He’s changed,’ she said. ‘You must have noticed that yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised what he was mixed up in. He has this sort of schizophrenia and an obsession with secrecy. I don’t know if you get like that in the Secret Service, or whether the Secret Service choose that sort of man. But it’s hell to live with, I’ll tell you that.’
‘I think you still love him,’ I said.
‘You’ve always hero-worshipped him,’ she said. ‘He was your big brother, wasn’t he? You just can’t imagine that some boring little housewife like me would have the effrontery to be glad to get rid of your wonderful Steve Champion. Well, I am glad. I just hope like hell that I never see him again, ever.’
I don’t know how she expected me to react, but whatever she expected, I failed her. I saw a look of exasperation. She said, ‘I tried, believe me, I tried very hard. I even bought new things and wore false eyelashes.’
I nodded.
‘I thought Steve had sent you … to get William.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘He’ll stop at nothing to get him. He told me that. But I’ll fight him, Charles. You tell Steve that. He’ll never get William from me.’
She picked up Billy’s favourite toy rabbit and went to the door. She looked back at me as if I was a Solomon who would decide Billy’s future. ‘If I thought he would be happy with Steve, I wouldn’t mind so much. But William is not like his father – he’s a gentle child and easily hurt.’
‘I know he is, Caty.’
She stood there for a moment, thinking of things to say, and not saying them. Then she went out of the room.
I saw her as she passed the window. She was wearing a riding mac and a scarf over her head. She had Billy’s rabbit under her arm.
4
That Champion’s Master File had been brought from Central Registry was, in itself, a sign of the flap that was in progress. It was seldom that we handled anything other than the Action Abstracts and they were a three-hour task. This Master would have stacked up to a five-feet-tall pile of paperwork, had the Biog, Associative, Report, Vettings and year by year Summaries been put one upon the other.
The papers had yellowed with age, the photos were brittle and dog-eared. The yellow vetting sheets were now buff-coloured, and the bright-red Report dossier had faded to a brownish-pink.
There was little hope of discovering anything startling here. The continuing triple-A clearance, right up to the time that Champion stopped reporting to the department, was in itself a sign that men more jaundiced than I could ever be had given Champion a clean bill of health. Since then the department had shown little interest in him.
I looked at his Biographical entries. Champion’s father, a Welsh Catholic, had been a senior lecturer at the Abbasiyah Military Academy, Cairo. Young Champion came back to England to attend public school. From there he won a place at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. For a boy who grew up to table-talk of tactics, battles and ballistics, Sandhurst was a doddle. Champion became an under-officer, and a well-remembered one. And his scholarship matched his military expertise: modern history, four languages and a mathematics prize.
It was Champion’s French-language skills that earned for him a secondment to the French Army. He went the usual round of military colleges, the Paris Embassy, Maginot Line fortresses and Grand General HQ, with occasional glimpses of the legendary General Gamelin.
Champion had only been back with his regiment for a matter of weeks when a War Office directive automatically shortlisted him for a Secret Intelligence Service interview. He was selected, trained and back in France by 1939. He was just in time to watch General Gamelin’s defence system surrender to the Nazis. Champion fled south and became ‘net-officer’ for what was no more than a collection of odds and sods in the unoccupied zone. His orders were to stay clear of the enthusiastic amateurs that London called their Special Operations Executive, but inevitably the two networks became entangled.
It was Champion who greeted me in person that night when I landed from the submarine at Villefranche. I was assigned to SOE but Champion kidnapped me and got it made official afterwards. If I’d gone up to Nîmes as ordered, my war service would have ended two or three months later in Buchenwald.
But Champion used me to sort out his own network and I stayed with him right up to the time the network crumbled and Champion was taken prisoner. Eventually he escaped and was flown back to London. He got a DSO and a new job. Even before D-Day, Champion was assigned to peacetime network planning. He demanded choice of personnel, and got it. His first request was to have me as his senior assistant. It wasn’t easy for me now to look at Champion’s file with an objective eye.
When you read old files, you realize how the paperwork itself decides the progress of an inquiry. Schlegel gave Bonn’s report a twelve-week life cycle, so the coordinator decided not to give it a file number. He attached it as an appendix to Champion’s abstract. Then I had to do a written report, to glue it all together. With everyone satisfied, the file would have gone over to Current Storage and then gone sliding down the priorities until it ended in a tin archive box in Hendon.
But it didn’t.
It was activated by an alert slip that came from the officer who was ‘running’ Melodie Page. She failed to report for two cycles. This would normally have meant the opening of an orange Caution File with its own file number. But with Champion’s abstract signed out to me, it caused the girl’s alert slip to be pinned on to my desk diary.
Suddenly the Champion file was wearing red stickers in its hair, and everyone concerned was trying to think of a ‘Latest action’ to pin to it, in case the Minister wanted to read it himself.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Schlegel.
‘Perhaps she’s fallen for Champion,’ I said.
He looked at me to see whether I meant it. ‘That’s all I need,’ said Schlegel. ‘You coming in here inventing new things for me to worry about.’
‘And you want me to go to this flat that Champion is supposed to have kept as some kind of bolt-hole?’
‘It’s a ten-minute job. Special Branch will send Blantyre and one of the Special Branch break-in specialists. Just take a look round, and file a short report tomorrow. No sweat – it’s only to show we’re on our toes.’
‘Are you sure I’m experienced enough to handle something like this?’
‘Don’t go touchy on me, bubblebrain. I want a piece of paper: something recent, with a senior operative’s signature, to put in the file before it leaves here.’
‘You’re right,’ I said.
‘Goddamn! Of course I’m right,’ he said in exasperation. ‘And Mr Dawlish will be looking in there on his way back from his meeting in Chiswick.’
The top brass! They really expected questions in the House, if Dawlish was going to do an I-was-there piece for them.
Steve Champion’s hideaway, in Barons Court. Well, I don’t have to tell you what kind of house it was: Gothic horror comes to town! Depressing place, with no sign of any tenants, and a dented metal grille that asks you who you are, and buzzes when it opens the lock.
That bugger Blantyre was already there, chatting away merrily with his ‘break-in specialist’ who’d already splintered the paintwork on the outer door and left a wet footprint in the hall, and who, on closer inspection, turned out to be Blantyre’s old buddy Detective-Inspector Seymour.
There they were, striding all over the clues and pouring each other double portions of Champion’s booze.
‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ said Blantyre.
‘So I see.’
Blantyre held up his glass and looked at it, like one of those white-coated actors in TV commercials about indigestion. He said, ‘We were wondering whether to send samples to the lab.’
‘Send a whole bottle,’ I said. ‘Order a case from Harrods, and give them his Diner’s Card number.’
Blantyre’s face reddened, but whether in shame or anger I could not be sure. I said, ‘Good. Well, if I’m not disturbing you two, I’ll take a look round while there’s still some evidence left.’
Blantyre gave me both barrels of a sawn-off twelve-bore, sighed and left the room wearing a sardonic smile. His drinking companion followed him.
I’d hardly started having a look round when Dawlish arrived. If Schlegel was hoping to keep our break-in inconspicuous, I’d say that Dawlish screwed up any last chance, what with his official car and uniformed driver, and the bowler hat and Melton overcoat. To say nothing of the tightly rolled umbrella that Dawlish was waving. Plastic raincoats are de rigueur for the rainy season in Barons Court.
‘Not exactly a playboy pad,’ said Dawlish, demonstrating his mastery of the vernacular.
Even by Dawlish’s standards that was an understatement. It was a large gloomy apartment. The wallpaper and paintwork were in good condition and so was the cheap carpeting, but there were no pictures, no books, no ornaments, no personal touches. ‘A machine for living in,’ said Dawlish.
‘Le Corbusier at his purest,’ I said, anxious to show that I could recognize a cultural quote when I heard one.
It was like the barrack-room I’d had as a sergeant, waiting for Intelligence training. Iron bed, a tiny locker, plain black curtains at the window. On the windowsill there were some withered crumbs. I suppose no pigeon fancied them when just a short flight away the tourists would be throwing them croissants, and they could sit down and eat with a view of St James’s Park.
There was a school yard visible from the window. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining. Swarms of children made random patterns as they sang, swung, jumped in puddles and punched each other with the same motiveless exuberance that, organized, becomes war. I closed the window and the shouting died. There were dark clouds; it would rain again.
‘Worth a search?’ said Dawlish.
I nodded. ‘There will be a gun. Sealed under wet plaster perhaps. He’s not the kind of man to use the cistern or the chimney: either tear it to pieces or forget it.’
‘It’s difficult, isn’t it,’ said Dawlish. ‘Don’t want to tear it to pieces just to find a gun. I’m interested in documents – stuff that he needs constant access to.’
‘There will be nothing like that here,’ I said.
Dawlish walked into the second bedroom. ‘No linen on the bed, you notice. No pillows, even.’
I opened the chest of drawers. There was plenty of linen there; all brand new, and still in its wrappings.
‘Good quality stuff,’ said Dawlish.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
Dawlish opened the kitchen cupboards and recited their contents. ‘Dozen tins of meat, dozen tins of peas, dozen bottles of beer, dozen tins of rice pudding. A package of candles, unused, a dozen boxes of matches.’ He closed the cupboard door and opened a kitchen drawer. We stared at the cutlery for a moment. It was all new and unused. He closed it again without comment.
‘No caretaker,’ I said. ‘No landlady, no doorman.’
‘Precisely,’ said Dawlish. ‘And I’ll wager that the rent is paid every quarter day, without fail, by some solicitor who has never come face to face with his client. No papers, eh?’
‘Cheap writing-pad and envelopes, a book of stamps, postcards with several different views of London – might be a code device – no, no papers in that sense.’
‘I look forward to meeting your friend Champion,’ said Dawlish. ‘A dozen tins of meat but three dozen bars of soap – that’s something for Freud, eh?’
I let the ‘your friend’ go unremarked. ‘Indeed it is, sir,’ I said.
‘None of it surprises you, of course,’ Dawlish said, with more than a trace of sarcasm.
‘Paranoia,’ I said. ‘It’s the occupational hazard of men who’ve worked the sort of territories that Champion has worked.’ Dawlish stared at me. I said, ‘Like anthrax for tannery workers, and silicosis for miners. You need somewhere … a place to go and hide for ever …’ I indicated the store cupboard, ‘… and you never shake it off.’
Dawlish walked through into the big bedroom. Blantyre and his sidekick made themselves scarce. Dawlish opened the drawers of the chest, starting from the bottom like a burglar so that he didn’t have to bother closing them. There were shirts in their original Cellophane bags, a couple of knitted ties, sweaters and plain black socks. Dawlish said, ‘So should I infer that you have a little bolt-hole like this, just in case the balloon goes up?’ Even after all these years together, Dawlish had to make sure his little jokes left a whiff of cordite.
‘No, sir,’ I said. ‘But on the new salary scale I might be able to afford one – not in central London, though.’
Dawlish grunted, and opened the wardrobe. There were two dark suits, a tweed jacket, a blazer and three pairs of trousers. He twisted the blazer to see the inside pocket. There was no label there. He let it go and then took the tweed jacket off its hanger. He threw it on the bed.
‘What about that?’ said Dawlish.
I said, ‘High notch, slightly waisted, centre-vented, three-button jacket in a sixteen-ounce Cheviot. Austin Reed, Hector Powe, or one of those expensive mass-production tailors. Not made to measure – off the peg. Scarcely worn, two or three years old, perhaps.’
‘Have a look at it,’ said Dawlish testily.
‘Really have a look?’
‘You’re better at that sort of thing than I am.’ It was Dawlish’s genius never to tackle anything he couldn’t handle and always to have near by a slave who could.
Dawlish took out the sharp little ivory-handled penknife that he used to ream his pipe. He opened it and gave it to me, handle first. I spread the jacket on the bed and used the penknife to cut the stitches of the lining. There were no labels anywhere. Even the interior manufacturer’s codes had been removed. So I continued working my way along the buckram until I could reach under that too. There was still nothing.
‘Shoulder-pads?’ I said.
‘Might as well,’ said Dawlish. He watched me closely.
‘Nothing,’ I said finally. ‘Would you care to try the trousers, sir?’
‘Do the other jackets.’
I smiled. It wasn’t that Dawlish was obsessional. It was simply his policy to run his life as though he was already answering the Minister’s questions. You searched all the clothing? Yes, all the clothing. Not, no, just one jacket, selected at random.
I did the other jackets. Dawlish proved right. He always proves right. It was in the right-hand shoulder-pad of one of the dark suits that we found the paper money. There were fourteen bills: US dollars, Deutsche Marks and sterling – a total of about twelve thousand dollars at the exchange rate then current.
But it was in the other shoulder-pad that we found the sort of document Dawlish was looking for. It was a letter signed by the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United Arab Republic’s Embassy in London. It claimed that Stephen Champion had diplomatic status as a naturalized citizen of the United Arab Republic and listed member of the Diplomatic Corps.
Dawlish read it carefully and passed it across to me. ‘What do you think about that?’ he asked.
To tell you the truth, I thought Dawlish was asking me to confirm that it was a forgery, but you can never take anything for granted when dealing with Dawlish. I dealt him his cards off the top of the deck. ‘Champion is not on the London Diplomatic List,’ I said, ‘but that’s about the only thing I’m certain of.’
Dawlish looked at me and sniffed. ‘Can’t even be certain of that,’ he said. ‘All those Abduls and Ahmeds and Alis … suppose you were told that one of those was the name Champion had adopted when converted to the Muslim faith. What then … ?’
‘It would keep the lawyers arguing for months,’ I said.
‘And what about the Special Branch superintendent at London airport, holding up the aeroplane departing to Cairo? Would he hold a man who was using this as a travel document, and risk the sort of hullabaloo that might result if he put a diplomat in the bag?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Precisely,’ said Dawlish.
A gust of wind rattled the window panes and the sky grew dark. He said nothing more. I took my coat off and hung it up. It was no good pretending that I wouldn’t be here all day. There’s only one way to tackle those jobs: you do it stone by stone, and you do it yourself. Dawlish sent Blantyre and his associate away. Then he went down to the car and called the office. I began to get some idea of the priorities when he told me he’d cancelled everything for the rest of the day. He sat down on the kitchen chair and watched me work.
There was nothing conclusive, of course: no dismembered limbs or bloodstains, but clothes that I’d seen Melodie Page wearing were packed in plastic carrier-bags, sandwiched neatly between two sheets of plasterboard, sealed at every edge, and integrated beautifully into the kitchen ceiling.
The wallpaper near the bed had deep scratches, and a broken fragment of fingernail remained embedded there. There was the faintest smell of carbolic acid from the waste-trap under the sink, and from there I managed to get a curved piece of clear glass that was one part of a hypodermic syringe. Other than that, there was only evidence of removal of evidence.
‘It’s enough,’ said Dawlish.
From the school yard across the street came all the exuberant screams that the kids had been bottling up in class. It was pouring with rain now, but children don’t mind the rain.
5
Schlegel likes Southern California. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing he does like. You take Southern California by the inland corners, he says, jerk it, so that all the shrubbery and real-estate falls into a heap along the coast, and you know what you’ve got? And I say, yes, you’ve got the French Riviera, because I’ve heard him say it before.
Well, on Monday I’d got the French Riviera. Or, more precisely, I’d got Nice. I arrived in my usual neurotic way: ten hours before schedule, breaking my journey in Lyon and choosing the third cab in the line-up.
It was so easy to remember what Nice had looked like the first time I saw it. There had been a pier that stretched out to sea, and barbed wire along the promenade. Armed sentries had stood outside the sea-front hotels, and refugees from the north stood in line for work, or begged furtively outside the crowded cafés and restaurants. Inside, smiling Germans in ill-fitting civilian suits bought each other magnums of champagne and paid in mint-fresh military notes. And everywhere there was this smell of burning, as if everyone in the land had something in their possession that the Fascists would think incriminating.
Everyone’s fear is different. And because bravery is just the knack of suppressing signs of your own fear, bravery is different too. The trouble with being only nineteen is that you are frightened of all the wrong things; and brave about the wrong things. Champion had gone to Lyon. I was all alone, and of course then too stupid not to be thankful for it. No matter what the movies tell you, there was no resistance movement visible to the naked eye. Only Jews could be trusted not to turn you over to the Fascists. Men like Serge Frankel. He’d been the first person I’d contacted then, and he was the first one I went to now.
It was a sunny day, but the apartment building, which overlooked the vegetable market, was cold and dark. I went up the five flights of stone stairs. Only a glimmer of daylight penetrated the dirty windows on each landing. The brass plate at his door – ‘Philatelic Expert’ – was by now polished a little smoother, and there was a card tucked behind the bell that in three languages said ‘Buying and Selling by Appointment Only’.
The same heavy door that protected his stamps, and had given us perhaps groundless confidence in the old days, was still in place, and the peep-hole through which he’d met the eyes of the Gestapo now was used to survey me.
‘My boy! How wonderful to see you.’
‘Hello, Serge.’
‘And a chance to practise my English,’ he said. He reached forward with a white bony hand, and gripped me firmly enough for me to feel the two gold rings that he wore.
It was easy to imagine Serge Frankel as a youth: a frail-looking small-boned teenager with frizzy hair and a large forehead and the same style of gold-rimmed spectacles as he was wearing now.
We went into the study. It was a high-ceilinged room lined with books, their titles in a dozen or more languages. Not only stamp catalogues and reference books, but philosophy from Cicero to Ortega y Gasset.
He sat in the same button-back leather chair now as he had then. Smiling the same inscrutable and humourless smile, and brushing at the ash that spilled down the same sort of waistcoat, leaving there a grey smear like a mark of penitence. It was inevitable that we should talk of old times.
Serge Frankel was a Communist – student of Marx, devotee of Lenin and servant of Stalin. Born in Berlin, he’d been hunted from end to end of Hitler’s Third Reich, and had not seen his wife and children since the day he waved goodbye to them at Cologne railway station, wearing a new moustache and carrying papers that described him as an undertaker from Stettin.
During the Civil War in Spain, Frankel had been a political commissar with the International Brigade. During the tank assault on the Prado, Frankel had destroyed an Italian tank single-handed, using a wine bottle hastily filled with petrol.
‘Tea?’ said Frankel. I remembered him making tea then as he made it now: pouring boiling water from a dented electric kettle into an antique teapot with a chipped lid. Even this room was enigmatic. Was he a pauper, hoarding the cash value of the skeleton clock and the tiny Corot etching, or a Croesus, indifferent to his plastic teaspoons and museum postcards of Rouault?
‘And what can I do for you, young man?’ He rubbed his hands together, exactly as he had done the day I first visited him. Then, my briefing could hardly have been more simple: find Communists and give them money, they had told me. But most of life’s impossible tasks – from alchemy to squaring the circle – are similarly concise. At that time the British had virtually no networks in Western Europe. A kidnapping on the German–Dutch border in November 1939 had put both the European chief of SIS and his deputy into the hands of the Abwehr. A suitcase full of contact addresses captured in The Hague in May 1940, and the fall of France, had given the coup de grâce to the remainder. Champion and I were ‘blind’, as jargon has it, and halt and lame, too, if the truth be told. We had no contacts except Serge Frankel, who’d done the office a couple of favours in 1938 and 1939 and had never been contacted since.
‘Communists.’ I remembered the way that Frankel had said it, ‘Communists’, as though he’d not heard the word before. I had been posing as an American reporter, for America was still a neutral country. He looked again at the papers I had laid out on his writing table. There was a forged US passport sent hurriedly from the office in Berne, an accreditation to the New York Herald Tribune and a membership card of The American Rally for a Free Press, which the British Embassy in Washington recommended as the reddest of American organizations. Frankel had jabbed his finger on that card and pushed it to the end of the row, like a man playing patience. ‘Now that the Germans have an Abwehr office here, Communists are lying low, my friend.’ He had poured tea for us.
‘But Hitler and Stalin have signed the peace pact. In Lyon the Communists are even publishing a news-sheet.’
Frankel looked up at me, trying to see if I was being provocative. He said, ‘Some of them are even wearing the hammer and sickle again. Some are drinking with the German soldiers and calling them fellow workers, like the Party tells them to do. Some have resigned from the Party in disgust. Some have already faced firing squads. Some are reserving their opinion, waiting to see if the war is really finished. But which are which? Which are which?’ He sipped his tea and then said, ‘Will the English go on fighting?’
‘I know nothing about the English, I’m an American,’ I insisted. ‘My office wants a story about the French Communists and how they are reacting to the Germans.’
Frankel moved the US passport to the end of the row. It was as if he was tacitly dismissing my credentials, and my explanations, one by one. ‘The people you want to see are the ones still undecided.’
He looked up to see my reaction.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘The ones who have not signed a friendship treaty with the Boche, eh?’
I nodded.
‘We’ll meet again on Monday. What about the café in the arcade, at the Place Massena. Three in the afternoon.’
‘Thank you, Mr Frankel. Perhaps there’s something I can do for you in return. My office have let me have some real coffee …’
‘Let’s see what happens,’ said Frankel. But he took the tiny packet of coffee. Already it was becoming scarce.
I picked up the documents and put them into my pocket. Frankel watched me very closely. Making a mistake about me could send him to a concentration camp. We both knew that. If he had any doubts he’d do nothing at all. I buttoned up my coat and bowed him goodbye. He didn’t speak again until I reached the door. ‘If I am wearing a scarf or have my coat buttoned at the collar, do not approach me.’
‘Thank you, Mr Frankel,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch out for that.’
He smiled. ‘It seems like only yesterday,’ he said. He poured the tea. ‘You were too young to be a correspondent for an American newspaper, but I knew you were not working for the Germans.’
‘How did you know that?’
He passed the cup of tea to me, murmuring apologies about having neither milk nor lemon. He said, ‘They would have sent someone more suitable. The Germans had many men who’d lived in America long enough. They could have chosen someone in his thirties or forties with an authentic accent.’
‘But you went ahead,’ I reminded him.
‘I talked to Marius. We guessed you’d be bringing money. The first contact would have to bring money. We could do nothing without cash.’
‘You could have asked for it, or stolen it.’
‘All that came later – the bank hold-ups, the extortion, the loans. When you arrived we were very poor. We were offering only a franc for a rifle and we could only afford to buy the perfect Lebel pattern ones even then.’
‘Rifles the soldiers had thrown away?’ It was always the same conversation that we had, but I didn’t mind.
‘The ditches were full of them. It was that that started young Marius off – the bataillon Guernica was his choice of name – I thought it would have been better to have chosen a victory to celebrate, but young Marius liked the unequivocally anti-German connotation that the Guernica bombing gave us.’
‘But on the Monday you said no,’ I reminded him.
‘On the Monday I told you not to have high hopes,’ he corrected me. He ran his long bony fingers back into his fine white wispy hair.
‘I knew no one else, Serge.’
‘I felt sorry for you when you walked off towards the bus station, but young Marius wanted to look at you and make up his own mind. And that way it was safer for me, too. He decided to stop you in the street if you looked genuine.’
‘At the Casino tabac he stopped me. I wanted English cigarettes.’
‘Was that good security?’
‘I had the American passport. There was no point in trying to pretend I was French.’
‘And Marius said he might get some?’
‘He waited outside the tabac. We talked. He said he’d hide me in the church. And when Champion returned, he hid us both. It was a terrible risk to take for total strangers.’
‘Marius was like that,’ said Frankel.
‘Without you and Marius we might never have got started,’ I said.
‘Hardly,’ said Frankel. ‘You would have found others.’ But he smiled and was flattered to think of himself as the beginning of the whole network. ‘Sometimes I believe that Marius would have become important, had he lived.’
I nodded. They’d made a formidable partnership – the Jewish Communist and the anti-Fascist priest – and yet I remembered Frankel hearing the news of Marius’s death without showing a flicker of emotion. But Frankel had been younger then, and keen to show us what his time in Moscow had really taught him.
‘We made a lot of concessions to each other – me and Marius,’ Frankel said. ‘If he’d lived we might have achieved a great deal.’
‘Sure you would,’ I said. ‘He would be running the Mafia, and you would have been made Pope.’
Flippancy was not in the Moscow curriculum, and Frankel didn’t like it. ‘Have you seen Pina Baroni yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘I see her in the market here sometimes,’ said Frankel. ‘Her little boutique in the Rue de la Buffa is a flourishing concern, I’m told. She’s over the other business by now, and I’m glad …’
The ‘other business’ was a hand-grenade thrown into a café in Algiers in 1961. It killed her soldier husband and both her children. Pina escaped without a scratch, unless you looked inside her head. ‘Poor Pina,’ I said.
‘And Ercole …’ Frankel continued, as if he didn’t want to talk of Pina, ‘… his restaurant prospers – they say his grandson will inherit; and “the Princess” still dyes her hair red and gets raided by the social division.’
I nodded. The ‘social division’ was the delicate French term for vice squad.
‘And Claude l’avocat?’
‘It’s Champion you want to know about,’ said Frankel.
‘Then tell me about Champion.’
He smiled. ‘We were all taken in by him, weren’t we? And yet when you look back, he’s the same now as he was then. A charming sponger who could twist any woman round his little finger.’
‘Yes?’ I said doubtfully.
‘Old Tix’s widow, she could have sold out for a big lump sum, but Champion persuaded her to accept instalments. So Champion is living out there in the Tix mansion, with servants to wait on him hand and foot, while Madame Tix is in three rooms with an outdoor toilet, and inflation has devoured what little she does get.’
‘Is that so?’
‘And now that he sees the Arabs getting rich on the payments for oil, Champion is licking the boots of new masters. His domestic staff are all Arabs, they serve Arab food out there at the house, they talk Arabic all the time and when he visits anywhere in North Africa he gets VIP treatment.’
I nodded. ‘I saw him in London,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a fez and standing in line to see “A Night in Casablanca”.’
‘It’s not funny,’ said Frankel irritably.
‘It’s the one where Groucho is mistaken for the Nazi spy,’ I said, ‘but there’s not much singing.’
Frankel clattered the teapot and the cups as he stacked them on the tray. ‘Our Mister Champion is very proud of himself,’ he said.
‘And pride comes before a fall,’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean, Serge?’
‘You said that!’ said Frankel. ‘Just don’t put words into my mouth, it’s something you’re too damned fond of doing, my friend.’
I’d touched a nerve.
Serge Frankel lived in an old building at the far end of the vegetable market. When I left his apartment that Monday afternoon, I walked up through the old part of Nice. There was brilliant sunshine and the narrow alleys were crowded with Algerians. I picked my way between strings of shoes, chickens, dates and figs. There was a peppery aroma of merguez sausages frying, and tiny bars where light-skinned workers drank pastis and talked football, and dark-skinned men listened to Arab melodies and talked politics.
From the Place Rosetti came the tolling of a church bell. Its sound echoed through the alleys, and stony-faced men in black suits hurried towards the funeral. Now and again, kids on mopeds came roaring through the alleys, making the shoppers leap into doorways. Sometimes there came cars, inch by inch, the drivers eyeing the scarred walls where so many bright-coloured vehicles had left samples of their paint. I reached the boulevard Jean Jaurès, which used to be the moat of the fortified medieval town, and is now fast becoming the world’s largest car park. There I turned, to continue along the alleys that form the perimeter of the old town. Behind me a white BMW was threading through the piles of oranges and stalls of charcuterie with only a fraction to spare. Twice the driver hooted, and on the third time I turned to glare.
‘Claude!’ I said.
‘Charles!’ said the driver. ‘I knew it was you.’
Claude had become quite bald. His face had reddened, perhaps from the weather, the wine or blood pressure. Or perhaps all three. But there was no mistaking the man. He still had the same infectious grin and the same piercing blue eyes. He wound the window down. ‘How are you? How long have you been in Nice? It’s early for a holiday, isn’t it?’ He drove on slowly. At the corner it was wide enough for him to open the passenger door. I got into the car alongside him. ‘The legal business looks like it’s flourishing,’ I said. I was fishing, for I had no way of knowing if the cheerful law student whom we called Claude l’avocat was still connected with the legal profession.
‘The legal business has been very kind to me,’ said Claude. He rubbed his cheek and chuckled as he looked me up and down. ‘Four grandchildren, a loving wife and my collection of Delftware. Who could ask for more.’ He chuckled again, this time in self-mockery. But he smoothed the lapel of his pearl-grey suit and adjusted the Cardin kerchief so that I would notice that it matched his tie. Even in the old days, when knitted pullovers were the height of chic, Claude had been a dandy. ‘And now Steve Champion lives here, too,’ he said.
‘So I hear.’
He smiled. ‘It must be the sunshine and the cooking.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And it was Steve who …’ He stopped.
‘Saved my life?’ I said irritably. ‘Saved my life up at the quarry.’
‘Put the réseau together, after the arrests in May,’ said Claude. ‘That’s what I was going to say.’
‘Well, strictly between the two of us, Claude, I wish I’d spent the war knitting socks,’ I said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means I wish I had never heard of the lousy réseau, the Guernica network and all the people in it.’
‘And Steve Champion?’
‘Steve Champion most of all,’ I said. ‘I wish I could just come down here on holiday and not be reminded of all that useless crappy idiocy!’
‘You don’t have to shout at me,’ Claude said. ‘I didn’t send for you, you came.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. I regretted losing my cool if only for a moment.
‘We all want to forget,’ Claude said gently. ‘No one wants to forget it more than I want to.’
The car was halted while two men unloaded cartons of instant couscous from a grey van. In the Place St François the fish market was busy, too. A decapitated tunny was being sliced into steaks alongside the fountain, and a woman in a rubber apron was sharpening a set of knives.
‘So Steve is here?’ I said.
‘Living here. He lives out at the Tix house near the quarry.’
‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘All of us here again.’
‘Is it?’ said Claude.
‘Well, it sounds like a coincidence, doesn’t it?’
The driver’s sun-shield was drooping and Claude smiled as he reached up and pushed it flat against the roof of the car. In that moment I saw a gun in a shoulder holster under his arm. It wasn’t an impress-the-girlfriend, or frightened-of-burglars kind of instrument. The leather holster was soft and shiny, and the underside of the magazine was scratched from years of use. A Walther PPK! Things must have got very rough in the legal business in the last few years.
He turned and smiled the big smile that I remembered from the old days. ‘I don’t believe in anything any more,’ he confessed. ‘But most of all I don’t believe in coincidences. That’s why I’m here.’ He smoothed his tie again. ‘Where can I drop you, Charles?’
6
Tuesday morning was cold and very still, as if the world was waiting for something to happen. The ocean shone like steel, and from it successive tidal waves of mist engulfed the promenade. The elaborate façades of the great hotels and the disc of the sun were no more than patterns embossed upon a monochrome world.
Trapped between the low pock-marked sky and the grey Mediterranean, two Mirage jets buzzed like flies in a bottle, the vibrations continuing long after they had disappeared out to sea. I walked past the seafood restaurants on the quai, where they were skimming the oil and slicing the frites. It was a long time until the tourist season but already there were a few Germans in the heated terraces, eating cream cakes and pointing with their forks, and a few British on the beach, with Thermos flasks of strong tea, and cucumber sandwiches wrapped up in The Observer.
I was on my way to Frankel’s apartment. As I came level with the market entrance I stopped at the traffic lights. A dune buggy with a broken silencer roared past, and then a black Mercedes flashed its main beams. I waited as it crawled past me, its driver gesturing. It was Steve Champion. He was looking for a place to park but all the meter spaces were filled. Just as I thought he’d have to give up the idea, he swerved and bumped over the kerb and on to the promenade. The police allowed tourists to park there, and Champion’s Mercedes had Swiss plates.
‘You crazy bastard!’ said Champion, with a smile. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Where are you staying?’ The flesh under his eye was scratched and swollen and his smile was hesitant and pained.
‘With the Princess,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘You’re a masochist, Charlie. That’s a filthy hole.’
‘She can do with the money,’ I said.
‘Don’t you believe it, Charlie. She’s probably a major shareholder in IBM or something. Look here – have you time for a drink?’
‘Why not?’
He turned up the collar of his dark-grey silk trench coat and tied the belt carelessly. He came round the car to me. ‘There’s a sort of club,’ he said.
‘For expatriates?’
‘For brothel proprietors and pimps.’
‘Let’s hope it’s not too crowded,’ I said.
Champion turned to have a better view of an Italian cruise-liner sailing past towards Marseille. It seemed almost close enough to touch, but the weather had discouraged all but the most intrepid passengers from venturing on deck. A man in oilskins waved. Champion waved back.
‘Fancy a walk?’ Champion asked me. He saw me looking at his bruised cheek and he touched it self-consciously.
‘Yes,’ I said. He locked the door of the car and pulled his scarf tight around his throat.
We walked north, through the old town, and through the back alleys that smelled of wood-smoke and shashlik, and past the dark bars where Arab workers drink beer and watch the slot-machine movies of blonde strippers.
But it was no cramped bar, with menu in Arabic, to which Champion took me. It was a fine mansion on the fringe of the ‘musicians’ quarter’. It stood well back from the street, screened by full-grown palm trees, and guarded by stone cherubs on the porch. A uniformed doorman saluted us, and a pretty girl took our coats. Steve put his hand on my shoulder and guided me through the hall and the bar, to a lounge that was furnished with black leather sofas and abstract paintings in stainless-steel frames. ‘The usual,’ he told the waiter.
On the low table in front of us there was an array of financial magazines. Champion toyed with them. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said. ‘You let me make a fool of myself.’
It was Steve who’d taught me the value of such direct openings. To continue to deny that I worked for the department was almost an admission that I’d been assigned to seek him out. ‘True-life confessions? For those chance meetings once or twice a year? That wasn’t in the Steve Champion crash-course when I took it.’
He smiled and winced and, with only the tip of his finger, touched his bruised cheek. ‘You did it well, old son. Asking me if I was recruiting you. That was a subtle touch, Charlie.’ He was telling me that he now knew it had been no chance meeting that day in Piccadilly. And Steve was telling me that from now on there’d be no half-price admissions for boys under sixteen.
‘Tell me one thing,’ Steve said, as if he was going to ask nothing else, ‘did you volunteer to come out here after me?’
‘It’s better that it’s me,’ I said. A waiter brought a tray with silver coffee-pot, Limoges china and a sealed bottle of private-label cognac. It was that sort of club.
‘One day you might find out what it’s like,’ said Steve.
‘There was the girl, Steve.’
‘What about the girl?’
‘It’s a Kill File, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Melodie Page is dead.’
‘Death of an operative?’ He looked at me for a long time. He knew how the department felt about Kill File investigations. He spooned a lot of sugar into his coffee, and took his time in stirring it. ‘So they are playing rough,’ he said. ‘Have they applied for extradition?’
‘If the investigating officer decides …’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Steve angrily. ‘Don’t give me that Moriarty Police Law crap. Are you telling me that there is a murder investigation being conducted by C.1 at the Yard?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘There were complications.’
Champion screwed up his face and sucked his coffee spoon. ‘So Melodie was working for the department?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
Champion nodded. ‘Of course. What a clown I am. And she’s dead? You saw the body?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Level with me, Charlie,’ said Champion.
I said, ‘No, I didn’t see the body.’ Champion poured coffee, then he snapped the seal on the cognac and poured two large tots.
‘Neat. Effective. And not at all gaudy,’ said Champion eventually, with some measure of admiration. He waggled the coffee spoon at me.
It seemed a bit disloyal to the department to understand his meaning too quickly. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘You understand, old boy,’ said Champion. ‘You understand. But not as well as I bloody understand.’ He paused while a waiter brought the cigarettes he’d ordered. When the waiter departed, Steve said softly, ‘There’s no dead girl – or if there is, your people have killed her – this is just a stunt, a frame-up, to get me back to London.’ Champion moved his cigarettes and his gold Dunhill lighter about on the magazines in front of him, pushing them like a little train from The Financial Times and on to Forbes and Figaro.
‘They are pressing me,’ I said. ‘It’s a Minister-wants-to-know inquiry.’
‘Ministers never want to know,’ said Champion bitterly. ‘All Ministers want is answers to give.’ He sighed. ‘And someone decided that I was the right answer for this one.’
‘I wish you’d come back to London with me,’ I said.
‘Spend a month or more kicking my heels in Whitehall? And what could I get out of it? An apology, if I’m lucky, or fifteen years, if that suits them better. No, you’ll not get me going back with you.’
‘But suppose they extradite you – it’ll be worse then.’
‘So you say.’ He inhaled deeply on his cigarette. ‘But the more I think about it, the less frightened I am. The fact they’ve sent you down here is a tacit admission that they won’t pull an extradition order on me.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Well, that’s because you’re too damned naïve. The department don’t want me back in London, explaining to them all the details of the frame-up they themselves organized. This is all part of an elaborate game … a softening-up for something big.’
‘Something that London wants you to do for them?’ I asked. ‘Is that what you mean?’
‘Let’s stop beating around the bush, shall we? The department has given me jobs from time to time. They do that with pensioned-off operatives because it keeps them signing the Act, and also because their pensions make them the most needy – and so the cheapest – people around.’
‘Come back to London, Steve.’
‘Can’t you understand plain bloody King’s English, Charlie? Either the girl is not dead, and the department have put her on ice in order to finger me …’
‘Or?’
‘Or she’s dead and the department arranged it.’
‘No.’
‘How can you say no. Do they let you read the Daily Yellows?’
‘It’s no good, Steve,’ I said. ‘The department would never do it this way and both of us know it.’
‘The confidence you show in those bastards …’ said Champion. ‘We know only a fraction of what goes on up there. They’ve told you that Melodie was a departmental employee – have you ever heard of her or seen any documents?’
‘The documents of an operative in the field? Of course I haven’t.’
‘Exactly. Well, suppose I tell you that she was never an employee and the department have wanted her killed for the last three months. Suppose I told you that they ordered me to kill her, and that I refused. And that that was when the row blew up.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘The department made that contact for me. They said she was from the Palestinian terrorists. They told me that she was a nutty American student, the London contact for five hundred stolen Armalites and two tons of gelignite.’ Champion was excited now and smiling nervously, as I remembered him from the old days.
He sipped his drink. ‘They sent an American chap to see me. Is his name Schindler? Drinks that Underberg stuff, I remember. I wouldn’t believe he was from the department at first. Then they sent a Mutual down to confirm him as OK. Is it Schroder?’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘He mentioned the killing end. I didn’t take him seriously at first. I mean, they must still have special people for that game, surely. But he was in earnest. Ten thousand pounds, he said. He had it all set up, too. He’d organized a flat in Barons Court stacked up with beer and whisky and cans of beans and soup. I’m telling you, it was equipped like a fall-out shelter. And he showed me this hypodermic syringe, killing wire and rubber gloves. Talk about horror movies, I needed a couple of big whiskies when I got out of there.’ He drank some coffee. ‘And then I realized how I’d put my prints on everything he’d shown me.’ He sighed. ‘No fool like an old fool.’
‘Did they pay the bill for the tweed jacket we found there?’
‘There was no reason to be suspicious,’ said Champion. ‘They told me to order the suits, and they paid for them. It was only when they sent a funny little man round to my place to take the labels and manufacturers’ marks out of them that I began to worry. I mean … can you think of anything more damning than picking up some johnny and then finding he’s got no labels in his suits?’
‘There was money in the shoulder-pads,’ I told him. ‘And documents, too.’
‘Well, there you are. It’s the kind of thing a desk-man would dream up if he’d never been at the sharp end. Wouldn’t you say that, Charlie?’
I looked at Champion but I didn’t answer. I wanted to believe him innocent, but if I discounted his charm, and the nostalgia, I saw only an ingenious man improvising desperately in the hope of getting away with murder.
‘How long ago are we talking about?’ I said.
‘Just a couple of weeks before I ran into you … or rather you sought me out. That’s why I wasn’t suspicious that you were official. I mean, they could have found out whatever they needed to know through their normal contacts … but that girl, she wasn’t one of them, Charlie, believe me.’
‘Did you tell her?’
‘Like fun! This girl was trying to buy armaments – and not for the first time. She could take care of herself, believe me. She carried, too – she carried a big .38 in that crocodile handbag.’ He finished his coffee and tried to pour more, but the pot was empty. ‘Anyway, I’ve never killed anyone in cold blood and I wasn’t about to start, not for the department and not for money, either. But I reasoned that someone would do it. It might have been someone I liked a lot better than her. It might have been you.’
‘That was really considerate of you Steve,’ I said.
He turned his head to me. The swelling seemed to have grown worse in the last half hour. Perhaps that was because of Champion’s constant touches. The blue and red flesh had almost pushed his eye closed. ‘You don’t go through our kind of war, and come out the other end saying you’d never kill anyone, no matter what kind of pressure is applied.’
I looked at him for a long time. ‘The days of the entrepreneur are over, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Now it’s the organization man who gets the Christmas bonus and the mileage allowance. People like you are called “heroes”, and don’t mistake it for a compliment. It just means has-beens, who’d rather have a hunch than a computer output. You are yesterday’s spy, Steve.’
‘And you’d sooner believe those organization men than believe me?’
‘No good waving your arms, Steve,’ I said. ‘You’re standing on the rails and the express just blew its whistle.’
He stared at me. ‘Oooh, they’ve changed you, Charlie! Those little men who’ve promised you help with your mortgage, and full pension rights at sixty. Who would have thought they could have done that to the kid who fought the war with a copy of Wage Labour and Capital in his back pocket. To say nothing of that boring lecture you gave everyone about Mozart’s revolutionary symbolism in “The Marriage of Figaro”.’ He smiled, but I didn’t.
‘You’ve had your say, Steve. Don’t take the jury out into the back alley.’
‘I hope you listened carefully then,’ he said. He got to his feet and tossed some ten-franc notes on to the coffee tray. ‘Because if you are only half as naïve as you pretend to be … and if you have put your dabs all over some carefully chosen incriminating evidence …’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Then it could be that London are setting us both up for that big debriefing in the sky.’
‘You’ve picked up my matches,’ I said.
7
‘You’d sooner live in a dump than live in a nice home,’ said Schlegel accusingly.
‘No,’ I said, but without much conviction. I didn’t want to argue with him.
He opened the shutters so that he could see the charcuterie across the alley. The tiny shop-window was crammed with everything from shredded carrot to pig feet. Schlegel shuddered. ‘Yes, you would,’ he insisted. ‘Remember that fleapit you used to have in Soho. Look at that time we booked you into the St Regis, and you went into a cold-water walk-up in the Village. You like dumps!’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘If this place had some kind of charm, I’d understand. But it’s just a flophouse.’ For a long time he was silent. I walked across to the window and discovered that he was staring into the first-floor window across the alley. A fat woman in a frayed dressing-gown was using a sewing machine. She looked up at Schlegel, and when he did not look away she closed her shutters. Schlegel turned and looked round the room. I’d put asters, souci and cornflowers into a chipped tumbler from the washbasin. Schlegel flicked a finger at them and the petals fell. He went over to the tiny writing table that wobbled unless something was wedged under one leg. My Sony radio-recorder almost toppled as Schlegel tested the table for stability. I had turned the volume down as Schlegel had entered, but now the soft sounds of Helen Ward, and Goodman’s big band, tried to get out. Schlegel pushed the ‘off’ button, and the music ended with a loud click. ‘That phone work?’ he asked.
‘It did this morning.’
‘Can I give you a word of advice, fella?’
‘I wish you would,’ I told him.
For a moment I thought I’d offended him, but you don’t avoid Schlegel’s advice that easily. ‘Don’t stay in places like this, pal. I mean … sure, you save a few bucks when you hit the cashier’s office for the price of a hotel. But jeeze … is it worth it?’
‘I’m not hitting the cashier’s office for the price of anything more than I’m spending.’
His face twisted in a scowl as he tried to believe me. And then understanding dawned. ‘You came in here, in the sub, in the war. Right? I remember now: Villefranche – it’s a deep-water anchorage. Yeah. Sure. Me too. I came here once … a long time ago on a flat-top, with the Sixth Fleet. Nostalgia, eh?’
‘This is where I first met Champion.’
‘And the old doll downstairs.’ He nodded to himself. ‘She’s got to be a hundred years old … she was the radio operator … the Princess! Right?’
‘We just used this as a safe-house for people passing through.’
‘It’s a brothel!’ Schlegel accused.
‘Well, I don’t mind that so much,’ I told him. ‘The baker next door waves every morning when I leave. This morning, he winked.’
‘Wouldn’t you rather be in a hotel?’
‘Well, I’m going to ask the Princess if the girls could be a little quieter with the doors.’
‘Banging all night?’ said Schlegel archly.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘A cat house,’ mused Schlegel. ‘A natural for an escape chain. But the Nazis had them high on the check-out list.’
‘Well, we won the war,’ I said sharply. Schlegel would get in there, checking out the syntax of my dreams, if he knew the way.
‘I’ll call Paris,’ he said.
‘I’d better tell the Princess.’
‘Do we have to?’
‘We have to,’ I said. ‘Unless you want her interrupting you to tell you how much it’s costing, while you’re talking to the Elysée Palace.’
Schlegel scowled to let me know that sarcasm wasn’t going to help me find out who he was phoning. ‘Extension downstairs, huh?’
I went to the door and yelled down to the bar, at which the Princess was propped with Salut les Copains and a big Johnny Walker. ‘I’m calling Paris,’ I shouted.
‘You called Paris already today, chéri,’ she said.
‘And now we’re calling again, you old bag,’ growled Schlegel, but he took good care to keep his voice down. Already she’d made him apologize to one of the bar girls for saying goddamn.
‘That’s right,’ I told her.
‘Just as long as you don’t forget the money you’re spending, my darling.’
‘Darleeeng,’ growled Schlegel. ‘Will you believe that’s the first hearing-aid I’ve seen with sequins on it?’
He picked up his plastic case, put it on the bed and opened it. At first glance it might have been mistaken for a portable typewriter, permanently built into its case. It was the newest model of acoustic coupler. Schlegel began typing on the keys.
I said, ‘Anything fresh on the girl? Body been found, or anything?’
Schlegel looked up at me, sucked his teeth and said, ‘I’ll ask them what Missing Persons knows.’ When Schlegel finished typing his message he dialled the Paris number. He gave his real name. I suppose that was to save all the complications that would arise if he was phoning from a hotel that held his passport. Then he said, ‘Let’s scramble,’ and put the phone handpiece into the cradle switch inside the case. He pressed the ‘transmit’ button and the coupler put a coded version of what he’d typed through the phone cables at thirty or forty characters a second. There was a short delay, then the reply came back from the same sort of machine. This time Schlegel’s coupler decoded it and printed it on to tape in ‘plain English’. Schlegel read it, grunted, pushed the ‘memory erase’ button and rang off.
‘You ask those guys the time, and they’d tell you what trouble they’re having from the Records Office,’ he said. He burned the tape without showing it to me. It was exactly the way the textbook ordered but it didn’t make me want to open my heart to him about Champion’s version of the girl’s death.
But I told him everything Champion had said.
‘He’s right,’ said Schlegel. ‘He knows we wouldn’t be pussyfooting around if we had the evidence. Even if he enters the UK I doubt whether the department would let us hold him.’
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Len Deighton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: Sinister rumours link clandestine Arab arms dealing with the man who led the old anti-Nazi Guernica network. Time to reopen the master file on yesterday’s spy…Sinister rumours link clandestine Arab arms dealing with the man who led the old anti-Nazi Guernica network. Time to re-open the master file on yesterday’s spy…This new reissue includes a foreword from the cover designer, Oscar-winning filmmaker Arnold Schwartzman, and a brand new introduction by Len Deighton, which offers a fascinating insight into the writing of the story.