by Len Deighton
‘I’ll come with you. What have we got to lose.’
The roadway was surfaced in loose gravel. This back road did not even qualify for a French map numeral. Not many cars came along here. Outside the Hostellerie, a battered van was parked, and a mangy dog tried to break from its chain and, having failed to do so, snarled at us. There were two people in the bar, both dressed in greasy black suits. Behind the bar there was a fragile-looking man, in a threadbare shirt and denim trousers. His hair was wispy and grey, and he peered myopically from behind thick, rimless spectacles.
‘Two beers,’ I said.
He reached behind him, opened a wood-faced refrigerator, found two Alsace lagers and slammed them on the counter. The men in black suits ended their conversation abruptly. The barman rinsed two glasses under the tap and pushed them towards us. ‘Visiting the doctor,’ he said. It was not a question.
‘That’s right,’ I said. I had already discovered that all the villagers called Hank Dean the doctor. It was probably the way he was referred to on his pension envelope.
‘Not many visitors at this time of year,’ said the barman. If he had seen the policemen arrive to collect Dean, he was not admitting it.
‘I want to talk to you about that,’ I said. ‘There is one particular friend of the doctor whom we must get in touch with.’
‘Oh,’ said the barman.
‘Came every few weeks,’ I said.
‘Perhaps,’ said the barman.
‘Did he stay here?’ Mann put the question too hurriedly.
‘Are you the police?’ said the man.
‘Yes,’ I said, but Mann had already said no. The barman looked from one to the other of us, and allowed himself that vacuous smile which peasants reserve for government officials. ‘A sort of police,’ I continued. ‘A sort of American police.’
‘The FBI?’ offered one of the men in black.
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘What has the doctor done?’ asked the barman.
I tried to see in his face whether he would prefer to see the doctor exonerated, pursuing criminals or taken away in a small black van. Unsure of myself I said, ‘The doctor is accused of defrauding an American bank.’ I turned to Mann and raised an eyebrow as if seeking his permission to take the old man further into our confidence. Mann, playing along with the game, nodded sagely. I leaned across the counter and said, ‘Now we are beginning to think he is innocent. We need to find this man who visited the house.’
‘Why won’t the doctor tell you?’ the man asked.
It was a hell of a good question. ‘That’s a very good question,’ I told him. ‘But it’s a rule of the underworld. Even when you can help yourself, you never help the police.’
‘Of course,’ said Mann hurriedly. ‘That doesn’t apply to citizens. It doesn’t apply to people who obey the law, and suffer from the criminals. Especially,’ he added archly, ‘especially it doesn’t apply to licensed innkeepers.’
‘The man you seek is young and slim, with hair that covers his ears. He wears the sort of clothes they wear in the Riviera – fancy silk neckerchiefs, tightly tailored trousers that show everything, and cheap imitation-leather jackets of all shapes and sizes and colours.’
‘Shut your mouth, you old fool.’
A young man had entered the bar from a door marked ‘private’. He was about twenty years old, wearing a large black droopy moustache and dressed in a phoney UCLA sweat-shirt and faded jeans. Around his wrist he wore a studded leather support, of the sort that old prize-fighters sometimes need. ‘Tell these people nothing,’ he said. ‘They are Americans, capitalist police spies …’
‘Now hold it, son,’ said Mann mildly.
I think it was the gentleness of Mann’s tone that incensed the boy. Feeling that he was not being taken seriously, he called us pigs, reactionary oppressors and Gestapo. One of the old men at the other end of the bar smiled derisively. Perhaps he remembered the Gestapo. The boy saw the old man smile. He grabbed my sleeve in an attempt to drag me from the bar. He was stronger than he looked, and I felt a seam give way under his grip.
‘Pig, pig, pig,’ said the boy as if the physical exertion had driven all reason, and vocabulary, from his head. All the while he was tearing at my coat, so that I must either move with him or watch it tear apart.
I hit him twice. The first punch did no more than position him, head down and off balance, for the hook that sent him flying across the room. It knocked the breath out of him, and he made that sort of whistling howl with which an express train acknowledges a country station. Two chairs toppled with him, and a table was dislodged, before the boy struck a pile of crates and collapsed to the floor.
‘Paid cash,’ said the barman continuing as if nothing had happened. ‘Never cheque, or those fancy travellers’ things; always money.’
‘Stayed overnight?’ I said. I straightened my clothes and sucked the blood off my grazed fist, which hurt like hell. The boy remained on the floor in the far corner. He was blinking and watching us and mouthing obscenities but he did not get to his feet.
‘It varied,’ said the barman. ‘But he seldom had any baggage with him. Just shaving things.’
‘Give me the car registration,’ I said.
‘I don’t have that,’ said the man.
‘Come along,’ I said. ‘A hotelier who takes clients without baggage, and doesn’t make a note of the car registration. I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere. I’ll pay you twenty francs for it.’
The man reached below the bar to get a battered hotel register. It was a mess of illegible signatures and unlikely addresses. Its pages were creased and ringed with the marks of wine and beer, and goodness knows what else. Hank Dean’s guest had not entered his name here but the barman was able to find his own scribbled note of the car registration. He read the number aloud, and I wrote it into my notebook and passed him the twenty francs. He smoothed the note carefully and inspected both sides of it before putting it into his bulging wallet.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘There are more,’ he said.
‘More registration numbers?’ I asked.
‘Certainly there are.’
‘Different ones?’
He nodded.
‘Goddamn rental cars,’ said Mann.
‘Ten francs each,’ I bargained.
‘Twenty was the price you yourself set,’ said the barman.
I looked at Mann. ‘But no duplicates,’ Mann warned him.
‘We’ll have the duplicates too,’ I contradicted. ‘But we must have the dates for each number.’
Page by page the man went through the book until we had a list of dates and numbers going back nearly two years. We finished our beers and drank two more.
‘The same registration!’ said Mann excitedly. ‘That makes four times the same number.’ He drained his beer, wiped his mouth and then pulled a face. ‘It could be that it’s a small rental company, or that he asks for that particular car.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Rental companies usually unload their cars every year or two. Those dates are too far apart. Here it is back at the beginning, soon after Dean moved here, and then again last August.’
‘Always at holiday times,’ said Mann.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Always at a time when rental companies might not have a car available. It must be his own car.’
‘The first lucky break we’ve had,’ said Mann.
‘Mine host feels the same way about it,’ I said as we watched the man tucking a small fortune into his wallet. The man looked up and smiled at us.
‘Goodbye and thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about the boy.’
‘My son had it coming to him,’ said the barman. ‘But there is eight francs to pay for your beers.’
11
It took forty-eight hours to trace the car registration. It belonged to a very old four-door Fiat that for over eight years had been owned by Madame Lucie Simone Valentin, a nurse, born in Le Puy in the Haute-Loi
re, now residing in Paris, at Porte de la Villette, across the canal from one of the biggest abattoirs in Europe.
This particular part of north-east Paris is not noted for its historical monuments, cathedrals or fine restaurants. Madame Valentin’s home was in a nineteenth-century slum, with echoing staircases, broken light-fittings and an all-pervading smell of stale food. It was just beginning to snow when we got there. Across the street two yellow monsters were eating walls and snorting brick-dust. Number ninety-four was at the very top. It was a garret. Painted up, crowded with antique furniture and sited so as to overlook Notre Dame, it would have been the sort of place that Hollywood set-designers call Paris. But this apartment had no such view. It faced another block, twice as tall and three times as gloomy. There was no chance that Gene Kelly would answer the door.
‘Yes?’ She had been beautiful once. She wore a hand-made sweater that was less than perfectly knitted, and her hair was styled into the sort of permanent wave that you can do at home.
‘We would like to talk to you about your car, Madame Valentin,’ I said.
‘I can explain about that,’ she said. ‘I thought it would need only new sparking plugs. By the end of the month it will all be paid.’ She paused. From the floor below came the sound of tango music.
‘We are not from the service station,’ said Mann. ‘We want to talk to you about Mr Henry Dean.’
‘You are Americans?’ She said it in good English.
‘Chéri,’ she called to someone behind her. ‘Chéri, it is for you.’ To us she said, ‘Henry has to be at work at six o’clock.’ She pronounced his name in the French manner: Henri.
The concierge had mentioned that a man lived with her. I had expected someone quite different to the pink-faced youngster who now smiled and offered his hand. He was dressed in a newly pressed set of working clothes, a Total badge sewn over the heart.
‘I’m Major Mann, US Army, Retired. I work for the State Department in Washington. I’d like to come in and speak with you.’
‘I know all about you,’ said the boy. ‘Dad sent a message. He said he’s being held in custody by the police. He said it was all a misunderstanding, but that you guys were straight and you’d do the right thing by him.’
‘You’re Hank Dean’s son?’ said Mann.
‘Yes, sir, I certainly am,’ said the boy. He grinned. ‘Henry Hope Dean. Do you want to see my passport?’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Mann.
‘Come in, come in,’ said the boy. ‘Lucie darling, get the bottle of Scotch whisky that we were saving for my birthday.’
The room was very clean, and almost unnaturally tidy, like a holiday cottage prepared for new arrivals. And, like such rented places, this was sparsely furnished with cheap bamboo chairs and unpainted cupboards. There were some Impressionist reproductions tacked to the faded wallpaper and a lot of books piled on the floor in stacks.
The boy indicated which were the best chairs and got out his precious bottle of whisky. I sat down and wondered when I’d have enough strength to get up again. It was four nights since either of us had had a full night’s sleep. I saw Mann sip his Scotch. I poured a lot of water into mine.
‘Who would want to get your father into trouble?’ Mann asked.
‘Well, I don’t know much about the work he once did for the Government.’
‘We’ll talk to other people about that,’ said Mann. ‘I mean, amongst the people you know, who would want to see your father in trouble, or in prison or even dead?’
‘No one,’ said the boy. ‘You know Dad … he can be exasperating at times, he can be pretty outspoken, and stubborn with it. I suppose I could imagine him getting into a brawl – but not this kind of scrape. Dad was swell company … is swell company. No one would go to all the trouble of planting a quarter of a million dollars in cash. Why, that’s just impossible?’
‘It’s supposed to look impossible,’ said Mann. ‘You send a man a bundle of money so big he can’t bear to turn it in – then you tell the cops he’s got it.’ I watched Mann’s face, trying to decide whether he already pronounced Hank Dean innocent. He saw me watching him, and turned away.
‘Gee, a quarter of a million bucks,’ said the boy. ‘You’d have to be really sore at someone to leave that kind of bread in his mail box.’
Lucie Valentin came into the room with coffee for us. The cheap crockery was brightly polished and there was a crisply starched linen tray-cover. She put it on the bamboo table, and then sat on the arm of the chair the boy occupied. She put her arm around him in a maternal gesture. ‘Perhaps you should go and see your father, darling,’ she said. ‘You can take the car.’
‘If I may be personal,’ I said to the woman. ‘How did you get along with Hank Dean?’
‘I met him only twice,’ said Lucie Valentin.
‘Lucie wanted to get the whole thing out in the open,’ said the boy. ‘Lucie and I are going to be married, and real soon, but I’ve got to make it OK with Dad.’
‘And he objects to Lucie?’
‘He liked her,’ said the boy. ‘I know he did, and still does.’ He patted her arm, looked at her and smiled. ‘But the truth is that Dad would like me to marry an American girl.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Oh, sure, Dad comes on very strong about how cosmopolitan he is, but Dad is an American, his French marks him as an American, and he’s very self-conscious about that.’
‘And your French is fluent?’
‘I’ve grown up here. Most of the people I work with think I am a Parisian. And I think like a Frenchman – it hurts Dad when I say that, but it’s true – I could never be really happy in the United States … nor married to an American girl.’
He smiled. The way that he’d said ‘girl’ was a way of saying that he preferred a ‘woman’. Lucie Valentin was a lot older than the boy; he didn’t have to say that Hank Dean didn’t like that either.
‘And there is Lucie’s divorce,’ said the boy. ‘That is the real difficulty. The Church doesn’t recognize it’ – he shrugged – ‘and neither does Dad.’
‘But your father divorced your mother,’ I said.
For a moment I thought the boy was angry that I had mentioned it, but he smiled at Lucie, and then said to me, ‘He wrote that he was divorced on all the official forms and stuff but the truth of it is that he’s always refused to give my mother a divorce – that’s what caused all the bad feeling.’
‘On religious grounds?’
‘Mom said it was easy for Dad to have religious scruples – he didn’t want to get married again.’
‘But your mother did?’
‘They never got on. They separated too long ago for me to remember anything about it but I can never imagine them getting along together. Mom digs the high-life. This guy Reid-Kennedy is just rolling in money. He’s always wanted me to take an allowance but I wouldn’t feel right about that; after all, he’s not even my stepfather.’
‘What does he do for a living?’
‘He’s in electronics.’
I said, ‘That can mean anything from repairing a broken TV to walking on the moon.’
‘His factories make complicated junk for communications satellites. They did a lot of work for this one French TV use to get live news coverage from the States. And there are the weather satellites too … I guess it’s not military secrets, if that’s what you guys are thinking.’
‘You’ll be late for the hospital, chéri,’ said the woman.
‘I’ll skip it today,’ said the boy. ‘I was due to give blood at the hospital on the Boulevard but I can easily do that tomorrow.’
Mann nodded. ‘You keep in touch with your mother?’
‘We write.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘One,’ said the boy, ‘no, what am I saying, two years ago.’
Lucie Valentin got up from the arm of the chair and walked over to the window and took a sudden interest in the falling snow.
‘And she doesn’t write or phone?’ Mann persisted.
‘A couple of times in this last year,’ said the boy. ‘She’s beginning to accept the situation for what it is.’
Lucie Valentin walked back to him and slipped a hand into the pocket of the overalls he was wearing, took his cigarettes out and lit one. It was an intimate gesture and yet it lacked the spontaneity that such actions usually have. He felt it too. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’
She turned away from him and shrugged. She puffed the cigarette and said, ‘Your mother was here yesterday.’
‘Are you sure?’ he said incredulously.
Lucie still didn’t turn. ‘Of course I’m sure. She came here looking for you. Of course I’m sure.’
‘Take it easy, baby.’
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said in a voice that showed no sign of regret. ‘She hasn’t accepted anything. She’s determined to part us. I dreamed about her last night.’
‘You’re being silly.’
Lucie Valentin rounded on him. ‘I’m not being silly, and don’t call me baby.’ She opened the handbag that was on the window-sill and produced from it a slip of paper. ‘Call her!’ said Lucie. ‘That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?’
He didn’t take the slip of paper. ‘I love you, Lucie.’
She shrugged and turned away.
It was Major Mann who took the slip of paper from her. He didn’t pass it on to the boy. He read it himself. Neither of them were aware of us any more.
‘You should have told me, Lucie.’
Lucie dabbed at her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. ‘She only stayed in France for three hours. She was going back to the airport again. It seemed silly to risk all we have when she was only here for a few minutes.’
‘She didn’t cross the Atlantic just to pay one short visit,’ said the boy. He was flattered by the idea, and his voice betrayed it.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They are in Europe.’
‘This is hotel stationery,’ said Mann holding up the note. ‘No message, just “Please phone” and the printed notepaper. The Gresham Hotel, Dublin. What would she be doing in Ireland, do you know?’
