by Len Deighton
‘She wants to stage her own death, so that they won’t be alerted to what she’s been doing over there. Stage her death and then go to ground somewhere for six months or so. We could continue using her material for ages if they are not alerted to what she’s been doing.’
I followed the reasoning but the implications made my head swim. If Fiona was to be hidden away somewhere, would I be there with her? And what reason could Gloria be given for my sudden disappearance; telling her the whole truth would be out of the question. And what about the children?
Silas added, ‘She’s given us all sorts of wonderful stuff that we haven’t used for fear of endangering her. Once she was safe we could really pull all the stops out.’
He might have said more but Mrs Porter came and set out tea for us. She had excelled herself today: home-made sausage rolls and a Kugelhopf; a sweet bread she’d learned to make after discovering that it brought back to Silas happy memories of times long ago.
‘I can’t eat all that, woman,’ said Silas fiercely.
‘Don’t fuss! Mr Samson will eat it. It’s a long drive; he must be hungry.’
Silas reached in his pocket for the keys that were on a ring at the end of a gold chain. He held one key up. ‘You see this fellow, Mrs Porter? If anything should happen to me, you take this little item and you give it to Mr Samson. You phone him and tell him to come here, and you give it to him and to no one else. You understand that, don’t you, Mrs Porter?’ In a carefree gesture, worthy of a boulevardier, he swung the keys round on the end of the chain before tucking them back into his pocket. Outside the chainsaw noise began again.
‘I can’t bear to think of such a thing, Mr Gaunt.’
‘You’ll do as I say now. I can depend upon you, can’t I?’
‘You know you can, sir.’
‘That’s good. Now toddle along. I don’t want you weeping all over me.’
Mrs Porter arranged the cups and lifted the lid on the vacuum jug to show me it was filled with hot water. Silas grunted to indicate his impatience. She gave me a brave smile, sniffed and withdrew.
‘I saw that fellow Dodo in Vienna,’ I told Silas casually as I poured tea from the magnificent silver tea pot. There was a date engraved on it. Silas had been given it by his staff when he left Berlin.
‘Ah, yes. We had to do something about him,’ said Silas vaguely.
‘So what happened?’
‘They gave him an MBE or something and supplemented his pension.’
‘They did what?’
‘Don’t get excited, Bernard. It was probably the best way of handling it. He was getting to be rather disgruntled and he knows too much for us to let him go around talking his head off. He got the stick and carrot routine.’
‘He’s a drunk.’
‘He’s settled down, Bernard. He knows what’s good for him.’
‘An MBE was the carrot?’ Even a cynic like me was appalled.
‘No citation, nothing like that. For services rendered to the intelligence community. All very vague. An MBE will disqualify his revelations. That award will make Moscow think we’re pleased – that he is acting on our orders.’ His compressed lips moved in what might have been a fleeting artful smile to celebrate the cunning of it. ‘It doesn’t cost anything, Bernard, and it’s Fiona’s safety we have to think about.’
‘Yes.’ How very English! When the peasants became troublesome, throw a title to them.
‘Give me that big brown packet.’ I took it from the table and passed it to him. From it he got a legal document: the curiously ornate sort of thing that – along with wigs and gowns, and the world’s most autocratic trade union – English lawyers find indispensable to practising the law. It consisted of about forty pages of typed material bound together with green tape that passed through eyelet holes punched in each sheet. ‘Here’s a complete description of everything I know concerning Fiona’s assignment. Names, dates and so on. It’s all here.’
Thinking he was about to give it to me I held out my hand, but he ignored it. ‘Have you got a pen that works?’ He opened it to the back page and said, ‘I want you to witness my signature. The solicitor johnny comes round tomorrow for me to sign and swear in his presence. I want you as a witness too. You don’t mind I hope.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not.’
He signed his name and then showed me where he wanted me to sign, pedantically insisting that my address was written in block capitals in the appropriate space. ‘I want to make sure that it is legally valid,’ he said. Where it said Occupation, I wrote civil servant. He inspected what I’d done, blew on the ink to help dry it and pronounced it satisfactory.
‘Can I read it now?’ I asked.
‘No need for you to read it, Bernard. This is just for insurance purposes. I have every reason to hope I’ll be alive and well when Fiona returns.’
‘Of course.’
He heaved himself from his chair and went over to an antique military chest. Using a key on his key chain he locked the document away. He held up the key before putting it back in his pocket. ‘Understand, Bernard?’
I nodded. ‘She was recruited at Oxford was she?’ I asked.
‘Let’s rather say she was noticed there. It was a cousin of mine – a history professor – who recruited for us. He’d never put forward a female student before. Fiona was to speak at a debate and he suggested that we both went over there to hear her. I’ll never forget that evening. She was supporting the motion that Einstein’s theory of relativity was a hoax. I wish you’d heard her: it was an impressive performance, Bernard.’
‘But Fiona doesn’t know anything about mathematics,’ I said.
‘That’s perfectly true, but not many of the audience did either. She was clever enough to exploit that. The other speakers bored everyone with rational argument. When it came to Fiona she was attractive and amusing. She made fun of her oppon ents and put together a loose but reasoned and coherent argument. She couldn’t win of course, everyone knew that – but she demonstrated some fast thinking. She assembled a few well researched facts, a few half-truths and a lot of absolute bosh and cobbled together a convincing whole picture from it all.’
‘I thought that’s what everyone did at university.’
‘You’re not far wrong, Bernard. But in Fiona I saw someone who could keep her own mind crystal-clear and far removed from the material she was handling. That is the essence of the work we do, Bernard. Failure in the art of intelligence comes to those who cannot distinguish between what they know to be facts, and what they wish were true.’
‘Or will not distinguish,’ I said feelingly.
‘Precisely. And your wife is a realist, Bernard. No flights of fancy for her, no romanticism, no wishful thinking.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘None at all.’
‘She was never recruited. I kept her to myself. It was the way things were done at that time. We all had our own agents: your dad, me, Lange, ran our own people by means of Central Funding’s unregistered transfers. The sort of money you hounded Bret Rensselaer about not too long ago: remember?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘When Sir Henry became Director-General I told him that Fiona was in deep cover. When she pressed for a chance at this big one I brought Bret in too. We decided to keep it to that. Her name was never written down.’
He relapsed into silence. I poured more tea for myself but he didn’t touch his. Staring into the fire, he seemed to be lost in thoughts that he was reluctant to share. ‘I miss your dad,’ he said finally. ‘Your father always had an answer for everything that came along. He hadn’t had his brain pickled by bloody university lecturers. I don’t think he ever sat an examination in his life.’ Silas looked at me; I didn’t respond. Silas said, ‘Self-educated people such as your father – auto-didacts I hear them called nowadays – don’t read in order to find accord with the answers predetermined by half-baked examining boards, they find an individual point of view.’ He sat back in his chair, ‘My word, Bern
ard, I’ve laughed to see your father demolish some of those young lads they sent us. He could quote from such diverse sources as to leave them gasping: Jung, Nietzsche, Suetonius, Saint Paul, Hitler, George Washington, statistics from Speer’s con fidential records, Schiller and Einstein. It was all at your father’s command. I remember him explaining to a scholarly old SS general that his great hero Arminius – who valiantly defeated the Romans in a way that the Britons, Celts and the rest of them had failed to do – deprived Germany of the benefits of civilization, kept her in a state of barbaric chaos so that for centuries they didn’t even use stone for building. “You Germans have a couple of centuries of civilization to catch up with,” said your father patiently. It was difficult to know how much of it was to be taken seriously.’ Silas chuckled. ‘We had such good times together, your dad and I.’ For a few moments Silas was his old self again, but then, as if coming to terms once more with the fact of my father’s death, he relapsed into a solemn silence.
‘What happened at Berchtesgaden, Silas? What happened there that seemed to destroy my dad’s career?’
‘And cast a shadow on my career too,’ said Silas. ‘Ever wonder why I didn’t get my K?’
‘No,’ I said, but in fact it was a question that I’d heard asked many times.
‘How much do you know?’
‘A German, a man named Winter, was shot. Dad was blamed. That’s all.’
‘Two Germans: a prisoner in the direct custody of your dad and the fellow’s brother who, technically at least, had a US army commission. It was the American Zone. The war had ended. The men involved were all waiting to go home. They weren’t front-line soldiers. They were middle-aged family men, supply clerks, warehouse men, misfits in low medical categories; not used to handling weapons: nervous, drunk, trigger-happy…Who knows how it actually happened? Your father was the only Englishman there and he’d ruffled a lot of feathers. The Yanks dumped all the blame on him. Max was sorry afterwards. He told me so more than once.’
‘Max?’
‘Max Busby. Lange’s man.’ Seeing my blank look he added, ‘The one who was killed when you came over the Wall with him. He had been a captain in the American army. He was in charge of the search party, that night when the Germans were shot. You didn’t know that? Max didn’t ever tell you?’
It took me a little time to get over my astonishment. ‘No, Max never told me that. He was a damned good friend.’ It was a mealy-mouthed description of a man who had been shot dead while giving me a chance to get home safe and sound. But I didn’t have to say more: Silas knew the story.
‘To you he always was. Max liked you, Bernard, of course he did. But I often wondered to what extent he was trying to make up for the injustice he helped to bring upon your dad. It was Max’s evidence that convinced the inquiry that your dad accidentally fired the shots. That story suited them. It enabled the soldiers to go back to civilian life almost immediately and it deprived the US newspapers of a story that they were planning to make into headlines. But your father’s reputation never recovered from it. They were going to get rid of him to some rotten liaison job but I insisted that he stayed with me.’
‘So that’s why Dad hated Max,’ I said.
‘Max: yes, and Lange too. He didn’t have much time for any American after that. It was a childish reaction but he felt bitter and frustrated.’
‘Didn’t he want the inquiry reopened?’
‘Of course he did. Your father wanted that verdict quashed more than anything in his life. But the Department couldn’t permit the publicity that would have come with it. And the official policy, of both us and the Americans, was to avoid anything that might engender bad feeling between the Allies.’ He sat back. The memories had invigorated him for a moment but now their ghosts had invaded the room and he seemed not to know that I was there. I drank some of my lukewarm tea.
When Silas spoke his voice was strained. He said, ‘I think I’d better have some of that damned medicine. Mrs Porter knows how much to give me.’
‘I’ll go now, Silas,’ I said finally. ‘You must get some rest.’
‘Stay to lunch, Bernard.’
‘I must get back,’ I said.
He didn’t put up much argument. Now that his task was done all the energy was sapped from him, he wanted to be left alone.
‘I’m sorry about the elms, Silas.’
‘The oaks will look fine,’ he said.
I declined Mrs Porter’s invitations to stay for something to eat. I had the feeling that Silas wanted me to leave the house and go away, rather than have something by myself in the kitchen. Or was that my paranoia? Whatever the truth of it, I wanted to get away and think my thoughts to myself. At the quiet little church, on the narrow road that goes from Whitelands gates to the village, a line of parked cars gave notice of a service in progress. It was a funeral. Perhaps two dozen dark-garbed people were standing around an open grave, huddled under their umbrellas while the priest braved the elements, his vestment whipped by the wind and his face radiant with rain.
Crawling along behind a tractor, I was given a chance to study this solemn little ceremony. It depressed me further, reminding me that soon – very soon – Silas and Whitelands and all they meant would have vanished from my life. My mother was old and sick. Soon Lisl would be gone, and the hotel would be unrecognizable. When that happened I would no longer have any connections with the times that meant so much to me.
Perhaps Silas was right: perhaps a shelf in a museum, with all the rubbish of our lives surrounding us, would be the best end of us all.
Suffering from this somewhat irrational melancholy I stopped at the next little town for a drink. No pubs were open and the only restaurant was full of noisy housewives eating salads. I went into the grocery store and bought a half-bottle of Johnnie Walker and a packet of paper cups.
I drove down the road until I reached the main road and a lay-by where I could pull off the road and park. The rain continued. It was the ideal sort of day and place and time to commit suicide.
As soon as the windscreen wipers were switched off the glass became a confusion of dribbling rain and there was the steady patter of it on the roof. I reached for the bottle, but before I took a drink from it I relaxed back upon the head-rest and must have gone straight to sleep. I’d known such instant sleep before, but always until now it had accompanied danger or great stress.
I don’t know how long I slept. I was awakened by the sound of a car pulling up alongside me. There was the buzz and slap of windscreen wipers and the resonant babble of a two-way radio. I opened my eyes. It was a police car. The uniformed cop lowered his window and I did the same.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ The suspicious look on his weathered face belied the courtesy of his address. I pushed the whisky bottle down between the seats but I couldn’t get it completely out of sight.
‘Yes, I’m all right.’
‘Mechanical trouble of any kind? Shall I call a breakdown service?’ The rain continued, the cop didn’t get out of his car.
‘I just thought I’d look at the map.’
‘Very well, sir, if you’re fit and well, and able to drive.’ They pulled away.
When the police car was out of sight I got out of the car and stood in the rain. It refreshed me. Soon I felt better. I got back into the car and switched on the heater and the radio. It was tuned to the Third Programme: Brendel playing Schubert. I listened. After a few minutes I tossed the unopened whisky into the ditch.
I wondered if the policemen had been told to keep an eye on me but decided it was unlikely. Yet even the doubt was a measure of my distress; in the old days I would never have given it a moment’s thought. Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Maybe all these people who kept telling me I looked ill were right.
I thought about everything Silas had said. I was particularly disturbed by the idea of Fiona going to ground, so that the KGB would not realize that she had been working for us all the time. It would be difficult to arrange such
a deception.
There was another way for the Department to achieve the same objective; by killing Fiona while she was still working over there. It would be simple enough to arrange, there were plenty of Thurkettles around, and it would be complete and effective. Even if the KGB detected the hand of the Department in such a killing, that would only ‘prove’ that Fiona’s defection was genuine. Expedient demise. Such a ruthless solution would be unthinkable and unprecedented but Fiona’s unique position was just as unthinkable and just as unprecedented.
16
I didn’t go in to the office that day. As I drove back from Silas Gaunt’s farm the weather got worse until, near London, I found myself driving through a spectacular electrical storm that lit the sky with blue flashes, made the car radio erupt static noises and provided long drumrolls of thunder. I went straight home. It was early evening. The house was cold, empty and dark, a chastening reminder of what it would be like to live alone. The children were eating with friends. I lit the gas fire and sat down in the armchair and watched the flame changing colour until the whole grid was red. I dozed off.
I was wakened by Gloria’s arrival. She switched on the light and, although she must have noticed the car outside, she raised a hand and gave a little start of surprise at seeing me sitting there. It was a very feminine reaction, contrived perhaps, but by some magic she could get away with such childish posturing. She was very wet. I suppose I should have gone to the station and collected her but she didn’t complain. ‘There’s only frozen Székelygulyás,’ she said as she took off her soaking wet raincoat and got a towel to dry her hair.
‘Only frozen Székelygulyás,’ I said reflectively. ‘What a colourful life we live.’
‘I didn’t get to the shops,’ said Gloria. I heard a warning note in her voice.
‘We can go to Alfonso’s or the little Chinese place,’ I offered.
