by Len Deighton
Behind us a strip of sky gradually lightened and coloured to become a contused mass of mauves and purples.
‘All right, darling?’ I asked. Still she didn’t respond to my overtures. She just concentrated on the road, her lips pressed together and her knuckles white.
The unbearable uncertainties that gave me severe stomach pains as we got nearer and nearer to the frontier proved unfounded. When we stopped she looked in the driving mirror and wiped some spots of blood from her face with a handkerchief moistened with spittle. Her expression was unchanging.
‘All all right?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
She drove forward. A bored border guard, seeing the Diplomatic registration plates, gave us no more than a glance before going back to reading his newspaper.
‘We made it,’ I said. She didn’t answer.
There was a reception committee waiting for us on the other side of the control point. It was dawn, with that uncertain light that soldiers use to start their battles. Some army vehicles were parked by the roadside: an armoured personnel carrier, a staff car and an ambulance: the complete panoply of war. From the empty roadside two soldiers suddenly materialized. One was middle-aged, the other in his twenties. Then came a cheerful young colonel of some unidentifiable unit with his khaki beret pulled tight upon his broad skull and a battle smock with no badges other than parachute wings and his rank stencilled in black.
‘We have a helicopter here,’ said the colonel. He affected a short swagger-stick, wielding it to give Fiona a mock salute. ‘Are you fit enough to travel to Cologne?’ His voice was loud, his manner almost jubilant. He was clean and freshly shaved and seemed oblivious to the hour.
‘I’m all right,’ said Fiona. The colonel opened the door to let her out of the driver’s seat. But Fiona sat tight and didn’t even look at him to explain why. She held the steering wheel very tight and, looking straight ahead, she gave a little sniff. She sniffed again, loudly, like a child with a runny nose. Then she began to laugh. At first it was the natural charming laugh that you might expect from a beautiful young woman who had just won the world championship in espion age and doubledealing. But as her laughter continued the colonel began to frown. Her face became flushed. Her laughing became shrill and she trembled and shook until her whole body was racked with her hysterical laughter, as it might be afflicted with a cough or choking fit.
The laughing still didn’t stop. I became alarmed but the colonel seemed to have encountered it before. He looked at the blood spots that covered her, and then at me. ‘It’s the reaction. From what I can see, she’s had a rough time.’ Over his shoulder he said, ‘You’d better help her, Doc.’
As he stood aside, the younger man behind him stepped forward. The middle-aged soldier handed him something. Then the boyish-looking doctor reached in through the window, grabbed her and with a minimum of fuss – in fact with no fuss at all – he put a hypodermic needle into her upper arm, right through her sleeve. The army is like that. He kept hold of her arm and watched her while she quietened down. Then he felt her pulse. ‘That should do it,’ he said. ‘A sedative. No alcohol. Better if she doesn’t eat for an hour or two. There will be an RAF doctor waiting for you at Cologne airport, I’ll give you a message for him. He’ll go with you all the way.’
‘All the way to where?’ I asked.
The young doctor looked at the colonel, who said, ‘Didn’t they tell you? It’s always the same isn’t it? They never tell the people at the sharp end. You’re transferring to a transatlantic flight. It’s a long journey but the air force will look after you.’
Fiona was relaxing. The laughter had completely stopped and she looked around her as if waking from a deep sleep. She let the colonel help her down from the car. ‘Where are your shoes?’ he asked her gallantly and tried to find them.
‘I’ve lost my shoes,’ she said flatly and pushed back her hair as if becoming aware of her scruffy appearance.
‘That doesn’t matter a bit,’ said the colonel. ‘They have lovely shoes in America.’
20
Summer is not the best time to be in southern California. Even ‘La Buona Nova’, the big hillside spread in Ventura County where Fiona was hidden away for her official debriefing, had long energy-sapping days when there was not a breeze off the Pacific. Bret Rensselaer was in charge. Some people – including me – had said he was too old ever to become a full-time Departmental employee again. But Bret was officially considered as Fiona’s case officer. Bret had been a party to Fiona’s long-term plan to defect to Moscow since that time when she first confided it to him. He’d monitored her progress. There was really no one else who could debrief her.
Bret Rensselaer was determined to make a big success of what would obviously be the last job he’d ever do. The prospect of a knighthood was never mentioned but you didn’t have to be a mind-reader to know what Bret thought would be an appropriate thank-you from a grateful sovereign. No worries about Bret bowing the head for that one: he’d walk coast to coast on his knees for a K.
No one ever mentioned any kind of thank-you for me. When my salary cheque was paid I noticed that all the allowances and extras had been trimmed off it. I was down to the bare bones. When I mentioned this to Bret he said that I should remember that I wasn’t having to pay for my food and keep. Good grief I said, what about the way I’m being deprived of contact with my children? I didn’t mention Gloria for obvious reasons. It was Bret who brought Gloria into our conversation. He said that she had been told that I was on a special mission too secret for details to be revealed. The Department was making sure my children were happy and well cared for. He said it as if his words contained some not very veiled threat for me: I had the feeling that what Gloria was told would depend upon my good behaviour.
One day I noticed amongst the papers on Bret’s marble-topped table a coloured postcard. It was van Gogh’s portrait of a blue-uniformed postman, a picture of which Gloria was inordinately fond. ‘Could that card be for me?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said immediately and without hesitation.
‘You’re sure?’
‘It’s my private correspondence,’ said Bret.
I felt like grabbing it to see but the table was big and Bret reached it before I did. He put it in a drawer. I knew it was a card from Gloria to me. I just knew it.
After that I was seldom allowed into Bret’s ‘office’, and when I did go in there his table was always cleared. And in all that time the only correspondence that was forwarded to me was a picture of Paul Bocuse. It was postmarked Lyon and was from Tante Lisl describing the meal she’d eaten.
They put me and Fiona into a comfortable guest house set apart from the main buildings. It was complete with kitchen, dining room and a young Mexican girl to make breakfast and clean and tidy. Fiona spent four – sometimes five – hours almost every day with Bret. Neither of them emerged to eat a proper lunch. Sandwiches, fruit and coffee were sent into them and they carried right on talking. Bret had a part-time secretary but she wasn’t with them during these sessions. His large and very comfortable office, with its window grilles and security locks, had maps and reference books and a computer that would feed into his screen and/or print out anything he required from all sorts of data banks. Everything Fiona said was recorded on tape and locked away in a huge safe. But there were no transcripts - all that would come later. This was the first run-through so that Bret could alert London and Washington to anything urgent.
Sometimes I went in and listened, but after a few days Fiona asked me to stay away. My presence made her too selfconscious, she said. I was hurt and offended at the time, but one-to-one was the usual form for such debriefings, and I’d never much liked having someone ‘sit in’ when I was doing one of these deep analysis stunts.
So I swam in the blue outdoor pool, caught up on my reading and listened to the 24 hours a day classical music on KSCA-FM or to cassettes on the big hi-fi. Most days I swam with Mrs O’Raffety, the artistic old lady who o
wned the place, and who had to swim on account of her bad back. And most days we took lunch together too.
I would have liked to go into Los Angeles, or, failing that, go for a beer in Santa Barbara which was much nearer. Walk along the beach, drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, do the tour of the Hearst Mansion – anything to break the monotony. But Bret was unyielding: both of us were confined inside La Buona Nova compound surrounded by the chain-link fences, the armed Mexican guards and the dogs. It was a prison, a nice comfortable prison but we were sentenced to stay there for as long as the Department decreed. I had the nasty feeling that that would turn out to be a very long term indeed. But what could I do? It was for Fiona’s safety, said Bret. There was no arguing with that.
One night, soon after arriving, I’d tried to talk to Fiona about her time with Stinnes and his merry men. We were preparing for bed. She answered normally at first but then she grunted shorter replies and I could see she was getting very upset. She didn’t weep or anything as traumatic as that. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if she’d done so: it might have helped her. But she didn’t weep; she climbed into bed and curled up small and pulled the bedsheet over herself.
Each evening we’d eat dinner with Bret, our hostess and her son-in-law, an amiable lawyer. They were dull affairs at which the Mexican servants hovered all the time and the rest of us made small-talk. Sometimes I’d see Bret Rensselaer at the pool and exchange pleasantries with him. His only response to anything I said about Fiona seeming unwell, was bland reassurances. The doctor had given her a physical the day following her arrival and she had lots of vitamin pills and sleeping pills if she required them. And he told me that she’d been through a tough time and generally treated me like a neurotic mother worrying about a child with a grazed knee. But the changes I saw in Fiona were perhaps not evident to those who didn’t know her so well. The changes were all small ones. She seemed shrunken and her face was drawn, and she didn’t walk absolutely upright in the attractive way that I remembered so well. There was the soft and hesitant way she spoke and the diffidence she showed to everyone from me and Bret right through to the Mexican house servants.
One evening at dinner she spilled a couple of drips of barbecue sauce on the tablecloth – the kind of thing I do all the time – and she slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes. No one round the table gave any sign of noticing it but I knew she was close to screaming, close perhaps to breaking point. The trouble was that she’d confide nothing to me, no matter how I tried to get her to talk. Finally she accused me of harassing her, so then I stopped and left it all to Bret.
Two days later Bret asked me to sit in with them for the morning session. ‘There are a few things unexplained,’ said Bret.
‘From where I’m sitting there are a lot of things unexplained,’ I said.
Fiona sat slumped in a big armchair. Bret was behind a table – an elaborate modern design of pink marble with polished steel legs – with his back to the tinted window. The garden was packed with colour. Against the whitewashed wall of the yard there were orange and lemon trees, jasmine, roses and bougainvillaea. There was no perfume from them, for the window was tightly closed and the air-conditioning fully on. Bret looked at me for a long time and finally said, ‘For instance?’
‘The traces of heroin in the Ford van.’ It was a bluff and it didn’t work.
‘Let’s not get side-tracked,’ Bret said. ‘We’re supposed to be establishing the identities of the other people there.’
‘Fiona can tell you that,’ I said. ‘She was in the car with them.’
‘Erich Stinnes,’ said Fiona somewhat mechanically. ‘Plus a Russian liaison man. And there was a man I had never seen before. He arrived on a motor cycle.’
‘Good! Good!’ murmured Bret as he laboriously wrote it down in case he forgot. He looked up. ‘Three men,’ he said and gave a quick nervous smile. Bret Rensselaer was one of those slim elegant Americans who, whether sick or healthy, always look well cared for: like a vintage Bugatti or a fifty-carat diamond. Sitting behind his desk, golden pen in hand, he looked like a carefully posed photo in a society magazine. He was wearing tailored white designer slacks and a white tennis shirt with a red stripe at the collar. It all went well with his white hair and made his tanned face seem very brown.
I wondered if the mysterious ‘extra man’ was going to be identified as Thurkettle. I didn’t volunteer that idea, and I noticed that Fiona said nothing of his American accent.
‘Have the monitors picked up anything?’ Fiona asked.
‘Nothing in any of the newspapers or periodicals and certainly nothing on the radio.’ He gave another of his crisp little smiles and fidgeted with his signet ring. ‘It would be surprising if there was.’
‘And even more surprising if you told us about it,’ I said.
Bret wasted no more than a moment on that one. He grunted and turned to Fiona again. ‘Why would they burn the car, Fiona?’
‘Bernard says it was to destroy the evidence,’ she replied.
‘I was asking you, Fiona.’
‘I really have no idea. It might have been an accident. There was still one man there.’
‘Ah! The man on the bike?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I wish you could tell me more about him.’ He waited in case Fiona said something. When she didn’t he said, ‘And you didn’t talk with Stinnes or this liaison guy during the car journey?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Did they talk together?’
‘I don’t think there’s much to be gained in this line,’ said Fiona. ‘I’ve told you all I know about them.’
Bret nodded sympathetically. He looked at his yellow legal pad and said, ‘This “other man” came by motor cycle? Unusual that, don’t you think?’
‘I really don’t know how unusual it was, Bret.’
‘But if the car was set on fire after you left, it has to be the biker who did it?’
‘I assume so,’ said Fiona.
‘So do I,’ said Bret. ‘Now we come to the final stage of this strange business – him letting you get away so easily.’
Fiona nodded and wet her lip as if she was distressed to think about it. ‘Strange, yes.’
‘What would be the motive for that? Bernie here had just shot his two buddies. Then he let you go. Does that sound a little crazy?’
Fiona said, ‘It was a stalemate. He couldn’t move without getting shot. He knew Bernard couldn’t get to the van without offering a target. Some kind of compromise had to be reached.’
‘No, it didn’t, honey,’ said Bret. ‘These people were in their own country. Let’s say Mr X holds out until it’s daylight. Passing traffic will see what’s happening. The construction workers will arrive. Just about anything that happens will resolve things his way. Right?’
‘I don’t know who he was,’ said Fiona, as if she hadn’t listened to Bret’s question.
‘What does that mean?’ said Bret.
Fiona looked at me needing support. I said, ‘Fiona means that if some CIA agent was in a shoot-out on the Pacific Coast Highway, along the road from here, how keen would he be to have himself discovered by the local cops and passers-by when daylight comes?’
‘Well, okay,’ said Bret in a voice that conceded nothing. ‘But this is the U.S. of A. Liberal newspapers who are looking for ways to take a swipe at the government, crackpot Senators ditto. In a situation like that, maybe some CIA agent might want to keep a low profile at whatever cost. But in the DDR…I don’t see it.’
‘Why don’t you just tell us what you want us to say, Bret?’ I said.
‘Come again,’ said Bret, the frayed edge of his temper showing through.
‘We all know you’re writing a fairy story,’ I said. ‘It’s a scenario that was probably all settled months, maybe years, ago. You don’t want to know what really happened: you just want to find excuses for saying everything went as planned. I know what the report will be: fifty pages pat
ting all the desk men on the back, and saying what a wonderful job they did. The only decisions still to be made are who gets the knighthood and who will have to make do with an MBE or a CBE.’
‘You’re a rude bastard, Bernard,’ he said softly.
‘Yes. I know. Everyone tells me the same thing. But what I say is true, all the same.’
He looked at me and conceded just a fraction. ‘Wasn’t it Goethe who said, Der Ausgang giebt den Taten ihre Titel – how’s that? The outcome decides what the title will be? Sure. This is a phenomenal success story. It’s Fiona’s success. She won’t ever get a proper credit for it because that’s not the way the Department handles these things: we all know that. What she will get is the report. Would you rather I write it up as some kind of turkey? You want me to say she screwed up?’
‘No,’ I said. Bret could always find a way of putting his opponents in the wrong.
Fiona said nothing. Her contribution to the talking was minimal and yet she was not uncooperative: she was like a sleep-walker. She knew her sister was dead – Bret had told her – but she avoided mention of Tessa. It was as if Tessa had never been there, and Bret left it like that. There were a lot of things that Fiona would not talk about, she seldom even mentioned the children. I didn’t envy Bret his task.
Bret looked at his watch. ‘Well, let’s move on to a few easier questions. We’ll get some of those rare roast beef sandwiches sent in, and break early. How about that?’
The sandwiches were lousy too.
A couple of days later we had a visitor. James Prettyman was an Americanized Englishman who used to work alongside me. Since then London Central had sent him to Washington in some deep cover plan that enabled him to do things for them at arm’s length. At one time we’d been close friends. Now I wasn’t so sure, although I suppose I owed him a favour or two.
