by Len Deighton
Jim was in his early thirties. He had the wiry form and presence of mind that are associated with the pushier type of door-to-door salesmen. His complexion was pale and bloodless. His head was domelike and he was losing his silky hair but sometimes a strand of it fell across his eyes. I think he was glad to see it.
It was early in the morning when he arrived. He was wearing a blue striped suit, the lightweight cotton you need in Washington DC at this sweaty time of the year. There was a paisley silk square in the top pocket and the trousers were very rumpled, as if he’d been strapped in to his seat for a few hours.
‘Good to see you, Bernie,’ he said and gave me a sincere handshake and fixed me with his eyes, in that way that Americans do when they are trying to recall your name. ‘I’m sitting in.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Later this morning. You, me and Bret: okay?’
‘Good,’ I said, uncertain of what was expected of me. I thought he must have come to talk with Fiona but she was taking breakfast in bed having been given a morning of ‘free activity’.
Bret Rensselaer went into secret session with Jim Prettyman and I was summoned to join them at ten o’clock. The remains of their breakfast were still distributed around the room. Bret couldn’t think without striding round the room so there were plates of half-eaten corn muffins, cups and unfinished glasses of orange juice on every side. I poured myself coffee from the vacuum jug and sat down. I reached for the cream jug but when I poured from it only a drip or two remained.
Bret Rensselaer said, ‘Jim would like to hear your version of what happened.’
I looked at Bret and he added, ‘On the Autobahn.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘On the Autobahn.’
‘Who was this man on the motor cycle?’ said Prettyman.
‘No one seems to know,’ I said.
‘I told Jim you had theories,’ said Bret. ‘And I told him you wouldn’t open up.’
Jim said, ‘Off the record, Bernie.’
‘It was a dark night, Jim,’ I said.
He leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder and said, ‘Off the record.’
‘Oh, that kind of off the record,’ I said. I drank some coffee. It was cold. ‘I think your vacuum flask is on the blink,’ I said. ‘Yes, well…He had an American accent.’
‘They’ve all got American accents,’ said Bret. ‘It’s the teaching machines.’
‘So I hear,’ I said.
‘Did you recognize the voice?’ said Prettyman.
‘Are you putting me on?’ I asked. ‘Do we have to go through with this nonsense?’
‘Who was it?’
‘Jesus, Jim! You know who it was. It was a thug named Thurkettle, a renegade American. A hit man the Department brought in to make sure Tessa Kosinski was blown away.’
‘Why you dumb…’ started Bret, but Prettyman waved a hand that silenced him.
‘Tell me more,’ said Prettyman. ‘Why would the Department want to kill Fiona’s sister?’ It was casually put, but in his voice there was that specially kindly tone with which psychiatrists coax maniacs.
‘The car burned,’ I said. ‘Tessa Kosinski’s remains – no more than a few bone fragments and ashes – will be identified as her sister Fiona. Fiona is hidden here: Moscow won’t know that she is alive and well and spilling everything to you guys.’
‘You’re forgetting the teeth,’ said Bret. ‘They are sure to find some jawbone. Fiona had dentistry – a crown and a filling – while she was over there in East Berlin.’ If anything was needed to convince me that my theory was right, it was Bret’s remarkable knowledge of Fiona’s dental chart.
Prettyman looked at Bret and then at me and then sneaked a quick look at his wristwatch.
‘I’m forgetting nothing,’ I said. ‘Let’s suppose a skull, suffici ently like Fiona’s, was fitted with dental work that exactly matched hers. That would have been put into the car.’
‘Two women’s skulls in the car?’
‘That’s why you need a madman like Thurkettle. Hacking a head from a body is covered by his all-inclusive fee.’
‘Thurkettle is the one who wasted the CIA man in Salzburg,’ said Prettyman, as if remembering the name from something in the dim and distant past. Then he said, ‘It would need a lot of planning…a lot of cooperation. Who would put him in position and so on?’
‘There was drug trafficking: officials on both sides. A scapegoat was needed. All concerned were desperate to close the file. That spot, with the construction work on the highway, would provide a chance to bury any inconvenient evidence.’
‘Where did you get all this?’ said Prettyman.
I said, ‘It’s the only feasible explanation.’
‘You’ll have to do better than that, Bernie,’ said Prettyman in a voice that seemed truly friendly. ‘I’ll listen to anything you have to say. I learned what I know from you: all of it. But you’ll have to do a rewrite for that cockeyed script.’
‘So what in hell was Tessa doing there?’
It was Bret’s turn to speak. ‘Isn’t that a question for you to answer, Bernard? You took her there with you. Remember?’
‘Will you go and see Gloria?’ I asked Prettyman on a sudden and desperate impulse. ‘Tell the children I’m well and that I love them?’
Bret said nothing.
Prettyman calmly said, ‘There’s not much chance of me getting a trip to London anytime in the foreseeable future, Bernie.’
I drank my tepid black coffee and didn’t answer.
‘I’ll be back,’ Prettyman told me like a dutiful son visiting a difficult octogenarian. ‘But I have to be at Camarillo Municipal Airport by two. Next month maybe…Good to see you, Bernie. Really good! I mean that sincerely.’
‘Get stuffed!’ I said.
Prettyman looked at Bret. Bret responded with a tiny shrug as he was showing Prettyman out. I remained where I was but I could hear them in the next room. As they parted I heard Prettyman say, ‘What a tragedy. Both of them.’
I heard Bret reply, ‘It’s not too late. Let’s see what happens.’
It was a week afterwards that I learned that Camarillo Municipal Airport used to be a fully equipped US Air Force operational base and that the runways are still in good order. So when Prettyman went there he hopped back into the supersonic military jet that had brought him, and he was in Washington for happy hour. I suppose it was something that Fiona had said to Bret and Washington had to be told double quick.
We’d been at the house for over a month before Fiona began to open up to me. Even then what she said was fairly banal stuff about her day-to-day work in Berlin, but it was a start. Then each evening it became routine for us to talk for half an hour or so. Sometimes we’d talk over a drink in our sitting room, and sometimes we’d take a walk around the perimeter fence. Then one evening Fiona almost trod upon a big grey rattlesnake, and after that we kept to the paths and the terrace. It was a big property, and high enough so that on a pitch-black night like this the California coastline shone like a diamond necklace laid out all the way to Los Angeles.
‘What really happened?’ she said one night as we were standing there looking at the view and listening to the ocean.
‘They got you out,’ I said. ‘That’s what happened.’
‘What was Tessa doing there? That’s what I can’t understand. What was Tessa doing there, Bernard?’
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘She was having an affair with Dicky. She thought it would be fun, I suppose.’
‘I loved you so much when I married you, Bernard. I loved you because you were the only man I’d ever met who had a real respect for the truth. You never lied to me, Bernard. I wanted my children to be like you.’
I was holding her hand, staring into the darkness and trying to recognize the distant coastline.
She said, ‘You wouldn’t be working against me, would you, Bernard? You wouldn’t do that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They haven’t even told George that Tessa is dead.�
�
‘Why not?’
‘Poor George. He’d never do harm to anyone.’
‘Why haven’t they told him?’
She turned to look at me. ‘He’s been sworn to secrecy and told that Tessa went to Berlin with you and that you’ve run away together…run away somewhere where no one can find you.’
‘So that’s the story,’ I said. It fitted so neatly: the hotel room that Dicky had shared with Tessa was registered in my name.
‘They want Moscow to believe that Tessa is alive. The story is that it was me who was killed at the Brandenburg exit.’
‘The burning car. Yes, that would be it.’
‘Could they get away with such a deception, Bernard?’
‘There was trade in heroin. Could Erich Stinnes have been involved?’
‘Erich? No!’
‘A lot of people think he was,’ I persisted. ‘And he was working for the Department. Do you see how he could have been set up?’
‘Stop worrying about Erich.’
‘Who says I’m worrying about him?’
‘You identify with him…the way he grew up in Berlin with a father in the army…you identify with him.’
I didn’t deny it: she knew. I suppose I’d been shouting in my sleep. I’d had a couple of nightmares. ‘I killed him.’
‘It’s all over, darling. Stop torturing yourself. Why was Tessa there? That’s what I want to find out.’
‘Tessa was an addict, you know.’
‘That’s what Bret said.’
‘That might have been the reason she went to Berlin. There was a man named Thurkettle who probably supplied her. I think he might have cut off her supply to make her follow him there. There were a lot of people involved. A scapegoat was needed. You can bet the official explanation is that you were bringing it in.’
‘That I was bringing it? Heroin? Whose explanation? East or West?’
‘Everyone. It was a chance to close the file,’ I said.
‘How far would the Department go with that?’
‘This is an unprecedented situation. We can’t be guided by past examples.’
‘Uncle Silas knew what I was really doing.’
‘Yes, I know, I talked to him. Uncle Silas said they needed six months with Moscow still believing you remained loyal. They’ll be using all the material that they were frightened of using before in case you were compromised.’
‘You’re saying someone deliberately planned it so that Tessa would die?’
‘I don’t know.’ My answer came too pat and she thought I was not telling her all I knew. ‘I really don’t know, Fi.’
She put her arm round me. ‘I have no one to trust any more. Sometimes that frightens me.’
‘I understand.’
‘Was it like that for you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Who would plan such a terrible thing?’
‘Perhaps I’ve got it all wrong,’ I said.
‘Bret?’
‘I wouldn’t start going through the possibilities. Probably it was a mixture of planning and opportunity. Maybe it’s nothing like that. As I say: maybe I’ve got it all wrong.’
‘I suppose Tessa did look like me. Daddy always said so.’
‘I have no evidence one way or the other,’ I said. ‘The most important thing is to give Bret the sort of answers he wants. We have to get out of here. The children need us.’
‘I abandoned them,’ said Fiona. ‘They must hate me.’
‘Of course they don’t.’
‘Why wasn’t it me? Tessa so loved life, and you and the children can manage without me. Why wasn’t it me?’
‘You’ve got to start again, Fi,’ I said.
‘I didn’t even recognize her,’ said Fiona. ‘I left her there in the mud.’
I could hear the ocean but I couldn’t see anything there but darkness. I said, ‘Why don’t we see if Bret would let the children come here for the final three or four weeks?’
‘Bret says we’ll be here for a long time,’ she said casually, as if she didn’t care.
I shivered. I was right. We were imprisoned here. Maybe for years. Maybe indefinitely. I knew of defectors, needing protection, who were tucked away out of sight for a decade or more. ‘Tell Bret you insist upon seeing the children,’ I suggested.
She didn’t reply immediately, and when she did her voice was listless. ‘I love the children and I desperately want to see them. But not here.’
‘Whatever you say, Fi.’
‘I need time, Bernard. I’ll be that lucky joyful girl you married, and the good times will come round again. We’ll live happily ever after. But I need time.’
From the Pacific Ocean there came that smell of salt and putrefaction that is called fresh air. The sky was very dark that night: no stars, no glimmer of moonlight. Even the lights along the waterfront were being extinguished.
About the Author
SPY LINE
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.
AUTHOR NOTE:
Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match together cover the period from spring 1983 until spring 1984.
Winter covers 1900 until 1945.
Spy Hook picks up the Bernard Samson story at the beginning of 1987 and Spy Line continues it into the summer of that same year.
Spy Sinker starts in September 1977 and ends in summer 1987. Faith picks up the story and continues it. The stories can be read in any order and each one is complete in itself.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
By Len Deighton
FICTION
The Ipcress File Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Declarations of War
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-FICTION
Action Cook Book
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain
Airshipwreck
French Cooking for Men
Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of
Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk
ABC of French Food
Blood, Tears and Folly
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.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
This paperback edition 2010
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson Ltd 1989
Copyright © Len Deighton 1989
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010
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
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American 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, downloaded, 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.
EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-39537-8
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
