Billion-Dollar Brain

by Len Deighton

  She sat down on my bed. ‘On the last day of the Winter War, after the armistice was signed, all shooting was to stop at noon, so during the last hour the Finnish soldiers were collecting up their equipment and the ones that weren’t in the fighting lines were marching back. All the roads in the rear of the armies were crowded with horses and civilians and soldiers, all pleased that the war was over even if we had given the Russians our beautiful Karelia. It was fifteen minutes before noon when the Russian bombardment began. They say it was one of the most intense bombardments ever carried out; thousands of Finns were killed in that last fifteen minutes of the war, many were only crippled and hobbled back to tell us of it.’ She smiled. ‘The only way I want to see a Russian is through a telescopic sight.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have made your point of view clearer to Harvey instead of encouraging him in his illusions, of every kind.’

  ‘I didn’t encourage him. I mean, I had an affair with him, but a girl should be able to do that without a man going dotty. I mean he’s dotty, Harvey.’ Signe’s long silk housecoat was black and gold, she got up and shook the skirt of it. ‘Do you think I look like a leopard in this?’

  ‘A bit like a leopard,’ I said.

  ‘I am a leopard. I shall spring on you.’

  ‘Don’t do that, there’s a good girl. Drink your tea before it gets cold.’

  ‘I’m a leopard. I’m cunning and ferocious.’ Her voice changed. ‘I’m not going to Russia with Harvey.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Harvey said you thought it’s a wonderful idea.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Harvey’s very fond of you, Signe.’

  ‘Very fond,’ she said scornfully. ‘A leopard wants more than that.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘He’s madly and passionately and desperately in love with you.’

  ‘Well you don’t have to make it sound so…so eccentric. You don’t have to make it sound like he’s got some sort of disease.’

  ‘Well I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but if you felt the same way about him I might be a little more enthusiastic.’

  ‘Oh so that’s it. You’re thinking about Harvey. All this time you’re just feeling sorry for Harvey. Here I am thinking that you’re jealous, thinking that you fancied me yourself and all the time you’re just feeling sorry that Harvey has got himself trapped by a terrible girl like me. So that’s it. That’s it, I might have guessed.’

  ‘Don’t start crying, Signe,’ I said. ‘Pour me some tea, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘Don’t you fancy me any more?’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘On Sunday,’ Signe said, ‘Harvey goes to Russia on Sunday. He’s going on the midday train to Leningrad. When he’s said goodbye and gone to Russia will things be different then?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Will things be different between us? Well you know.’

  ‘It’s a lovely idea,’ I said. ‘But I’ll be going to Russia with Harvey.’

  ‘You are a terrible tease,’ she pronounced.

  ‘Don’t spill the sugar in my bed.’

  Signe jumped on to the bed and punched me playfully but with a certain sexual innuendo. ‘I’m a leopard,’ she was shouting. ‘My claws are long and feeerooooocious.’

  She put her long fingernails against my spine and counted the thoracic vertebrae as far as the lumbar region. ‘I’m a left-handed leopard,’ she said. Her fingertips moved carefully like an archaeologist disinterring a fragile find. She measured four finger widths to the left and then stabbed me with her fingernail.

  ‘Ouch,’ I said. ‘Either go to bed, Signe, or put more boiling water in the teapot.’

  ‘Do you know where Harvey has gone?’ She nuzzled her head against my shoulder; her face was sticky with cold cream.

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ I said, knowing that she was going to tell me.

  ‘Gone to see a doctor from England,’ she paused. ‘You are listening now.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ I admitted.

  ‘A Mrs Pike—a woman doctor—brought some of those fertile hens’ eggs. The woman thinks that they are going to America but Harvey has to take them to Russia with him or the Russians won’t let him stay.’

  She must have collected them from the agent in Porton Experimental Establishment before we took him into custody. Kept at the correct temperature they would be perfectly OK and Mrs Pike would know all about that.

  ‘Harvey’s crazy to tell you anything,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Signe. ‘Leopards are cunning, merciless and untrustworthy.’

  She reached across me to the bedside light. That damned pyjama-jacket was far too loose on her. The light went out.

  ‘As one leopard to another,’ I said, ‘remember that baboons are the only animals that can put us to flight.’

  Chapter 25

  All my plans were made by Sunday. I had informed London. I had a visa for Leningrad, and Harvey seemed pleased that I had agreed to go with him. On Sunday morning we got up late. Harvey and I packed our cases slowly. Signe sipped coffee and listened to the English football results, marking her Finnish football coupon. She didn’t win. I think Leeds United lost instead of drawing just as we finished packing. We had a late breakfast at the station. The restaurant is on the first floor and there is a view down the long central hall where the kiosks sell hamburgers, shirts, flowers, souvenir jugs, Mechanix Illustrated and Playboy.

  Two fur-hatted policemen in blue mackintoshes were combing the seats for vagrants and another plain-clothes cop was leaning on the twenty-four-hour locker eating a hot dog. The shoe-shine man was studying the shoes of passers-by. Outside in the cold roofless terminus the trains were lined up side by side. The coaches were dark brownish-grey and made of thin vertical wooden slats. They were high and angular, with a dozen big ugly ventilators along the roof. On the rear of the final train there were three red metal carriages. A yellow stripe ran beneath the large windows and on each there was a Soviet Union crest and a white sign that said ‘Helsinki-Moscow’. From the chimney of these carriages came a thin line of black smoke.

  There was a Russian conductor standing at the foot of the step to the carriage. He was a huge man in a blue overcoat and fur hat. He took our tickets and watched the embrace of Signe and Harvey with dispassionate interest. There was plenty of snow around and steam and train whistles gave Signe a chance to play Anna Karenina. She had prepared for the part with matching fur hat and muff and a coat with a high collar. I kissed Signe in a brotherly way and she dug her fingernails into that vulnerable place in my spine as I made way for Harvey to do his farewell scene. It was amazing how much they both enjoyed acting. She adjusted the collar of Harvey’s coat like she was sending him to his first day at school. There were tears in Signe’s eyes and I half expected that she would change her mind and climb aboard, if only to do the same scene all over again in Leningrad.

  When Harvey finally joined me in the compartment he pressed his nose to the glass and waved and waved until Signe was a tiny dot on the snowy station yard. The conductor had taken off his overcoat and was piling fuel on to a fantastic little stove that stood at the end of the corridor. He soon brought us a cup of weak lemon tea in a nickelplated sputnik holder, and a packet of Moscow biscuits. Harvey settled back in his seat. His decision was made, he sipped his tea and watched the long trains loaded with timber, oil and paraffin clanking down the same route with us. The smoke scrawled graffiti across the slate-like sky. There was a jolt and a clang and the train stopped. The colourless northern winter lay heavy and inert on either side, and across it, tiny black scratches of civilization—fences, wires, paths and slow trains—moved nose to tail like ants across an ashen corpse.

  ‘This winter will never end,’ Harvey said and I nodded. I knew that for him it wouldn’t.

  There was a hiss of brakes. Some small animals perhaps rabbits—ran out of the trees on the far side of the field, frightened by the sudden noise.

  ‘You think she�
��s a whore,’ Harvey said. ‘You can’t understand what I see in her.’

  What a pair, I thought, both of them more concerned with seeming to be fools than being foolish.

  ‘I like her very much,’ I said.

  ‘But?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘But what?’ Harvey demanded.

  ‘She’s a child, Harvey,’ I said. ‘She’s a replacement for your children, not for your wife.’ Harvey, his arms folded, stared across the snow and ice. His face moved slightly, perhaps he nodded.

  We looked at each other without communicating.

  ‘It just couldn’t be,’ said Harvey. ‘It was wonderful while it lasted but it was too perfect. Personal happiness must take second place when life itself is threatened.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I’m glad you see it like that,’ I said.

  ‘You knew all the time?’ I nodded.

  ‘He wasn’t an important agent. He was a courier, he’d been working for the Russians a couple of years and they didn’t rate him so highly. Not until Signe killed him. Then they did. After Signe killed him with a hairpin—the Midwinter school taught her how—and stole a couple of documents from him, he suddenly became important and heroic and a martyr. I didn’t know,’ Harvey said. ‘That’s the funny thing. I didn’t know until Signe told me yesterday.’ His arms were tight across his body like hoops around a barrel. ‘They won’t do anything to her as things stand, but if she went to Russia it would be asking for trouble.’

  I nodded. ‘Asking for it,’ I agreed.

  ‘She’s killed four men if you include the Russian courier and Kaarna. She’s the official killer for the Midwinter organization. An amazing girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘She’ll marry her cousin now. It will be loveless, just for appearances, he’s a police official. Loveless marriage, poor devil.’ His folded arms relaxed.

  ‘The husband?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harvey. ‘Poor devil. I wish she had told me before. I shall never marry either.’ He produced his cigarettes and offered them but I didn’t accept one.

  ‘But you are married,’ I reminded him.

  ‘But not deep down,’ said Harvey. He shook his head in wonder. ‘Poor devil,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Poor devil.’

  The train gave a long agonized groan of stretching metal and a plink-plink-plink-plink-plink ran like a shudder up through it.

  I said, ‘We’ve known each other a long time, Harvey. I didn’t ever try to give you advice before, did I?’

  Harvey didn’t say anything.

  I said, ‘When this train gets to the station at Vainikkala we are both going to get off.’

  Harvey continued to look out of the window, but this time his face moved enough to indicate that he wouldn’t.

  ‘What you are trying to do is impossible, Harvey,’ I said. ‘And Washington will have to keep everyone knowing it’s impossible. They’ll squash you like a gnat, Harvey. They might take a year to do it but they will. When an agent has the sort of knowledge you are carrying…’ I shook my head. ‘Parley your situation into a deal with Midwinter. He’ll pension you off for the rest of your life.’

  ‘And he’ll make sure it doesn’t last too long,’ Harvey said.

  ‘We can work out details to protect you if that’s what you are scared of. Take a year’s holiday, fish and relax. I’ll work on Signe. She’ll visit you…’

  ‘She will not. It’s the end. We said good-bye.’

  ‘There are other girls…’

  Harvey shook his head again.

  ‘If it’s girls…’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Harvey said. ‘You’re talking to me like I’m a cipher clerk in East Berlin. Girls and champagne, roulette and fast cars. Look, I love Signe. Are you incapable of understanding that? I’m pleased that she isn’t with me. She’s too wonderful to be mixed up in this stinking business.’ Harvey made pecking gestures with his fingers and thumb, emphasizing each word as though he was taking them and placing them upon the horizon in a long precarious string. ‘That’s how I love her; I talked her into staying in Helsinki. I don’t want your lousy holidays around the fleshpots of Europe, but most of all I don’t want girls.’

  I’d gone wrong. I tried again. ‘All right, Harvey,’ I said. ‘We’ll play it any way you want. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You know what my orders have to be; we are both in the same business. Let’s figure out something that will make Washington happy and make you happy too.’

  ‘Don’t you ever give up? Can’t you see that I’m not just a defector?’

  ‘What are you then exactly: a trade commission selling extra-marital sex?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’ Harvey crammed himself into the corner and took the very tip of his nose between his finger and thumb as though it was another word he was trying to wrench loose.

  ‘Just what do you think is going to happen when you get across that border?’ I asked. ‘You think that someone is going to be waiting for you with a medal? You think you’re just in time to watch the May Day Parade from Lenin’s tomb? You know what happens to defectors that come to us, what makes you think that you’re going to be different? You’ll end by teaching English at a political school in Kiev. At best, that is; at best.’

  ‘What do you think I’m defecting for?’ Harvey said scornfully. ‘Because Midwinter wouldn’t give me a fifty-dollar raise?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re doing it for,’ I said. ‘But I know that when the train moves out of Vainikkala it’s going to be too late to change your mind. It’ll be goodbye to your kids, good-bye to your wife, good-bye to Signe and good-bye to your country.’

  ‘It’s not my country any more,’ said Harvey. ‘They tried to make me into an American but they couldn’t do it. I don’t need Walt Disney and Hollywood, Detroit and Madison Avenue to tell me how to dress and think and hope. But they write the script for the American dream. Every night Americans go to bed thinking that when they wake up tomorrow there will be no Red China. They dream that the Russians will have finally seen reason. Time, Life and Reader’s Digest will all have Russian-language editions and Russian housewives will be wearing stretch pants and worrying about what kind of gas stations have clean toilets and whether Odessa will buy the Mets.’

  ‘Midwinter doesn’t think that.’

  ‘Sure he does. He just thinks we’ll have to shake a fist at them first, that’s all. Look,’ he said confidentially. ‘I don’t have any strong political opinions but I’m a Russian. My old man was a Russian. I speak Russian nearly as well as Colonel Stok does. I’m just going back home, that’s all.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But not with the eggs, Harvey. I can get away with not hauling you back feet first, but I can’t let you take the eggs. I mean…’ I opened my hand towards him. Harvey interpreted the movement as a threat.

  ‘Just don’t get rough,’ he said. ‘I have four fertilized hens’ eggs inside my shirt. They are the few successful ones existing of a batch of twelve hundred. I don’t say your boys can’t reproduce them, they can. But you know that they won’t believe any story you tell them about their being broken.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well those eggs are against my body. They are alive because of my body heat, those virus samples. I only have to roll against this seat and I’ll be wearing scrambled eggs. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You come to Leningrad with me and I’ll have their boys reproduce that virus and then give you four eggs sealed in exactly the same way to take back to London. How’s that for a deal?’

  ‘It stinks,’ I said. ‘But just for a minute I can’t think of anything else.’

  ‘Attaboy,’ said Harvey. He drank the rest of his cold tea and watched the countryside. ‘I’m really pleased you made your pitch; I’d gotten quite tense waiting for it.’

  The train stopped and started many times all the way to the border. Harvey stared moodily out of the window as a long freight train went by.

&nb
sp; ‘Trains,’ he said. ‘They used to be important once. Remember bogie bolsters, borails, refrigerators, ventilated, low-loaders? Remember all those reports?’

  ‘That’s going back a bit,’ I said. Harvey nodded and said, ‘I’m glad you know about Signe killing that Russian courier.’ He smiled and exhaled smoke very slowly so that he disappeared behind a veil of it. ‘You know what Signe’s like.’

  ‘You thought she was inventing that story,’ I accused him.

  ‘Hell no,’ said Harvey. He smoked his cigarette. ‘She was more upset about leaving me than I was about leaving her. Much more upset.’ The snow began again. Harvey said, ‘This must be the most terrible winter of all time.’

  ‘It is from where you’re sitting,’ I said. The train stopped again.

  ‘Vainikkala.’ The voices called the name of the Finnish border station.

  ‘Let’s go and have coffee,’ I said. ‘We have twenty minutes here while they couple up the Russian locomotive. Last cup of real coffee for a little while.’

  Harvey didn’t budge. I said, ‘Last cup of real coffee, Harvey. For a lifetime.’

  Harvey grinned and put on his overcoat cautiously so as not to disturb the eggs.

  ‘No funny business,’ Harvey said.

  I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender and led the way along the corridor.

  ‘Too many Finns about anyway,’ I said.

  The Russian conductor looked up from his stove and grinned. Harvey spoke to him in Russian and said something about not letting the train go without him and we will have more tea and biscuits when we come back. I said, ‘What do we want tea and biscuits for? We are getting off the train now to go to the buffet.’

  ‘You don’t have to eat them,’ Harvey said. ‘But the old guy makes a little profit on them so that he has some spending money in Finland.’

  ‘Looks like he’s doing nicely,’ I said, ‘judging by that bottle of Gordon’s gin he’s clutching.’

  ‘That was a present,’ Harvey said. ‘He told me that that was a present from someone he hardly knew.’

  Harvey was very proud of speaking Russian.