by Len Deighton
‘Not here,’ he said and began to close the door.
‘You’d better find out where she is,’ I said, ‘before I find myself checking your work permit.’
He grudgingly admitted us. We sat down on the long buttoned Chesterfield among the ivory carvings, antique snuff-boxes with funny rhymes, silver pen-sets and letter-openers. In the hearth a dachshund was curled like a pretzel among the carefully polished fire-irons. The manservant came back. ‘Mrs Pike is here,’ he said and gave me a bright orange paper.
Besterton Village Junior Private School invites parents and friends to a grand performance. Ting-aling-a-ling. Performances by children of Besterton Junior Private School. Doors open 6.30. Performance begins at 7.0 P.M. Admission free. Silver collection in aid of local charities. Come early. Coffee and light refreshments available at popular prices. Teachers will be happy to answer parents’ questions.
‘Come on, Jean,’ I said.
A cold wind howled through the telephone lines, the last molecule of daylight gone. A great amber traffic-light moon urged caution upon the reckless universe. Toads croaked in the ditch. Somewhere near by a Little Owl was making its kiu-kiu-kiu call. Jean took my arm and said,
‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign;
The night-owl cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howled, and hideous tempests shook down trees…’
I said, ‘My sole excursion into Shakespearean drama was playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. My cue was Marcellus saying, “Look where it comes again.” Enter ghost; stand around haunting until someone said, “Stay! speak, speak! I charge thee, speak!”, then exit ghost, without a word.’
Jean said, ‘You were forming the behaviour patterns of later years.’
I said, ‘The ghost does have lines: “My hour is almost come when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames must render up myself.” And there were some about “lust, though to a radiant angel link’d, will sate itself in a celestial bed, and prey on garbage”, but they didn’t like the way I said them and they finally had a boy backstage speak them through a metal funnel.’
The school is a large house that was once called The Grange. Its grounds had been divided into rectangles upon each of which a modern house stood. A large signboard—Besterton Junior Private School—had been hammered into the front garden to attract juvenile residents of the village who declined to mix with lower-income groups.
A lady in a fur coat sat in a chair in the doorway. ‘Are you a father?’ she asked, as Jean and I entered.
‘We’re working at it,’ I said. She smiled grimly and allowed us in. A large hand-drawn arrow pointed down a corridor that smelled of exercise books and chalky dusters. We went through the door marked ‘Assembly Hall Platform’. The monotonous sound of a carefully played piano came from the body of the hall. Mrs Philippa Pike was behind the scenes. I gave her the note from her husband and she looked at me a long time before unfolding it. When she had read it she looked unsurprised.
‘I’m going nowhere,’ she said. There was only just enough light to see her face, but beyond her a little girl on the stage was caught in the criss-cross green beams of the spotlights. She wore sequincovered wings and they flapped as she moved, twinkling in the hard green light.
‘You’d be wise to take your husband’s advice,’ I said. ‘He’s probably in a better position to judge the situation.’
The little girl was saying,
‘The north wind doth blow And we shall have snow, And what will poor Robin do then? Poor thing.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Mrs Pike. ‘You tell me he’s in prison, that’s not a good place from which to judge any situation except your own.’
‘I didn’t say where he was, I said I had a message from him.’
The little girl said,
‘He’ll sit in a barn, And keep himself warm, And hide his head under his wing, Poor thing.’
The spotlight changed to pink, as she hid her head under her nylon wing.
Mrs Pike pulled the collar of her suit against her neck as if she too felt the north wind blowing. ‘Felix was a fool,’ she said to no one in particular. Her face was brightly lit by the pink spotlight and I could see the place where her liquid make-up stopped a little below her jaw. ‘Someone should pay,’ she said. ‘Someone had the benefit of the work they did—dangerous work—someone benefited and someone should pay. Why should I suffer, and why should the child?’
I looked at Mrs Pike, a small, hard, faceless woman with hair expensively tinted and tiny eyes ashine with bitterness because her spying hadn’t paid off. There was a pause while I controlled my anger, and when I spoke I spoke quietly.
‘It’s simple enough,’ I said. ‘Here’s an airline ticket for you and your son to Milan. If you catch this next plane I will pay your expenses and there will be plenty for clothes etcetera to save you going back to the house, which may already be under observation. If you don’t do that we will accompany you back to the house when you leave here. You will be taken into custody.’
‘I suppose you are just obeying your orders,’ she said.
‘But not unthinkingly, Mrs Pike,’ I said. ‘And that’s the difference.’
The little girl on the stage twirled around with her head under her wing. I could see her lips move as she counted the twirls. Mrs Pike said, ‘I don’t trust you.’
A little boy dressed as a toy soldier with huge white buttons and two discs of red on his cheeks came up to Mrs Pike and touched her hand. ‘I’m on next, Mummy,’ he said.
‘That’s right, dear,’ said Mrs Pike. The little girl on the stage was waving a large papier-mâché lantern about the stage and there was now only one blue spotlight.
She said,
‘How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.’
All the lights came on. Mrs Pike’s face was suddenly revealed clearly. The little girl curtsied and there was a noise of clapping. The audience had been so quiet that I hadn’t realized that there were about sixty people just a few inches behind the hardboard.
‘Do you have a clean handkerchief, dear?’ Mrs Pike said.
‘Yes,’ said little Nigel Pike, the toy soldier. The little girl came flushed and laughing to the side of the stage where her father lifted her down. A man said, ‘In position the toy soldiers. Where’s the unicorn?’ He climbed on to the stage and arranged Nigel and his friends in formation and scrambled out of sight behind a pile of dwarfsized desks.
‘And I don’t trust you,’ I said to Mrs Pike. ‘I also was in Helsinki last week.’
The toy soldiers, a lion with sticking plaster on its knee, and a unicorn with a horn that was coming unravelled, had formed up on the stage. The piano began. One of the toy soldiers waved a sword and the others began to recite in unison.
‘The lion and the unicorn Were fighting for the crown; The lion beat the unicorn All round about the town.’
The lion and the unicorn tapped wooden swords and made growling noises like TV wrestlers.
Mrs Pike was watching the brightly lit children with unseeing eyes.
‘You’d better make up your mind quickly,’ I said. ‘But let me just make it as clear as I can. By now…’ I looked at my watch: it was 7.45 ‘…a warrant has probably been issued, but because this is Buckinghamshire there will probably be a bit of telephoning going on to appease the Chief Constable. I’d say you have two hours before they block ports and airfields. These tickets won’t be worth a damn once Special Branch at London Airport get their orders.’
One of the toy soldiers was singing.
‘Some gave them white bread, And some gave them brown; Some gave them plum cake And drummed them out of town.’
Mrs Pike was watching her son. The man at the other side of the stage was whispering very loudly, ‘Go on unicorn. Go on unicorn, run round the tree.’
‘The unicorn has taken too long eating the plum cake,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Pike. ‘He did at
rehearsals too.’
‘It beats me,’ Dawlish said. He had the office fire piled precariously high with coal and had borrowed a fan heater from the dispatch department, but still the office was cold. Dawlish leaned down to the fire and warmed his hands. ‘You walked through London Airport with this child dressed as a toy soldier? I don’t know how you can be so foolish. Passport control noted it of course. When the alert came through they remembered.’
‘Yes,’ I said patiently, ‘but Mrs Pike and the kid had left the country by then.’
‘Dressed as a toy soldier,’ said Dawlish. ‘Can you think of anything more conspicuous? Couldn’t you have put an overcoat on him?’
‘Where would I get an overcoat to fit a small child between Buckingham and Slough at eight o’clock at night?’
‘One improvises,’ said Dawlish. ‘Use your initiative.’
I said, ‘I used up so much initiative on this case that it was wearing thin.’
‘You do think of some things,’ said Dawlish. ‘Dressed as a toy soldier. I said that to Ross the other day when he was objecting to you going down to Salisbury. I said he may be a little captious, he certainly has a chip on his shoulder and he is liable to get hold of the wrong end of the stick; but he does keep the department lively. What were you thinking of, walking up to the Alitalia desk with a toy soldier?’
‘I was thinking how lucky I was not to be there with a unicorn.’
‘A unicorn,’ said Dawlish, humouring me, ‘I see.’
Behind him I could see a tiny blue patch through the grey cloud; perhaps spring would be coming soon.
Appendix One:
Soviet military districts
There are twenty-three military districts. The most important are: Moscow, Leningrad, Baltic, Belorussia, Kiev and Maritime (which includes Far Eastern). As well as these there are Army Groups, Germany, and also the Polish Army which is still largely officered by Russians, some of whom don’t speak Polish.
A Military Council commands each military district under the direct orders of the Ministry of Defence. The military district is remarkably selfsufficient, commanding even tactical air forces.
Naval units and long-range air force units have their own systems of districts and are under Moscow’s orders but, like Stok’s KGB, their food, lodging, vehicles, fuel, etc. are supplied by the local military district.
Appendix Two:
Soviet Intelligence
Soviet units are not only very complex and overlapping but constantly change their names and their relative power. For instance, the MVD (formerly the NKVD) was at one time the most powerful of all such organizations, and a visit from a sergeant could intimidate an ordinary army colonel. It had its own air force, tank force, supply service and communications. Nowadays the MVD sergeant will be the man looking under your seat for stowaways when you cross the Soviet border, and even then he is likely to have an officer watching him to see that he does it right. Among the many other intelligence units in the USSR there are those of the Foreign Ministry, the Party, the Air Force, Army and Rocket Forces. The major units, however, can be divided into three.
1. The MVD. It has been called the Cheka, GPU, OGPU and NKVD, but after Stalin’s death the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) became mostly concerned with intelligence only at a tactical level. Its present duties include highway patrols, traffic services, fire services and militiamen. It also handles all registration, e.g. marriage, birth, driving licence, visa and passport, including those of foreigners. Each Border District HQ has an Intelligence Unit to report about the foreign territory facing them. At present its most important unit—GUVV—is responsible for internal security units.
2. All military intelligence of the General Staff comes under the Chief Intelligence Administration (Directorate) and this is the GRU. Each army division has a GRU unit commanded via its military council GRU. At the top of the GRU tree there are GRU networks in Western countries. Famous old boys include Colonel Zabotin of the Gouzenko affair in Ottawa, Alexander Foote (author of the famous Handbook For Spies) and Richard Sorge of Tokyo. The GRU also control the specialized ‘Study Department’ which studies documents published in the West which will provide information—especially technical information—of use to Russia. Over the past decade this particular department—in spite of its lack of glamour—has provided more and better information than all the other departments put together.
3. The most important unit of intelligence is the KGB. Under Beria this was the Ministry of State Security—MGB—but was reformed as a mere committee of State Security KGB and had certain devices built into the chain of command to prevent another Beria—or even a Hoover—taking it over as a personal force. The top-ranking foreign section—INU—is calculated to operate about seventy-five per cent of all Soviet espionage overseas. Rosenberg and Colonel Abel were employees of the INU section of KGB, so were Petrov, Khokhlov, Rastvorov, etc. There are many sections of the KGB: the KRU—counter-intelligence—and SPU (Special Political) are next in order of importance after INU. There is a special part of the KGB which is devoted to watching the army. This is called the GUKR, which is often translated as Senior Counter-intelligence and its duties are thereby confused with the KRU mentioned earlier. The GUKR, however, watches the Soviet Army. Before 1946 GUKR was sometimes called SMERSH and was a part of the Defence Ministry.
The function and power of each of these organizations is subject to change. Although there is just as much back-biting among Soviet Intelligence as among Western Intelligence there is one difference: it is not unusual for one department to relinquish its network to a rival command. A man this week working for the GRU might next week be working for the KGB, whether he knows it or not. In any case, as I have pointed out, he probably thinks he is working for America or France. So if you are indulging in a little extra-curricular espionage remember that you might be working for your ideological enemies. Take a tip from the professionals: do it just for the money.
Appendix Three:
Privately owned intelligence units
There are quite a few, of all shapes and sizes. Most of them are émigré formations like the Ukrainian Socialist Party which is an anti-Communist Russian group based in Munich. There also is the Natsionalno Trudovi Soyuz (NTS) or National Labour Alliance which has been going since the early thirties. It has Whites and all sorts of Soviet Army deserters mixed up with ex-Vlassov men (a Nazi puppet army). It is especially interested in putting men into the USSR to spread propaganda because it feels that the USSR is on the verge of revolt. It is said to have links with the Gehlen Bureau and the CIA. NTS men were parachuted into Soviet territory in April 1953, but their trial didn’t come until much later because Soviet Intelligence didn’t want to endanger a man named Georg Müller who had penetrated the NTS in 1948. The trial said the men were trained at Starnberg school in shooting, radio, forging, sabotage and parachuting. They publish newsheets: Za Rossiou (For Russia) and Nashy Dni (Our Days). NTS also controls International Research on Communist Techniques.
The most famous private organization is the Crusade for Freedom headed by Eugene Holman (Standard Oil Esso, New Jersey) which ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Europe Press. The RFE has twenty-eight transmitters and employs well over one thousand persons. Some people think that RFE was too provocative in its broadcasts to Hungary during the revolt.
Another organization is the International Service of Information Foundation Inc. which is run by Air Force Reserve Colonel Amoss on a grant from a millionaire businessman. Information Bureau West is a private news agency which concentrates upon building a minutely detailed picture of the DDR (East Germany) from press, radio, visitors and Government sources.
The radical right gets quite a lot of support from business; one insurance company alone has distributed thirty million anti-Communist pamphlets. Savings banks and oil companies are especially generous, and large companies have bought TV time for anti-Communist rallies.
About the Author
BILLION-DOLLAR BRAIN
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.
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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.
