Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  ‘Is that also what Frank says?’

  ‘No, that’s what I’m saying. It’s obvious. I don’t know why you are being so baroque about it. Maybe it’s not a very big deal. But these KGB people like a nice little jaunt to Mexico, fresh lobster salad and a swim in the Pacific to brighten up their working days. Stinnes is no different.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right. Biedermann is rich and successful; he is woolly-minded and flabby with it. He doesn’t have the motivation, and he certainly doesn’t need the money.’

  ‘So what? Biedermann was frightened for his family. Shall we eat here? Some of this food looks really good. Look at that.’ He read the sign. ‘What are carnitas?’

  ‘Stewed pork. He’s serving it on chicharrones: pork crackling. You eat the meat, then eat the plate. Biedermann wouldn’t give that plate of pork for his family, and especially not for distant relatives in Rostock.’

  ‘We’ll walk to the end and see what else there is and then come back here and try some,’ Dicky suggested. Dicky could always surprise me. Just as I had decided he was the archetypal gringo tourist, he wanted to have lunch at a fonda. ‘So what’s your theory?’

  ‘I have no theory,’ I said. ‘Agents come in many shapes and sizes. Some are waiting for the socialist millennium, some hate their parents, some get angry after being ripped off by a loan company. Some simply want more money. But usually it begins with opportunity. A man finds himself handling something secret and valuable. He starts thinking about using that opportunity to get more money. Only then does he become a dedicated communist agent. So how does Biedermann fit into that? Where are his secrets? What’s his motivation?’

  ‘Guilt,’ said Dicky. ‘He feels guilty about his wealth.’

  ‘If you’d ever met Paul Biedermann you’d know what a good joke that is.’

  ‘Blackmail, then?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Paul Biedermann would pay to have people say he was a sex maniac. He thinks of himself as a rich playboy.’

  ‘You let your acute dislike of Paul Biedermann spill over into your judgements, Bernard. The fact of the matter is that Biedermann is an agent. You heard the two KGB people talking. He is an agent; it’s no good your trying to convince yourself he’s not.’

  ‘Oh, he’s an agent,’ I said. ‘But he’s not the sort of agent that a man such as Stinnes would be running. That’s what puzzles me.’

  ‘Your experience makes you over-estimate what qualities an agent needs. Try and see it from their point of view: rich US businessman – someone the local cops would be reluctant to upset – isolated house on a lonely stretch of beach in western Mexico, not too far by road from the capital. And not too far by sea from Vladivostok.’

  ‘Landing guns, you mean?’

  ‘A man with a reputation for drinking who gets so rough with his servants that he’s left all alone in the house. Wife and children often away. Convenient beach, pier big enough for a big motor boat.’

  ‘Come along, Dicky,’ I said. ‘This is just a holiday cottage by Biedermann’s standards. This is just a place he goes to read the Wall Street Journal and spend the weekend dreaming up a quick way to make a million or two.’

  ‘So for half the year the house is completely empty. Then Stinnes and his pals have the place all to themselves. We know guns go from Cuba to Mexico’s east coast and onwards by light plane. So why not bring them across the Pacific from the country where they are manufactured?’ We’d got to the end of the food stalls and Dicky became interested in a stall selling pictures. There were family group photos and coloured litho portraits of generals and presidents. All of the pictures were in fine old frames.

  ‘It doesn’t smell right,’ I said. But Dicky had put together a convincing scenario. If it was the house they were interested in, it didn’t matter what kind of aptitude Biedermann had for being a field agent. Yes, London Central would love a report along those lines. It had the drama they liked. It had the geopolitic that called for maps and coloured diagrams. And, as a bottom line, it could be true.

  ‘If it doesn’t smell right,’ said Dicky with heavy irony, ‘I’ll tell London to forget the whole thing.’ He stood up straight as he looked at the selection of pictures for sale, and I realized he was studying his reflection in the glass-fronted pictures. He was too thin for the large, bright-green safari shirt. It made him look like a lollipop. ‘Is it going to rain?’ he said, looking at the time. He’d bought a new wrist-watch too. It was a multi-dial black chronometer that kept perfect time at 50 fathoms.

  ‘It seldom rains in the morning, even during the rainy season.’

  ‘It will bucket down on the stroke of noon, then,’ said Dicky, looking up at the clouds that were now turning yellowish.

  ‘I’m still not sure what London wants with Stinnes,’ I said.

  ‘London want Stinnes enrolled,’ he said, as if he’d just remembered it. ‘Shall we walk back to where the pork is? What did you say it’s called – carnitas?’

  ‘Enrolled?’ It could mean a lot of things from persuaded to defect, to knocked on the head and rolled in a carpet. ‘That would be difficult.’

  ‘The bigger they are the harder they fall,’ said Dicky. ‘You said yourself that he’s forty years old and passed over for promotion. He’s been stuck in East Berlin for ages. Berlin is a plum job for Western intelligence but it’s the boondocks for their people. A smart KGB major left to rot in East Berlin is sure to be fretting.’

  ‘I suppose his wife likes it there,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said Dicky. ‘Would I take an intelligence job in Canada because my wife liked ice hockey?’

  ‘No, Dicky, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘And this fellow Stinnes will see what’s good for him. Frank Harrington thought the chances were good.’

  ‘You talked about all this with Frank?’

  ‘Sure. Frank has to be in on it because Stinnes is based in Big B. Stinnes is very much in his territory, Bernard.’ A nervous movement of fingers through curly hair. ‘The worst difficulty is that the Data Centre showed that Stinnes has an eighteen-year-old son. That might prove sticky.’

  ‘Christ, Dicky,’ I said, as I came to terms with this bombshell. ‘Did you know all this when we left London?’

  ‘Enrolling Stinnes, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, enrolling Stinnes I mean.’

  ‘It looked as if it might go that way.’ That was Dicky on the defensive. He’d known all along, that was obvious. I wondered what else he knew that he was not going to tell me about until it happened. ‘London Central put out a departmental alert for him, didn’t they?’ We had reached the carnitas stand by now. He selected a chair that didn’t wobble and sat down. ‘I’ll have mine wrapped in a tortilla; pork skin is very fattening.’

  ‘London Central puts out departmental alerts for clerks who make off with the petty cash.’

  ‘But they don’t send senior staff, like us, to identify them when they are spotted,’ said Dicky.

  ‘Enrolled,’ I said, considering all the implications. ‘A hotshot like Stinnes. You and me? It’s madness.’

  ‘Only if you start thinking it’s madness,’ said Dicky. ‘My own opinion…’ Pause. ‘For what’s it’s worth…’ A modest smile. ‘…is that we stand an excellent chance.’

  ‘And when did you last enrol a KGB major?’

  Dicky bit his lip. We both knew the answer to that one. Dicky was a pen-pusher. Stinnes was the first KGB officer Dicky had ever come this close to, and he hadn’t seen Stinnes yet.

  ‘Isn’t London proposing to send someone over here to help? This is a complicated job, Dicky. We need someone who has experience.’

  ‘Nonsense. We can do it. I don’t want Bret Rensselaer breathing down my neck. If we can pull this one off, it will be a real coup.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t expect you to start asking London for help, Bernard. I thought you were the one who always liked to do everything on his own.’

  ‘I
’m not on my own,’ I said. ‘I’m with you.’ The stallholder was stirring his cauldron of pork and arranging suitable pieces on a large metal platter.

  ‘And you’d prefer to work with your friend Werner, eh?’

  I could hear danger signals. ‘We were at school together,’ I said. ‘I’ve known him a long time.’

  ‘Werner Volkmann isn’t even employed by the department. He hasn’t been employed by us for years.’

  ‘Officially that’s right,’ I said. ‘But he’s worked for us from time to time.’

  ‘Because you give him jobs to do,’ said Dicky. ‘Don’t try to make it sound as if the department employs him.’

  ‘Werner knows Berlin,’ I said.

  ‘You know Berlin. Frank Harrington knows Berlin. Our friend Stinnes knows Berlin. There is no great shortage of people who know Berlin. That’s no reason for employing Werner.’

  ‘Werner is a Jew. He was born in Berlin when the Nazis were running things. Werner instinctively sees things in people that you and I have to learn about. You can’t compare his knowledge of Berlin and Berliners with anything I know.’

  ‘Calm down. Everyone knows Werner is your alter ego, and so mustn’t be criticized.’

  ‘What do you want? You can have “lean meat”, “pure meat”, “meat without fat” or “a bit of everything”.’

  ‘What’s the difference between…’

  ‘Don’t let’s get into semantics,’ I said. ‘Try surtido, that’s a bit of everything.’ Dicky nodded his agreement.

  Dicky, who always showed a remarkable aptitude for feeding himself, now discovered that a carnitas stand is always conveniently close to those that sell the necessary accompaniments. He provided us with salsas and marinated cactus, and was now discovering that tortillas are sold by the kilo. ‘A kilo,’ he said as the tortilla lady disappeared with the payment and left him with a huge pile of them. ‘Do you think they’ll keep if I take them back for Daphne?’ He wrapped some of the pork into the top tortilla. ‘Delicious,’ he said as he ate the first one and took a second tortilla to begin making another. ‘What are all those pieces?’

  ‘That’s ear, and those pieces are intestine,’ I said.

  ‘You just wait until Daphne hears what I’ve been eating; she’ll throw up. Our neighbours came out to Mexico last year and stayed in the Sheraton. They wouldn’t even clean their teeth unless they had bottled water. I wish I had my camera so you could photograph me eating here in the market. Now what is it again – carnitas? I want to get it exactly right when I tell them.’

  ‘Carnitas,’ I said. ‘Surtido.’

  Dicky wiped his mouth on his handkerchief and stood up and looked round the market square. Just from where we were sitting I could see people selling plastic toys, antique tables and gilt mirrors, cheap shirts, brass bedsteads, dogeared American film magazines and a selection of cut-glass stoppers that always survive long after the decanters. ‘Yes,’ said Dicky. ‘It’s really quite a place, isn’t it? Fifteen million people perched at seven thousand feet altitude with high mountain tops all round them and thick smog permanently overhead. Where else could you find a capital city with no river, no coastline and such lousy roads? And yet this is one of the oldest cities the world has ever known. If that doesn’t prove that the human race is stone-raving mad, nothing will.’

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m going to walk right up to Stinnes and offer him a chance to defect,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Dicky. ‘The Volkmanns already know him. Shall we let them make the first overtures?’

  ‘Werner doesn’t work for the department. You just told me that.’

  ‘Correction,’ said Dicky. ‘I said that Werner’s knowledge of Berlin is not sufficient reason for using him in Berlin. Let’s remember that Werner has had a “non-critical employment only” tag on his file.’

  ‘You can be a spiteful bastard, Dicky,’ I said. ‘You’re talking about that signals leak in 1978. You know very well that Werner was completely cleared of suspicion.’

  ‘It was your wife who did it,’ said Dicky. Suddenly he was angry. He was angry because he’d never suspected Fiona of leaking secrets, and now I realized that Dicky saw me as someone who had helped to deceive him rather than as Fiona’s principal victim.

  The sky was darkening with clouds now and there was the movement of air that precedes a storm. I never got used to the speedy effects of the heat and humidity. The sweet smell of fresh fruits and vegetables had filled the air when we first arrived at the market. Now it was already giving way to the smells of putrefaction as the spoiled, squashed and broken produce went bad.

  ‘Yes, it was my wife who did it. Werner was innocent.’

  ‘And if you’d listened you’d have heard me say that Werner has had a “non-crit” tag on his file. I didn’t say it was still there.’

  ‘And now you’re going to ask Werner to enrol Stinnes for you?’

  ‘I think you’d better put it to him, Bernard.’

  ‘He’s on holiday,’ I said. ‘It’s a sort of second honeymoon.’

  ‘So you told me,’ said Dicky. ‘But my guess is that they are both getting a bit bored with each other. If you were on your honeymoon – first, second or third – you wouldn’t want to spend the evenings in some broken-down German club in a seedy part of town, would you?’

  ‘We haven’t seen the club yet,’ I reminded him. ‘Perhaps it’s tremendous.’

  ‘I love the way you said that, Bernard. I wish I could have recorded the way you said “tremendous”. Yes, it might be Mexico’s answer to Caesar’s Palace in Vegas, or the Paris Lido, but don’t bank on it. You see, if it was me on a second honeymoon with that delectable little Zena, I’d be in Acapulco, or maybe finding some sandy little beach where we could be undisturbed. I wouldn’t be taking her along to the Kronprinz club to see who’s winning the bridge tournament.’

  ‘The way it’s turned out,’ I said, ‘you’re not taking the delectable little Zena anywhere. I thought I heard you saying you didn’t like her. I remember you saying that one honeymoon with Zena would be enough for you.’ From the sulphurous yellow sky there came a steady drum-roll of thunder, an overture for a big storm.

  Dicky laughed. ‘I admit I was a little hasty,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t been away from home for very long when I said that. The way I feel now, Zena is looking sexier and sexier every day.’

  ‘And you think talking to Stinnes about Western democracy and the free world will give the Volkmanns a new interest in life,’ I said.

  ‘Even allowing for your sarcasm, yes. Why don’t you put it to them and see what they say?’

  ‘Why don’t you put it to them and see what they say?’

  ‘Look at those children and the donkey and the old man with the sombrero. That would make the sort of photo that wins prizes at the Photo Club. I was so stupid not to bring a camera. But have you seen the sort of price you have to pay for a camera in this country? The Americans are really putting the squeeze on the peso. No, I think you should put it to them, Bernard. You get hold of Werner and talk with him, and then he could go along to the Kronprinz Club tonight and see if Stinnes is there.’ He stopped at a stall to watch a man making chiles rellenos, putting meat fillings into large peppers. Each one got a big spoonful of chopped chillies before being deep-fried and put in a garlicky tomato sauce. Just looking at it made me feel queasy.

  ‘Werner will have to know what London is prepared to offer Stinnes. I assume there will eventually be a big first payment, a salary and contractual provisions about the size of the house they’ll get and what sort of car and so on.’

  ‘Is that the way it’s done?’ said Dicky. ‘It sounds like a marriage contract.’

  ‘They like it defined that way because you can’t buy houses in East Europe and they don’t know the prices of cars and so on. They usually want to have a clear idea of what they are getting.’

  ‘London will pay,’ said Dicky. ‘They want Stinnes; they really wa
nt him. That’s just between us, of course; that’s not for Werner Volkmann to know.’ He touched the side of his nose in a conspiratorial gesture. ‘No reasonable demand will be refused.’

  ‘So what does Werner say to Stinnes?’ On the cobbled ground there were shiny black spots appearing one after the other in the grey dust. The rain had come.

  ‘Let’s keep it all very soft-sell, shall we?’ said Dicky. His wife Daphne worked in a small advertising agency. Dicky told me that it had very aggressive methods with really up-to-date selling techniques. Sometimes I got the feeling that Dicky would like to see the department being run on the same lines. Preferably by him.

  ‘You mean we don’t brief Werner?’

  ‘Let’s see how the cookie crumbles,’ said Dicky. It was an old advertising expression that meant put your head in the sand, your arse in the air and wait for the explosion.

  My prediction that the rain came only in the afternoons was only just right. It was a few minutes after one o’clock when the rain started. Dicky took me in the car as far as the university, where he was to see one of his Oxford friends, and there – on the open plaza – let me out into steady rain. I cursed him, but there was no hostility in Dicky’s self-interest; he would have done the same thing to almost anyone.

  It was not easy to get a cab but eventually an old white VW beetle stopped for me. The car’s interior was battered and dirty, but the driver’s position was equipped like the flight deck of a Boeing jet. The dashboard was veneered in walnut and there was an array of small spanners and screwdrivers and a pen-shaped flashlight as well as a large coloured medallion of the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In contrast to the derelict bodywork of the little car, the young driver was dressed in a freshly starched white shirt with a dark-grey tie and looked more like a stockbroker than a cab driver. But Mexico is like that.

  The traffic moved slowly through the heavy rain but it didn’t make less noise. There were two-stroke motorcycles and cars with broken mufflers and giant trucks – some so carefully painted up that every bolt-head, rivet and wheelnut was picked out in different colours. Here on the city’s outskirts, the wide boulevard was lined with a chaos of broken walls, goats grazing on waste ground, adobe huts, rubbish tips, crudely painted shop-fronts in primary colours and corrugated-iron fences defaced with political slogans and ribaldry. Despite the rain, drunks sprawled full-length on the pavement and the barbecue fires hissed and flared at the taco counters.