Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  ‘What happened last week?’

  ‘Did I tell you he went to Italy, the Ferrari factory, last week? He’s been there before and I know the hotel he always stays in. So I phoned them and asked if Mrs Kosinski was staying there. The switchboard girl said Mr and Mrs Kosinski were not in their room but there was another gentleman occupying the second bedroom of the suite if I’d like to speak with him or leave a message with him.’

  ‘And did you speak with this “him”?’

  ‘No, I got scared and rang off.’

  ‘Who was the other man?’

  ‘One of the people from the factory, or perhaps it was George’s general manager. He goes along on these trips sometimes.’

  ‘And have you tackled George about it?’

  ‘I tried a little test. He’s going to South Africa on some business deal. I’ve never been to South Africa so I said I’d go with him. He gave me a strange look and said he couldn’t change the arrangements, and he is going alone.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘He’s going with a woman. Surely that’s obvious. He’s taking her to South Africa with him.’

  ‘He’s always going off on business trips. Are you saying he’s always taken women with him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve hardly ever gone with him on a business trip before. It’s always so boring to meet all these car salesmen. It was bad enough when he brought them home. All they ever talk about is delivery dates, advertising schedules and profit margins. They never talk about motor cars unless it’s rally driving or the Grand Prix. Have you ever been to a motor race, Bernard?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember it.’

  ‘Then you haven’t been to one. Because if you’d been to a motor race you’d never forget it. George took me to the Monte Carlo one year. It sounded as if it might be fun. George got a suite at the Hotel de Paris, and a girl I was at school with lives in Monte Carlo with her family. Well, Bernard, I knew I’d done the wrong thing when I phoned my friend and her maid told me that they always leave town when the race is on. Because the noise is deafening and it goes on non-stop day and night. Endless, darling. I put a pillow over my head and screamed.’

  ‘You didn’t stay in your hotel room all through the race?’

  ‘I’m not a complete ninny, Bernard. George had the best seats anyone could have. But after the race has been on for ten minutes, there is no way of telling which of the wretched cars is in front and which is at the back. All you see is these stinking little machines driving past you, and you choke on the petrol fumes and get deafened by the noise. And when you try to get back to your hotel you run into the Monaco policemen who are just about the most asinine gorillas in the whole world. It’s their big opportunity to scream and shout and push people around and they take full advantage of it. Don’t ever go, Bernard, it’s absolutely ghastly.’

  ‘I take it that was the last business trip you did with George.’

  ‘And you guessed right, darling.’ She looked at me. Her eyes were wide and very blue.

  ‘And now you are convinced that George has found some lady who likes the noise and petrol fumes, and thinks the Monaco police are wonderful.’

  ‘Well, it looks like that, doesn’t it? My mother always said I should go with him everywhere. Mummy never lets David out of her sight. She hated the idea of my letting George go away alone. That’s always how trouble starts, my mother says.’ Tessa put her face into her hands and wept in a rather restrained way. I felt sorry for her. The weeping was straight out of drama school. But I could see that, beyond the abandoned-little-woman act, she was genuinely distressed.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world, Tessa.’

  ‘I’ve got no one to turn to,’ she said between sobs. ‘You’re the only one I can talk to now that Fi has gone.’

  ‘You have a thousand friends.’

  ‘Name one.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You have so many friends.’

  ‘Is that your polite way of saying lovers, Bernard? Lovers are not friends. Not my sort of lovers anyway. The men in my life have never been friends. My love affairs have always been jokes…schoolgirl jokes. Silly pranks that no one took seriously. A squeeze, a hug, a couple of hours between the sheets in a very expensive hotel room. A weekend stay in the country house of odd people I hardly knew. Passionate embraces in ski chalets and quick cuddles in parked cars. All the flushed excitement of infatuation and then it’s all over. We knew it couldn’t last, didn’t we? Goodbye, darling, and don’t look back.’

  ‘You always seemed so happy, Tessa.’

  ‘I was, darling. Happy, confident Tessa, full of fun and always making jokes about my love life. But that was while I had George to go home to. Now I don’t have George to go home to.’

  ‘Do you mean…?’

  ‘Don’t look so alarmed, Bernard. I don’t mean literally, darling. I don’t mean that I’m moving in here with you. You should see your face.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said. ‘If you leave George you can always use the boxroom. There’s a bed there that we’ve used when my mother came to stay. It’s not very comfortable.’

  ‘Of course it’s not comfortable, darling. It’s a room made for mothers to stay in. It’s a horrid, dark little room that would exactly suit a sister-in-law who came to stay, and who might otherwise stay too long.’ She gave all her attention to the bubbles rising through the champagne and ran her fingertip down the glass to trace a line through the condensation.

  ‘Sounds like you’re determined to feel sorry for yourself.’

  ‘But I am, darling. Why shouldn’t I feel sorry for myself? My husband doesn’t want me any more, and the only man I’ve always loved keeps looking at his lovely new watch and yawning.’

  ‘Go back home and tell George you love him,’ I said. ‘You might find that everything will come out all right.’

  ‘You must be Mrs Lonelyheart. I read your column every week.’

  I picked the bottle out of the bucket and divided the last of the champagne between our two glasses. The bottle dripped icy water down my arm. She smiled. This time it was a more convincing smile. ‘I’ve always adored you, Bernard. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘We’ll talk about that some other time, Tessa. Meanwhile do you think you can drive home, or shall I phone for a cab?’

  ‘They don’t have alcohol at the bridge club, that’s the worst thing about it. No, I’m as sober as a judge. I will drive home and leave you in peace.’

  ‘Talk to George. The two of you can sort it out.’

  ‘You’re a darling,’ she said. I helped her into her smart suede car coat and she gave me a decorous kiss. ‘You’re the only one I can talk to.’ She smiled. ‘I’ll be over here when nanny arrives. You get on with your work. No need to worry.’

  ‘I’m flying to Berlin in the morning.’

  ‘How wretched for you, Bernard. You won’t be here to welcome the children.’

  ‘No, I won’t be here.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll go to Gloriette – opposite Harrods – and get them a superb chocolate cake with “Love from Daddy” written on the top, and I’ll tell them how sorry you are to be away.’

  ‘Thanks, Tessa.’

  I opened the front door for her but she didn’t leave. She turned to me and said, ‘I dreamed about Fiona the other night. I dreamed that she phoned me, and I said was she speaking from Russia, and she said never mind where she was speaking from. Do you ever dream about her, Bernard?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘It was so vivid, my dream. She said I was to meet her at London Airport. I was to tell no one. She wanted me to bring her some photos.’

  ‘Photos?’

  ‘Photos of your children. It’s so silly when you think of it. Fiona must have taken photos with her when she went. In this dream she desperately wanted these photos of the children. I dreamed she was shouting down the phone at me the way she did when we were children and she couldn’t get her own way. Wake up,
she shouted. It was such a silly dream but it upset me at the time. She wanted photos of you too.’

  ‘What photos of me?’

  ‘It was only a dream, darling. Oh, photos of you she left at my house a couple of months ago. She forgot to take them with her one night. Photos taken recently, for your passport, I should think. Awfully dull photos and portraits of the children. Isn’t it odd how one dreams such silly trivial things?’

  ‘Which terminal?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In the dream. Which terminal at London Airport did she ask you to go to?’

  ‘Terminal 2. Don’t let it upset you, Bernard. I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I’d known. Mind you, it upset me at the time. It was very early in the morning and I dreamed I answered the phone and the operator asked me if I’d accept a reverse-charge call from Bosham. I ask you, darling. From what deep dark confines of my brain-box did I dredge Bosham? I’ve never been there.’ She laughed. ‘George was awfully cross when I woke him up and told him. If the phone had really rung, I would have heard it, wouldn’t I, he said. And then I realized it was all a dream. Mind you, the phone often rings without George hearing it, especially if he’s been boozing at his club as he had that night.’

  ‘I’d just try and forget about it,’ I said. ‘It’s not unusual to get strange dreams after something like that happens.’

  She nodded and I squeezed her arm. Her sister’s betrayal had affected her deeply. For her, as for me, it was a personal betrayal that required a fundamental rethinking of their whole relationship. And that meant a fundamental rethinking of oneself. Perhaps she knew what was in my mind, for she looked up at me and smiled as if at some secret we shared.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said again. I didn’t want Tessa to worry, and, on the practical level, I didn’t want her to phone the telephone exchange and check if there really was a reverse-charge call from Bosham. It could only lead on to inquiries I was trying to avoid. I could follow Fiona’s reasoning. By reversing the charges, she made sure the call didn’t appear on the telephone bill of the house in Bosham and thus implicate her sister.

  I kissed Tessa again and told her to look after herself. I didn’t like the idea of Fiona wanting passport pictures of me. She didn’t want them to go beside her bed.

  I watched Tessa get into her silver VW. She lowered the car window so that she could blow me a kiss. The way the headlights flashed a couple of times, and the direction indicators winked, as she backed out of the tiny parking space, made me wonder if she was telling the truth about the availability of alcohol at her bridge club.

  But when I went upstairs to bed I saw MacKenzie sprawled across the floor with his brains spattered over the wallpaper. It was some sort of hallucination. But just for a moment, as I switched on the bedroom light, his image was as clear and as real as anything I’ve ever seen. It was the shock and the drink and the tiredness and the anxiety. Poor little sod, I thought; I sent him to his death. If he’d been an experienced agent perhaps I’d not have felt so guilty about it, but MacKenzie was not much more than a child, and a novice at the spy game. I felt guilty, and as I prepared for bed I began to suffer the delayed reaction that my body had deferred and deferred. I shook uncontrollably. I didn’t want to admit, even to myself, that I was frightened. But that image of MacKenzie kept blurring into an image of myself, and my guilt was turning into fear. For fear is so unwelcome that it comes only in disguise, and guilt is its favourite one.

  15

  There was a time when Lisl Hennig’s house seemed gigantic. When I was a small child, each marble step of that grand staircase was a mountain. Scaling mountains had then required an exertion almost beyond me, and I’d needed a moment’s rest when each summit was won. And that was how it now was for Frau Lisl Hennig. The staircase was something she tackled only when she felt at her best. I watched her as she inched her way into the ‘salon’ and berthed in a huge gilt throne, plumped up with velvet cushions so she didn’t put too much strain upon her arthritic knees. She was old, but the brown dyed hair, big eyes and the fine features in her wrinkled face made it difficult to guess exactly how old.

  ‘Bernd,’ she said, using the name by which I’d been known at my Berlin school. ‘Bernd. Put my sticks on the back of the chair where I can find them if I want them. You don’t know what it’s like to be crippled in this way. Without my sticks I am a prisoner in this damned chair.’

  ‘They are there already,’ I said.

  ‘Give me a kiss. Give me a kiss,’ she said testily. ‘Have you forgotten Tante Lisl? And how I used to rock you in my arms?’

  I kissed her. I had been in Berlin for three days, waiting for Werner to come back from his ‘short reconnaissance’ to the East Sector, but every day Lisl greeted me as if seeing me after a long absence.

  ‘I want tea,’ said Lisl. ‘Find that wretched girl Klara and tell her to bring tea. Order some for yourself if you’d like to.’ She had always had this same autocratic demanding manner. She looked around her to be sure that everything was in its rightful place. Lisl’s mother had chosen these hand-carved pieces of oak furniture, and the chandelier that had been hidden in the coal cellar in 1945. In Lisl’s childhood this room had been softened by lacework and embroidery as befits a place to which the ladies retired after dining in the room that now contained the hotel reception desk. This ‘salon’ was where Lisl’s mother gave the fine ladies of Berlin afternoon tea. And on fine summer days the large windows were opened to provide a view from the balcony as the Kaiser Alexander Guard Grenadiers went marching back to their barracks behind their band.

  It was Lisl who first called it a ‘salon’ and entertained here Berlin’s brightest young architects, painters, poets, writers and certain Nazi politicians. To say nothing of the seven brawny cyclists from the Sports Palace who arrived one afternoon with erotic dancers from one of the city’s most notorious Tanzbars and noisily pursued them through the house in search of vacant bedrooms. They were here still, many of those celebrities of what Berlin called ‘The Golden Twenties’. They were crowded together on the walls of this salon, smiling and staring down from sepia-toned photos that were signed with the overwrought passions that were an expression of the reckless decade that preceded the Third Reich.

  Lisl was wearing green silk, a waterfall rippling over her great shapeless bulk and cascading upon her tiny, pointed, strap-fronted shoes. ‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asked. Klara – the ‘wretched girl’ who was about sixty and had worked for Lisl for about twenty years – looked round the door. She nodded to me and gave a nervous smile to show that she’d heard Lisl demanding tea.

  ‘I have to see Werner,’ I said.

  ‘I was hoping you’d play cards,’ she said. She rubbed her painful knee and smiled at me.

  ‘I would have liked that, Lisl,’ I said, ‘but I have to see him.’

  ‘You hate playing cards with your old Tante Lisl. I know. I know.’ She looked up and, as the light fell on her, I could see the false eyelashes and the layers of paint and powder that she put upon her face on the days she went outside. ‘I taught you to play bridge. You were only nine or ten years old. You loved it then.’

  ‘I would have loved it now,’ I protested untruthfully.

  ‘There is a very nice young Englishman whom I want you to meet, and old Herr Koch is coming.’

  ‘If only I didn’t have to see Werner,’ I said, ‘I would have really liked to spend an evening with you.’ She smiled grimly. She knew I hated card games. And the prospect of meeting a ‘very nice young Englishman’ was rivalled only by the idea of spending the evening listening to the oft-repeated reminiscences of old Mr Koch.

  ‘With Werner?’ exclaimed Lisl, as if suddenly remembering. ‘There was a message for you. Werner is delayed and can’t see you tonight. He’ll phone you early tomorrow.’ She smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter, Liebchen. Tante Lisl won’t hold you to your word. I know you have more interesting things to do than play bridge with an ugly old crippled woman like m
e.’

  It was game, set and match to Lisl. ‘I’ll make up a four,’ I said with as much grace as I could muster. ‘Where was Werner phoning from?’

  ‘Wundervoll,’ said Lisl with a great smile. ‘Where was he phoning from, darling? How would I know a thing like that?’ I think she’d guessed that Werner was in the East Sector, but she didn’t want to admit it, not even to herself. Like so many other native Berliners she tried not to remember that her town was now a small island in the middle of a communist sea. She referred to the communist world by means of jokes, half-truths and euphemisms, the same way that 300 years earlier the Viennese had shrugged off the besieging Ottoman Turks. ‘You don’t really understand the bidding,’ said Lisl. ‘That’s why you’ll never be a good bridge player.’

  ‘I’m good enough,’ I said. It was stupid of me to resent her remark, since I had no ambition to become a good bridge player. I was piqued that this old woman was able to trap me into an evening’s bridge using the same obvious tactics that she’d used on me when I was an infant.

  ‘Cheer up, Bernd,’ she said. ‘Here is the tea. And I do believe there is cake. No lemon needed, Klara. We drink it English style.’ The frail Klara set the tray down on the table and went through the ritual of putting out the plates, forks and cups and saucers, and the silver bowl that held the tea-strainer. ‘And here is my new English friend,’ said Lisl, ‘the one I was telling you about. Another cup and saucer, Klara.’

  I turned to see the man who’d entered the salon. It was Dicky’s college chum from Mexico City. There was no mistaking this tall, thin Englishman with his brown, almost ginger, hair brushed flat against his skull. His heart-shaped face still showed the effects of the fierce Mexican sun. His ruddy complexion was marked in places by freckles that, together with his awkwardness, made him look younger than his thirty-eight years. He was wearing grey flannels and a blue blazer with large decorative brass buttons and the badge of some cricket club on the pocket. ‘Bernard Samson,’ he said. He stretched out his hand. ‘Henry Tiptree. Remember?’ His handshake was firm but furtive, the sort of handshake that diplomats and politicians use to get through a long line of guests. ‘What good luck to find you here. I was talking to a chap named Harrington the other night. He said you knew more about this extraordinary town than any other ten people.’ His voice was cultured, throaty and rather penetrating. The sort of voice the BBC assign to reading the news the night someone very important dies. ‘Extra…awwwrdinary town,’ he said again, as if practising. This time he held the note even longer.