by Len Deighton
‘What are you going to be doing?’ said George.
‘I’m going to steal their Volvo. These are local security cops, posted to this godforsaken region because they are not smart enough to be in action where the real trouble occurs.’ I looked at the lake, swamped in a malignant and mysterious haze. To the other side of us there was forest where slim black trees – their lower trunks hidden by deep snowdrifts – seemed to be suspended in midair. Between forest and water there ran a drained strip of land, its function as a wartime airstrip long since forgotten.
‘But if you steal their Volvo, they’ll simply steal our Fiat.’
‘No they won’t. And you get their car key. I don’t want to be grubbing around trying to find it in the snow.’ I knew in fact that they would all be carrying a car key, and in a last resort, that hot-wiring their car was only a thirty-second task, but it was better that George had something to think about.
‘How can you be sure what they will do?’ said George. He was nervous and he was agitated. I had to get him fully occupied or he would freeze on me. I’d seen it happen before.
‘Several reasons – you’ll see. But the principal reason is that while you are holding their attention I am going to kill them. Okay?’ George’s face went as white as a sheet. Without waiting for a reply, I gave him a hefty shove and said: ‘Jump out and start screaming. This is it.’
George put everything he had into his performance. He jumped and shouted and threw his arms in the air. No one could have resisted it.
And while the boys in the wide-brimmed hats were watching his solo dance performance and jumping out of their car to grab George, I was splashing the contents of a bottle of petrol over the interior of the Fiat so that when I tossed a lighted match into it the fumes ignited with a whoomp that took my eyebrows off.
You’ve got to understand what it was like for those men to watch someone set light to a precious motor car. In the West, to reproduce the deep emotions my action generated, you’d have to watch some yuppie torch his Bentley-Turbo or Ferrari.
The hot engine helped, and the flames went up twenty or thirty feet, so that the whole clearing was lit by brilliant light that caught the five men as if in a flashlight photo. The picture is printed upon my mind. George had stumbled into a snowdrift and was half-turned, his hand held up to his face as if shielding his eyes. He was as surprised as anyone to see me torching the car. The security men had turned to see it. There were four of them: dressed in long overcoats and large felt hats, their faces gleaming in the light of the fire, their faces registering shock and bewilderment. While the others remained still, George moved. Now he realized what was coming. He was backing away, stumbling through the deep snow and kicking away the frozen debris as his feet encountered it. George thought I was after all five of them.
I could hear the buzz-saw engines of the plane. The sound of its piston engines was reflected from the lake to make a deafening sound as he came over us very low. The pilot with his face pressed against the glass was no doubt worried sick about what was happening. This was the moment of maximum danger.
As the plane droned out of sight I was hit by a suffocating smell of burned rubber and plastic from the blazing car. Big red sparks darted around like fireflies and then I was enveloped in a sudden billow of black oily smoke. The security men began shooting at something on the other side of the blaze. Perhaps it was the movement of the smoke that attracted their shots, or a wild animal disturbed by it.
Whatever it was that caught their attention, I was grateful for the respite. I quickly folded back the Skorpion’s skeleton metal stock and pulled it tight into my shoulder. The sights were crude and virtually useless, so I fired with both eyes open. The Skorpion has a simple blowback action, but like all such lightweights it rises and rises and will end up firing straight up into the air if you don’t hold it tight and point it low.
‘Rrrrip.’ The rate of fire was faster than I remembered it. The first burst hit the nearest of the men. He crumpled, but by that time two of the others were firing back at me. I fired again – two very short bursts – but I couldn’t see if I registered hits or not. I listened: no aircraft engines, no shouts, no cries of pain.
The silence was broken by half a dozen aimed shots from them, the last coming uncomfortably close. That was always a sign to move on. They had only hand-guns. Their automatic weapons would be in a rack in the car, I could almost hear them cursing their misfortune. At this range and in this light, their single-shot fire was a risk I could afford to take provided I kept moving. It was darker now. The initial flare was over. The Fiat’s choicest morsels were ash. The excited yellow flames had become orange and red, and were settling down to enjoy devouring the car slowly, like a lion with a juicy carcass.
I didn’t have enough time, or the inclination, for a gun battle. Suddenly the engines of the plane sounded very loud as he roared over the tree-tops to get a last look at what was happening before turning on to finals. There was nothing for it but to finish this off. I fitted the second, and last, magazine into the Skorpion and got to my feet and ran forward. It was dark, the flames making moving shadows everywhere. There were more shots and I fired back, hose-piping the whole magazine as I went. I wasn’t trying to find a way of killing them, I just wanted to make sure that all four men had a few disabling wounds to keep them from chasing us and giving me trouble.
George was struggling with the door of the security men’s Volvo by the time I reached it. ‘I got the key,’ said George. ‘I got it from the one you shot.’
‘Good man. Jump in,’ I said, although hearing four dangerous opponents referred to in the singular was disconcerting. I got into the driver’s seat and started up the car and went as fast as I could drive towards the other end of the strip, bumping over roots, rotten tree-trunks and who knows what.
‘Jump out and stand off fifty yards, George. I’m going to torch this one now.’
‘They’ll see us for miles.’
‘I hope so.’
The Volvo went up in flames so quickly that it scorched my hair. With a flaming car marking each end of the strip the Swede came right across the lake, descending gently for a nice soft landing. I knew what he’d be flying: a curious old BN Trislander, its long nose extending like a crane’s neck, and its third engine perched up high on the tail. The Swede had lost none of his magic touch. He was the best of our contract people. There was snow and ice – more than I’d reckoned on – but I suppose a few years based in Sweden had provided him with plenty of practice.
‘You didn’t have to kill them, Bernard,’ said George, having looked for our pursuers without spotting them. Perhaps this admonition was designed to cool my overheated blood. If so it didn’t work, it simply made me want to beat sanctimonious George over the head.
‘Stay where you are!’ I said. ‘He’ll swing round and then brake. We’ll go together. The door is this side. Watch out for the prop blades; he won’t switch off the engines. The security stiffs? They are just scratched. Don’t worry about them.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said George. He could be a lot like Dicky at times.
The pilot reached back and opened the door and I heaved George up into the cabin. It was a prop-driven eight-seater with extra tanks built into the cabin. The tanks divided the pilot from the seats we were in; they had to keep the weight forward to preserve the centre of gravity.
‘Trouble?’ shouted the Swede.
‘No. Just friends seeing us off,’ I said.
‘Strap in. Here we go. I thought it would be you when I saw the bonfires.’ He revved up and let go of the brakes and we went rushing forward, skimming the tops of the dark trees. I looked back and saw the two burning cars. From up here they looked very close together: getting into the strip wasn’t quite the simple task it seemed from ground level. By now the Volvo was almost burned out, glowing deep rosy red. Our car, the Fiat, was still bright with flame – the burning fuel had poured out of it to make flaming petals flat on the ground. There were spark
s coming from a third place, nowhere near the cars, but these sparks turned out to be gunfire from the spooks, a reassessment confirmed by the smacking sounds of rounds hitting the tailplane as we banked steeply before skimming low across the dark still water of the lake.
George sat back breathing deeply, and with his eyes tightly closed. ‘Are you all right, George?’ I said.
‘Did you plan that?’ he said between catching his breath.
‘No. Plan what?’
‘Did you let them follow us all the way so that you could have a burning car at each end of the strip. Did you kill those men and then just wait for the plane?’
‘No, George. I didn’t torch the car until I heard the engines of the plane. And I didn’t kill them; I just fired in their direction to keep them from killing us.’
‘You said this pilot would try night after night. What would you have done if he’d not turned up tonight?’
‘I would have thought of something.’
The Swede was reaching back over the auxiliary internal gas-tanks. He didn’t look back: he was watching the dark forest that was almost close enough to touch. His hand held a bottle and he waggled it to get attention. I took it from him. Johnny Walker. I uncorked it and took a swig. ‘What about you, George?’ I said and offered it to him. But George made a retching sound and was dramatically sick into a tin can.
‘Take it easy, George,’ I said.
He was trying to say something. I leaned close. ‘I’ll pay for it to be cleaned up,’ said George. ‘Tell him I’m sorry.’ He was winding his rosary tightly around his wrist, and unwinding it to reveal deep indentations, as though this self-inflicted pain might preserve him from something worse.
‘It’s all part of the job, George,’ I said. ‘Cleaning up other people’s mess is what people like me and him are employed to do.’
The plane was battered by the gusting wind so that we skidded and bumped through the turbulent air.
George closed his eyes and concentrated upon feeling sorry for himself. ‘I wish you’d never told me, Bernard. I wish you’d let them give me the baby, and let me pretend. Wouldn’t that have been kinder?’
‘I don’t know, George. Try and sleep. It’s a long flight; these old planes are very slow. This whole coast is dotted with the Soviet navy’s electronics. He’ll have to fly low to get under the radar.’
‘Those dead men will be on my conscience,’ said George.
It was the point at which I’d had enough. I leaned across and grabbed him. ‘Don’t lecture me, you sanctimonious little stooge. You’re nothing but a lousy traitor, so don’t tell me about your rotten conscience because I don’t want to know. See the man up there at the front? He’s over sixty years old: he’s the best man we have, and he doesn’t do these trips to keep his cross-country qualification. I should have wasted those bastards back there but I didn’t have the guts to do it and I’m ashamed. Do you hear that, I’m ashamed. Because the next time the old Swede drops in to some battered little wartime airstrip, to pull some poor bastard like me out of trouble, they are likely to be waiting for him. Got it, George? They’ll be waiting for him with a complete description of me, and this funny old plane, and him and how he works. And that is all because of you and your stupid fantasy life.’
I had him tight by the collar and was shaking the life out of him. Now I released my grip and he slumped back in his seat inert, as if I’d scared him to death. I suppose he’d never seen me lose my temper before. It wasn’t something that happened very often.
‘The coast,’ shouted the Swede. ‘Order your duty-free.’
‘We might get shot at again,’ I told George. ‘And he’ll throw the plane around. They don’t like unidentified aircraft flying low at night, and you can’t get insured against flak.’ George showed no reaction. I looked out of the window. The grey Baltic Sea is a daunting prospect in winter when seen from spumed wave-top height. I thought about George and about the night in London when he collected that injured man and took him off to see a doctor. George had obviously done a useful job for the regime when he became a generous supporter of Polish expatriate organizations. I wondered how the gold from the moneybelt fitted into the picture. Perhaps it was the way in which George was funded. Perhaps some enterprising expatriate had grabbed the gold for himself. I pushed it out of my mind; the interrogators would get it out of him, I was sure of that.
As we crossed the Swedish coast the sky was streaked with sunlit red clouds. ‘Home sweet home,’ said the Swede. It was a private airfield built alongside the extensive buildings of the Schliemann company, which once made wooden office furniture and exported its entire production to Russia. I’d never been able to fully understand why the USSR, a vast land covered in forest, imported not only wooden furniture but lumber too. But it did. Now however the Russians had little money to import anything from anywhere. Mr Schliemann’s factory was boarded up and most of the machinery sold. Mr Schliemann lived in Antibes and rented his airstrip, and an outbuilding, to three middle-aged pilots who shared the costs of this funny old Trislander plane and had printed notepaper that claimed they were an ‘all-Sweden air service’. They had Panamanian passports, a registered office in the Cayman Islands, took payments through a bank in Luxembourg and did any kind of work that came along.
‘You’ve got a welcoming party,’ the Swede called to me as we were taxiing back to the shed he used as an office.
‘You did good, you old bastard,’ I said feelingly. The Swede smiled.
There were three of them: a doctor, a man from the embassy and a woman in a smart new coat and a fur hat. She was waving furiously as I climbed out of the plane.
Gloria!
While we exchanged hellos the Swede went to examine the bullet holes in the tail. George climbed into a Saab with diplomatic licence plates. The embassy doctor got in too. There was also an embassy official who shook hands through the lowered car window. He didn’t want to get out of the car because it was too cold. George would have a physical examination and then be photographed for a locally issued UK passport. George slumped back in his seat and looked at me through the frosty glass. He gave no sign of recognition. His long wavy hair, usually so carefully arranged, was in total disarray, his skin was pale, his eyes shiny, his whole expression lifeless, like an unwanted waxwork dummy headed for the storeroom. There wasn’t room for me in the car but I had Gloria looking at me and grinning as if she’d caught me doing something foolish.
‘Hello, Bernard,’ she said.
‘Hello, Gloria.’
‘Mr Rensselaer sent me to meet you.’ Her cheeks were glowing and her eyes soft and moist. These were of course the marks of a young woman in love, but standing on an airfield in the northern wind in December could also redden the cheeks and make the eyes water.
‘Did you bring money?’ I said, forgetting that my pockets were bulging with Rupert’s money.
‘There are more important things in life than money, Bernard,’ she said.
‘Prove it,’ I told her.
On the far side of the landing space, crouching low and ready to spring, there was a sleek and shiny twin-turbofan Learjet: the sort of thing the presidents of big international corporations buy for themselves because they think their shareholders wouldn’t like them to be standing in line at airports. What a machine it was, compared with the slab-sided little British-built plane that the Swede had used to collect us. That was the difference between the Brets of the world, and the Bernard Samsons.
Gloria, having watched the others climb into the Saab and drive away, turned to me and said: ‘Thank God you’re safe. Bret was worried. So was I.’ She looked at me. ‘You are all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ She glanced again at the departing car, and she looked at me. I suppose she could see some kind of reservation in my face. George was the third one to go. Tessa was dead, Fiona was a hollow shell, and George was going to face a lot of hard questions. He’d never be the same man again, and I wondered if he knew that. ‘It went be
tter than I hoped,’ I said.
In my pockets I still had the bundle of dollar bills and the zlotys and the roll of gummed plastic tape for gagging and binding George. I hadn’t used any of it. ‘Everything went according to plan,’ I said.
She said: ‘Perhaps we should have crowded into the car with them. They said there would be two embassy cars.’
‘What are you supposed to do now?’
‘Bret was certain that Kosinski was going to arrive injured. In that case he was to go back to London directly. Bret didn’t want him in a hospital here. Not even a private clinic.’
‘He’s okay,’ I said.
‘He looked like hell.’
‘He thought he’d found a home in Poland but he hasn’t got a home anywhere. It’s tough.’
‘I know,’ said Gloria. ‘I thought I was English once, but the girls at school made sure I knew I was a foreigner. It’s what we have in common.’
‘You and me?’
‘You’ve lived all your life in Germany but you are not German. Are you really English?’
‘At least I know which side I’m on,’ I said. ‘George Kosinski never decided.’
‘He came out here because of his wife, didn’t he? Was that so bad?’
‘Oh, he loved Tessa. Perhaps that was the only genuine thing about him.’
‘Not his religion?’
‘Perhaps. But I suspect that his devout churchgoing, and all that counting his rosary, was a part of his cover as an anti-communist.’
‘I can’t believe he was working against us,’ said Gloria.
‘Him and his brother. They travelled the world servicing the Polish army’s intelligence networks. They are both as guilty as hell.’
