by Len Deighton
‘He’s a decent kid. He wouldn’t tell lies. He’d tell an inquiry the truth, and blow Dicky’s theory sky-high.’
‘I’m glad you are so confident about that,’ said Frank. ‘That settles my mind. But of course one can’t guarantee anyone a job in London. Nowadays a young chap like that one can find himself posted to some God-forsaken place in Asia or Africa. Some of them are out of touch for years.’ He opened the door of the stove and prodded the burned paper delicately with a poker. For a moment I thought he was going to throw my report in there. Such dramatic gestures by Frank were not unknown. But instead he tried again to light the fire using small pieces torn from a newspaper. He was rewarded by a sudden flame and pushed a piece of kindling into it.
‘Point taken, Frank,’ I said.
He looked up and gave a fleeting smile, pleased perhaps at his success with the fire. ‘Of course I’ve kept this business very need-to-know. Dicky, me, you, and of course what’s-his-name: this youngster who went with you.’
‘Plus secretaries, code-clerks and messengers – any one of them might have leaked it,’ I added, joining in the silly game in an effort to show the absurdity of his conspiracy theory. ‘And there’s VERDI too. He knew we were coming, didn’t he?’
‘Of course he did. And who knows who else got to hear? I’ve no intention of starting a witch-hunt, Bernard. That killing might have had nothing to do with him wanting to defect. A man like that – deep in the secrets of the KGB and Stasi too – is sure to have made plenty of enemies. For all we know the reason he wanted to come to us was because his life was in danger from whoever murdered him.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. I got up to go.
‘I know I can’t stop you visiting Werner,’ said Frank, ‘but you’d better guard your tongue when you are with him. If London gets to hear that you’ve been sharing Departmental secrets with him – even low-grade ones – they will throw the book at you.’
‘I’ll be careful, Frank. I really will.’
As I was going to the door, he undid the pouch and put his empty pipe into his mouth while fingering the tobacco. The smell of it reached me as he grabbed a handful of it. I watched him, thinking he was going to fill the pipe, but he didn’t. He opened the door of the stove and thrust the entire contents of the pouch into the fire. The tobacco flared and hissed and a snake of pungent grey smoke coiled out into the room. ‘I’m determined this time,’ said Frank, looking over his shoulder at me, his eyes wide and birdlike.
I was outside the door, and about to push it closed, when Frank called out to me and I looked back inside.
‘The pistol, Bernard. I haven’t asked you about the pistol.’ He pursed his lips. In Frank’s view anyone using a gun betrayed the Department and all it stood for. ‘You shot the tyres out, it said in the report. But where did the hand-gun come from?’
‘I thought the kid told you about that,’ I said warily.
‘No, he was as puzzled as we were,’ said Frank, watching me with great interest.
‘I found it on the body,’ I said.
‘Fully loaded?’ said Frank formally, as if he was about to write it down and ask me to sign.
‘That’s right, fully loaded. A Makarov – German manufacture: a Pistole M to be precise – I put it in my pocket and that’s what I used when they chased us in the car.’
‘I don’t remember anything of that in your report.’
‘I thought the kid would have covered those sort of details.’
‘Write the whole thing again,’ suggested Frank. ‘Fill in a few of those missing details … the Pistole M, how glass bends and so on. You know what those people in London are like. They might think you collected the gun from one of your East Berlin cronies. And then they won’t give me any peace until I find out who it might have been.’
‘You’re right, Frank,’ I said, wondering how quickly I could close the door and get out of there without offending him, and how soon Dicky would return with a thousand more questions.
‘Smell that tobacco,’ said Frank, wallowing in the smoke coming out of the stove top. ‘I’m beginning to think it’s better than smoking.’
4
‘You just leave it to me, Mr Samson,’ said the cheerful ordnance lieutenant.
The army is always there when you need it. My father’s loyalty to the army remained no matter how long after his army service he worked for the Foreign Office. And Frank Harrington’s devotion to the army was renowned. The army looks after its own and was always ready to take under its wing those who understood the obligations this entailed. And now it was a young army lieutenant who, without any up-to-date paperwork or even a telephone call, had put me into the cab of one of his trucks heading down the Autobahn. The soldiers were posted back to their depot. They were in convoy for Holland, and the ferry to Harwich in England. But I was on my way to Switzerland.
‘We’re getting near to the place you’re wanting, sir,’ said the driver without preamble. ‘You’ll hitchhike south from there.’ He had a Newcastle accent you could cut with a knife, and my German upbringing had left me unable to comprehend the more pronounced British regional voices. ‘Going home,’ he added, doing his best to make me understand. ‘We’re all going home.’
‘Yes,’ I said. You could see the joy of it written in the faces of all these soldiers.
‘What about you, sir?’
‘Yes, I’ll soon be going home too,’ I said mechanically. The truth was I had no home; not in the sense that these men had their homes in Britain. My English parents had brought me up in Berlin and sent me to the neighbourhood school, frequently reminding me how lucky I was to have two languages and two countries; two lands in which I could pass myself off as a national. But as I got older I discovered just how tragically wrong they were. In fact even my most intimate German friends – boys who’d been close chums at school – had never regarded me as anything except a foreigner. While the British – not the least those men who sat behind the desks at London Central – regarded me as an unreliable outsider. I had none of the credentials essential for anyone who wanted to join their ranks. I wore no school or university tie, nor that of any smart regiment. I rode with no hunt, loitered in no Jermyn Street club, had no well-known tailor chasing me for payment. I couldn’t even name a seedy local pub where I regularly played darts and could get a pint of beer on credit.
‘You’ll need money,’ the corporal warned me. ‘Hitchhikers are expected to pay their fare nowadays. It’s the way things are.’
‘I’ve got enough.’
‘You should have bought a couple of bottles of duty-free booze. That’s what most of the boys do. Do you understand me?’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I wish I’d thought of it.’
The army in Germany – squeezed tighter and tighter by a German prosperity that shrank the pound sterling – had learned a great deal about saving money. The driver knew all about picking up a lift from one of the endless streams of heavy trucks that head south from Holland through Switzerland to deliver their freight to the Euro-Community warehouses in Italy. ‘Good luck,’ said the corporal. ‘And persevere. It won’t be easy. They’ll think you are a soldier, and these fat civvies all despise squaddies until there’s a bomb needs defusing or their plane gets hijacked. Keep asking; you’ll get a lift eventually.’
It was a frosty night with a wind that cut through the moth-eaten lining of my old trenchcoat. I regretted for a moment leaving all my personal baggage – shaving kit, linen and change of clothes – behind in the kid’s apartment, but it was a necessary part of giving the Berlin office the slip. My airline seat reservation would keep them content until morning: they were endearingly simple souls in the Berlin office.
The night was cold and dark. The sky moonless, starless and unremittingly black. ‘It’s good weather,’ the corporal added. ‘You’ll be in Italy in no time. But get yourself cleaned up; you’ll never get a lift if you’re scruffy.’ I suppose it was good weather from a driver’s point of view. A dry
road, without the prospect of ice or snow, and visibility as far as the headlight’s beam stretched.
The corporal had dropped me off at what he said was his favourite interchange: two great cross-Europe highways meeting and intertwining in a desolate reach of rural Germany. The complex was lit like a football stadium, the ferocious glare illuminating a white haze of diesel pollution that wound in and out of the gas pumps and buildings like skeins of silk. From a distance the interchange looked like some huge and malevolent interplanetary vehicle forced-landed upon the empty black German countryside. But upon arrival it proved no more than a plastic oasis, a limbo land occupied by drowsy downcast Gastarbeiter. No one lived here, no one slept here, no pedestrian would be mad enough even to attempt to get here. It was simply a ‘stop’; a place where cramped and weary travellers paid extortionate prices for the basic essentials of the travelling life – fuel, hot food, cigarettes and aspirin – before resuming their trip.
After buying soap, a disposable plastic razor, toothbrush, clean underclothes and a tee-shirt in the silent fluorescent lit shop, I purchased a shiny plastic shoulder bag emblazoned, for reasons known only to the tortuous minds of the merchandising experts, with a crudely drawn skyscraper and the words New York New York. I went and shaved and changed. Then, following the corporal’s advice, I walked into the special canteen reserved for long-distance truck drivers. It was a cheerless place, with long plastic-topped tables for men in dirty coveralls who wanted to keep an eye on the floodlit truck park to be sure their cargoes were safe.
Here at the self-service counter, East met West. An identical array of spicy flour-thickened stews was saved from anonymity only by the exotic labels promising Madras curry, Hungarian goulash, Irish stew and Mexican chilli. With no wish for journeys into the culinary unknown, I took a bowl of noodle soup and a cheese sandwich before moving from table to table soliciting a ride. Eventually I was lucky. After half a dozen negative responses a wavy-haired Dutchman signalled to me from across the room with a barely perceptible beckoning finger.
‘Where are you headed, stranger?’ His use of American vernacular was awkward and unconvincing. He was a muscular man with a puffy face and fair skin reddened at the cheeks and nose by the wind and weather. His neat moustache and eyebrows, like the wavy hair on his head, were blond, so that from a distance he looked like a plump angel who’d fluttered down from the loft of some baroque church. Under his battered brown leather jacket he was wearing what I recognized as a very expensive rainbow-striped silk shirt. On the table in front of him, aligned as if for inspection, there were a bunch of keys, a leather bag, a flashlight and a red plastic folder containing a batch of manifests, registrations and customs documents needed for him to take his truck and cargo across ‘frontierless’ Europe.
‘South. Switzerland. Anywhere in Switzerland,’ I replied.
‘After that you’ll pay your way?’ he asked mockingly.
‘I’ll pay you,’ I offered, ‘if it’s not too much.’
‘Keep your dough in your pocket. Take the weight off your feet. My name is Wim. I’m transporting cars to Milan. I can do with the company; rapping keeps me awake.’
I sat down opposite him and drank my soup and ate my sandwich while he finished his steak. ‘I’m not permitted to take hitchhikers,’ he said with a furtive glance over his shoulders. ‘Plenty of big-mouths in here tonight. Better you wait by the exit from the truck park.’ He tore a bread roll in half, wiped the plate using the crust, and then stood up to drink the final mouthful of his coffee. On his hand there was a heavy gold signet ring and a tattoo that artfully incorporated his fingers into its continuous design, and gave emphasis to his gold wrist-watch. Driving long-distance heavy trucks was a well-paid job. It was not unusual to find such nomads spending their wages on personal luxuries rather than equipping the homes they seldom saw.
He stood up, flicked crumbs from the front of his shirt and picked up his flashlight after putting the rest of his belongings into his leather bag. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the show on the road.’ It was the smooth American-style accent that those brought up speaking Dutch and German often assume. I was to find that his whole education and experience was derived from Hollywood films. From them he could quote episodes and dialogue with the effortless assurance of a preacher summoning Bible texts. I guessed he was going to use me as an English-conversation lesson, but that seemed a fair exchange. ‘You leave now. You’ll spot me all right. I’m driving that rig with the brand-new Saabs on it.’ He was toying with the flashlight and he switched it on to be sure it worked. He did it automatically, more a neurotic habit than a test of its batteries.
The vast car transporter swayed and groaned as it came across the car park to where I was standing at the exit. It stopped with a squeak of brakes and I got in, slammed the door and looked around. This was Wim’s world, and it came complete with air-conditioning, embroidered silk cushions and pin-ups. He ran through the gears and spun the steering wheel with one finger, grinning at me as we sped along the ramp and slid into the stream of traffic heading south. I need not have worried that he would interrogate me or want to be entertained with the story of my life. This fellow Wim wasn’t like that: his idea of entertainment was having an audience for the story of his life.
It was the sort of yarn to be heard in the bars of almost every big town in the modern world. With difficulties in reading, a self-confessed truant and thief, he was well able to manage his spoken English, and German and Italian too according to what he told me. He handled his huge transporter truck with the same casual ease. Sentenced to three years in prison for large-scale car thefts and an armed assault upon a policeman, he had served seven months before being released on a technicality and his police and prison records erased. Thirty-one years old, he had five children by two different mothers: ‘a ready and willing piece of ass in Stockholm and another in Turin’ was how the unrepentant Wim described his present situation. One of them he’d married, but Wim gave no money to either family, for he thought it was the government’s duty to provide for all. Didn’t he pay his income tax? he asked rhetorically. ‘She can give a heart-wrenching plea about money to feed the kids. I said: “Give ’em canned dog-food, at least they’ll have good teeth and hair.”’ He laughed as he remembered this response. ‘Never get married,’ he advised. ‘Once you’re married they demand everything; never a word of gratitude whatever you do. Girlfriends expect little or nothing. And it’s love and kisses when you bring them a box of chocolates.’
I listened, head lolling against the seat and dozing off during his long asides about the failings of society to look after its victims, among which Wim numbered himself. His droning voice was soporific but his caustic jokes jolted me awake from time to time. Despite my reservations about almost everything he said, he was an engaging personality; I could see why so many women had fallen under his spell. And yet his diatribe brought a growing realization of how much I had changed since that fateful night I left Germany for California. I had never cracked, the way the doctor there had warned me I might, but the enforced tedium of my days there on the far side of the Western world – and the pitiless repetitions of my debriefings – had deadened my mind and slowed my reactions, as I’d seen happen so often to those who survived psychoanalysis. Worse, I was taking life day by day … taking things as they came. I’d always despised people who took things as they came.
Frank Harrington had recognized the change in me of course. I could see it in his eyes as soon as we exchanged hellos. The shift I’d seen in Frank’s attitude to me during the uncomfortable interview I’d just had in Berlin had its roots in some new and inadequate something that Frank detected in me.
And Wim’s domestic predicaments were not without an echo in my own consciousness: ‘You live in London but you’re heading south?’ he’d remarked, using that animal instinct which informs such street-wise semi-literates.
Perhaps the look on my face revealed something of the confusion in my mind.
‘Running from one wife to another?’ he said. ‘Or running away from them both, like I am?’
I responded with a soft derisive laugh, but in a way he was right. Perhaps I was going on this excursion to Zurich in order to get vital information from Werner. Perhaps I was going there in order to put off that terrible time when I would be in London and forced to start sorting out my personal affairs. What did I have left of my relationships with two women I loved – with Fiona, my wife, and with Gloria who had patiently pieced together a new life for me when I was at my lowest? And what of my relationships with my two children, who were doubtless as confused as any of us?
‘Be a real man,’ urged Wim, flexing his arm in a lewd signal of machismo. ‘The man makes the decisions; women wait for him to make up his mind. That’s what nature intended. It’s the way life is.’ He offered me a swig from a bottle of Old Jenever that he had tucked into a toolbox behind his head. I declined and he smiled and put the gin away. ‘Drinking and driving don’t mix,’ he said, with that smug air of accomplishment with which we all use cliches in a foreign tongue.
It was beginning to rain. Big droplets hit the glass and then moved sluggishly downwards, flattened by the air flow into wavy patterns. He switched on the massive wipers, which slid across the windscreen with a thirsty slurp and a contented whine from the motor. The weather had changed. It was no longer good weather for driving, for hitchhiking or for anything else.
The heating was switched fully on in the cab of the transporter. I became drowsy and, eyes closed, I found it difficult to respond to Wim’s commentary and his occasional questions. Perhaps he was also succumbing to the warmth, for when I asked him what time he thought we’d cross the Swiss frontier he said: ‘Go back to sleep, it’s a long way yet.’ He changed to a lower gear for the long incline ahead. ‘At the next chance I shall pull over and check the load. I think I hear a rattle. Sometimes the car doors come open. It will take me only a minute or two.’
