by Len Deighton
‘What you told Dicky was right,’ said Fiona. She was angry because Dicky had not told her of the cancellation earlier and had caused her a wasted journey across London. But she didn’t rail against Dicky; she blamed the house instead: ‘It’s this damned safe house. It’s compromised. It shouldn’t be used for operational meetings any longer.’
‘It’s the money,’ I said. ‘There isn’t enough money for new safe houses. Not even enough to heat this one properly.’
‘I didn’t switch the heating on. I thought you would come here directly from the office.’
‘I wondered why it was so cold in here,’ I said. ‘Would you like to go out for dinner?’
‘I don’t want fish and chips from Geale’s, if that’s what you mean.’
The Notting Hill safe house was conveniently close to one of London’s finest fish and chip restaurants, but I suppose Fiona wasn’t dressed for it.
I went to the phone in the hallway and ordered an official car to take us home. While on the phone I inquired from the car pool desk why my car hadn’t arrived.
‘Your car was cancelled, Mr Samson,’ said the duty transport officer.
‘Cancelled? I don’t think so.’
‘A lady phoned …’ there was a pause and I heard him as he turned the pages of his booking register. ‘Here we are: six-thirty. Car to Notting Hill Gate – cancelled at five minutes past six. I took the call myself. It was a young lady’s voice. I thought it was your secretary. Is that where you are now?’
‘I haven’t got a secretary,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’s where I am.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Samson. It sounded official. I’ll send a car right away.’ He’d recognized Gloria’s voice of course. He knew who’d cancelled my car.
‘Thank you,’ I said and rang off.
So Gloria had pretended she couldn’t get her car started, to provide a chance to tell me about the wiped files. She reasoned that anyone going to such elaborate trouble to eliminate the files would also want to eliminate everyone who knew what was in them. What she told me seemed like a persecution theory, but Gloria was a smart girl.
So had she been about to tell me more? Had my slowness to understand what she was driving at caused her to abandon an attempt to explain a more elaborate theory? Or were Fiona’s suspicions, about Gloria wanting me to marry her, the real motive? Was this ‘persecution’ invented as a way of seeing me regularly?
‘What’s happening?’ Fiona asked when I stepped back into the drawing-room. She was standing near the window, still wearing her mink coat, framed by the elaborate floral curtains and the ridiculous flouncing that topped them.
‘The car pool will send a car right away,’ I said.
She looked at me, and, using both hands, smoothed the big fur collar up around her head as if she didn’t want to hear any more.
I knew the transport officer. He was a young red-haired Scotsman. I liked him – he always laughed at my jokes – but how long would it take to go around the Department that I was getting together with Gloria after work? And how long would it take for the rumours to get back to Fiona?
13
‘Your new hair-do looks nice, Tante Lisl,’ I said, in that feeble confused way I always delivered such compliments.
She fluttered her mascara-laden eyelashes and touched her dyed and lacquered hair. She was sitting in her study. This had always been her special retreat; she took her breakfast here – on the tiny balcony with the french window open if the weather was warm – and did the accounts, checked the bills and took the cash from her hotel residents. A stirring portrait of the young Kaiser Wilhelm was on the wall where it had hung in her father’s day, when this was his study. And on the mantelpiece, over the stove, there was the old ormolu clock that measured the night hours away with chimes more audible than most within earshot wished.
She was no longer confined to the stainless steel wheelchair that had occupied the centre of this room on my last visit. The wheelchair was relegated to the cobwebbed basement store-room, along with a trunk of my father’s possessions which I’d not so far disposed of, and Werner’s cherished golf clubs for which Lisl, upon finding them, had expressed picturesque contempt.
Her knee and hip operations had made her surprisingly ambulant, so that she was occupying a comfortable wing-armchair under a reading light. Some of the light struck the lower part of her face and revealed the powder and rouge without which she felt undressed. On the floor beside her chair there was a magnificent leather photo album with a hand-written label: My Caribbean Cruise. ‘New hair-style, new hips and knee, new hotel, new life,’ she said, and gave one of her inimitable full-throated laughs.
‘Yes. It was a quite a surprise walking in here,’ I said with unalloyed sincerity. I’d known Lisl Hennig and this shabby old hotel off Kantstrasse since I was a child, since I was an infant I should say. And when I walked in that morning I had almost shouted out loud. It wasn’t that there was anything here that I didn’t remember seeing before. But the last time I was here Werner Volkmann was taking over the management of the hotel. He had just married Lisl’s niece – the onetime Ingrid Winter – and a complete refurbishing was being undertaken.
But now Werner’s brief spell as manager, and his marriage, had ended. The tasteful furnishings that the dedicated Ingrid had lavished upon the hotel had been swept away. Back behind the bar, arranged around the old spotty mirror, were the shelves filled with dozens of bottles of rare and remote liqueurs and spirits that no one ever ordered. Huge prehensile potted plants, that endlessly shed leaves but never flowered, were once again helping to block the narrow entrance at the bottom of the stairs. Lisl’s collection of signed photos of people who’d visited the house as guests in the old days or as hotel clients after the war – Albert Einstein, Von Karajan, Max Schmeling and Admiral Dönitz – had been reinstated on the wall. The complete set of ‘Scenes of German Rural Life’ prints were back on the walls of the dining-room along with the priceless original George Grosz drawing. Lisl’s hotel was now almost restored to the place it had been for half a century or more before she handed over to Werner. The old bentwood chairs in the breakfast room, the dusty aspidistra plants that seemed to flourish in the salon’s dim light, everything was back the way I remembered it from my childhood. Even Tante Lisl had turned the clock back. The joint replacement operations had restored to her the ability to stride slowly around the whole premises, go unaided up and down stairs – albeit with deliberation and care – and to pounce upon anything that was not exactly to her liking; anything that seemed to have originated with the mild-mannered Ingrid.
The legal reversion, and the exhaustive reinstatement of furnishings that followed it, was understandable when one remembered that for Lisl this was not just a hotel. It had been her home; she’d grown up in this house. So had I; that was something that I shared with her. My father had been posted to Berlin at the end of the war and billeted in this house together with me and my mother. The salon had become a smart little teashop by that time, with Lisl’s concert pianist husband playing Gershwin tunes on the Bechstein, missing a chord now and again because of the arthritis that was slowly transforming his hands into claws. My family remained here even when all manner of lovely houses were available to the ‘rezident’ – a man who was running the only reliable Allied intelligence organization probing the Russians. I suppose all three of us Samsons became sentimentally attached to this house, its shell-pocked façade, its interior decoration – like a museum of old Berlin – and became bewitched by wonderful crazy old Lisl too.
‘Did you eat? The plat du jour is Eisbein.’ She was wearing a vivid emerald green wrap-around dress, a convenient garment for someone on a drastic weight-loss programme with some way still to go.
‘I’ve eaten already,’ I said.
‘You used to adore Eisbein.’
‘I still do.’
‘I’m sure there will be one left. A little extra cooking time doesn’t hurt an Eisbein.’
‘This evening
perhaps.’
‘You’ve seen your room?’ she asked.
‘Thank you, Lisl,’ I said. ‘You’re a darling.’ In fact I knew that it was Werner and his wife I had to thank for preserving the accumulated squalor of the cramped attic room I always used. But Lisl was not above taking credit from others when affection was at stake. I went to her, leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. She was heavily made up with the sort of paint and mascara job that was more usually seen on the other side of the footlights. Her perfume was almost overwhelming.
‘Two kisses in Germany, Bernd. You are not in England now.’ She lifted her head and turned the other cheek to me.
‘I love you, Lisl,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderful to see you so fit and well.’
‘I look after myself,’ she said complacently. ‘You should stop drinking, lose some weight, take exercise and get more sleep.’ She said it automatically and without much hope that her advice would be taken. She’d always enjoyed mothering me, and like a mother she repeated always the same advice. Even when I was eighteen years old, and as thin as a beanpole, she would tell me to stop eating dumplings and avoid any but German beer, because of the chemicals. ‘You promised that next time you would bring family photos,’ she said.
‘I’ll send some,’ I said. ‘Fiona is looking wonderful. And the children have grown so tall you’ll not recognize them.’
‘Stay with your wife, Bernd. You’ll not regret it in the long run. She’s given you those two wonderful children. What more could a man ask?’
I smiled and said nothing.
‘That girl you were with on the night of the party. She was no good, Bernd. That’s why she got killed. She was no good.’
‘That was Fiona’s sister. I wasn’t with her,’ I said, trying hard to remain unruffled.
‘I heard differently.’ She looked down to admire the silver boots she was wearing. They were high-sided shiny ones intended for party wear. She wiggled her toes and then grinned at me. I suppose she hadn’t seen her toes in a long time.
Her distraction was intended to stop the conversation, but I was determined not to let it go at that. I said: ‘Dicky Cruyer booked a double room at the Kempi or somewhere, using my name. Tessa was with Mr Cruyer.’
Lisl waggled a finger at me. ‘That woman left with you, Bernd. Don’t deny it. She got into your car and you drove off with her.’
‘It was a van with diplomatic plates. And it wasn’t mine. I couldn’t persuade her to get out. I had to leave. It was an official job.’
‘Cloak and dagger,’ said Lisl slowly in her execrable English. She liked sprinkling her speech with English and French words and phrases. That was why people had trouble understanding her.
‘Yes, cloak and dagger.’
‘Her man came looking for her. He was angry. She was no good, that woman. You only had to look at her to see what she was.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said.
‘Crime passionnel,’ said Lisl. ‘He was furious, the man who came to collect her. He roared off on his motor cycle with a terrible look on his face. I could see there was trouble ahead.’
‘What man on a motor cycle?’
My question gave Lisl instant and profound satisfaction. She smiled smugly. ‘Ah! You don’t know it all, Liebchen. So they didn’t tell you about her man following her. I was frightened for your safety, Bernd. If he’d found you together …’
‘Tell me more about the man. How do you know he was looking for Tessa?’
‘He was her boyfriend or some sort of paramour. He was asking everyone where she was.’
‘What did he look like?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, I don’t know: older than you, Bernd, quite a lot older. Plumpish, but strong-looking, with trimmed grey beard and American-style glasses. He kept saying he was late. He was carrying two of those big shiny helmets. Two of them! I suppose one was for her to wear while on the back of the bike.’
‘You’re right, Tante Lisl. I didn’t know about him.’ It was a man named Thurkettle. So that was the missing link. It all started at that damned fancy-dress party at List’s hotel. Until now I’d never been able to believe that Tessa’s death was part of a conspiracy, for I’d taken her to the Brandenburg Exit, that place on the East German Autobahn where she met her death. And since then I’d been blaming myself for everything that happened. When I set out from the party to meet Fiona, in her escape to the West, I’d let Tessa climb into the van … or at least I’d not dragged Tessa out of it, the way I should have done. But now it seemed more likely that Tessa had deliberately got a lift with me, perhaps because Thurkettle had not turned up to collect her.
‘Detectives came next day. They said there were reports of drug-taking at the party. I said I didn’t know half the people who were there. They spoke to Werner too. They didn’t come back. Were there people taking drugs that night?’
‘I don’t know, Tante Lisl. I didn’t see anyone who looked particularly high.’
‘Not even that woman – Tessa?’
‘Perhaps.’
It was a trap: ‘She was on drugs, Bernd. How can you deny it?’
‘You may be right, Lisl. She was behaving very strangely.’
‘I hate drugs. You don’t take anything like that, I hope.’
‘No, Lisl, I don’t.’
‘You’ve got to think of your family, Bernd.’
‘I do, Lisl. I don’t take drugs.’
‘Neither does Werner I hope.’
‘No, I’m sure he doesn’t,’ I said.
‘Have you spoken with Werner?’
‘I always come to see you first.’
She smiled. She knew it wasn’t true. ‘Werner is backwards and forwards. Doing things over there. It’s dangerous, Liebchen. Can’t you stop him?’
‘You know what Werner is like,’ I said. ‘How could I tell him what to do?’
‘He respects you, Bernd. You are his closest friend.’
‘Sometimes I wonder if that’s still true.’
‘Yes, it is,’ she snapped. ‘Werner thinks the world of you.’
‘He’s back with Zena,’ I said.
‘He told me.’ She rolled her head and stared at me in a wide-eyed grimace that signified that the world was a strange place in which outspoken judgements concerning such partnerships could be hazardous. ‘Perhaps it’s all for the best.’
Poor Ingrid. So that’s how the situation had played out. I suppose she was the focus of Lisl’s displeasure for changing the hotel. It was too inconvenient to blame Werner. ‘I liked Ingrid,’ I said cautiously. ‘Zena is just out for what she can get. She doesn’t care about him.’
‘You can’t tell people whom they must love, Liebchen. That’s something I learned many years ago.’ Lisl’s upper body swayed, and then using the strength of both arms she got to her feet with admirable agility. ‘I shall now have my afternoon nap. The doctor says it’s important for me. You go and find Werner. I think I heard him come in.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your ears, Lisl.’ I hadn’t heard Werner or anyone else come in.
‘He has that room with the hard mattress. I think his spine is bothering him again; he’s always suffered with his back. The door squeaks. And you must tell him to stop going over there.’
‘I’ll try, Tante Lisl.’
‘It’s lovely to have you back here, Liebchen. Just like old times. But if your people in London want to find the killer of that woman …’ she paused. Her tone of voice expressed considerable doubt about this being our wish. ‘Look for the man on the motor bicycle.’
‘Yes, Lisl.’
Werner must have had hearing as acute as Lisl, for no sooner had I left Lisl’s study to find a seat in the salon than he came in carrying a vase with a dozen long-stem red roses in it. ‘Has she gone?’ he asked.
‘For a nap.’ Werner always remembered to buy her flowers.
‘I’d better not disturb her,’ he said, although we both knew that Lisl’s naps were convenient fictions, con
trived to enable her to do the crossword in Die Welt, or drink a glass of sherry without the distraction of polite conversation. ‘I’ll take them to her later.’ Werner put the flowers on the piano.
The piano was open and Werner couldn’t resist fingering the keys while standing over it, but in deference to Lisl’s notional nap he stopped after a couple of bars. Still at the piano he said: ‘She keeps nagging me about exercising and losing weight.’ His tailored tweed pants and custom-made shirt were obviously Zena’s doing, and he was looking very trim despite Lisl’s recommendations. It was certainly a change from his usual outfit of baggy corduroy trousers and old knitted shirt.
‘She does that to everyone,’ I told him.
He closed the piano. ‘It’s the hip replacement. She’s suddenly discovered good health. She is fired with all that evangelizing zeal of the newly slender.’
‘You need have no fear of anything like that from me,’ I said.
‘She treats me like a small child.’
‘She worries about you.’ Werner pulled a face. ‘She worries about you going over there,’ I said and pronounced drüben – over there – in the slurring exaggerated way that Lisl always said it.
‘I haven’t been over there,’ said Werner in the same voice.
‘I thought you were there doing Dicky Cruyer’s bidding.’
‘Bidding?’
‘A network for VERDI.’
Airily he said: ‘You’re losing your grip, Bernie. You don’t go over there when you are negotiating that kind of deal. That would tempt them to lean upon you heavily, or even arrest you on a charge of suborning a servant of the People. No, at the very first contact when you are enrolling a first-rate Moscow-trained bastard like VERDI, you make him come over here and talk.’ There was a certain restrained relish to the manner in which Werner delivered this lesson. Playing at spies for London Central was to Werner what batting for England represented for Dicky Cruyer: a dream so precious that it was usually referred to only by means of bad jokes.
