Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

by Len Deighton

  Bekuv looked away.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mann, breathing a sigh. ‘The fact of the matter is that the investigation is closing as far as you are concerned. My people have lost interest in you – you’ve cost the American taxpayer too much money already. You’ll be allowed to live wherever you like – within reason – but you’ll have to find a place for yourself … the same goes for getting a job. No chair at NYU. You will have to read the vacancies in the papers. For the time being the two of you are being kept separate but that’s for your own protection. My people say that there will be more chance of your KGB squads killing you if you are together. Next year, of course, the danger will have subsided a little. By then there will probably be no objection to your living under the same roof again.’

  ‘Now wait a minute …’ said Bekuv.

  ‘Sorry it had to be this way, Professor. As your wife understood so well, this could have been a big one for us.’ He smiled to show that he held no ill feelings. ‘You’ll be able to keep the hi-fi and the recordings and stuff of course.’ He picked up papers from his desk and tapped them edge-down on the desk to tidy them.

  It was only then that Bekuv seemed to become aware of my presence in the dark corner of the office. He turned to me. ‘Is Miss Bancroft with my wife?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘She’ll be with her for a little while.’

  ‘How long,’ he said. ‘I don’t want my wife to be with Miss Bancroft.’

  ‘No one tells me anything, Professor,’ I said.

  Mann said, ‘Your wife wanted Miss Bancroft along for company.’ Bekuv nodded. Mann had been making a great play of rummaging round his desk and, as Bekuv turned to leave, he suddenly produced a flimsy sheet of paper, waved it and said, ‘Oh, this is something for you, Professor. It’s a copy of a letter to your wife.’

  He passed it to him. It was a carbon copy of a letter. There were a couple of official rubber stamps on it and a paper-clip. Bekuv took it without a word, and moved over to the window to read it by the grey morning light. He read it aloud in his careful English …

  ‘Dear Mrs Bekuv, This is to confirm our conversation of yesterday. As promised, I have applied for the necessary documents in connection with your immigration and naturalization. You will appreciate that, although you have been admitted to the USA under the special provisions granted to certain government agencies, your continued stay and permission to take up gainful employment must remain subject to the usual procedures. Yours truly …’

  ‘Just a lot of legal evasions and doubletalk,’ pronounced Bekuv when he finished reading.

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Mann, who had invented it and typed it.

  Professor Bekuv put the flimsy copy back on to Mann’s desk. Bekuv had been close to the security business long enough to understand such a message.

  ‘You’re going to send us back to Russia?’ said Bekuv. He walked across the room and opened the door a fraction so that there was a bar of blue fluorescent light cutting him into two halves. ‘Either we do exactly as you demand, or you will send us back to them.’

  Mann didn’t answer but he was watching Bekuv’s every move.

  ‘This letter is just the beginning,’ said Bekuv. ‘It is typical of you, Major Mann. You’ll let your official government departments carry out the execution for you. Then you will be able to say you had no hand in it.’

  ‘You’ve got it a little bit wrong haven’t you, Professor? The US immigration department has no executioners on its payroll. These executions you want to make me responsible for will be carried out after you return. They’ll be carried out by your little old KGB comrades. Remember the KGB, Professor? Those wonderful people who gave you the Gulag Archipelago.’

  ‘You have never lived in the Soviet Union, or you would know how little choice a man has. The KGB ordered me to work for them – I did not volunteer to do so.’

  ‘You’re breaking my heart, Professor.’

  Bekuv stood in the doorway, with the door to the corridor open just an inch or two. Perhaps he wanted to let enough light into the room to be able to see the expressions on our faces.

  ‘Is that all you have to say, Major Mann?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything else, Professor … except maybe farewell.’

  Bekuv stood in the doorway for a long time. ‘I should have told you about the place in Ireland … I should have told you earlier.’

  ‘You jerk,’ said Mann. ‘Three people died.’

  ‘I was with the trade delegation in London,’ said Bekov. ‘It was years ago. I had to meet a man from Dublin. I met him only once. It was at Waterloo Station in London. He had some documents. We used the copying machine on the station.’

  ‘The maser programme?’

  ‘We were falling behind,’ said Bekuv. ‘This man brought drawings and calculations.’

  Mann pulled the desk light so that it shone on to a bright blue blotter. Under the light he arranged a row of photos. One of them was a passport picture of Reid-Kennedy. ‘Do you want to come here a moment, Professor.’ Mann’s voice was precise and quiet, like that of a terrified parent coaxing a small child away from an electrified fence.

  ‘He wasn’t a scientist,’ said Bekuv, ‘but he understood the calculations.’ He walked over to the desk and looked at the photos arranged neatly like winning tricks in a bridge game. Mann held his breath until Bekuv placed a finger on the face of Reid-Kennedy.

  Mann shuffled the pictures together without commenting on Bekuv’s choice. ‘And the KGB were running the operation?’

  ‘Entirely,’ said Bekuv. ‘When the maser programme was given a shortened development target, the KGB became responsible. I’d been reporting to the KGB since my time in university and I was a senior man in the maser programme. It was natural that the KGB chose me. When the scientific material started to arrive from America, the KGB told me that I would get it first, and that the department would not be notified.’

  ‘That gave you a chance to shine,’ said Mann.

  ‘It was the way the KGB always did such things. They wanted their own people promoted, and so they gave their own men the best of the foreign intelligence material.’

  ‘And no one suspected? No one suspected when you went into the lab next morning and shouted eureka?’

  ‘It would have been a reckless fool who voiced such suspicions,’ said Bekuv.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Mann sourly, ‘and you corrupt bastards have the nerve to criticize us.’

  Bekuv didn’t reply. The telephone rang. Mann picked it up and grunted into it for a minute or two before saying goodbye.

  ‘Why don’t you take a coffee break, Professor,’ said Mann.

  ‘I hope I’ve been of help,’ said Bekuv.

  ‘Like a good citizen,’ said Mann.

  ‘I will be happier,’ Bekuv said, ‘when I can read what those duties are, on the back of a US passport.’ He didn’t smile.

  ‘We’re going to get along just fine, Professor,’ said Mann.

  Neither Mann nor I spoke until we heard Bekuv go into his room and switch on the radio. Even then we observed all the usual precautions for not being overheard.

  ‘It was her all the time,’ said Mann. ‘It was Mrs Bekuv. We had it the wrong way round. We thought he was clamming-up.’

  I said, ‘Without his wife, he’ll be singing his way through the hit parade by weekend.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Mann. He went over to the light-switch and put the lights on. They were fluorescent tubes, and they flickered a dozen times before filling the room with light. Mann searched the drawers of his desk before finding the box of cigars his wife had given him at Christmas. ‘Makes you wonder what kind of hold she had over him,’ said Mann. He lit the cigar and offered the box to me. Already half the contents had been smoked – I declined.

  ‘Perhaps he loves her,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s one of those happy marriages you never read about.’

  ‘I hate those two Russian bastards,’ said Mann.

>   ‘Having his wife join him was the worst thing that happened to this investigation,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ agreed Mann. ‘Just a little more help like that from Gerry Hart, and I fall down dead.’

  I looked at my watch and said, ‘If there’s nothing else, I’ve got a call booked to London.’

  Mann said, ‘And it looks like another trip to Florida tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ I said.

  ‘That phone call just now – the CIA duty-officer at Miami Airport. Reid-Kennedy just got off the London direct flight. His chauffeur met him with the Rolls – looks like his old lady was expecting him.’

  ‘What time do we leave?’

  ‘Give the Reid-Kennedys a little time to talk together,’ said Mann. ‘What about the six A.M. plane tomorrow morning. Leave here at four thirty.’

  16

  It wasn’t the same when we went back: it never is. The gardener was having trouble with the sprinklers, one of the cars had scraped the fencing and taken away a section of bougainvillaea. Crab grass was in the lawn, the humidity was high and there was haze over the sun.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Reid-Kennedy are not at home,’ said the Spanish lady slowly and firmly and for the third time.

  ‘But that’s not what we were asking,’ explained Mann patiently. ‘Are they in? Are they in?’

  I suppose even the ladies who guard rich people’s doors learn to recognize the ones who can’t be stopped. She let Mann push her to one side but she failed to look as if she liked it.

  ‘You know we’re cops,’ said Mann. ‘Let’s not fool about, shall we.’

  ‘They are not here,’ said the woman sullenly.

  He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. He ran his fingers up his cheeks as if trying to force himself to smile. ‘Listen, did I ever tell you that I moonlight for the immigration department?’ he said. ‘You don’t want us to run all through the house, checking out whether all these people have got permission to work in Florida. You don’t want that, do you?’

  The lady went as pale as an illegal Mexican immigrant without working papers can go, and then shut the door gently, behind us.

  ‘Now, where are they?’

  ‘On the Sara Lee,’ said the woman pointing to the big motor-boat that was moored to the jetty at the end of the enormous garden.

  ‘Sara Lee!’ said Mann very respectfully. ‘And there’s me been calling it the Aunt Jemima all the time.’ He smiled at her and she forced a smile back at him. ‘Well, you just make sure no one leaves the house, Duchess, or …’

  We walked through the breakfast-room. It faced the lawn and the water. The remains of a breakfast were still on the white marble table. There were half a dozen different kinds of bread, a couple of uneaten boiled eggs and a silver dish loaded with crisp rashers. Mann picked up a piece of bacon and ate it. ‘Still warm,’ he said, ‘they must be there.’ He went out on the balcony and looked at the boat. There was no sign that it was about to depart. In the distance across the water I could see the Goodyear airship glinting silver against the clear blue sky.

  ‘What the hell would they be doing down there in that boat,’ muttered Mann. ‘They aren’t the kind of couple who enjoy decoking diesels together.’

  I said, ‘If you’ve got a dozen servants in the house, I guess you need a long garden, and a moored boat, to go and have an argument.’

  I was opening the fly-screen that separates the polished oak balcony from the raked gravel back-drive, when I heard a woman shout. Then I saw Mrs Reid-Kennedy. She had already come down the gangway from the boat, and was hurrying towards us across the lawn. She was shouting.

  ‘Hey there, what do you want? What do you want?’ She almost tripped. She was wearing the same sort of silk lounging pyjamas that we’d seen her wearing last time, except that these were pale green, like the silk scarf she had tied round her head. But a lot of that Southern belle had disappeared. That you-all eyelash fluttering, and help yourself to the candied-yams gesturing, had now been replaced by a nasal tone and shrillness that was saurbraten, schweinkotelett and sour cream, and all the way from Eighty-Second Street.

  She was speechless when she reached us. She put a hand on her chest while she caught up on her breathing.

  ‘You shouldn’t run like that, Mrs Reid-Kennedy,’ said Mann. ‘A woman of your age could do herself a permanent injury running across the lawn like that.’

  ‘You will have to come back,’ she said. ‘Come back another day. Any day you like. Phone me and we’ll fix it.’

  ‘Unless of course the kind of injury that you might do yourself by not running across the lawn is even more permanent. Then, of course, it would make sense.’

  ‘We’ll talk in the house,’ she said. ‘We’ll have coffee.’

  ‘That’s mighty civil of you, Ma’am,’ said Mann. ‘That’s right hospitable of you.’ He touched his hat at the end of the peak. ‘But I think I’m going to just nosey down to the levee there and see if I recognize anyone aboard the paddle-steamer. You see, I’ve always been a gambling man.’

  ‘You’re too late, Major Mann,’ she said. Her voice was neither frightened nor boastful. She said it as if she was stating a fact that could not be argued, like the number of kilogrammes in a ton, or the weight of a cubic metre of water.

  ‘You had better tell us about it, Mrs Reid-Kennedy.’ His voice was gentle, and he took her arm, to support her weight.

  ‘If I talk to you, will you promise that it is in confidence? Will you promise not to do anything … at least for the time being?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t promise that, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. No one could. I mean, suppose you told us about a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. You think we could listen to you and keep a promise about doing nothing?’

  ‘My husband was a good man, Major.’ She looked up, into Mann’s face. ‘I mean Douglas was … Mr Reid-Kennedy.’

  ‘I know that’s who you mean,’ said Mann. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He’s in the boat,’ she said. She didn’t turn round far enough to see the twelve-ton cabin-cruiser, but she pointed vaguely at the waterfront. ‘Douglas went down to the boat about half an hour ago. I thought something was wrong, so after the bacon was almost cold … Douglas loves bacon when it’s crisp and warm but he never eats it when it’s cold …’

  ‘OK, Mrs Reid-Kennedy.’ Mann patted her arm.

  ‘And bacon is so expensive nowadays. The servants could have it, of course, but none of them eat it either.’

  ‘Go on, about Douglas.’

  ‘Well, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I found him on the boat, just now. He’s shot himself. He’s lying there in the engine-room … the top of his head … I don’t know who will clear it up. There’s blood everywhere. Will the police know someone who will do it? I couldn’t go down there again.’

  ‘No need, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. No need to go down there again. My friend will take a look in the boat just to make sure that there are no valves open, or anything like that. While you and me go up to the house, and get you a stiff brandy.’

  ‘Do you think I should, Major? It’s not even eleven thirty yet.’

  ‘I think you need one,’ said Mann firmly.

  She shivered. ‘My, but it’s turned cold suddenly,’ she said.

  ‘Yes it has,’ agreed Mann, trying to look suddenly cold.

  ‘It’s telling the servants that’s the real trouble,’ she confided.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Mann briskly. ‘My friend will do that. He’s British; they’re terribly, terribly good at speaking to servants.’

  Many American soldiers kept their guns after the war. It was bad luck for the woman who found him that one-time Master Sergeant Douglas Reid-Kennedy, US Army Military Police, had been equipped with the M 1911 automatic pistol. Even if you can’t take it with you, a .45-inch bullet still makes an expensive way to blow your head apart.

  He was a big man, and it was easy to imagine him as a military cop, in white helmet liner, swingin
g a stick. Now his body was twisted, face up, his arms spread as if to keep himself from falling into the oily bilges between the beautifully maintained twin diesels, where he now lay sprawled. The floral patterned Hawaiian shirt was open to reveal a tanned hairy chest. He wore smart canvas shoes with the yachtsman’s grip-sole, and around his tailored shorts there was an ancient leather belt with a sailor’s clasp-knife hanging from it.

  The back of his skull had exploded, so that there was blood, brain and bone fragments everywhere, but most of his jaw was still there, complete with enough teeth to get a positive identification from his dental records. He must have been standing in the lounge at the fatal moment, with one hand on the stair-rail and the pistol in his mouth. The force of it had thrown him down the steps into the engine-room. I suppose he’d been taking a last look at the mansion, and the gardens, and perhaps at his wife breakfasting. I looked at the jetty and the lie of the land and tried to stop thinking of the different ways I could have come and killed him unobserved.

  I went to the forward end and sorted through the radar and depth-sounding gear. It was all very new and there were screw-holes and paint-lines to show where previous models had once been. Owning the most modern electronics had now become more prestigious for a yachtsman than having a few extra feet of hull or even a uniformed crew, providing of course there was a distinctive aerial for it somewhere in view.

  Douglas Reid-Kennedy had left his zipper jacket draped over the throttles. It was blue nylon, with an anchor design and the word ‘captain’ embroidered on the chest. And it had two special oilskin pockets, in case you were the sort of captain who fell overboard with the caviar in your pocket. In one of the pockets there was a briar pipe, with a metal windguard, and a plastic tobacco pouch with a Playboy bunny on it. In the other pocket there was a wallet containing credit cards, yacht-club membership cards, a weather forecast from the yacht club, dated the same day, a notebook with some scribbled notes, including radio wavelengths, and a bunch of keys.