Spy Story hp-5

by Len Deighton

  I lip-read him saying, 'This card has been used once this morning and there is no exit time against the entry. This holder is…' he turned for a better view of me, '… late thirties, spectacles, clean shaven, dark hair, about six foot…' He stopped as I heard Schlegel's rasping voice even through the glass panel. The gate-man opened it. 'Your office want to speak with you.'

  'Hello,' I said.

  'That you, Pat?'

  'Yes sir.'

  'What are you playing at, sweetheart?'

  I didn't answer. I just gave the phone back to the gate man. I suppose Schlegel got my message because the gate man had no time to close the panel before Schlegel's voice spilled over, cursing him for all kinds of a fool. The old man's face went bright pink and he subdued Schlegel with a barrage of placatory noises. 'Your boss says to go ahead,' said the man.

  'My boss says that, does he. And what do you say?'

  'We'll sort out the cards. Someone has probably walked out with the card still in his pocket. It happens sometimes.'

  'Am I going to have the same trouble getting out of here?'

  "No, sir,' said the gate man. 'I'll make sure about that You'll never have trouble getting out of here.'

  He smiled and brushed his moustache with his hand. I didn't try to cap it.

  * * *

  There was not one library but many, like strata of ancient Troy. Deepest were foxy leather spines and tattered jackets of the original Trust donations, and then box-files and austerity bindings of the war years, and then, in layers above that, the complete Official Histories of both world wars. Only the new metal shelving held the latest additions, and much of that was stored as microfilm, and could be read only in the tiny cubicles from which came a steady clatter and the smell of warm projector bulbs.

  I started with the Northern Fleet but I would have found him even had I selected all the rear-admirals, and worked my way through them alphabetically. None of the microfilm up-datings were of much interest but there were new pictures. This was the man who wanted to be me.

  Remoziva, Vanya Mikhail (1924-) Kontr-Admiral,

  Commander: Anti-Submarine Warfare Command,

  Northern Fleet, Murmansk.

  The Remoziva family provided a fine example of revolutionary zeal His father was a metal worker from Orel, his mother a peasant from Kharkov who'd moved farther east when the Germans occupied vast areas of Russia from the Bolsheviks, by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Of their family of seven children, two daughters and three sons survived. And what children they were; not only a rear-admiral, but Piotr, a professor of zoology; Evgeni, a sociologist; Lisaveta, a political analyst; and Katerina, the second daughter, who had been an assistant to Madame Furtseva, the first woman to reach the Presidium of the Central Committee. The Remoziva family sounded like the Ferdy Foxwells of the worker's Soviets.

  The compiler had done a thorough jot — even if most: of his data were cross-referenced to Central Registry — and he had included the sociologist's order of Alexander Nevsky, the three amputated fingers of the zoologist — yes, I wondered that, too — and the kidney trouble that was likely to cost the Rear-Admiral his promotion to the First Deputy's office.

  I went through the sheet on which was listed Remoziva's career. He owed much to Admiral Rickover, U.S. Navy, for the American decision to build nuclear submarines — armed with Polaris missiles — was the best thing that could have happened to Remoziva. It was a nuclear rags to riches story. When the keel of the Nautilus went: down, in 1954, he was a Starshii Leitenant, sitting around in the Coast Defence Department of Northern Fleet, desperate for even a staff appointment with Naval Artillery. Suddenly his anti-submarine work in the war is taken out and dusted off. He immediately regains his wartime rank. Northern Fleet A.S.W. trumps even Baltic Fleet A.S.W., now that the U.S. Navy is sailing under the Arctic ice. Remoziva gets a senior staff job. Khrushchev pushes for a nuclear submarine fleet, and by 1962 the Leninskii Komsomol has; also been to the North Pole under the ice. From being a forgotten bywater in a neglected arm. Northern Fleet's A.S.W. staff are the elite of the Russian armed services. No wonder it was difficult to find a photo in which Remoziva wasn't smiling.

  I returned the material, and picked up the analysis that Schlegel wanted. I checked out past the smiling men in the glass box, and took the papers back to the Centre. I dumped them into the reception guard and then strolled through to Saddler's Walk to have a quiet cup of coffee.

  There, a Georgian façade had been newly adorned with red and black stripes, and its name, 'The Anarchist', painted in gold letters. It was another of those art, coffee and non-chemical coleslaw hang-outs that sprout, bloom and die. Or worse, survive: a crippled commercial travesty of the original dream.

  Che and Elvis shared the walls. The coffee cups were folk-art and the potato salad cut with loving care. It was a bright dry day, the: streets were filled with woolly-hatted Australians, and delicate men with nervous dogs. Some of them were sitting around here drinking coffee. Behind the counter there was a girl anarchist. She had heavy-rimmed spectacles and a pony-tail tight enough to make her squint.

  'This is our first week,' she said. There is a nut cutlet free for everyone.'

  'The coffee will do.'

  'There is no charge for the nut cutlet. It's a way of getting customers to see how delicious a vegetarian diet can be.' She picked up a slice of the pale grey mixture, using plastic tongs like an obstetrician. 'I'll put it on the tray — I'm sure you'll like it.' She poured out the coffee.

  'With milk-if that's allowed.'

  'Sugar is on the table,' she said. 'Natural brown sugar — it's better for you.'

  I sipped the coffee. From my table near the window I watched two parking wardens clobber a delivery van and a Renault with French plates. It made me feel much better. I brought out my notebook and wrote down that biographical note on the Rear-Admiral. And then I listed all the things that puzzled me about the changes to my old flat. I drew an outline picture of Rear-Admiral Remoziva. Then I drew a plan of the old flat and included the secret ante-room with the medical machinery. When I was a kid I'd wanted to be an artist. Sometimes I thought Ferdy Foxwell only tolerated me was because I could pronounce Pollaiuolo, and tell a Giotto from a Francesca. Perhaps I was more than a little envious of the half-baked painters and hairy bohemians that were always in evidence up here in Hampstead. I wondered if I might have been one of them under different circumstances. It was while I was doodling, and thinking about nothing of any consequence, that some subconscious segment of my brain was dealing with the mix-up at the entrance to the Evaluation Block that morning.

  I put down my pen and sipped the coffee. I sniffed it. Perhaps it was acorns. Behind the soy sauce was propped a pamphlet advertising 'Six lectures in modern Marxism'. I turned it over, on the back someone had pencilled, 'Don't complain about the coffee, you might be old and weak yourself some day.'

  Suppose that the two gate men had not been so far wrong. Suppose that I had been in the Evaluation Block once already that morning. Ridiculous, but I pursued the notion. Suppose I had been drugged or hypnotized. I decided to discount both those possibilities for the time being. Suppose my exact double had been there. I rejected that idea too because the men on the door would have remembered: or would they? The card. Those gate men seldom bothered to look at faces. They checked the card numbers against the rack and against the time-book. It wasn't my Doppelgänger that had been through the gate: it was my security card.

  Before I got to the door another thought occurred to me. I sat down at the table and took out my wallet. I removed the security card from its plastic cover and looked at it closely. It was exactly the right shape, size and springiness for sliding up the door catch of my locker. I'd used it to force the lock dozens of times. But this' card had never been used for that purpose. Its edges were sharp, white and pristine. This wasn't the security card I'd been given, someone else had that. I was using the forgery!

  That disturbing conclusion got me nowhere. It just ma
de me lonely. My world wasn't peopled by charming wise and influential elders as Ferdy's world was. My friends all had real worries: like who can you get to service a new Mercedes properly, should the au pair have colour TV, and is Greece warmer than Yugoslavia in July. Yeah, well maybe it was.

  I looked at my watch. This was Thursday and I'd promised to take Marjorie to lunch and be lectured about my responsibilities.

  I got to my feet and went to the counter. 'Ten pence,' she said.

  I paid.

  'I said you'd eat the nut cutlet,' she said. She pushed her spectacles up on her forehead to see the cash register better. Damn, I'd eaten the wretched thing without even tasting it.

  'You didn't like the coffee?' she asked.

  'Is this anarchist's coffee?' I asked the girl.

  'Grounds enough for arrest,' she said. I suppose someone had said the same thing before. Or maybe they thought of the joke and then built the coffee shop around it.

  She passed me the change. Alongside the cash register there were half a dozen collection boxes. Oxfam, World-Wildlife and Shelter. One of the tins had a hand-written label with a Polaroid photo fixed alongside it. 'Kidney Machine Fund. Give generously for Hampstead Sick and Elderly.' I picked up the tin and looked closely at the photo of a kidney machine.

  That's my pet charity,' said the girl. 'Our target is four machines by Christmas. Going all the way to the hospital every week or so is too much for some of the old ones. They can have those machines in their own home.'

  'Yes, I know.' I put my change into the tin.

  The girl smiled. 'People with kidney trouble would do almost anything for one of those machines,' she said.

  'I'm beginning to believe you're right,' I said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Attacker. For the purposes of the assessment the 'phasing' player, who brings his unit into range, is allied the attacker. The player against whom the unit is brought is called the defender.

  GLOSSARY. 'NOTES FOR WARGAMERS'. STUDIES CENTRE. LONDON

  THE LONELIEST place in the world is the entrance hall of a big hospital. The huge and elaborate Victorian palace in which Marjorie worked was a maze of cast-iron staircases, stone arches and decorated paving. From these pitiless materials, whispers echoed back like the endless thrash, of a furious sea. The staff were inured to it. They clattered past in white coats, smelling of ether and hauling trolleys which I did not dare examine. By the time Marjorie arrived I needed medical reassurance.

  'Then you should wait outside in the car.'

  'I haven't brought the car.'

  'In my car.' She was wearing a pink jersey shirt-dress instead of one of the dark suits she usually wore when on duty. She tied a black silk scarf and put on her belted raincoat. I said, 'I haven't got the key of your car.'

  'Wait near my car.'

  'You didn't bring it today remember?'

  'The real answer,' said Marjorie, 'is that you like the frisson of hypochondria.' We stepped through the portal. The sun was high in a clear blue sky. It was hard to believe it was almost Christmas.

  She was always like this when she was on duty: trimmer, younger, more independent. More like a doctor, in fact. It was difficult to escape the thought that the scatterbrained little girl that she became when with me was not the person she wanted to be. And yet we were happy together, and just waiting for her I rediscovered all the excitements and anxieties of adolescent love. We took one of the taxi cabs from the hospital cab rani;. I gave him the address of The Terrine du Chef.

  'I bought you a present.'

  'Oh, Pat. You remembered.'

  She unwrapped it hastily. It was a wristwatch. 'It must have cost a fortune.'

  'They'll exchange it for a desk barometer.'

  She held the watch tight, and put her closed fist inside her other hand, and pressed it to her heart, as though frightened that I might take it from her. 'You said repapering the sitting-room would be for my birthday.'

  'We'll probably be able to afford that as well,' I said. "And I thought… well, if you do go to Los Angeles, you wouldn't be able to take the wallpaper.'

  'And it's got a sweep second-hand.' Tears welled up in her eyes.

  'It's only steel,' I said. 'Gold isn't so waterproof or dustproof… but if you want gold…'

  There was a lot of the little girl in her. And there was no denying that that was what attracted me. I leaned forward to kiss the tip of her nose.

  'Los Angeles…' she said. She sniffed, and smiled. 'It would mean working in a research lab… like a factory, almost… I like being part of a hospital… it's what makes it worth while.'

  The cab swerved and threw her gently into my arms. 'I do love you, Patrick,' she said.

  'You don't have to cry,' I told her. Her hair came undipped and fell across her face as I tried to kiss her again.

  'We just don't get on together,' she said. She held me tight enough to disprove it.

  She drew back from me and looked at my face as if seeing it for the first time. She put out a hand and touched my cheek with the tips of her fingers. 'Before we try again, let's find somewhere else to live.' She put her hand lightly across my lips. 'There's nothing wrong with your flat, but it is your flat, Patrick. I feel I'm only a lodger there, it makes me insecure.'

  'I have another trip scheduled. While I'm away, you could speak with one of the less crooked house-agents.'

  'Please! Do let us look. I don't mean in the suburbs or anything. I won't look at anything farther out than Highgate.'

  'It's a deal.'

  'And I'll try for a position in whatever hospital is local.'

  'Good,' I said. As long as she worked in the same hospital as her husband there would always be this distance between us, even if — as she insisted — it was solely of my creation. I'd seen her with her husband. It was bloody disconcerting when they got on to the topic of medicine: it was as if they had their own culture, and their own language in which to discuss its finer nuances.

  For a few minutes neither of us spoke. As we passed Lords Cricket Ground I saw a newspaper seller with a placard: RUSSIAN MYSTERY WOMAN CHAIRS GERMAN UNITY TALKS. That's the way it is with newspapers. The car strike had already become ANGRY CAR pickets: violence flares after some name-calling outside the factory that morning.

  'Have you got a game in progress?' It was Marjorie's attempt to account for my moodiness.

  'I left just as Ferdy was deciding whether to atomize a sub outside Murmansk and risk contaminating the shipping and ship yards in the fjord. Or whether to wait until its multiple clusters leave him without nukes for retaliation — or with the random target selection of the surviving silos.'

  'And you ask me how I can work in the Pathology Lab.'

  'It's comparable in a way… disease and war. Perhaps it's better to pick them to the bone and see what they are made of than to sit around and wait for the worst to happen.'

  The cab stopped outside The Terrine. 'I must be back by two thirty at the latest."

  'We don't have to eat here,' I said. 'We can have a beer and a sandwich and get you back ten minutes early.'

  'I'm sorry. I didn't mean that,' she said. 'It was a lovely idea.'

  I paid the taxi off. Marjorie said. 'How did you find this little place — it's sweet.'

  I was cupping my hands and peering close to the window. There were no lights on and no customers, just the neatly arranged place settings, polished glasses and starched napkins. I tried the door and rang the bell. Marjorie tried the door too. She laughed. 'That's typical of you, darling,' she said.

  'Just cool it for a minute,' I told her. I went down the narrow alley at the side of the restaurant. It gave access to back entrances of houses above The Terrine. There was a wooden gate in the wall. I put my arm over the top of it, and by balancing a toe on a ledge in the wall I reached far enough to release the catch. Marjorie followed me through the gate. There was a tiny cobbled yard, with an outside toilet and a drain blocked with potato peelings.

  'You shouldn't.'


  'I said cool it.' There seemed to be no one looking down from the windows, or from the iron balcony crammed with potted plants, now skeletal and bare in the wintry sun. I tried the back door. The net curtains were drawn. I went to the window but its lacy-edged yellow blind was down, and I couldn't see in. Marjorie said, 'Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.'

  I tried to lever the spring bolt open with the edge of my security card but it must have been one of those double torn movements with a dead-bolt. 'That's women,' I said. 'Give them presents and they complain they're not getting enough kindness.' I gave her another tiny kiss on the nose.

  The lock wouldn't give. I leaned my back against the glass panel in the door to deaden the sound, then I pressed against it until I heard the glass snap.

  'Have you gone mad?' said Marjorie.

  I put a finger in the crack and widened it enough to pull a large piece of broken glass away from the putty. 'O.K., Ophelia,' I said. 'You're the only one I love; stop complaining.'

  I put my hand through the broken glass panel and found the key, still in the old-fashioned mortice lock. It turned with a screech of its rusty tumblers. Glancing round to be sure there was no one coming down the alley, I opened the door and went in.

  'This is burglary,' said Marjorie, but she followed me.

  'House-breaking, you mean. Burglary only at night, remember what I told you far that crossword?'

  The sun came through the holland blind; thick yellow light, viscous, almost, like a roomful of pale treacle. I released the blind and it sprang up with a deafening clatter. If no one heard that, I thought, the place is empty.