Charity

by Len Deighton

  She frowned at me. ‘No, he’s not on the mend, Mr Samson – may I call you Bernard? I thought you knew that.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean yes, do call me Bernard.’

  ‘And my friends call me Tabby, it’s short for Tabitha.’

  ‘Tabby. That’s a pretty name. So he’s not on the mend?’

  She made a movement of her hand to invite me to sit on one of the high padded stools that were alongside the breakfast counter. An ‘open-plan kitchen’ was the sort of amenity estate agents like to mention on their prospectus.

  There was a glass pot of coffee sitting on the hot-plate of the coffee-maker. She took two decorative mugs from a shelf and poured coffee into both of them. My mug had a brightly coloured pre-Raphaelite woman drowning in a pale blue river. Ophelia I suppose. The coffee was watery too.

  ‘He’s not expected to live above three months,’ she said.

  ‘I had no idea. I knew he was sick of course … I was on the train with him.’

  ‘He wanted to be in England again. North London, he said, but this was the best I could do at short notice.’

  ‘Three months?’

  ‘At most. Jay doesn’t know that of course. He thinks he’s recovering strength enough for his treatment to resume. But I think it’s better that you should know the score.’

  ‘Thank you. Are you telling all his friends?’ I wondered if Cindy was a party to this alarming prognosis.

  ‘He hasn’t seen any friends. Few people know where Jay is.’ She gave a little chuckle, as if hiding him away was good fun. ‘I was surprised when you tracked us down and said you wanted to come.’

  I smiled and nodded. We drank coffee.

  ‘Jay goes up and down,’ she said. ‘Today seems to be one of his good days.’ She was very restrained, very understated: no make-up, no ornaments, not even a watch; cotton dress, and hair cut like a schoolgirl. Yet she had a natural effortless elegance that gave her authority and importance. It was, I suppose, a product of her affluent background. Bret had the same sort of aplomb.

  ‘The nurse will be down in a moment,’ she said. ‘She goes through a routine. She takes about twenty minutes usually. Tell me about yourself, Bernard. Are you married?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said. In theory – and on paper – the second Mrs Prettyman was everything I usually ran fast to escape, but I have to admit that I found her both clever and charming, the way Werner told me I used to see Cindy. I decided that Jay was lucky to find such a loyal and generous lifetime companion, for Tabby told me that, despite two failed marriages and grown-up children, he was ‘the real thing at last’.

  ‘We understand each other, you see,’ she told me. ‘My previous husbands were not too particular about telling the truth: to me or anyone else. But Jay is just wonderful. We tell each other everything.’

  ‘Do you really?’ I said. Jim Prettyman was entrusted with some very dark Departmental secrets. It was hard to believe that Tabby had been made a party to all of them. And in any case Jimjay was not noted for his unwavering veracity.

  She leaned over to see that my coffee cup was empty and poured more for me. ‘I’m not saying it wasn’t the religion that did it. But Jay says that has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘What religion?’ I said.

  ‘He went back to the Church. You didn’t know that?’

  ‘The Catholic Church?’ I remembered the rosary he clutched constantly on the train.

  ‘Yes, I’m not a Catholic. I was brought up a Presbyterian. What are you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘It depends what sort of trouble I’m in.’

  ‘Jay felt bad at discouraging his first wife from attending Mass. He was born a Roman Catholic. His folks were Catholic. Catholic childhoods seem to take a grip on people, don’t you find?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘It’s a comfort. It has helped him endure this terrible sickness. He can’t go to Mass, of course, but the local priest calls in frequently. He’s a lovely Scotsman. Jay looks forward to the visits, and the father likes a glass of whisky. They chat for hours.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. But it wasn’t nice. I didn’t like anything I was hearing. I didn’t enjoy the idea of Prettyman confiding secrets to his wife, nor chatting for hours with his priest over a glass or two of whisky.

  Perhaps my reservations showed on my face, for she said: ‘Have you seen Jay’s first wife recently?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I have.’

  Tabby seemed distressed at this: ‘You are not here because of her?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘She’s blackmailing Jay, you know that, do you, Bernard?’

  ‘Blackmail is a serious accusation, Tabby. I hope you know what you are saying.’

  She smiled: ‘I should do, Bernard. I have a PhD in International Law and ten years’ experience as an attorney in Washington.’

  Touché. ‘So what kind of blackmail?’

  ‘You’d best level with me, Bernard. What’s your angle? You say you are not acting for the first Mrs Prettyman?’

  ‘I certainly am not,’ I said.

  ‘But you have spoken with her. Is she seeing you again?’

  ‘Not if I see her first.’

  ‘Okay. I’m convinced. I was all prepared to be friendly with her. I’m sympathetic. But she’s nothing but a trouble-maker.’ She held up the coffee pot and I shook my head.

  ‘So what kind of blackmail?’ I asked again.

  ‘Maybe you should ask Jay,’ she said. ‘It’s his ex-wife.’

  Tabby had warned me that the injections, and whatever other dope they were feeding him, left him in a euphoric mood, but I wasn’t prepared for the transformation. I’d last seen him on the Moscow express stretched out like a corpse and only half as lively, but I found a Jim who was full of fight.

  ‘Bernard, you son of a gun. Where have you been?’ ‘Trying to find you,’ I replied.

  ‘England is wonderful, Bernard.’ He had a plate of grapes by his side, and he was popping one into his mouth between every few words. ‘Green and fresh and friendly. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it until I came back this time.’

  I looked out of the window. It didn’t look so great to me: too many bricks and cars and not enough trees and grass.

  ‘We are not bothered by the planes,’ he said. ‘They take off the other side; unless the wind is that way we hardly hear them.’ He offered me his grapes but I shook my head.

  The bedroom was equipped with an assortment of expensive medical equipment of the sort that glitters in the windows of medical suppliers in London’s Wigmore Street. Jim was not in bed. He was dressed in a striped cotton dressing-gown and sitting in a chair, a soft cream-coloured blanket draped over his legs. Despite his lively manner his complexion was, as always, chalky. On his knee he had an open notebook, its pages covered with scribbled numbers. He saw me looking at it: ‘I can’t seem to concentrate on reading these days, Bernie. I started doing number games … it started me off remembering old times.’ He tapped the notebook. ‘I was thinking of the way we cracked the one-time pad,’ he explained. ‘That was the high point of my days in the Department.’ He stared at me. His eyes were bright and unnaturally active. I suppose it was the medicine.

  ‘I heard about that,’ I said.

  ‘They all said that the Soviet one-time pads were unbeatable, didn’t they? No one wanted to know. I said it was worth tackling, but no one wanted to know.’

  He held up his notebook so that I could look at the lines of numbers he’d written, but it was difficult for me to understand what he’d been doing. Was it gibberish or genius? I couldn’t even read it properly. Perhaps his scrawling writing was also something to do with his drugs.

  ‘Consider the problem,’ said Jim, as if to the world at large, rather than to me. ‘Forty-eight five-digit groups. Every page of every pad different, with the sole exception of the corresponding leaf of the pad at th
e other end. Impossible to crack. Bret told me that. He said: “In two words, Jim, Im possible.”’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Bret has always had a great sense of humour.’

  Ploughing on without pause: ‘Where do one-time pads, and all their clever constantly changing codes, come from? I asked them that. They are not handwritten, are they? They are all printed, and if they are printed that must be done on a printing machine. They don’t have thousands of Russian machinists standing there, turning a handle to change the numbers one by one, do they? They use a printing machine that automatically changes the numbers or letters. That printing machine has to be programmed. And that order – the sequence in which the machine changes the ciphers – can be cracked, just like any other code can be cracked.’

  ‘It was quite a triumph,’ I said. There was no way of stopping him; it was better to let him go on. While he talked I looked round the room at the electrically controlled bed and the stainless steel bedpans, the medical trolley and racks for medicines and syringes. It all made me wonder if Tabby was that kind of woman who, late in life – after charity committees, piano lessons and the history of Renaissance painting – discovers a need to play Florence Nightingale with any relative within reach. Well, maybe that’s the way it was, and maybe it suited both of them.

  ‘And later on I found that it had been done before; back in the war,’ Jim was saying. ‘Of course I went back through the American Mathematical Monthly. I found the copies published in the summer of 1929 when the idea was first being mooted at Hunter College in New York. But then a chance remark from one of the old-timers put me on to what our own Denniston and his Diplomatic Section had done in Berkeley Street, Piccadilly, right here in London in the war. The German pads had eight lines of six five-figure groups. Of course that set me thinking.’ He gave me a quizzical stare.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, trying to look like someone who would know how many lines of six-figure groups a German wartime one-time pad always had. And figure it the way Jim had figured it.

  ‘It was obviously using 240 wheels,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘When I went to the old man and showed him the way that the diplomatic OTPs had been cracked in the war, he wouldn’t believe it at first. When I talked to him about it, he gave in.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said.

  ‘The old man was ecstatic: he gave me everything I asked for.’

  ‘It was a triumph, Jim.’

  ‘It came together neatly. The Americans went wild; Langley opened a whole new department to handle it. Millions of dollars went into it.’

  ‘It restored their faith in us,’ I said.

  ‘I would have got an OBE – maybe something even grander – had we not been so covert. The old man told me that, and later on Bret told me the same.’

  ‘Maybe even a K,’ I said.

  ‘Not a K, Bernie,’ he said, coming to earth with a bump. ‘You don’t have to overdo it.’ He looked at me. ‘Now what did you really come here to ask me?’

  ‘Does there have to be anything?’

  ‘Come along, Bernard. You don’t pay social calls and you don’t like grapes. When you come out here, to the wrong side of the airport, it’s because you are after something.’ Perhaps he felt he was being a shade too offensive, for he added: ‘No one in the Department pays social calls. It’s not in the training manual, is it?’

  ‘Cindy dropped in on me. She said you left a box file with her. She wants to get rid of it.’

  He swallowed the grape he was chewing and pushed the rest of them aside. ‘Get rid of it?’

  ‘She says she’s looked after it long enough,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what she told you?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what she said. It’s not true?’

  ‘She’s a lively one, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ I agreed emphatically.

  ‘She stole it. She stole that box file. I gave her a lift to her apartment in Brussels, and when I helped her carry her bags from my car boot into the building she took the box file along with her other baggage. I didn’t notice until I got to the airport. I called her from the transit lounge but her line was busy.’

  ‘You didn’t do anything about it?’

  ‘What am I going to do? Tell the Department that I let my ex-wife steal a secret box file? Jesus, they would have ripped my balls off. If they find out what’s happened, they still will. You’ve got to get it back for me, Bernard.’

  ‘Okay. You think she will just hand it over?’

  ‘Not Cindy. Nothing comes free with Cindy. Where is she keeping it?’

  ‘In her office safe, she said.’

  ‘In Brussels?’

  ‘How many offices does she have?’

  ‘What did you think? When you saw her, what did you think of her?’

  ‘She looked fine,’ I said cautiously. Experience told me that no matter how much men criticized their ex-wives, it was not an invitation to join in. ‘Very glamorous; very attractive.’ And yet making ex-wives sound too attractive also held its dangers, so I added: ‘Of course we are all getting older.’

  ‘Is she still using all that make-up? Fluttering those false eyelashes; rouged cheeks like a tart. And dousing herself in scent? I told her she was overdoing it: she smelled like the perfume room in Harrods.’

  ‘You told her that, did you?’ It sounded like a dangerous conversational ploy.

  ‘We’ve got to get that box back,’ he said.

  ‘What’s in it?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘You’re not sure? I thought it would be something you wanted and needed.’

  ‘I was told to open it only after getting the order to open it. I figured it contained orders of some sort.’

  ‘It’s big and heavy,’ I reminded him.

  ‘And maybe a gun or something. I had the key and the combination but I lost both. And then I thought what the hell.’

  ‘I see.’

  He looked at me. ‘Have you reported this?’

  ‘Reported what?’

  ‘Don’t be dumb, Bernard. Have you reported what Cindy told you? That she has the box file.’

  ‘Of course I haven’t. I wanted to talk to you about it first.’

  ‘I always said you were the smartest one there,’ he said. ‘More cunning, more devious and more far-sighted than any of the rest of them.’

  ‘Spread it around,’ I said. ‘Or maybe not.’

  He was smiling, and perhaps there was some margin of admiration in this trenchant description but I don’t know how much. He was resentful. Indignant in the way that I would have been if he had tried on me the trick I was pulling on him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘If you had reported it you would have nothing to threaten me with, would you?’

  ‘Don’t be that way, Jim.’

  ‘So now I’ve got two of you twisting my arm. You and Cindy: the two who were closest to me in the old days.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Et tu, Brute. But Caesar hadn’t mislaid a box file, old buddy.’ I gave him back his notebook and his numbers. ‘I’d get that box back from her, Jim. If I were you, I really would get it back from her. Even if it means paying her some alimony. In the long run it might prove cheaper. The Ides of March are come, Jim. This is a bad time of year.’

  ‘But not gone. Yes, well I don’t give a damn. Go back and tell them all you know. And tell Cindy to go to hell. I don’t work for the Department any more. I don’t give a damn what happens to any of you.’

  ‘Cindy said two men came to her asking for it. Americans from Geneva, she said. Business associates of yours.’

  ‘And you believed her? Jesus Christ, Bernard. How can you let her make such a fool of you? That was my lawyer and his partner. I sent them along to talk with her, but she played little girl lost with them. She is too cunning to say anything that a lawyer might use.’

  ‘I wish you two would get your stories straight,’ I said. ‘Surely you don’t enjoy all this hassle.’

&n
bsp; ‘I’ve got no money to spare for Cindy. Do you know how much it costs to be sick nowadays? A fortune!’

  ‘You should have taken time out to be sick back when we could afford it.’

  ‘Yes, that was my big mistake,’ he said ruefully. ‘Why are you so interested in that box file? What are you expecting to find inside it? Give it to me straight.’

  ‘Once upon a time there was a man named Thurkettle, a rent-a-gun who killed my sister-in-law …’

  ‘Hold it …’

  ‘No hold-its, Jimmy. I was there; I saw it. He shot Tessa Kosinski on the Autobahn, and then came to meet you and catch a plane to safety. Knowing the way the Department do things, I know that he must have been debriefed by someone …’ Seeing that Jimmy was about to start interrupting again, I quickly added: ‘And that someone was you.’

  Jim wet his lips. I thought he was going to say something interesting but he picked up a glass of water and sipped some. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Cindy drove to the plane and got the box from the Swede. Meanwhile you paid off Thurkettle and helped him do his disappearing act.’

  ‘No, Bernard.’

  ‘Don’t tell me no. You gave him his money and his new ID. He was so pleased that he made you a present of the sapphire brooch that he had ripped from the dead body of Tessa Kosinski.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Well, you’ll be able to explain how wrong I’ve got it to a Board of Inquiry. Washington has agreed to extradite Thurkettle. So don’t imagine you will be able to run back to America and escape their clutches.’

  ‘Extradite Thurkettle!’ He laughed scornfully. ‘How are they going to do that? Resurrection? Thurkettle is dead. Very very dead. Yes, I went to the rendezvous – the Ziesar exit ramp – and saw Thurkettle. But he was dead.’

  ‘If Thurkettle is dead you killed him. Where did you get Tessa’s brooch? You must have stolen it from his body after you wasted him.’

  ‘I didn’t steal anything from him. I didn’t touch him.’

  ‘Let’s play it your way, Jim. You arrive to find your contact is dead. Of course you would touch him. You’d have to be crazy not to check his pockets. London would want proof that someone had hit the right target. You would need to know if he had a gun in his pocket. A gun could get you into a lot of trouble in that jurisdiction. Or get you out of it.’