Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy. Len Deighton
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where is your home?’
‘My home is a Samsonite two-suiter.’
‘It’s a well-known address,’ I said. ‘Why New York City?’
She smiled. Her very white teeth were just a fraction uneven. She sipped her drink. ‘I’d had enough of Seattle,’ she said. ‘New York was the first place that came to mind.’ She put the half-smoked cigarette into an ashtray and stubbed it out as if it was Seattle.
From the next room the piano player drifted into a sleepy version of ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’ Red moved a little closer to me and continued to stare into her drink like a crystal-gazer seeking a fortune there.
The intruder alarm manufacturer passed us and smiled. Red took my arm and rested her head on my shoulder. When he was out of earshot she looked up at me. ‘I hope you didn’t mind,’ she said. ‘I told him my boy-friend was here; I wanted to reinforce that idea.’
‘Any time.’ I put my arm round her waist; she was soft and warm and her shiny red hair smelt fresh as I pressed close.
‘Some of these people who lose money at the table think they might get recompense some other way,’ she murmured.
‘Now you’ve started my mind working,’ I said.
She laughed.
‘You’re not supposed to laugh,’ I said.
‘I like you,’ she said and laughed again. But now it was a nice throaty chuckle rather than the nervous teeth-baring grimace that I’d seen at the backgammon table.
‘Yes, you guessed right,’ she said. ‘I ran from a lousy love-affair.’ She moved away but not too far away.
‘And now you’re wondering if you did the right thing,’ I said.
‘He was a bastard,’ she said. ‘Other women … debts that I had to pay … drinking bouts … no, I’m not wondering if I did the right thing. I’m wondering why it took me so long.’
‘And now he phones you every day asking you to come back.’
‘How did you know.’ She mumbled the words into my shoulder.
‘That’s the way it goes,’ I said.
She gripped my arm. For a long time we stood in silence. I felt I’d known her all my life. The intruder alarm man passed again. He smiled at us. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
There was nothing I would have liked better but Mann had disappeared from the room, and if he was engaged in the sort of parley he’d anticipated, he’d be counting on my standing right here with both eyes wide open.
‘I’d better stay with the Manns,’ I told her. She pursed her lips. And yet a moment later she smiled and there was no sign of the scarred ego.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I understand,’ but she didn’t understand enough, for soon after that she saw some people she knew and beckoned them to join us.
‘Do you play backgammon?’ one of the newcomers asked.
‘Not so that anyone would notice,’ I said.
Red smiled at me but when she learned that two one-time champions were about to fight out a match in the next room she took my hand and dragged me along there.
Backgammon is more to my taste than chess. The dice add a large element of luck to every game, so that sometimes a novice beats a champion just as it goes in real life. Sometimes, however, a preponderance of luck makes a game boring to watch. This one was that – or perhaps I was just feeling bad about the way Red exchanged smiles and greetings with so many people round the table.
The two ex-champions were into the opening moves of their third game by the time that Bessie Mann plucked my sleeve to tell me that her husband wanted me.
I went down the hall to where Tony Nowak’s driver was standing on guard outside the bedroom. He was scowling at the mirror and trying to look like a cop. I was expecting the scowl but not the quick rub down for firearms. I went inside. In spite of the dim lighting, I saw Tony Nowak perched on the dressing-table, his tie loosened and his brow shiny.
There was a smell of expensive cigars and after-shave lotion. And seated in the best chair – his sneakers resting upon an embroidered footstool – there was Harvey Kane Greenwood. They had long ceased to refer to him as the up-and-coming young Senator: Greenwood had arrived. The long hair – hot-combed and tinted – the chinos and the batik shirt, open far enough to reveal the medallion on a gold neck-chain, were all part of the well-publicized image, and many of his aspirations could be recognized in Gerry Hart, the lean young assistant that he had recently engaged to help him with his work on the Scientific Development Sub-Committee of the Senate Committee of International Cooperation.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw as far as the Hepplewhite sofa, upon which sat two balding heavyweights, comparing wrist-watches, and arguing quietly in Russian. They didn’t notice me, and nor did Gerry Hart, who was drawing diagrams on a dinner napkin for his boss Greenwood, who was nodding.
I was only as far as the doorway, when Mann waved his hands, and had me backing-up past Nowak’s sentry, and all the way along the corridor as far as the kitchen.
Piled up along the working surfaces there were plates of left-over party food, dirty ashtrays and plastic containers crammed with used cutlery. The remains of two turkeys were propped up on the open door of a wall oven, and as we entered, a cat jumped from there to the floor. Otherwise the brightly lit kitchen was unoccupied.
Major Mann opened the refrigerator and took a carton of buttermilk. He reached for tumblers from the shelf above and poured two glassfuls.
‘You like buttermilk?’
‘Not much,’ I said.
He drank some of it and then tore a piece of paper from a kitchen-roll and wiped his mouth. All the while he held the refrigerator door wide open. Soon the compressor started to throb. This sound, combined with the interference of the fluorescent lights above our heads, gave us a little protection against even the most sophisticated bugging devices. ‘This is a lulu,’ said Mann quietly.
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I will have some buttermilk.’
‘Do we want to take delivery of Mrs B?’ He did not conceal his anger.
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘Here!’ said Mann indignantly. ‘Right here in schlockville.’
I smiled. ‘And this is an offer from gentleman-Jim Greenwood and our friend Hart?’
‘And the two vodka salesmen from downtown Omsk.’
‘KGB?’
‘Big-ass pants, steel-tipped shoes, fifty-dollar manicures and big Cuban cigars – yes, my suspicions run that way.’
‘Perhaps Hart got them through central casting.’
Mann shook his head. ‘Heavy,’ he said. ‘I’ve been close to them. These two are really heavy.’
Mann had the mannerism of placing a hand over his heart, the thumb and forefinger fidgeting with his shirt-collar. He did it now. It was as if he was taking an oath about the two Russians.
‘But why?’
‘Good question,’ said Mann. ‘When Greenwood’s goddamned committee is working so hard to give away all America’s scientific secrets to any foreigner who wants them – who needs the KGB?’
‘And they talked about B.?’
‘I must be getting senile or something,’ said Mann. ‘Why didn’t I think about those bastards on that Scientific Cooperation Committee – commie bastards the lot of them if you ask me.’
‘But what are they after?’
Mann