Charity. Len Deighton
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scare them. And she thrives on it. These days she’s looking like some glamorous young model. Really wonderful!’
‘Yes,’ I said. I would always have to defer to Frank in the matter of glamorous young models.
‘She said the children were doing very well at school. She showed me photos of them. They are very attractive children, Bernard. You must be very proud of your family.’
‘Yes, I am,’ I said.
‘And she loves you,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘So why keep stirring up trouble for yourself?’ Frank gave one of those winning smiles that half the women in Berlin had fallen prey to. ‘You see, Bernard, I suspect you planned the whole thing – your train ride from Moscow with Prettyman. I think you made sure that there would be no one else available from here to do it.’
‘How would I have made sure?’
‘Have you forgotten the assignments you arranged in the days before you went away?’ As he said this he toyed with his pipe and kept his voice distant and detached.
‘I didn’t arrange their assignments. I don’t know those people. I did as Operations suggested.’
‘You signed.’ Now he looked up and was staring at me quizzically.
‘Yes, I signed,’ I agreed wearily. His mind was made up, at least for the time being. My best course was to let him think about it all. He would see reason eventually; he always did. No reasonable person could believe that I’d carefully plotted and planned a way to get Prettyman alone in order to grill him about Tessa’s death. But if Frank suspected it, you could bet that London believed it implicitly; for that’s where all this crap had undoubtedly originated. And, in this context, ‘London’ meant Fiona and Dicky. Or at least it included them.
‘Did you try one of those fried potato things?’ he said, pointing to one of the silver dishes. ‘They are flavoured with onion.’
‘Curry,’ I said. ‘They are curry-flavoured. Too hot for me.’
‘Are they? I don’t know what’s happening to Tarrant lately. He knows how I hate curry. I wonder how they put all these different flavours into them. In my day things just tasted of what they were,’ he said regretfully.
I got to my feet. When the conversation took this culinary turn I guessed Frank had said everything of importance to him. He rested his pipe in a heavy glass ashtray and pushed it aside with a sigh. It made me wonder if he smoked to provide some sort of activity when we had these get-togethers. For the first time it occurred to me that Frank might have dreaded these exchanges as much as I did; or even more.
‘You were late again this morning,’ he said with a smile.
‘Yes, but I brought a note from Mummy.’
Surely he must have known that I was going to the Clinic every morning; they’d found two hairline cracks in my ribs, and were dosing me with brightly coloured pain-killing pills, and taking dozens of X-rays. I shouldn’t be drinking alcohol really, but I couldn’t face a lecture from Frank without a drink in my hand.
‘Stop by for a drink tonight,’ he said. ‘About nine. I’m having some people in … Unless you have something arranged already.’
‘I said I’d see Werner.’
‘We’ll make it another night,’ said Frank.
‘Yes,’ I said. I wondered if he’d taste one of the ‘potato things’ and find they were onion after all. I don’t know what made me tell him they tasted of curry, except in some vague hope that the hateful Tarrant would be blamed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mixed alcohol and pain-killers.
By the time my official confirmation as Frank’s deputy came through I was settled into my comfortable office and making good use of my assistant and my secretary, as well as a personally assigned Rover saloon car and driver. I’d often remarked that Frank had kept the Berlin establishment absurdly high, but now I was reaping some of the rewards of his artful manipulations.
Frank, having resisted appointing a deputy for well over two years, made the most of my presence. He attended conferences, symposiums, lectures and meetings of a kind that in the old days he’d always avoided. He even went to one of those awful gatherings in Washington DC to watch his American colleagues in CIA Operations trying to look cheerful despite the seemingly unending intelligence leaks coming from the top of the CIA tree.
Although in theory Frank’s frequent absences made me the de facto chief in Berlin, I knew that his super-efficient secretary Lydia never missed a day without reporting to him at length, even when this meant phoning him in the middle of the night. So I never emerged from Frank’s shadow, which was perhaps something of an advantage.
My new-found authority granted me the chance to put my old friend Werner Volkmann on a regular contract. Werner was always saying he needed money, although the fees we paid him wouldn’t go very far to meeting Werner’s lifestyle. His business – arranging advance bank payments for East German exports – was drying up. Things were becoming more and more difficult for him because the bankers were frightened that the DDR might be about to default on its debts to the West. But being on Departmental contract seemed to do something for his self-esteem. Werner loved what I once heard him call the ‘mystique of espionage’. Whatever that was, he felt himself a part of it and I was happy for him.
‘Having you here in Berlin, on permanent assignment, is like old times,’ Werner said. ‘Whose idea was it?’
‘Dicky sent me here to spy on Frank.’ I said it just to crank him up. We were sitting in Babylon, a dingy subterranean ‘club’. It was owned by an amusing and enigmatic villain named Rudi Kleindorf, who claimed to come from a family of Prussian aristocrats, and was jokingly referred to as der grosse Kleine. We were sitting at a hideous little gilt table, under a tasselled light fitting. We had been invited for a drink and a chance to see how everything was coming along. Our inspection had been quickly completed and now we were having that drink.
The club wasn’t functioning yet; it was still in the process of being redecorated. The workmen had departed but there were ladders and pots of paint on the stage, and on the bar top too. There had been stories that it was to be renamed ‘Alphonse’, but the Potsdamerstrasse was not the right location for a club named Alphonse. Whatever name it was given, and whatever the colour of the paint, and the quality of the new curtains for the stage, and even some new, slimmer and younger girls, it would never be a place that tourists, or Berlin’s Hautevolee, would want to frequent, except on a drunken excursion to see how the lower half lives. I wondered if Werner had been enticed to put some money into Rudi Kleindorf’s enterprise. It was the sort of thing Werner did; he could be romantically nostalgic about dumps we’d frequented when we were young.
Werner reached for the bottle on the table between us and poured another drink for me. He smiled in that strange way that he did when figuring the hidden motives and devious ways of men and women. His head slightly tilted back, his eyes were almost closed and his lips pressed together. It was easy to see why he was sometimes mistaken for one of the Turkish Gastarbeiter who formed a large percentage of the city’s population. It was not only Werner’s swarthy complexion, coarse black hair, large square-ended black moustache and the muscular build of a wrestler. He had a certain oriental demeanour. Byzantine described him exactly; except that they were Greeks.
‘And Frank?’ said Werner. There was nothing more he need say. Dicky was youthful, curly-haired, energetic, ambitious and devious; while Frank was bloodless, tired and lazy. But in any sort of struggle between them, the smart money was on Frank. Frank had spent a great deal of his long career being splashed in the blood and snot of Berlin, while Dicky was concentrating upon crocodile-covered Filofax notebooks and Mont Blanc fountain-pens. Werner and I both knew a side of Frank that Dicky had never seen. Never mind all that avuncular charm, we’d seen the cold-blooded way in which Frank could make life-and-death decisions that would have consigned ‘don’t-know Dicky’ to a psychiatrist’s couch in a darkened room.
‘What’s Dicky frightened of?’