Faith. Len Deighton
manner of weapons … and heavies like that get their shots in first.’
‘But …?’
‘I have a feeling we were set up. I have a nasty feeling that – apart from my shooting that driver – we did everything the other side wanted us to do, right from the moment we were stopped at that militia checkpoint.’
‘Well if you are right, we sure put a spanner in the works.’ He was not to be deprived of his gleeful satisfaction.
‘And don’t mention Krohn’s bar or that damned handgun in your report.’
‘You can rely on me, old-timer.’
‘And you can leave out the old-timer, Kinkypoo.’
3
‘I have your report,’ said Frank Harrington. ‘I read it very carefully.’ Frank Harrington was Head of the Berlin Field Unit. Because the Russians call their equivalent outfits rezidentura he was usually called the Berlin Rezident, and that had passed into official use. Frank, although no longer young, had a soldier’s bearing, a pale face and blunt-ended stubbly moustache, so that he was frequently mistaken for an officer of the British garrison. He’d been one of my father’s best friends.
I didn’t respond. Dicky Cruyer, Controller of German Stations and temporarily in charge of Operations in London, had come hurrying to Berlin. Presumably he wanted to be here when VERDI arrived. Now he stood by the window peering through the louvred window shutters to see down into Frank Harrington’s extensive back garden, sucking on the end of his Mont Blanc fountain-pen and trying not to interrupt. Although these days it was growing more and more difficult to distinguish soldiers from anyone else, a soldier was not the first guess one would make about Dicky Cruyer’s occupation. His curly hair was too bushy and he favoured faded designer denim, and the sort of tall elaborately decorated cowboy boots that he was wearing today.
In another part of the city, the Berlin offices were temporarily hidden behind a cocoon of scaffolding, and enjoying a long-overdue redecoration. To get away from the mating cries of construction workers, the regular clang and jangle of metal rods dropped from a height upon pavement and the pungent smell of paint, Frank was staying home and using the office he’d established in one of the upstairs rooms of his grand old Berlin mansion in Grunewald. None of the room lights were lit, and only a thin melancholy daylight filtered through the window shutters. The sombre light in the domestic surroundings, the stillness, and the silence into which the two men had fallen, produced a feeling that they shared some almost overwhelming sorrow into which I found it difficult to break. And now I waited for one or the other of them to speak.
I looked around. This was the mansion provided to Frank in his capacity of Rezident, and I had known this room since my father occupied that coveted post. There was the same buttoned leather bench, scarred, whitened and worn but as familiar as an old friend. The wall was adorned with the horned heads of various fleet-footed quadrupeds. It was difficult to believe that Frank had actually shot any of these mournful beasts, for Frank – despite his wistful attitude to the profession of arms – had always showed a curious antipathy for guns. Getting him to issue any sort of handgun was such a struggle that most of the field agents found it simpler to provide their own. Amid the trophies of the hunt there was a formal sepia-coloured portrait photo of the Queen. It hung immediately above a camphor-wood military chest upon which Frank Harrington’s ancient typewriter was enshrined; a totem of the ascendant role of paperwork in service to the Crown.
Unforgettably, it was also the day that the heating of Frank’s mansion suffered a failure that defied all the efforts of three determined heating engineers and now caused all three of us to be wearing our overcoats. The antique stove, six feet tall, standing in the corner clad with lovely old blue pattern tiles, had been coaxed into use for the first time in many decades. The comfort it gave was entirely illusory. Despite the efforts of Frank’s servants with bundles of kindling and screwed-up pages from Der Spiegel followed by the more inflammatory sheets of Die Welt, there was no sign of flame through its dull and discoloured mica door, but the distinctive aroma of burned paper made my nostrils twitch.
‘Your report is a masterpiece,’ said Frank, speaking as if this verdict was the result of long and deep reflection. He was sitting before the stove, stiff-backed on a small bentwood chair, wearing a smooth woollen herring-bone overcoat of such beautiful material and cut that, had I not known Frank so well, I might have suspected it as a reason for turning off the heat. ‘It will be incorporated into the lectures at the training school and some future Director-General will quote pages of it from memory.’ Such heavy sarcasm did not come naturally to Frank, who was avuncular, and by nature a healer of wounds rather than one to rub salt into them.
The ensuing silence was broken only by the sound of Dicky tapping his expensive fountain-pen against his still more expensive teeth. I recognized that look on his face: Dicky was thinking; lost in a world of dreams, plans and ambitions. Feeling that a reply was expected of me, and with Dicky’s recent promotion – albeit temporary – a living reminder that the Department was inclined to value effort above result, I said: ‘I spent a long time writing it.’
‘I’m certain of that,’ said Frank with a snort. ‘And I spent a long time reading it. The first time I read it, I marvelled. Here was a report seemingly reasoned, acute and reflective and informative.’
I said nothing. With a self-tormenting perversity that I suspected to be a product of his public school years, Frank, who was trying to give up smoking, was toying ceaselessly with the bright yellow oilskin pouch that contained his favourite tobacco and pipe.
‘I read it two or three more times,’ said Frank, as he stood up and dumped the pouch on the table. ‘To see the extent to which the whole thing is evasive, ambivalent and noncommittal.’
‘I try to be empirical,’ I said.
‘Imperious I would have said. Even when you meet a Lutheran pastor you call him “a man in clergyman’s clothes”. At what stage does cautious observation become evasion?’ Just because a large measure of Frank’s irascibility was due to the torment caused by his renunciation of tobacco, it didn’t make being the target of his bitter comments any more appealing. I looked at him with polite attention and said nothing.
Frank said: ‘Yes, I know you have been away. I know you feel you’ve been badly treated by the Department. That you resent not being told everything about the decision to send your wife across there as a double …’
‘Anything,’ I corrected him mildly. ‘I was not told anything.’
Dicky had been staring down into the garden and giving no sign of following Frank’s questioning or my responses. Now Frank paused long enough for Dicky to swing round and say: ‘For God’s sake! Need-to-know! That’s the essence of the business we’re in.’ He was wearing a short black leather overcoat, a double-breasted design complete with lots of buckles and buttons and shoulder straps. As he moved, the lining of bright red silk was revealed. It looked brand-new. I guessed he’d just bought it in one of those swanky men’s shops in the Ku-Damm; every visitor found time to visit them. ‘You’re supposed to be a secret agent, Bernard. How can you complain about the way secrets are guarded?’
I saw Frank make a paddling motion with a limp hand that was hanging at his side. It was a signal to Dicky to shut up and let him handle the situation. Frank said: ‘You are still judging us, Bernard. It’s not healthy.’
‘Not unless you would prefer being permanently behind a desk somewhere,’ drawled Dicky. Just in case I recognized that as the threat it was, he added: ‘You know what they are like in London,’ as if he had no say in postings and assignments.
‘I wish you would be a little more explicit,’ said Frank to me.
‘It was a set-up,’ I said.
‘Why not put you in the bag?’
‘Surely that’s what they were trying to do?’ I said.
‘The men in the car you fired the pistol at? Umm.’ Frank rubbed his chin as he thought