"Spy Hook" - читать интересную книгу автора (Deighton Len)

19

Having returned to London with the malicious drunken defamations of Dodo still ringing in my mind, I left a message for Cindy Prettyman or Matthews as, despite the Prettyman pension, she was determined to be known. She called back almost immediately. I expected her to be annoyed that I'd not contacted her earlier, but she had no recriminations. She was sweet and elated. Friday evening would be just fine for her. A hotel in Bayswater? Any way you want to play it, Cindy. Before I rang off, I heard the pips going. So she'd gone out of the office and called from a pay phone. Pay phone? And a hotel in Bayswater? Oh well, Cindy had always been a bit weird.

I had to talk to her. Dodo's various bombshells, whether true or entirely nonsense, made it all the more urgent. And delicate little assignments like nosing into the tight little empire of Schneider, von Schild and Weber was best done via the big anonymous facilities of the Foreign Office, rather than the parochial ones of my Department, where all concerned would know, or guess, that the request had come from me. I'd come out of it with a lot of explaining to do if any of Dodo's exotic allegations proved true.

'I hate the idea of you confiding in that woman,' said Gloria when I got home that night. 'She's so…' Gloria paused to think of the word, '… cold-blooded.'

'Is she?'

'When are you seeing her?'

'Friday evening, from the office.'

'Can I come?' said Gloria.

'Of course.'

'I'd be intruding.'

'No, do come along. She won't be expecting dinner. A drink, she said.' I watched Gloria carefully. In all our years together, my wife – Fiona – had never revealed a trace of jealousy or suspicion, but Gloria scrutinized every female acquaintance as a possible paramour. She especially examined the motives of unattached females, and those from my past. In all these respects Cindy loomed large.

'If you're sure,' said Gloria.

'You might have to close your ears,' I warned. I meant of course that there would be things said that I might later officially deny, that Cindy might later deny and that, if Gloria was going to be there, she'd have to be prepared to deny too. Deny on oath.

I think Gloria understood. 'I'll make a trip to the Ladies, that will give her a chance to say anything confidential.'

In the event Gloria decided not to come after all. I suppose she just wanted to see whether I'd say no, and how I would do it. I knew these little 'tests' she gave me were all part of her insecurity. Sometimes I wondered whether her plan to go to university was a test, designed to push me into a proposal of marriage.

Meanwhile, that Friday evening, I went to meet Cindy alone. It was just as well. Cindy was not in the best of moods. She was rather distracted, and it would not have improved her humour to see Gloria tagging along behind me. Cindy regarded her as a very junior civil servant who had come trespassing on the old friendship we'd once had.

'Your blonde interlude' is how Cindy referred to Gloria. It summed up what she thought of the relationship: its participants, its incongruity, its frivolity and its impermanence.

I let it go. She smiled in a fashion that both gave emphasis to what she'd said, and noted my passive acceptance of the judgment she'd passed. Cindy was an attractive woman, sexy in the way that health and energy so often are. But I'd never envied Jim. Cindy was too devious and manipulative and I was not good at handling her.

She was in a room on the second floor, sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette. Beside her there was a tray with a teapot and milk and cup – just one cup – and a big Martini ashtray with lots of lipstick-marked cigarette butts. Cindy's attempt to give up smoking seemed to have been abandoned. She asked me if I wanted a drink. I should have said no but I said I'd have a Scotch and I gave her the box with the photos of the tomb inscriptions and the deciphering attempts, or rather I tried to give it to her. She waved it away with a world-weary flick of splayed fingers. 'I don't want it.'

'Gloria said…'

'I've changed my mind. Keep it.'

'There's nothing there that will shed any light on Jim or his work,' I told her. 'I'll stake my life on that.'

She shrugged and touched her hair.

We wasted a lot of time getting the hotel staff to supply drinks, and while we waited we passed the time talking about nothing in particular. It was not my idea of an enjoyable evening out. Cindy had chosen the venue; The Grand amp; International, a seedy old hotel standing on the northern edge of Kensington Gardens, and hiding behind the Chinese restaurants of Queensway.

She'd coped with getting the room, paying in advance and arranging to occupy it without luggage and entertain a male visitor for an hour or so. I looked at her in her smart green and black plaid jacket and matching skirt. A boxy imitation fur coat was thrown across the bed. She wasn't tall and graceful in the way that Gloria was but she had a shapely figure and the way she was lounging across the pillows did everything to emphasize it. I wondered what they made of her downstairs at the desk. Or had reception clerks in this part of the town stopped wondering about their clients?

It was probably one of their best rooms, but it was a squalid place by any standards. A flyblown mirror surmounted a cracked blue china sink. The bed was big with a quilted headboard and grey sheets. Cindy said it was suitably anonymous but I think she was confusing anonymity with discomfort – many people did. But if 'The G and I', an amalgamation of two Victorian monoliths, was somewhere that Cindy was in no danger of seeing anyone she knew, the same could not be said for me.

I'd been in this place many times. I'd brought a lovely old Sauer automatic pistol to the bar there back in 1974. I'd sold it to a man named Max, who died saving my life during the last 'illegal' border crossing I ever made. It was a good little gun: its blueing had worn but it had been little used. At the time its double action was better than anything else manufactured, but I suspect that Max selected it because during the war it had been the favoured side-arm of high-ranking German officers. Max was as anti-Nazi as anyone I knew, but he had a healthy respect for their choice of weapons.

There was hardly a day went by when I didn't think of Max. Like Dodo, he had been one of 'Koby's Prussians', an American Prussian in this case, for Max was one of those curious men who drift from place to place and from job to job. And somehow the towns they go to are all troublespots, and the jobs they find are always violent and dangerous jobs, and usually illegal too. But Max was different to all the others, an ex New York police detective who fretted and worried and looked after everyone he worked with, especially me, the youngest member of his team.

Max had the most amazing memory for poetry, and his quotes ranged from Goethe to Gilbert amp; Sullivan librettos. I could usually keep up with his Goethe: 'Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?' but his Gilbert was what I always remembered him for:

'When you're lying awake with a dismal headache,

and repose is taboo'd by anxiety,

I conceive you may use any language you choose

to indulge in, without impropriety.'

and of course, sung with verve and derision, for Max was not an uncritical admirer of his British allies:

'For he might have been a Roosian,

A French, or Turk, or Proosian,

Or perhaps Ital-ian!

But in spite of all temptations

To belong to other nations,

He remains an Englishman!'

Some of Gilbert's phrases were too cryptic for Max. As the only Englishman with whom Max was regularly in contact, I was expected to decipher all the 'Britishisms' and explain such Gilbertian inexplicables as 'A Sewell amp; Cross young man, A Howell amp; James young man'. Poor Max, I never did find out for him.

And yet there was nothing so inexplicable as Max himself. He was his own worst enemy, if my father was to be believed, but my father detested Max. In fact he detested 'Lange' Koby and all of what he called 'the American freebooters' in Berlin. That's why my father stayed clear of them.

'Are you listening, Bernard?' I was jolted from my memories by Cindy.

'Yes, Cindy, of course I am.' I suppose I hadn't nodded and smiled frequently enough while listening to her small-talk.

'I'm going to Strasbourg,' she said suddenly, and she had all my attention. With the cigarette still in her hand, she made a movement that left a thin trail of smoke. Then she touched her hair; it was shiny and curly and looked as if she'd been to the hairdresser. Her hair always looked like that.

'On holiday?'

'God-a-mercy! Don't be stupid, Bernard. Who would go to Strasbourg on holiday?' She waved the cigarette in the air, and a long section of ash fell on the bedcover.

'A job?'

'Don't be so dense, Bernie. The bloody European Parliament is there, isn't it?' As if angry about the marked bedcover, she stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray, pushing it down in a punitive action that deformed its shape and left it bent and broken.

'And that's who you'll be working for?' I wondered why the hell she hadn't mentioned it earlier, when we'd been talking about the weather and how difficult it was to get seats for the Royal Opera House unless you knew someone. But then I realized that she didn't want to tell me until I'd had a drink.

'The pay is terrific and I'll have no trouble selling my place in London. The estate agent is putting an ad. in next Sunday's papers. He says I'll have hordes of people after it. He said that if I spent a bit of money on the kitchen and bathroom he could get another fifteen grand but I just don't have the time.'

'I see.'

'You're not interested, I suppose?'

'Interested in what?'

'What's wrong with you tonight, Bernie? Are you interested in buying my house? I'd sooner it went to a friend.'

'I've just moved,' I said. 'I couldn't go through packing and unpacking again.'

'Yes. I forgot. You're in the sticks. I couldn't live in the suburbs again. It's a slow death.'

'Yes, well, I'm not in a hurry,' I said. I felt as if I'd just been given a swift kick in the guts. I'd come here believing that Cindy was even more determined than I was to get to the bottom of the mystery, and now I found she wasn't interested in anything but selling her bloody house. Tentatively, and keeping Dodo out of it, I said, 'I think I might have had a breakthrough on the matter of the German bank account.'

She had started rummaging through the expensive crocodile handbag that never left her side. 'Good,' she said looking down into the handbag and showing little or no interest in anything I might have discovered.

I persisted. 'I hear it's a bank called Schneider, von Schild and Weber. I found it in the Berlin phone book. We'll need more details.'

'I'll be in Strasbourg as from the end of next week.' From the handbag she brought her pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter.

'That's damned sudden.'

Without hurrying she lit her cigarette, blew a lot of smoke high into the air and said, 'Sir Giles put my name in.'

'Creepy-Pox strikes again.'

She gave a fixed smile to show that she didn't think it was amusing but wasn't going to make an issue of it.

'It's a plum job. The vacancy came up out of the blue. That's why I got it. The fellow there now has AIDS. Two others shortlisted for the job are both family men with children at school. They wouldn't move at such short notice. No, I have to be there next week.'

I swallowed the angry words that first came to mind and said, 'But the last time we talked, you said that no one was going to shut you up. You said you weren't going to let it go.'

'I've got my life to lead, Bernard.'

'So now you want me to forget it?'

'Don't shout, Bernie. I thought you'd be pleased and wish me good luck. I'm not telling you what to do, Bernie. If you want to continue and solve your whodunnit I'm not going to stop you.'

Patiently and quietly I said, 'Cindy, this isn't a whodunnit. If it's what I think it is – what we both think it is – it's the biggest KGB penetration of our department ever.'

'Is it?' She didn't give a damn. It was as if I was talking to a stranger. This wasn't the woman who'd vowed to uncover the truth about the murder of her ex-husband.

'Even if I'm wrong,' I said, 'we're still talking about embezzlement on a mammoth scale: millions!'

'I thought the same at first,' she said very calmly and very condescendingly. 'But when you consider it more carefully, it's difficult to sustain the notion that there's some gigantic financial swindle, and that the D-G is in on it.' She smiled one of her saccharine smiles to emphasize the absurdity of that suggestion.

'The D-G has virtually disappeared.' I was exaggerating only slightly; he was very seldom in the office these days.

'Is the disappearance of the D-G all part of this plot?' she said with that same stupid smile on her face.

'I'm not joking, Cindy,' I said. Only with considerable difficulty did I resist telling the stupid bitch that she was the one who'd started all this. And she was the one who set up this discreet meeting and used a pay phone to do so.

'I'm not joking either, Bernie. So just answer my question: are you saying there is a conspiracy in which Bret Rensselaer, Frank Harrington, the Deputy and maybe Dicky Cruyer are all implicated?'

It was such an absurd misrepresentation of anything I'd ever thought that I didn't know where to start refuting it. I said, 'Let us suppose that just one really irreproachable individual…'

'The D-G,' she said, like a particularly haughty member of the audience choosing a card for an amateur conjuror.

'Okay. For the sake of argument, let's say the D-G is a party to some big swindle. Surely you see that the structure of the Department is such that no one would believe it. Frank, Dicky, Bret and all the others would simply stand firm and say everything's fine.'

'And you're the little boy telling the Emperor he has no clothes?'

'Just because everyone says there is nothing wrong, we shouldn't refuse to examine it more closely. Strange things happen in the place where I go to work. I'm not talking about the Ministry of Education or the Department of Health and Social Services, Cindy. I'm talking about the place the rough stuff is arranged.'

'If you want my advice…' She slid off the bed and stood up. Having eased her shoes half off her feet she squeezed back into them, putting all her weight on first one foot then the other. 'You should stop beating your head against a brick wall.'

'You make it sound like I enjoy beating my head against a brick wall.'

She smoothed her lapels and reached for her coat. 'I think you want to destroy yourself. It's something to do with Fiona leaving you. Perhaps you feel guilty in some way. But all those theories you dream up… I mean, they never come to anything do they? Don't you see that inside you there is some kind of worm that is eating you up? I suppose you desperately want to believe that all the world is wrong, and only Bernard Samson is right.' She snapped her handbag lock closed. 'Forget all this crap, Bernard. Life is too short to rectify all the world's wrongs. It took me a long time to see that, but from now on I live my life. I'm not going to change the world.'

'There's one small thing you could do before you go to Strasbourg.'

'Not before I go, and not after I get there either. I don't want to know, Bernie. Do I have to draw a diagram for you?'

I looked at her and she stared back. She was not in any way hostile, not even tough. She was just a woman who'd made up her mind. There was no way to change it. 'Okay, Cindy. Have a good time in Strasbourg.'

She smiled, visibly relieved by my friendly tone of voice. 'God willing, I'll find some nice young sexy Frenchman and get married.' She drew the window curtain aside to see if it was raining. It was. She buttoned up her coat. 'Do you want to buy the Mercedes, Bernard? Dark green 380 SE. It's only two years old; it does twenty-five to a gallon.'

'I can't afford it, Cindy.'

'That's on the motorway, of course. In town, more like twenty.' When she got to the doorway she stopped. Just for a moment I thought she was going to say she'd help after all but she said, 'The steering is on the wrong side for the Continent, and I can buy a tax-free car when I'm there, so I'll have to sell it.'

We walked down the stairs in silence. When we got to the brightly lit foyer she stopped and delved into her handbag until she found a white plastic rain hat. There was no one there, even the reception desk was unmanned. Cindy walked over to look in the mirror and be sure her hair was tucked away. 'Everything else I'm taking with me,' she said while looking at herself in the mirror. 'Furniture and TV and video and hi-fi. That sort of thing is very expensive in France.'

'Your TV won't work in France,' I said. They have a different system.'

She didn't look at me. She turned and pushed the main door open and went out into the night without saying goodbye. The heavy doors slammed behind her with a soft thud. She thought I was trying to annoy her.

It was a long walk to where I'd left the car. The street was noisy and crowded with people and cruising traffic of all kinds. Young couples, skinheads, punks, freaks, whores of all sexes, cops and robbers too. Painted faces whitened under the bright neon. I found my car still in one piece. No sooner had I pulled away from the kerb than another car was taking my place in the narrow parking slot.

The rain got heavier. My old Volvo stuttered and choked in the heavy downpour. Maybe they didn't have rain in Sweden. So I thought about Cindy's Mercedes all the way home: British racing green; paintwork waxed so that even Mr Gaskell approved, and a Vee-eight engine. I wondered what she was asking for it.

When I got to Balaklava Road the downstairs lights were out. The children were in bed and nanny was watching a TV play in her room. Gloria wasn't there. I'd forgotten that she'd changed the night for visiting her parents to Friday. She probably never had the slightest intention of joining me and Cindy for our little drink and discussion in town. Gloria knew she could depend upon me to forget which evenings she went out.

I opened a tin of sardines and a bottle of white burgundy. I put a tape of Citizen Kane in the video and ate my supper from a tray on my knees. But I spent all the time thinking about Bret Rensselaer's anger, Jim Prettyman's murder, Dodo's diatribe and Cindy Matthews' sudden change of mind.

By the time Gloria got home I was in bed. I wasn't surprised that she was late. I guessed that it was something to do with this 'crisis' that her mother said threatened their marriage.

Whatever domestic crisis she'd attended, Gloria didn't arrive back low-spirited. In fact she was bubbling with excitement. I knew what she'd be like even before she came into the house. Her old yellow Mini could only just be fitted into the space between the kitchen and the fence to which our neighbour's cosseted wistaria clung. Even then it meant squeezing out on the passenger side. This tricky feat was not something that Gloria always felt willing to attempt, but on this night I heard her bump over the kerb and, with no slackening of speed, on to the garden path and stop with a squeal of brakes. She gave the accelerator a little jab of satisfaction before switching off the ignition. I could visualize the smile on her face.

'Hello, darling,' she said as she tiptoed into the bedroom still carrying the plastic bag that I knew contained one of her mother's Hungarian walnut cakes and a tub of home-made liptoi cheese, pickles and all sorts of other things that her family felt she needed regular supplies of when not living at home. 'How was Mrs Prettyman?'

'Suddenly silent.'

Gloria looked at me, trying to read the expression on my face. 'Has someone put a gun at her head?'

I laughed. 'Right,' I said. 'A golden gun. Suddenly she's been offered a plum job with the Strasbourg bureaucrats, lots of money, little or no tax. God knows what else.'

'You don't think…'

'I don't know.'

'I wouldn't like to be trying to bribe her,' said Gloria.

'Because she'd ask for more than you had to offer?'

'No, I don't mean that. I just think she'd be touchy. I'd worry that she might write it all down and take it to the newspapers.'

'It's just a soft job in Strasbourg,' I said. 'Not even the reporters from the tabloids could make that into a bribe, unless Cindy declared herself so incompetent that the offer was ridiculously inappropriate.'

'I suppose so.' She put the bag of Hungarian delicacies on the dressing table and began to undress.

'What is it?' I asked, for she had the sort of self-satisfied grin on her face that usually meant I'd done something careless, like locking the cat in the broom closet or absent-mindedly picking up the milkman's money and putting it in my pocket.

'Nothing,' she said, though I could tell by the wanton abandon with which she disrobed and threw aside her clothes that there was some kind of joke to share. But I thought it would be something about her parents or the latest about the egregious Dodo, who'd now been given temporary rent-free use of a comfortable little house near Kingston on Thames.

'That bank,' she said as she got between the sheets and huddled against me. 'Guess who owns that bank?'

'Bank? Schneider, von Schild…'

'And Weber,' she supplied still grinning at her cleverness and at the joke that was to come. 'Yes, that's the bank, my darling. Guess who owns it.'

'Not Mr Schneider, Mr von Schild and Mr Weber?'

'Your precious Bret Rensselaer, that's who.'

'What?'

'I knew that would bring you fully awake.'

'I was already fully awake.'

'At least, it belongs to the Rensselaer family.'

'How did you find out?'

'I didn't have to raid the Yellow Submarine darling. It's public knowledge. Even German banks have to make ownership declarations. My teacher at the Economics class got it from an ordinary data-bank listing. He phoned me back in half an hour and had its history.'

'I should have checked that out.'

'Well, you didn't; I did,' she chuckled like a baby.

'You're such a clever girl,' I said.

'So you've noticed?'

'That you're a clever girl? Yes, I've noticed.'

'Don't do that… at least, don't do it yet.'

'The Rensselaer family?'

'Are you ready for the details? Hold on to your hat, lover, here goes. Back in 1925 a man named Cyrus Rensselaer bought shares in a California bank group. Bret and his brothers worked for them, I guess they had directorships or something. I can get more details… Then, sometime in the Second World War, the old man died. Under the terms of his Will the shares went into a trust, of which Bret's mother was the beneficiary. In a complicated share issue and merger in 1953 the Californian bank became a part of Calibank (International) Serco which began large-scale buying of other banks. One shareholding they acquired gave them a majority holding in Schneider, von Schild and Weber.'

'Anything else?'

'Anything else, he says! My darling, you're insatiable. Has anyone ever told you that?'

'I plead the Fifth Amendment,' I said.