Len Deighton - Spy Hook

'I wondered about that,' I said.

'He knows about chemistry. It amuses him to reproduce the pigments, and age the wood and the other materials. He's awfully clever.'

The old man stirred again and put a hand to his head where he'd banged it in falling. 'Oh my God!' he groaned.

'You're all right,' I told him.

'He can't hear you; he's talking in his sleep,' said Gloria. 'You do that sometimes.'

'Oh yes,' I scoffed at the suggestion.

'Last week you woke up. You were calling out crazy things.' She put an arm round me in a protective gesture.

'What things?'

'They're killing him; they're killing him.'

'I never talk in my sleep,' I said.

'Have it your own way,' said Gloria. But she was right. Three nights in a row I'd woken up after a nightmare about Jim Prettyman. 'They're killing Jim!' is what I'd shouted. I remember it only too well. In the dream, no matter how urgently I shouted at the passers-by, none of them would take any notice of me.

'Look at these photos,' said Gloria, unrolling some old prints that had been curled up on a cluttered side-table. 'Wasn't he a handsome young brute?'

A slim youthful athletic Dodo was in a group with half a dozen such youngsters and an older man whose face I knew well. Three of them were seated on wicker chairs in front of a garden hut. A man in the front row had a foot upon a board that said The Prussians'.

'Probably a tennis tournament,' explained Gloria. 'He was a wonderful tennis player.'

'Something like that,' I said, although I knew in fact that it was nothing of the kind. The older man was an old Berlin hand named John 'Lange' Koby – a contemporary of my father – and his 'Prussians' were the intelligence teams that he ran into the Russian zone of Germany. So Dodo had been an agent.

'Did Dodo ever work with your father?' I asked her.

'In Hungary?' I nodded. 'Intelligence gathering?' She had such a delicate way of putting things. 'Not as far as I know.' She took the photo from me. 'Is that a team?'

'That's the American: Lange Koby,' I said.

She looked at the photo with renewed interest now that she knew that they were field agents. 'Yes, he's much older than the others. He's still alive isn't he?'

'Lives in Berlin. Sometimes I run into him. My father detested Lange. But Lange was all right.'

'Why?'

'He detested all those Americans who Lange ran. He used to say, "German Americans are American Germans." He had an obsession about them.'

'I've never heard you criticize your father before,' said Gloria.

'Maybe he had his reasons,' I said defensively. 'Let's go.'

'Are you sure Dodo will be all right?'

'He'll be all right,' I said.

'You do like him, don't you?'

'Yes,' I said.

At that first meeting I did like him: I must have been raving mad.

'It went well, I thought,' Dicky Cruyer said with a hint of modest pride. He was carrying illustration boards and now he put them on the floor and leaned them against the leg of his fine rosewood table.

I came into the room still trying to read the notes I'd scribbled during the babble, indignation and dismay that were always the hallmark of Tuesday mornings. I wasn't giving my whole attention to Dicky and that was the sort of thing he noticed. I looked up and grunted.

'I said,' Dicky repeated slowly, having given me a good-natured smile, 'that I thought it all went very well.' I must have looked puzzled. 'In the departmental get-together.' He tapped the brass barometer that he'd lately added to the furnishings of his working space. Or maybe he was tapping the temperature, or the time in New York City.

'Oh yes,' I said. 'Very well indeed.'

Well, why wouldn't it go to his satisfaction? What Dicky Cruyer, my immediate boss, called a 'departmental get-together' took place in one of the conference rooms every Tuesday morning. At one time it took place in Dicky's office, but the German Station Controller's empire had grown since then: we needed a larger room nowadays because Tuesday morning had become a chance for Dicky to rehearse the lectures he gave to the indefatigable mandarins of the Foreign Office. It was usually a mad scramble of last-minute paper-work but today he'd used satellite photos and had pretty coloured diagrams – pie-charts, stacked bars and line-graphs – prepared in the new 'art department' and an 'operator' came and put them on the projector. Dicky prodded the screen with a telescopic rod and looked round the darkened room in case anyone had lit a cigarette.

The get-together was also the opportunity for Dicky to allocate work to his subordinates, arbitrate between them and start thinking about the monthly report that would have to be on the Director-General's desk first thing on Friday morning. That is to say he got me to start thinking about it because I always had to write it.

'It's simply a matter of motivating them all,' said Dicky, sitting at his rosewood table and straightening out a wire paper-clip. 'I want them to feel…'

'Part of a team,' I supplied.

'That's right,' he said. Then, detecting what he thought might be a note of sarcasm in my voice, he frowned. 'You have a lot to learn about being part of a team, Bernard,' he said.

'I know,' I said. 'I think the school I went to didn't emphasize the team spirit nearly enough.'

'That lousy school in Berlin,' he said. 'I never understood why your father let you go to a little local school like that. There were schools for the sons of British officers weren't there?'

'He said it would be good for my German.'

'And it was,' conceded Dicky. 'But you must have been the only English child there. It made you into a loner, Bernard.'

'I suppose it did.'

'And you're proud of that, I know. But a loner is a misfit, Bernard. I wish I could make you see that.'

'I'll need your notes, Dicky.'

'Notes?'

'To do the D-G's report.'

'Not much in the way of notes today, Bernard,' he said proudly. 'I'm getting the hang of these Tuesday morning talks nowadays. I improvise as I go along.'

Oh my God! I should have listened to what he was saying. 'Any rough notes will do.'

'Just write it the way I delivered it.'

'It's a matter of emphasis, Dicky.'

He threw the straightened wire clip into his large glass ashtray and looked at me sharply. 'A matter of emphasis' was Dicky's roundabout way of admitting total ignorance. Hurriedly I added, 'It's so technical.'

Dicky softened somewhat. He liked being 'technical'. Until recently Dicky's lectures had been a simple resume of the everyday work of the office. But now he'd decided that the way ahead was the path of hi-tech. So he'd become a minor expert – and a major bore – on such subjects as 'photo-interpretation of intelligence obtained by unmanned vehicles' and 'optical cameras, line-scan and radar sensors that provide monochrome, colour, false-colour and infra-red imagery'.

'I think I explained it all carefully,' Dicky said.

'Yes, you did,' I said and bent over far enough to flip through the cardboard-mounted pictures he'd used, in the hope that they would all be suitably captioned. To some extent they were: 'SLRR sideways-looking reconnaissance radar' the first one said, and there was a neat red arrow to show which way was up. And 'IRLS infra-red line scan photo showing various radiometric temperatures of target area at noon.

Notice buildings occupied by personnel, and the transport vehicles at bottom right of photo. Compare with photo of same area at midnight.'

'Don't take that material away with you,' Dicky warned. 'I'll need those pictures tomorrow, and I promised the people at Joint Air Reconnaissance that they'd have them back in perfect condition: no fingerprints or bent corners.'

'No, I won't take them,' I promised and slid the illustrations back in place. I was hopeless at understanding such things. I began to wonder which one of Dicky's staff, present at this morning's meeting, might have remembered his discourse well enough to recapitulate and explain it to me. But I couldn't think of anyone who gave Dicky their undivided attention during the Tuesday morning meetings. Our most assiduous note-taker, Charlie Billingsly, was now in Hong Kong and Harry Strang, with his prodigious memory, had artfully contrived an urgent phone call that granted him escape just five minutes into Dicky's dissertation. I said, 'But you used to be strongly opposed to all this stuff from JARIC, and the satellite material too.'