Len Deighton - Spy Hook

'That's just speculation,' I said and waited to see if he'd say it wasn't.

'Why ask Zena?' His face was distorted as he bit his lip with rage and anxiety. 'He has his own people to do that kind of work.'

'Yes,' I admitted.

'It's Bizet. He's trying to reopen a contact string.'

'She'll be all right, Werner,' I said. I sympathized with Werner's anger but I'd been at the sharp end of operations. From the field agent's point of view it sometimes looked like good sense to send legitimate travellers such as Zena into these touchy situations. They are told nothing, so they know nothing. Usually they get away scot-free.

My apparent indifference to Zena's plight made him angrier than ever but as usual he smiled. He leaned back on the sofa and stroked the house-phone as if it was a pet cat. From the street outside there was the growling sound of the long-distance buses that had to turn into a narrow sidestreet to get to the bus terminal. 'I want you to do something,' he said.

'What do you want me to do?'

'Get her out,' he said. His fingers were twitching on the phone. He reached for the handpiece, called reception and, without asking me what I wanted to eat, told them he wanted the restaurant dinner sent round for us. He spoke rapidly into the phone ordering two portions of the very good salmon mousse and a couple of fillet steaks – one rare and one well done – and whatever went with it. Then he put the phone down, turned and looked at me. 'It's getting late,' he explained, 'the kitchen will close soon.'

I said, 'You don't really want the Department to bring her out, do you? From what you've told me, there's nothing to suggest she's in any kind of danger. I imagine Frank just asked her to make a couple of phone calls, or knock at a door. If I go rushing in to the office demanding a full-scale rescue attempt, everyone will think I've taken leave of my senses. And, quite honestly Werner, it might be putting Zena into a worse position than she is.' What I didn't add was that there was no chance at all that Dicky, or anyone in authority at the office, would countermand Frank's actions on my say-so. It sounded as if Frank had been made 'file officer' and his word would be law.

'How dare Frank ask Zena to help him?' Was that the real focus of Werner's rage: Frank Harrington? They'd never seen eye to eye. Even before Frank stole Werner's wife, he'd eased Werner out of the Berlin Field Unit. Now there was no way to convince Werner that Frank was what he was: a very experienced departmental administrator, and an archetypal 'English gentleman' who not only knew how to attract adventuresome young women but often fell prey to them.

And I could hardly tell Werner that his wife should have learned to stay away from Frank by now. So I said, 'When is she due back?'

'Monday.' He touched his beard. Glenn Gould finished playing but after a couple of clicks Art Tatum started. Werner liked the piano. In the old days he used to play at all the most rowdy Berlin parties. Seeing him now it was difficult to believe the things we had done in Berlin back in those days when we were young.

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

Unconvinced by my reassurances he nodded without replying, and studied his glass of mineral water suspiciously before taking a sip of it. We sat for a moment in silence. Then he looked at me, gave me a little shrug and a smile and, noticing that my glass was empty, he got up and went to the refrigerator and brought more wine for me.

I watched him carefully. There was more to it – some other aspect to the story – but I didn't press him for more details. His anger had peaked. It was better for him to simmer down.

There was a tap at the door and – like some sort of well rehearsed cabaret act – a uniformed man from the reception desk helped a restaurant waiter to set up two folding chairs, a folding table, and an array of tableware. There were steaks and some spinach keeping warm on a chafing dish. The portions offish mousse, which the waiter insisted upon showing us, were under the heavy dome-shaped silver covers that are always needed to keep microscopic portions of food from escaping.

It wasn't until they'd gone and we were seated at the table eating the mousse that Werner mentioned Zena again. 'I love her. I can't help that, Bernie.'

'I know, Werner.' The salmon mousse was sinking into a puddle of bright green sauce; a pink, tilted slab with fragments of vegetable looking out of it, like passengers waiting for a rescue boat. I ate it quickly.

'So I worry,' said Werner, and he shrugged in a gesture of resignation. I felt sorry for him. It wasn't easy to imagine being in love with Zena. That some man might murder her, or join the Foreign Legion to escape her, was simple to envisage. But love her: no. 'She's the only woman for me.' He said it defensively, almost apologetically.

Sometimes I think he loved her because she was incapable of loving anyone. A friend of mine once explained the lifetime he'd given to the study of reptiles by saying that he was fascinated by their complete lack of any response to affection. And I think Werner's relationship with Zena was like that. She seemed to have no real feelings about anyone alive or dead. People were all the same for her, and she dealt with them by means of a curious highly developed sense of self-imposed and carefully apportioned 'justice' that some of her critics had called 'fascistic'.

But it was no use talking to Werner about Zena. For him she could do no wrong. I remember him falling in love with girls at school. His love was boundless; the respect he showed for them usually earned only their withering contempt, so that eventually Werner's ardour faded and died. So I thought it would be when Zena came along. But Zena wasn't so profligate with Werner's love. She welcomed his affection, she encouraged him and knew how to handle Werner so that she could do almost anything with him.

Werner picked at the fish mousse. It was dry and completely tasteless, only the creamy watercress sauce had any flavour. It was salty. 'Refrigerated and then warmed in a micro-wave,' said Werner knowledgeably. He pushed the mousse aside and started on the steak as I'd already done. 'It looks as if you liked the mousse,' he said accusingly.

'It was delicious,' I said. 'But I'm beginning to think that this is your well-done fillet.' By that time I'd already eaten some of his steak. Silently he passed the untouched underdone one to me and took what was left of the steak I'd half-eaten. 'Sorry, Werner,' I said.

'You eat everything,' he said. 'Even at school you ate everything.'

'You won't like the underdone one,' I told him, and offered it back to him.

He declined. 'I know,' he said.

To change the subject I said, 'How is the hotel?'

'It's going all right,' he said sharply. Then he added, 'Did I tell you that that damned woman Ingrid Winter insists on coming to Berlin?'

'She wants some things,' I said, keeping it vague.

'She wants to help,' said Werner as if it was the direst threat in his vocabulary.

'Tell her you don't need help.' It seemed simple enough.

'I can't stop her coming. She's Lisl's niece…'

'… and she has a claim on the house. Yes, you'd better be nice to her, Werner, or she could upset the whole apple-cart.'

'Just as long as she doesn't get in the way,' he said ominously. Werner was in a bad mood.

I decided I might as well face it. He wasn't going to simmer down. 'Are you going to tell me about Zena?' I said as casually as I could.

'Tell you what?'

'You're not worried about what could happen to her for knocking on the wrong door in Frankfurt an der Oder, Werner. Not Zena, she'd talk her way out of that one with a paper bag over her head.'

He looked at me with that impassive look I knew so well and then chewed a piece of steak before replying. 'I should have given you some red wine,' he said. 'I've got some for you.'