Len Deighton - Spy Hook

'You've got him. White hair now but that's him all right. He's been sick. Real bad. An auto accident somewhere in Europe. Mrs O'Raffety brought him here. She had that guest house remodelled and fixed up a beautiful room with equipment where he could do his special exercises and stuff. He could hardly walk when he first arrived. One or other of the therapy nurses comes up here every day, even Sunday.' He looked at the expression on my face. 'You knew him in Europe, maybe?'

'I knew him very well,' I said.

'Isn't that something.' Buddy Breukink nodded. 'Yeah, he's some kind of distant relation to Mrs O'Raffety. Old Cy Rensselaer – the famous one they named the automobile for – was Mrs O'Rafferty's grandfather.'

'I see.' So Bret Rensselaer really was still alive and they'd brought me all this way to see him. Why?

We ate lunch very late. Mrs Helena O'Raffety didn't eat much. Perhaps she'd had lots of other lunches earlier in the day. But she kept her salad scared, moving it around the huge pink plate like a cop harassing a drunk.

'I'm a European,' she said. She'd been explaining that she was, at heart, quite unlike her native Californian friends and acquaintances. 'When I was very young I always said that one day I'd buy a little apartment in Berlin, but when I got there, it seemed such a sad place. And so dirty. Everything I wore got sooty. So I never got around to it.' She sighed and this time speared a segment of peeled tomato and ate it.

'It gets cold in Berlin,' I told her. I looked at the sun glittering on the blue water of the pool beside us and the brightly coloured tropical flowers. I smelled the wild sage, breathed the clean air off the ocean and watched the hawks slowly circling high above us. We were a long way from Berlin.

'Is that right?' she said exhibiting only mild interest. 'I've only been twice; both times in the fall. I always take vacations in the fall. It stays warm and the resorts are not so crowded.' As if to offset the simplicity of her blue cotton beach dress she wore lots of jewellery: a gold chain necklace, half a dozen rings and a gold watch with diamonds around the face. Now she touched the rings on her fingers, twisting them as if they were uncomfortable, or perhaps to make sure they were all still there.

From the garage at the back there was the sudden sound of the Wrangler being started and gunned impatiently. I'd got used to Buddy Breukink's manner by now and I recognized his touch. Varoom, varoom, varoom, went the engine. Mrs O'Raffety looked up to the sky with a pained expression. It wouldn't require an overdeveloped imagination to see suppressed rage in just about everything that Buddy did.

'They quarrelled about the education of my little grandson Peter.' No need for her to say who she was talking about. 'Buddy has his own ideas but my daughter wants him brought up in the Jewish faith.' She drank some iced tea.

I was fully occupied with the elaborate 'lobster salad' that had been put before me. Every salad vegetable I'd ever heard of- from Shütaki mushrooms to lotus root – made a decorative jardiniere for half a dozen baby lobster tails in rich mayonnaise. On a separate pink plate there was a hot baked potato heaped with sour cream and garnished with small pieces of crispy bacon. Salads in California are not designed for weight-loss. I looked up from my plate. Mrs O'Raffety was looking at me quizzically. She waited until I nodded.

'It's solely a question of the female line,' she explained, prodding at a radish that rolled over and escaped. 'My mother was a Jew, so I am a Jew. Therefore my daughter is a Jew and so her son is a Jew. Buddy just can't seem to understand that.'

'Perhaps,' I ventured, 'it's difficult to reconcile with a mother-in-law named O'Raffety.'

She looked at me with a stern expression I'd noticed when she was swimming. Her eyes were glacial blue. 'Maybe it is,' she conceded. 'Maybe it is. Mind you, I'm not strict. We don't eat kosher. You can't with Mexican kitchen staff.'

'And where is your little grandson now?'

'In Florida. Last week Buddy was taking lunch with a private detective. I'm frightened he's got some plan to take the child away somewhere.'

'Kidnap him?'

'Buddy gets emotional.'

'But he's a lawyer.'

'Even lawyers get emotional,' she said, dismissing the subject without entirely condemning such emotion. As the sound of Buddy's jeep receded she went back to the subject of being European. 'I was born in Berlin,' she told me. 'I have relatives in Berlin. Maybe one day I'll seek them out. But then I ask myself: who needs more relatives.' She toyed with a pack of Marlboro cigarettes, and a gold lighter, as if trying to resist temptation.

'You came to America as a child?'

She nodded. 'But lost the language. A few years back I started taking German lessons, but I just couldn't seem to get the hang of it. All those bothersome verbs…' She laughed. 'More wine?'

'Thank you.'

She plucked the bottle from the bucket. 'A friend of mine – not far from here – makes it. His Chablis is excellent, the rose is good – wonderful colour – but the red doesn't quite come off so I keep to the French reds.' She poured the remainder of the wine into my glass. She called all white wines Chablis; everyone in California seemed to do that.

'What about you, Mrs O'Raffety?' I said. She never invited me to call her by her first name and I noticed that even her son-in-law addressed her in that same formal way, so she must have liked being Mrs O'Raffety. She had, I suppose, paid enough for the privilege.

'I take only half a glass. Chablis affects the joints you know, it's the uric acid.'

'I didn't know that.'

The bottle dripping from the ice water, had made her fingers wet. Fastidiously she dried her hands on a pink towel before touching the cigarettes again. 'You're easy to talk to,' she said, looking at me through narrowed eyes as if my appearance might explain it. 'Did anyone ever tell you that? It's a gift being a good listener. You listen but show no curiosity; I suppose that's the secret.'

'Perhaps it is,' I said.

'You can't imagine how excited Bret was to hear you were actually coming.'

'I'm looking forward to seeing him again.'

'He's with the physiotherapist right now. Miss a session and he's set back a week: that's what the doctor says, and he's right. I know. All my life I've suffered with this darn disc of mine.' She touched her back as if remembering the pain.

When I finished the lobster salad a servant magically appeared to remove the plates to a side-table: mine totally cleaned and Mrs O'Raffety's still laden with food.

'Do you mind if I smoke, Mr Samson?'

The Mexican servant – a muscular middle-aged man with the tight skin and passive face of the Indian – waited for her orders. There was not only a dignity about him, there was an element of repressed strength, like a fierce dog that was awaiting the order to spring.

I felt like inviting Mrs O'Raffety to call me Bernard, but she was the sort of woman who might decline such an invitation. 'It's your home,' I told her.

'And my lungs. Yes, that's what Buddy tells me.' She gave a throaty little laugh and tugged a cigarette from the pack on the table. The servant bent over and lit it for her. 'Now Mr Samson: fresh strawberries? Raspberries? Cook's home-made blueberry pie? What else is there, Luis?' There was something disconcerting about the way that California 's menus defied the strictures of the seasons. 'The pies are just gorgeous,' she added but didn't ask for any.

When I'd decided upon blueberry pie and icecream, and the silent Luis had departed to get it, Mrs O'Raffety said, 'You'll notice the change in him. Bret, I mean, he's not the man he used to be.' She looked at the burning tip of her cigarette. 'He'll want to tell you how tough he is, of course. Men are like that, I know. But don't encourage him to do anything stupid, will you?'