Len Deighton - Spy Hook

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 & 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 & Cross young man, A Howell & 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!'