Len Deighton - XPD

Charles Stein was a happy man. The son of a Polish-born trade union official in the garment industry in New York City ’s West Side, Stein had grown up in a house where a strike meant a bare dinner table. In such times the young Steins were fed on left-overs from the table of their equally penurious next-door neighbours.

Charles had never shared the interest in books that his father had stimulated in his brother Aram, but that did not mean that he grew up illiterate. Charles-or Chuck, as he was more usually called at the garment factory where he was eventually employed as an assistant to a senior salesman-could find his way through an order book or an account sheet with the natural ease that some untutored men bring to the intricacies of horse-racing. And he was a generous boy who never begrudged the money that he paid each week into the family expenses, which in turn enabled his mother to send Aram cinnamon khvorost and some money to supplement his meagre scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. But Chuck was not entirely benign. From his father, Chuck Stein got an all-pervading hatred of Hitler and on Pearl Harbor day he joined the long line of men in Times Square who waited patiently to join the US army. So did his young brother.

Charles Stein’s political convictions had now faded, but his natural ability to read an account book remained. It was this facility, together with the unmistakable power of his personality and the energy that even his immense bulk could not disguise, that had made Stein the leader of the men who called themselves ‘the Kaiseroda Raiders’. In spite of the military etiquette, the nostalgia and the respect that all of them showed towards Colonel John Elroy Pitman the Third, every last man of them knew that the important decisions were made by Charles Stein. And they preferred it that way.

‘You’ll like the bau ,’ Charles Stein told his son. ‘They have shrimp inside. The chicken ones are not so tasty.’ He wiped his mouth on his napkin. That was the worst of eating ‘small chow’, one always got fingers and face covered in soy and sauce and bits of food. At least, Charles Stein always did.

‘I’ve had enough, thank you, dad. Why don’t you finish it?’

‘They’ll wrap it if you want to take it home.’

‘You have it, dad.’

‘I hate to see food wasted,’ said Stein. He wrestled with temptation. ‘I’ve had enough to eat really, but it’s a crime to see food wasted.’ He gulped a little of his jasmine tea and then filled the tiny cup again. ‘Paper-wrapped shrimp?’

‘No thanks, dad. I couldn’t eat another thing.’

‘These little eateries in Chinatown are the only places where you find the real thing. The Breslows took me to eat in a fancy Chink joint on La Cienega last Monday. Waiters in claw-hammer coats, finger bowls with lemon slices, linen bibs to protect your necktie, and everything. But at the end of the line, what have you got?’

Stein’s son shook his head to show that he didn’t know.

‘Chop suey. That’s what you’ve got,’ Charles Stein pronounced sagely. ‘Not these delicate little specialities that the cooks up here on North Broadway know how to put together.’

‘Is Breslow going to make that movie?’ said Billy.

‘He’s spending money on pre-production,’ said his father.

‘I’d like to see one of the majors getting involved in it. If Paramount or Universal put their machine into action… ’

Charles Stein reached for two paper-wrapped fried shrimps and put them in his mouth in rapid succession. He crunched them in his teeth and wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘What do you do, when you are not writing your column in Variety ?’ said Stein with his mouth full.

‘But I don’t write any… ’

‘It’s a joke, son,’ said his father wearily. Oh, my god, he had heard about the generation gap but this was the San Andreas fault! ‘If Breslow puts together a halfway decent little film, he’ll take the rough-cut round the world and get back his money four-fold, five-fold, maybe, and still have a piece of the equity. He couldn’t hope for anything like that if he takes this deal to the majors.’

‘Here, dad,’ said Billy. ‘I didn’t know you knew anything about movie financing.’

‘Movie financing is no different from any other kind of financing,’ said Stein. ‘Anyone who knows the difference between red ink and the black kind can understand the movie industry.’

‘You’re seeing a lot of the Breslows lately.’ A girl came into the restaurant. The dining room was large and crowded with local Chinese clients. The waitress seated her in a booth on the far side of the room. Billy Stein admired her tailored suit of cream-coloured silk, its yarn stubbed to make a texture in the weave. On the lapel there was a small gold brooch. The brightly coloured silk neckerchief completed the effect. She slid her large sunglasses up on to the crown of her head in order to scrutinize the menu and then looked at the tiny gold wristwatch on her suntanned wrist.

For a moment there was a pause in the activity. Staff and customers alike watched the beautiful young woman as she produced a packet of cigarettes from her handbag. An elderly Chinese waiter hurried forward to strike a match for her. She was out of place in this run-down restaurant on the wrong side of the freeway. She belonged down in the ‘golden triangle’ or at the Bel Air country club. But this was Los Angeles and even the sight of a radiantly beautiful woman does not halt business for more than a moment or two. The three dark-suited Chinese men in the next booth went back to discussing insurance, the two blue-shirted security men at the corner table took up again the issue of Dodger Stadium tickets, the barman finished mixing four vodka martinis and the Steins went back to the subject of Max Breslow.

‘I’ve been seeing a lot of the Breslows,’ said Charles Stein, ‘because I want to keep an eye on what the little son of a bitch is doing.’

Billy Stein took a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. The lenses were corrected for his vision and in spite of the coloured glass they gave him a better look at the young woman across the room. She was stunning, he decided. He flicked a couple of pastry fragments from the front of the faded blue denim jacket and glanced down to be sure that the large gold medallion was visible in the unbuttoned front of his shirt. He was wearing his favourite boots-light brown suede from Italy with criss-cross laces all the way up the front to the knees. The young woman must have noticed the movement for she looked up from the menu. He caught her eye but she looked away quickly. ‘I thought you were getting to like him.’

‘I said he was a good businessman,’ said Charles Stein, while chewing. He waved one of the little minced pork dumplings in a horizontal movement to show that his son had got it wrong. ‘That doesn’t mean I like him.’ He dipped the second dumpling into the dish of soy and put it into his mouth. ‘Means I got to watch out for what he might try to pull.’

‘For instance?’ said Billy.

‘Did it ever strike you, Billy, that if Breslow could get his hands on all the documents we got out of the mine, he wouldn’t need me?’

‘He wouldn’t need any of us,’ said Billy, still giving some of his attention to the woman, who was now ordering a meal. Perhaps she was not waiting for some companion after all, thought Billy. It was unusual for a woman so stylishly dressed to take lunch over here in Chinatown; for her to have come here to lunch alone was unthinkable. Even so…

‘Right,’ said Stein. ‘He wouldn’t need Colonel Pitman, wouldn’t need me. Wouldn’t need any of “the Raiders” for anything at all. And that would suit him very well because he doesn’t enjoy having me looking over his shoulder, and interfering with everything he’s doing and planning.’