Len Deighton - XPD

Charles Stein rubbed his face. The memory ended as he intended it should. Perhaps some of the details were wrong but it did not matter.

Delaney said, ‘Petrucci was the sergeant-the machine gunner-who was coming towards us up the hill, just about the time Major Carson got killed. Petrucci-short guy, big black moustache, gold rings on his ringers-stayed with us all during the retreat.’

‘Retreat,’ said Stein. ‘Is that what we’re calling it nowadays?’

‘His brother is a lawyer, a mob lawyer, in New Jersey. Petrucci retired and lives in Phoenix. He’ll know the people you’ll have to talk to.’ Delaney opened a drawer in his desk and found an address book. He turned to the name Petrucci and held the book open while Stein wrote down the details. Stein noticed that Delaney did not let him look at the other pages, or even handle it.

‘You’re a pal,’ said Stein.

‘Then do me a favour,’ said Delaney. ‘Don’t tell him I gave you the address, huh?’

‘And you’ve got good operatives tailing Stein’s son?’ asked the West Coast section head. He wanted to show that he knew what he was doing. The case officer yawned.

‘Good guy; ex-LAPD cop. Not much chance Billy Stein will show him anything new.’ He interlocked his fingers and stretched his arms out in front of him until the joints cracked. That it was a gesture of both boredom and disdain was registered by the section head. He was not popular.

‘Just one man?’

‘I didn’t get into this business yesterday,’ said the CO. ‘I’ve allocated five good men for Stein and another five for Max Breslow. They’re working two turns, two guys per shift, with the fifth man for relief and emergencies. It’s costing us more than we can afford. We can’t keep it going for ever.’

‘Local people?’

‘Not all of them, but they all know the city well enough.’

‘I feel sure Stein and Breslow have those damned papers here in town. Stein was able to take that Dr Morell file to show Stuart at fairly short notice. I think that means they have everything close by.’

‘Could be anywhere,’ said the CO. ‘Stein went to Geneva last month. We don’t know where he went in Switzerland. Could be that’s where he has the papers. His son Billy has a plane and he spends a lot of time down in Mexico, fooling around with that twelve-metre sailing boat. The documents might be somewhere south of the border, might even be on the yacht.’

The CO shifted in his seat. They had been in the car a long time by now and he was becoming uncomfortable. He watched a radio car drive slowly down the street; the cops eyed the passing crowds with careful and suspicious concentration.

‘Not on the boat,’ said the section head after the police car had passed them. ‘Not unless they have split the documents into more than one lot. The boat wouldn’t hold them. The report I saw describes the load as two large packing cases full.’

‘But maybe not all documents,’ said the CO. ‘Stein got suddenly rich after the war; I’d guess that there was also gold and stuff in the trucks that Stein helped to steal. The documents were probably a disappointment to them at the time.’

‘Disappointment, yes, I suppose so.’

‘The kind of disappointment I need once in a while,’ said the CO enviously.

‘Who did you say he’ll be talking to in this club?’

‘The owner is Jerry Delaney, a smooth-talking crook who’s into everything from porno movies to stolen fruit machines. Suspected of mob connections.’

‘In the army with Stein, you say?’

‘We’re not certain of that. London won’t let us dip into the Washington computer, you know, not even unofficially. But they are both about the same age; so it’s probable.’

‘I don’t think we’re going to get anything out of this,’ said the section head. ‘Let’s tell the people in the other car to take over. I’m sure that Stein will stay in that club all evening and then drive home and go to bed. I promised to phone London tonight with a situation report.’

‘I’m inclined to agree,’ said the case officer. ‘Let’s call it a day.’ But before they did anything about it, a grey Pontiac double-parked alongside them and a young man jumped into the rear seat of their car.

‘Hello, Santos,’ said the CO. The man grinned. He was a dark-skinned youth with an Afro hair-do and a long moustache which drooped over the ends of his mouth. He was wearing a rock-and-roll T-shirt and a football jacket.

‘ Santos is monitoring the tap on the Stein and Breslow phones,’ the controller explained to the section head.

‘A call to Stein,’ said the youth. ‘A call timed at 8.30. A man named Bock called him from London.’

‘Who answered? Billy Stein?’

‘Billy Stein took off for Ensenada. He phoned the Breslow girl but he got nowhere with that proposition, so he took his T-bird and headed south. We have a tail on him.’

‘So who answered?’

‘No one. The message went on to the answering machine. I’ve got a transcript here.’ He was holding a piece of paper. ‘But you probably would sooner hear the essence of it.’

‘Yes.’

‘This guy Bock works for a German bank in London. Says he has life and death information about the documents-papers, he said on the phone, but that’s got to be the documents, right?’

The case officer nodded.

‘Bock wants to talk to Stein but he’s acting very nervous about his contact number. We have a secretarial service number. Bock says to leave a message there.’

‘Could be a chance for us,’ said the CO. He looked at the section head quizzically. The section head nodded.

The CO said, ‘On an answering machine, is it? Could you wipe it clean, Santos?’

‘Not without getting inside the Stein place, and his home is pretty well equipped with bolts and locks. Stein’s got a lot of valuable carpets and stuff in there. You can bet the insurance company have approved the burglarproofing.’

‘I smell this as being something of a break for us,’ said the CO.

‘I think we must try to get inside the Stein home and wipe it clean,’ said the section head. ‘I’ve arranged a high-security phone call to Stuart on Sunday evening.’

‘You want us to try getting into the Stein place?’ said the youth.

‘Let’s think about that for a moment. Stein might not even take the messages off the machine when he gets home tonight.’ The youth leant forward between the front seats. ‘Yeah, and he might be taking the messages off his tape right now. He has one of those musical codes that enables him to read back his own messages from any phone. Why don’t we take Stein off the street while we try to clean the tape?’

‘How?’

‘It doesn’t have to get rough,’ said the youth. ‘I could fix it so that the highway patrol pick him up for drunk driving and put him in jail all night.’

‘Highway patrol? What makes you think he’s going out of town?’

‘The CHP has jurisdiction on the freeways that criss-cross the whole of Los Angeles,’ explained the CO patiently to his visitor. ‘It would be unlikely-if not impossible-for Stein to go home without using them.’ The section head nodded his agreement.

‘Get on to it,’ said the CO.

The youth got back into the Pontiac and disappeared in the direction of Inglewood.

‘If anyone can fix it, Santos can,’ said the CO. ‘You can reckon on Charlie Stein being out of operation for the rest of the night. Early tomorrow morning I’ll try and get a telephone repairman into the Stein home.’

The phone connection that Boyd Stuart used in London to speak to Los Angeles was the highest priority ‘crypto-ciph B’. The crypto-ciph network (A for America, B for Britain) is a scrambler phone. The encryption machines take the varying frequencies of the human vocal chords and, converting them first into fluctuating electrical current, use computer technology to rearrange each fraction of sound, a microsecond at a time, into new patterns. At the other end, similar machinery reconstructs the impulses and recreats a facsimile of the original sounds. Although the American National Security Agency owned and operated the network, they were so far not able to decipher intercepted conversations without knowing the day’s code. Thus London advised Boyd Stuart to use the ‘crypto-ciph B’ to speak to his contact clerk.