Len Deighton - XPD

He was sitting at the back of the pizza parlour. It was typical of Willi to choose such a place for a meeting, a ‘ Treff ’ he would have called it; he had never really stopped fighting the War. Max Breslow looked round him with a shudder. The plain wooden tables and uncomfortable benches were, littered with paper plates, the remains of a pizza and salad and some Coke cups. It was not the sort of place that Max Breslow would have chosen for a meeting. At the sides of the eating room there were a dozen coin-in-the-slot amusements, most of them with video screens and warlike themes. ‘U-boat-Commander’, ‘Blitzkrieg’, ‘Dive Bomber’ or ‘Panzer Clash’, from each of the machines in use there came the electronic bleeps of ricocheting bullets and the continual rat-a-tat of simulated machine-gun fire. This was the war we won, thought Max Breslow, this war that came after the war.

‘Max, it’s good to see you again.’ Willi Kleiber was sitting behind a pile of plates and had obviously enjoyed his meal. It was the nearest thing he could get to dining in a foxhole, thought Max Breslow.

‘Hello, Willi. You’re looking well.’ On a big screen in the corner there was an old scratchy silent film being shown. A fat man in a black suit and top hat sat at a table, while an obsequious waiter set a vast meal before him. Max Breslow looked away. He hated silent comedies.

‘I came straight from the airport. I don’t sleep very well on these long-distance flights.’

There was a roar of childish laughter. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, Max Breslow realized that the other side of the restaurant was crowded with small children.

‘Get some coffee,’ said Willi.

Max got a paper cup from the counter and the youthful assistant poured weak black coffee into it. Breslow returned to the table and sat down, carefully avoiding the shredded lettuce and spilt ketchup. Willi Kleiber reached into his back pocket and produced a silver hip flask. With a furtiveness that he clearly relished, Willi Kleiber poured a measure of brandy into Max Breslow’s coffee. It was always like this. And every time they met they went through the same ritual. It was like meeting a stranger, thought Breslow, rather than someone he had seen only a few weeks ago. Perhaps that was what they were: not friends or old comrades, simply two strangers who met often.

‘Your family are well?’ Kleiber asked.

‘Marie-Louise loves California,’ said Breslow with automatic politeness. ‘And so does my daughter Mary.’

‘And you, Max?’

‘There are things I miss, Willi, but the sunshine works wonders for my old joints. And what about your family? Still well?’

‘My father is very old, Max. He is tired and in pain.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Breslow. ‘I remember your father well. He was a fine old man.’

‘My father’s life ended in 1945, Max. The war is the only thing he ever wants to talk about. Now he is forgetting even that.’

Max Breslow could see the movie screen out of the corner of his eye. In spite of all his resolutions about old films, he shifted his position slightly to see it better. The camera position had just changed to show that the man sitting down to dinner in the top hat was on a railroad track which stretched to the horizon. Breslow said, ‘But your mother is quite well?’ It cut to a locomotive in mid-shot, under-cranked to make it seem as if the train was speeding at 200 miles an hour.

‘Thank God,’ said Willi. He had his back to the screen. He always sat facing the door, Max remembered that now. They said he had been wounded in a restaurant in Athens during the war. Some passerby had thrown a grenade.

‘We have a lot to be thankful for,’ said Breslow.

Kleiber put some more brandy into both cups of coffee. It was like a ceremony. Only after these preliminaries would it be possible to have the real conversation.

‘A lot of things have happened,’ explained Kleiber. ‘I thought it was best to come myself.’

‘I’m surprised you found me at the workshops,’ said Breslow. ‘You have lost none of the old skills, Willi.’

Kleiber had been an Abwehr officer. He had made his name infiltrating a French underground network in 1942. Later the Abwehr had been taken over by the SS intelligence service and Willi’s subsequent career included many incidents of which he never spoke. ‘There has been a bad failure of security,’ said Kleiber. ‘Some youngster gained access to the big new FRÜHLING computer that Dr Böttger’s bank have installed in Hanover. He went right through all the security checks and was retrieving data from the zweiter Fall , something the experts said was impossible.’

‘Experts!’ said Breslow. ‘A couple of years in the movie business and you’d no longer listen to the experts.’

‘They say it would have been impossible from anywhere in Germany,’ said Kleiber, ‘but some bloody fool asked the programmers to insert a simplified series of “keys” for retrieval from overseas. It was to save the bank money, Max! How do you like that? Forty million Deutschemarks that damned computer cost the bank, and some idiot simplifies the security in order to save a few Pfennigs in telephone charges.’

‘What did they discover?’

‘It was a German-a clerk in the London office-who decided to try his hand at getting as far as he could into the secrets.’

‘What did he get?’

Kleiber nodded to acknowledge the repetition of the question. ‘He found his way right into Operation Siegfried.’

‘Good God, Willi!’

‘I told them not to use that code name.’

‘Operation Siegfried,’ said Breslow. ‘It was a foolish choice. The name smells of the Third Reich.’

‘They are old men,’ said Kleiber. ‘Old men become romantic. They do not readily face up to the realities we face.’

Intuitively, Max Breslow began to realize what Kleiber was about to tell him. ‘You had this boy killed?’

‘What alternative was there, Max? He had all the names and addresses. He knew the way in which all the banks and our companies were working together. He had the details of the trust fund from which we are financing the work.’

‘Sometimes a man can read such material without understanding its import.’

Willi Kleiber studied the bottom of his coffee cup and then, without replying, went across to the machine at the counter and took the coffee pot off the hot plate. He poured more for himself as he planned his reply. ‘It’s easy to be critical afterwards, Max. But that boy had already placed a long-distance call from London to the Stein house here in Los Angeles. He couldn’t get a person to person, so finally he left a brief message on Stein’s answering machine.’

‘I know all about that,’ said Breslow. ‘I used the musical tone to intercept the stored calls. I know all about that.’

‘Do you?’ said Kleiber with mock surprise. ‘You were behaving as if you had forgotten it.’ Kleiber turned round so that he could see the movie. There was too much light in the room, and the images on the screen were muddy and blurred. A locomotive roared through the picture, scooping up the man in the top hat, but in the subsequent close-up he was still eating. The camera shot widened to show that he was seated astride the cow-catcher, the table and table cloth still in position and his elaborate meal undisturbed.

‘You said the killing of the Britisher from Washington would be the end of it,’ said Breslow. ‘You tried to kill the Englishman Stuart, and wiped out the wrong man. It was a bad business, Willi. And killing Stuart would have solved nothing. I hope you realize that.’

‘It’s easy to be clever afterwards,’ said Kleiber. ‘Don’t tell me you are losing your nerve, Max. I knew that the others would squeal like stuck pigs the moment the business started, but I depended upon you for support.’