Len Deighton - XPD

‘Breslow?’ The corridor stretched to infinity and the doors were set close together. Puny doors on flimsy hinges which, with a little extra effort, Charles Stein could have ripped away.

‘No.’ Adolf Hitler, dressed in a well-cut grey jacket and plain black trousers, shook his head. ‘No,’ he said again.

The next room was little different. Adolf Hitler was admiring himself in a full-length mirror. He waved Stein away with an imperious hand. ‘Breslow!’ shouted Stein, his voice echoing in the narrow corridor. In the next room, a third Adolf Hitler was tying a shoelace. Charles Stein slammed the door very hard. A voice complained loudly from somewhere at the other end of the building.

The fourth Adolf Hitler was sitting slumped in his chair. He did not respond to Breslow’s name. The fifth was crouched over a table, staring closely at a mirror as he combed his hair over his forehead and positioned it with a long squirt of hair spray. The sixth Adolf Hitler was applying make-up, touching his cheeks with greasepaint and rubbing it carefully into the surrounding colouring. Dozens of bare yellow bulbs outlined his reflection, so that another Führer touched foreheads with this one. And the images-reflected from one mirror to another-made a long golden tunnel peopled with Adolf Hitlers, their balletic gestures synchronized to perfection.

‘Breslow!’

A thousand Hitlers stood up and glared at Stein, raising their hands mockingly in mute salute to him.

‘Breslow!’ Stein’s voice was so loud that it made the thin hardboard walls of the dressing room rattle as they echoed back the sound of it. ‘Breslow!’ It was more like a cry for help than a threat. ‘Breslow!’ shouted Stein again. He was beginning to realize that Max Breslow controlled a thousand Führers. It was Breslow he would have to finish off. Breslow had become the focal point of all Stein’s anger, sadness and frustration. Through the painful haze of his concussion, he blamed Breslow for everything from Aram ’s death to that of Colonel Pitman.

‘I’m coming to get you, Breslow!’ Stein shouted again.

‘Close that door!’ called the make-up assistant, ‘Every kook in town is auditioning for this Hitler role,’ he muttered. ‘And that fat guy toting the old gun has got to be the noisiest ham in the building.’

‘The moustache is coming off again,’ Hitler told him quietly. ‘Will you give me a little more of that gum?’

Max Breslow had counted the days to when he would first enter the studio and see the Reich Chancellery set. First and foremost came his anxieties about the film itself. This was the most expensive set and it was important that, in the jargon of the trade, its ‘production value’ got to the screen. He ran his hands across the twenty-foot-high doorway of simulated green marble. Over the entrance Adolf Hitler’s initials were carved into a gigantic shield. Max Breslow pushed open the mahogany doors to the Führer’s study, remembering the two black uniformed SS guards with their white gloves and impeccable jackboots who used to stand there.

Yes, this was it. Nearly a hundred feet wide and fifty feet across, with dark red marble walls nearly forty feet high. Max Breslow had often been in the Führer’s study. He remembered the great cofferwork ceiling of rosewood and Lenbach’s full-length portrait of Bismarck over the marble fireplace. Facing him there were the windows that gave on to the colonnade and the Chancellery garden. Once the big lights were illuminating the trees and shrubs and the painted background, it would all come to life. All the batteries of photographic lighting were dark and idle, for the time being there was only the feeble studio lighting that enabled the technicians to see their way round the set. And yet this too helped to bring the place alive for Breslow, for there was an artificiality to film lighting, a whitewash effect which even the best-designed sets could never survive. This shadowy place was more like the one he had once known. Breslow reached out to the silk-shaded light on the Führer’s desk and switched it on. It was ‘practical’, and its light shone across the Gobelin tapestry on the wall. Breslow had never lost his admiration for the technicians who were able to produce such convincing imitations of woods and metals. He looked at the Führer’s desk inlaid with leather. The set dresser had prepared everything for tomorrow, the first day of shooting. The green blotter, the telephone, some reference books and the pen set had all been faithfully copied from old photographs taken by the propaganda service soon after the new Chancellery was built. Breslow went round the desk and sat down to survey the set from Hitler’s high-backed brown leather chair. Often, when bringing messages to the Führer, back in those exciting days of the war, he had wondered what it would be like to sit here seeing the world from the point of view of the man who had changed it out of all recognition. Well, now he knew. From Hitler’s point of view, the world consisted largely of that huge painting of Bismarck at the far end of the room. Was it the daily sight of Otto von Bismarck which had provoked Hitler into ever greater excesses? Had it driven this mad fool to the final smash-up?

Max Breslow sat for a long time, lost in contemplation of the events which had taken him from the Reich Chancellery and brought him in a complete circle back to it again. Staring into the gloom of his imposing set, Breslow’s eyes moved down from the Bismarck portrait to the armchairs grouped round the fireplace below it. He leant forward to stare into the darkness.

‘It’s me,’ said the voice of Charles Stein. ‘It’s me, Breslow. I knew you’d come.’

Breslow stood up. He felt his heart beating at abnormally high speed. ‘What the devil do you want? I thought you were dead.’

‘I’m going to kill you, Max. I’ve been waiting here a long time. I’ve been waiting to kill you. That’s what kept me alive, Max.’

Breslow reached for the carved wooden armrest to steady himself. He was frightened by the tone of Stein’s voice. There was some quality in the voice that persuaded Breslow immediately that he was in earnest. Breslow held tight to the arm of the chair and felt the palm of his hand sweaty under his grip. There was not much light here. He could only just see the gross shape of Stein slumped in the big armchair, his crumpled white suit visible against the dark red marble wall behind him. Breslow had mistaken the white shape for a dust sheet thrown over some genuine piece of antique furniture.

‘It’s too late now,’ said Breslow. ‘The papers are destroyed. The Jaguar burnt.’

‘I know,’ said Stein. ‘I lost every last penny I had in that auto… Bearer bonds: two million dollars’ worth of them.’

Breslow inched along the edge of the Führer’s desk. He had always thought that desk absurdly out of proportion to the human scale and now, as he moved along it, it seemed as long as a football field.

‘Just stay exactly where you are,’ Stein called. Now that Breslow’s eyes had become more accustomed to the darkness he could see that Stein was not sprawled back in the armchair; he was crouching forward. Breslow continued to move sideways only a fraction at a time. He knew that the left side of the desk was in line with the double doors behind it. He had remembered that from the real thing, and from the photographs he had given the set dresser. Now he prayed to God that the technicians had placed everything exactly the way the research indicated that it had been. At last he could get his left hand to the chamfered corner that surmounted the massive leg.

‘You’re moving,’ called Stein loudly. It was a good-natured complaint of the sort that children might use when playing the game of ‘statues’. Breslow strained his ears and fancied he heard the distant sound of a police-car siren. It was no more than a stifled whine but then sometimes they only used the siren just before crossing the intersections, and cut it off until they got to the next one.