Len Deighton - Mexico Set

When they were ready to count the money, Zena went to the table to watch the man piling the hundred-dollar bills on the table. I went to watch too. They were used notes; 250 of them in each thick bundle. They were held together by heavy-duty red rubber bands into which torn scraps of paper had been inserted with '$25,000' scrawled on each of them. There were ten bundles.

Perhaps in some other bank, in some other town, the money might then have been passed across the table. But this was Mexico and these were men well accustomed to the mistrust that peasants show for bankers. It all had to be counted a second time note by note. Despite Pepe's fumbling, it took only a few minutes.

When he'd finished counting, Pepe opened a cupboard to get a cardboard box for the money. There were many other boxes, of all shapes and sizes, stacked in the cupboard. On the side of this box it said 'Flat fillets of anchovies 50 tins – 2 oz.' I wonder who first discovered that fifty tins of anchovies fit into exactly the same space as a quarter of a million dollars. Or vice versa.

Perhaps I should have given more attention to Pepe's nervous manner and to the clumsiness he showed in handling the notes but I was too concerned with the prospect of Zena departing with the money before Stinnes arrived. I looked at my watch and I looked at the clock on the wall. Stinnes was late. Something had gone wrong. All my professional intuition said leave, and leave right away. But I stayed.

While Pepe was putting strapping-tape on the box, Zena went to the window. She was holding back the edge of the blind to see down into the square when Pepe told me and Tiptree to put our hands on our heads.

'I'm sorry,' said Pepe, whose drawn white face, the stubble of tomorrow's beard already patterning his chin, bore a frown of desolate unhappiness. 'I'm doing only what I must do.'

Tiptree, despite his excellent Spanish, did not understand Pepe's soft instruction.

'Put your hands on your head,' I said. 'Do as he says.' Even then I think Tiptree would not have understood except that he saw me put my hands on my head. 'Someone got here ahead of us.'

'Your friends?' said Tiptree, looking round the room.

'How I wish they were,' I said. But I had no time for Tiptree's stupid suspicions. I was trying to decide what role the old man with the shotgun was playing in this business, and whether the two boys with him were armed.

Now Zena also had her hands on her head. She'd been pulled away from the window in case her shadow on the blind was seen by someone in the street. 'What's happening?' said Zena.

It was then that a burly, dark-suited man came from the next room. Beside him there was a Mexican boy with a machine-pistol. I didn't like machine-pistols. Especially cheap machine-pistols like this one. Hoping to survive a false move against a man with a machine-pistol was like shouting abuse at a man with a garden hose and hoping not to get wet. I looked at it carefully. It was a Model 25, a Czech design that dated from the time before they changed over to Soviet calibres. An old, cheap gun, but the boy liked waving it around, and he kept the metal stock folded forward to make this easier to do.

I recognized the dark-suited man from the night I'd spent at Bieder-mann's house. It was Stinnes's companion, the man who called himself Pavel Moskvin; the 'fink' – a tough-looking fifty-year-old with a cropped head and the build of a debt-collector. 'You,' he said to me in his abominable German. 'You make sure your friends know that no one will harm them if they do as they are told.'

'What's it all about?' I said.

He looked at me but didn't answer. 'Tell them,' he said.

Zena and Tiptree had heard for themselves. Tiptree said, 'Is this your doing, Samson?'

'Don't be stupid,' I said. 'It's a KGB stake-out. They are waiting for Stinnes. They might leave us out of it if we behave.'

'What will they do?' said Tiptree. 'Are they going to kill him?'

I shrugged. We could only wait and see. The door-buzzer sounded, and Moskvin nodded to tell Pepe to open the spy-hole.

Pepe looked through and after a brief muttering through the hatch said it was a woman who wanted to change some US one-dollar bills into Mexican money. 'Do you recognize her?' Moskvin asked Pepe.

'We have a lot of people asking for change: waiters, hotel workers, shop workers. I don't know. I can't see much through the hatch.'

'Tell her to return tomorrow. Say you've run out of money.' Moskvin's Spanish was even worse than his German. To get a job in the Soviet foreign service with so little aptitude for languages, a man would have to be a very loyal Party supporter.

Pepe sent the woman away and then we all settled down to wait. It was a nerve-racking business. Moskvin had prepared it well. It was the right place. He had all the evidence he needed to nail Stinnes, and this way he'd have the dollars too. There was nothing the KGB liked better than rubbing our noses in it. I cursed Tiptree for changing the rendezvous. It wouldn't have been so easy for Moskvin out there in the dark crowded square.

I looked at Pepe. His business made it unlikely that he had Communist Party connections. Probably the KGB had had Tiptree under observation when he came here to make arrangements about the money.

In such a situation almost everything is guesswork. I guessed the old man was the regular guard for the bank, simply because he did not look like the sort of tough whom Moskvin would bring in. And I guessed from the way he held the double-barrelled gun that Moskvin had removed the shells. And the despondent expressions of the faces of the young boys and the envy with which they eyed the machine-pistol convinced me that they were unarmed. I could take the old man and the kids, I could probably handle Moskvin at the same time, but the machine-pistol tilted the balance.

I kept my hands on my head and tried to look very frightened. It was not difficult, especially when I saw the way the kid with the machine-pistol was flourishing it and caressing the trigger lovingly. 'I want everyone to remain still,' said Moskvin. He said it frequently and in between saying it he was looking at his wrist-watch. 'And stay away from the windows.'

Pepe made a harmless move to get a handkerchief from his pocket. Moskvin was angry. He punched Pepe in the back with a force that knocked him to his knees. 'The next person to move without permission will be shot,' he promised, and gave Pepe a spiteful kick to emphasize this warning.

There were just the two of them, it seemed, and it was unlikely that they had worked together before. One machine-pistol and probably some kind of handgun in Moskvin's pocket. Against them, one person alone would stand little chance.

I looked round the room, deciding what to do when and if Stinnes pressed the buzzer. They'd have to open the door because otherwise the steel door-lining would both protect and hide him. Did they have someone downstairs in the bar, I wondered. Or someone outside in the street to watch for Stinnes's arrival. The crowded bar would make a perfect cover.

I looked at the three partners, the three guards and the two women clerks who'd been brought in from the next room. They all kept their hands on their heads, and they all had that patient and passive visage that makes the people of Latin America so recognizably different from the Latin people of Europe.

It was while I was musing on this question that I heard the bang of the downstairs door. Under normal circumstances the sounds of footsteps on the staircase would not have been audible, but the circumstances were not normal; everyone in the room was wound up tight.

The boy with the machine-pistol pulled the bolt back to cock the gun for firing. There was a dick as the sear engaged the sear-notch in the bolt. It was enough to snap some mechanism within Zena's mind. 'You promised,' she shouted. 'You promised not to hurt him.'