Len Deighton - Berlin Game

Frank looked at me quizzically. 'For God's sake!' he said suddenly. 'You're not saying you don't trust me.' He stood up to face me and banged his chest with a flattened hand. 'This is Frank Harrington you're talking to. I've known you since you were a tiny tot.'

'Let it go, Frank,' I said.

'I won't,' said Frank. 'I told your father I'd look after you. I told him that when you joined the Department, and I told him it at the very end. I said I'd look after you, and if you're going over the other side, you're going to do it my way.'

I'd never seen Frank get so emotional. 'Let me think about it,' I said.

Tm serious,' said Frank. 'You go my way or you're not going.' It was a way of avoiding it, and for a moment I felt like taking the opportunity. 'My way or I'll veto it.'

From the hall I could hear Dicky telling the electrician that he was charging too much to fix the bell. Then Dicky put his head round the door and borrowed a fiver from me. 'It's the black economy,' explained Dicky as he took the money. 'You can only get things done if you pay spot cash.'

'Okay, Frank,' I said when Dicky had gone. 'We'll do it your way.'

'Just you and me,' said Frank. 'I'll get you over there.' He didn't promise to get me back again, I noticed.

'Dicky is keeping everything very tight,' I said. 'Did he tell you that?'

Frank was examining his oilskin pouch again to see how much tobacco he had left. 'You can't go wrong that way,' he said.

'Not even Bret,' I said.

'It's coming from someone,' said Frank. 'It's coming from someone with really good access to material.'

I didn't say anything. Such a remark from Frank was l è se-majest é and I could think of nothing to reply.

I looked at the clock over the fireplace and wondered aloud if that was really the time. I told Frank to come and have dinner with us some time, and he promised to phone if he could fit it in. Then I shouted goodbye to Dicky, who was still on the phone explaining that Daphne's folio of breakfast-food roughs was vitally important. It was a contention that someone on the other end of the phone seemed to doubt.

Of the Departmental safe houses in which to meet Giles Trent I had chosen the betting shop in Kilburn High Road. The girl behind the counter nodded as I came in. I pushed past three men who were discussing the ancestry of a racehorse, and went through a door marked 'staff only' and upstairs to a small front room. Its window overlooked the wide pavement, where a number of secondhand bathtubs and sinks were displayed.

'You're always in time for the coffee,' said Trent. He was standing at a wooden bench. Upon it there was a bottle of Jersey milk, a catering-size tin of Sainsbury's powdered coffee and a bag of sugar from which the handle of a large spoon protruded. Trent was pouring boiling water from an electric kettle into a chipped cup with the name Tiny painted on it in nail varnish. 'No matter how long I wait for you, the moment I decide to make coffee, you arrive.'

'Something came up,' I said vaguely. For the first time I could see Trent as the handsome man who was so attractive to Tessa. He was tall, with a leonine head. His hair was long and wavy. It was not greying in that messy mousy way that most men's hair goes grey; it was streaked with silver, so that he looked like the sort of Italian film star who got cast opposite big-titled teenagers.

'I really don't think it's necessary for us to go through this amazing rigmarole of meeting here in this squalid room.' His voice was low and resonant.

'Which squalid room would you prefer?' I said, taking a cup from those arranged upside down on the draining board of the sink. I put boiling water, coffee powder, sugar and milk into it.

'My office is no distance from yours,' said Trent. 'I come across to that building several times a week in the normal course of my work. Why the devil should I be making myself conspicuous in this filthy betting shop in Kilburn?'

'The thing I don't like about powdered coffee,' I said, 'is the way it makes little islands of powder. They float. You get one of those in your mouth and it tastes horrible.'

'Did you hear what I said?'

'I didn't realize you wanted an answer,' I said. 'I thought you were just declaiming about the injustice of life.'

'If you put the coffee in first, then poured the hot water on it a little at a time, it would dissolve. Then you put the cold milk in.'

'I was never much good at cooking,' I said. 'First of all, you are not nearly as conspicuous going into a broken-down betting shop in Kilburn as you like to think. On race days, that shop downstairs is crowded with men in expensive suits who put more on a horse than you or I earn in a year. As to your point that it would be better security procedure for us to meet in my office or yours, I can only express surprise at your apparent naiveté.'

'What do you mean?'

'Security from who?' I said. 'Or, as you might put it, from whom? What do you think is secure about meeting in that office of yours, with all those Oxford graduates staring at us with wide eyes and open mouths? You think I've forgotten the way I had a procession of chinless crustaceans coming in and out of your office the last time I was over there? Each one staring at me to see if people from SIS wore their six-shooters on the hip or in shoulder harness.'

'You imagine things,' said Trent.

'I do,' I said. That's what I'm paid to do: imagine things. And I don't need to spend a lot of tune imagining what could happen to you if things went sour with Chlestakov. You might be a world authority on making instant coffee but you'll be safer if you leave the security arrangements to me.'

'Don't give me that security lecture all over again,' he said. 'I don't want a twenty-four-hour guard on my home or special locks on the doors and windows.'

Then you're a bloody fool.' I said. We were both standing by the wooden table as we talked. There were only hard little wooden chairs in the room; it was more restful to stand up.

'Chlestakov didn't turn up,' said Trent. He was looking out the window, watching a young woman with a baby in her arms. She was stopping people as they walked past. Most of them walked on with tight embarrassed expressions on their faces. 'She's begging,' said Trent. 'I thought those days had gone for ever.'

'You spend too much time in Mayfair,' I said. 'So who came?'

'And no one gives her anything. Do you see that?'

'So who came?'

'To the meeting at Waterloo station? No one came.'

'They always send someone,' I said. 'And keep well back from the window. Why do you think we put net curtains up?'

'No one arrived. I did it exactly by the book. I arrived under the big four-faced clock at seven minutes past the hour. And then went back two hours later. Still no one. Then I went to the standby rendezvous.'

'Where was that?'

'Selfridge's food department, near the fresh fish counter. I did it exactly as arranged.'

'Moscow Centre like to stick to the tried and true methods,' I said. 'We arrested one of their people under that damned clock back in 1975.' I went to the window where he stood and watched the woman begging. A man wearing a dark raincoat and grey felt hat was reaching into his inside pocket.

'She's had luck at last,' said Trent. 'I wondered why she didn't stand outside Barclays Bank, but I suppose a betting shop is better.'

'Can't you spot a plainclothes cop when you see one?' I said. To beg or gather alms in a public place is an offence under the Vagrancy Act of 1824, and by having the baby with her she can be charged under the Children and Young Persons Act too.'

'The bastard,' said Trent.

'The plainclothes cop is there because this is a safe house,' I said. 'He doesn't know that, of course, but he knows that this is Home Office notified premises. The woman doesn't beg regularly or she'd have learned to keep clear of betting shops, because betting shops attract crooks and crooks bring cops.'