Len Deighton - Billion-Dollar Brain

‘You,’ said Dawlish removing his spectacles and ending the discussion, ‘are the one best protected against cold.’

Old Montagu Street is a grimy slice of Jack-the-Ripper real-estate in Whitechapel. Dark grocers’ shops, barrels of salt herring; a ruin; a kosher poultry shop; jewellers; more ruins. Here and there tiny groups of newly painted shops carry Arabic signs as a fresh wave of underprivileged immigrants probes into the ghetto. Three dark-skinned children on old bicycles pedalled away quickly, circled and stopped. Beyond the tenements the shops began again. One, a printer’s, had fly-specked business cards in the window. The printed lettering had faded to pale pastel colours and the cards were writhing and twisting with bygone sunlight. The children made another sudden sortie on their bicycles, leaving arabesques in the thin skin of snow. The door was stiff and warped. Above my head a small bell jangled and shed dust. The children watched me enter the shop. Inside the small front office there was an ancient counter, topped with a slab of glass. Under the glass were examples of invoices and business cards: faded ghosts of failed businesses. On a shelf there were boxes of paper clips, office sundries, a notice that said ‘We take orders for rubber stamps’ and a greasy catalogue.

As the bell echoes faded a voice from the back room called, ‘You the one that phoned?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Go on up, luv.’ Then very loudly in a different sort of voice she screamed, ‘He’s here, Sonny.’ I opened the counter-flap and felt my way up the narrow stairs.

At the rear, grey windows looked down upon yards cluttered with broken bicycles and rusty hip-baths all painted with a thin film of snow. The scale of the place seemed too small for me. I’d wandered into a house built for gnomes.

Sonny Sontag worked at the top of the building. This room was cleaner than any of the others but the clutter was worse. A table with a white plastic surface occupied much of the room. On the table there were jam-jars crammed with punches, needles and scrapers, graving tools with wooden mushroom heads that fit into the palm of the hand, and two shiny oilstones. Most of the wall space was filled with brown cardboard boxes.

‘Mr Jolly,’ said Sonny Sontag, extending a soft white hand that gripped like a Stillson wrench. The first time I ever met Sonny he forged a Ministry of Works pass for me in the name of Peter Jolly. Since that day, with a faith in his own handiwork that typified him, he always called me Mr Jolly.

Sonny Sontag was an untidy man of medium height. He wore a black suit, black tie and a black rolled-brim hat which he seldom removed. Under his open jacket there was a hand-knitted grey cardigan from which hung a loose thread. When he stood up he tugged at the cardigan and it came a little more unravelled.

‘Hello, Sonny,’ I said. ‘Sorry about this rush.’

‘No. A regular customer should expect special consideration.’

‘I need a passport,’ I said. ‘For Finland.’

Looking like a hamster dressed in a business suit, he lifted his chin and twitched his nose while saying ‘Finland’ two or three times. He said, ‘Mustn’t be Scandinavian, too easy to check the registration. Mustn’t be a country that needs a visa for Finland because I haven’t time to do a visa for you.’ He wiped his whiskers with a quick movement. ‘West Germany; no.’ He went humming and twitching around the shelves until he found a large cardboard box. He cleared a space with his elbows, then just as I thought he was going to start nibbling at the box he tipped its contents across the table. There were a couple of dozen mixed passports. Some of them were torn or had corners cut and some were just bunches of loose pages held together with a rubber band. ‘These are for cannibalizing,’ explained Sonny. ‘I take out pages with visas I need and doctor them. For cheap jobs – the hoop game fn1– no good for you, but somewhere here I have a lovely little Republic of Ireland. I’d have it ready in a couple of hours if you fancy it.’ He scuffed through the mangled documents and produced an Irish passport. He gave it to me to look at and I gave him three blurred photos. Sonny studied the photos carefully and then brought a notebook from his pocket and read the microscopic writing at closer range.

‘Dempsey or Brody,’ he said, ‘which do you prefer?’

‘I don’t mind.’

He tugged at his cardigan, a long strand of wool fell away. Sonny wound it quickly round his finger and broke it free.

‘Dempsey then, I like Dempsey. How about Liam Dempsey?’

‘He’s a darling man.’

‘I wouldn’t attempt an Irish accent, Mr Jolly,’ said Sonny, ‘it’s very difficult the Irish.’

‘I’m joking,’ I said. ‘A man with a name like Liam Dempsey and a stage Irish accent would deserve all he got.’

‘That’s right, Mr Jolly,’ said Sonny.

I got him to pronounce it a couple of times. He was good with names and I didn’t want to go around mispronouncing my own name. I stood against the measure on the wall and Sonny wrote down 5?, 11?, blue eyes, dark-brown hair, dark complexion, no visible scars.

‘Place of birth?’ inquired Sonny.

‘Kinsale?’

Sonny sucked in a breath of noisy disagreement. ‘Never. Tiny place like that. Too risky.’ He sucked his teeth again. ‘Cork,’ he said grudgingly. I was driving a hard bargain. ‘OK Cork,’ I said.

He walked back around the desk making little disapproving sounds with his lips and saying, ‘Too risky Kinsale,’ as if I had tried to outsmart him. He pulled the Irish passport towards him and then turned up the cuffs of his shirt over his jacket. He put a watchmaker’s glass into his eye and peered closely at the ink entries. Then he stood up and stared at me as though comparing.

I said, ‘Do you believe in reincarnation, Sonny?’ He wet his lips and smiled, his eyes shining at me as though seeing me for the first time. Perhaps he was, perhaps he was discreet enough to let his clientele pass unseen and unremembered. He said, ‘Mr Jolly, I see men of all kinds in my establishment. Men to whom the world has been unkind and men who have been unkind to the world, and believe me they are seldom the same men. But men do not escape the world except by death. We all have our appointments in Samarra. That great writer Anton Chekhov tells us, “When a man is born he can choose one of three roads. There are no others. If he takes the road to the right, the wolves will eat him up. If he takes the road to the left he will eat up the wolves. And if he takes the road straight ahead of him, he’ll eat himself up.” That’s what Chekhov tells us, Mr Jolly, and when you leave here tonight you’ll be Liam Dempsey, but you won’t discard anything in this room. Destiny has given all her clients a number’ – he swept a hand across the numbered cardboard boxes – ‘and no matter how many changes we make she knows which number is ours.’

‘You’re right, Sonny,’ I said, surprised at mining a rich vein of philosophy.

‘I am, Mr Jolly, believe me, I am.’

Finland is not a communist satellite, it is a part of western Europe and shares its prosperity. The shops are jammed full of beefsteaks and LP records, frozen food and TV sets.

Helsinki airport is not a good place from which to make a confidential phone call. Airports seldom are: they use rural exchanges, record calls and have too many cops with time on their hands. So I took a taxi to the railway station.

Helsinki is a well-ordered provincial town where it never ceases to be winter. It smells of wood-sap and oil-heating, like a village shop. Fancy restaurants put smoked reindeer tongue on the menu next to the tournedos Rossini and pretend that they have come to terms with the endless lakes and forests that are buried silent and deep out there under the snow and ice. But Helsinki is just the appendix of Finland, an urban afterthought where half a million people try to forget that thousand upon thousand square miles of desolation and Arctic wasteland begin only a bus-stop away.