Len Deighton - Faith

As Bernard Samson is now on an assignment in Poland I searched through my collection of photographs for a suitable image that would evoke that part of the world, and Bernard’s involvement with the women in his life.

I remembered that, while on location for one of my documentaries in Poland, I had come across a window with a lace curtain adorned with a pair of ladies; the image of this would now provide a subtle visual analogy for the Iron Curtain.

I discovered that by placing a larger than life photograph of Samson in the window it created a rather surreal effect. Rather like Kong peering in at an unsuspecting Fay Wray, Bernard looms behind the curtain, an unwilling outsider ostracized from domestic comfort.

For a further reference to the two women in Bernard’s life, the back cover displays a heart-shaped traditional Polish Wycinanki, an intricate design carefully cut from folded paper. Here, the heart is torn in two, separated by the sword of a KGB badge. You will note that the Western half features a very elegant gold wedding ring.

At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1994

FAITH. Copyright © Len Deighton 1994.

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2011

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2011

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007395743

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2011 ISBN: 9780007395781

Version: 2018-07-31

Cover designer’s note

Title Page Len Deighton Faith

Copyright

Introduction

1

‘Don’t miss your plane, Bernard. This whole operation depends upon…

2

Magdeburg, where we were headed, is one of the most…

3

‘I have your report,’ said Frank Harrington. ‘I read it…

4

‘You just leave it to me, Mr Samson,’ said the…

5

There was a time when Zurich was my back yard.

6

‘So – here is pain?’ I felt the dental probe…

7

Fiona loved to go to bed ridiculously early and then…

8

Dicky arrived at work only thirty minutes after I did.

9

On Tuesday morning, as if to confirm Gloria’s theory –…

10

Those grey and stormy days were, like my life, punctuated…

11

I’ve often suspected that my father-in-law had sold his soul…

12

I ordered a car to collect me from the office…

13

‘Your new hair-do looks nice, Tante Lisl,’ I said, in…

14

Whatever trauma may have been troubling the deeper recesses of…

15

I don’t know how long it was before I was…

16

Had I persisted with my plan to return to the…

17

I often thought that Daphne’s life with Dicky must have…

18

When we were driving home from the Cruyers’ that Saturday…

19

I got to the office a few minutes before eleven.

20

Werner went back to Berlin and began making all the…

21

‘Why have you got all this paper in your office?’…

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‘Is this going to go into a book, Len?’ my friend asked. He was a close and trusted friend and also an important functionary of the communist government. But he was armed with a healthy scepticism for all authority and this provided a bond and, at times, much merriment. I can’t remember which year it was; sometime in the mid-nineteen sixties probably. We were sitting on a bench in what had once been the site of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘Because when I read your books I suddenly come across a description of something we have seen or done together and it brings it all back to me.’

To write these introductions I have been reading my books and this has revived many memories. Some memories have been happy ones but some are painful and now and again I have had to put the book aside for a moment or two. It is only now, with this re-reading, that I see how much of what I wrote was based on people, facts and experiences. I have often claimed that my books were almost entirely created from my imagination but now I see that this was something of a delusion. Now, as I read and recall events half-forgotten, brave people and strange places come crowding into my memory. Many of these people and places no longer exist. I can’t offer you the past world but here is a depiction of it; here are my impressions of that world as I recorded it.

I had asked my friend to take me to the Sachsenhausen site, which was in the ‘Zone’ thirty miles from Berlin and outside the limits of its Soviet Sector. We went in his ancient Wartburg car with its noisy two-stroke engine that left a trail of smoke and envy. For even this contraption represented luxury to the average citizen in the East. Since neither of us had permission to enter the Zone we enjoyed the childish thrill of breaking the law. Sachsenhausen had been the Concentration Camp nearest to Berlin, and for that reason it was haunted by the ghosts of Hitler’s specially selected victims. Eminent German generals had been locked up here before being tortured and executed for participation in the ‘July 20 th’ attempt to overthrow the Führer. Some notable British agents passed through these bloodstained huts including Best and Stevens, who were senior SIS agents and whose capture and interrogation crippled the British Secret Intelligence Service for the whole war. Peter Churchill, an agent of the British SOE, was brought here. Martin Niemoller was imprisoned here too, so was Josef Stalin’s son and Bismarck’s grandson. Paul Reynaud, the PM of France, the prominent former Reichstag member Fritz Thyssen, Kurt Schuschnigg the Austrian chancellor and countless other anti-Nazis were locked away here. So were the Prisoners of War who escaped from Colditz, German Trade Union leaders, Jews and anyone who stepped out of line.