Len Deighton - The Harry Palmer Quartet

‘OK for lunch?’ he asked, and in his proprietorial manner led the way towards it without waiting for a reply.

We had all slept late that morning in the rather grand villa out there on the Baalbek road. Simon was a Lt-Col in the RAMC and some sort of specialist. He had never been involved in a stunt like last night’s before. I felt a little guilty at my unspoken criticism. He was back there now, keeping an eye on the man who had held centre stage last night. The villa was discreetly situated and under the quiet control of an elderly Armenian couple who accepted our arrival last night without surprise. The house stood in the middle of a vast acreage of terraced garden. Azaleas, cyclamen and olive trees all but hid the building which was ‘U’ shaped in plan. Behind the house across the open end, an irregular-shaped pool was cut into the natural rock. Under the clear blue water at one end a Roman statue was transfixed in athletic pose, and there were no changing-rooms, beach-chairs, parasols or diving-boards to mar the pool’s natural appearance. The walls of the house facing inwards were glass from floor to ceiling, with bright plain curtains which moved on electrically propelled runners. At night when the lights were on throughout the house and the curtains fully open, and when the coloured lights illuminated the Roman statue, the paved central loggia made a perfect helicopter landing space, while the double-glazed windows kept the worst of the sound out.

Here at the temple the air was clear and clean and soft and because morning gives a dimension of magic to any place it was soft and sharp at the same time. The fluted columns had been burnished by the centuries of wind but under the hand the surface was as rough as pumice and as pitted as a honeycomb. A dirty child with torn trousers and a pair of American canvas shoes drove three goats clanking along the road to the north. ‘Cigarette,’ he called to Dalby, and Dalby gave him two.

Dalby was especially relaxed and expansive; it seemed a good chance to find out more about the opposition that we had just outwitted. I asked him about Jay – ‘But what’s his cover story – what’s his angle, his business?’

‘He runs, or more accurately he pays someone to run a research unit in Aargau.’ He stopped, and I nodded. ‘You know where it is?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Where?’ asked Dalby.

‘Forgive me if my lack of ignorance is an embarrassment to you. The Canton of Aargau is in the north of Switzerland, the river Aar joins the Rhine there.’

‘Oh, yes, forgive me, the finance king is bound to know Switzerland.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Now let’s take it from there – what sort of research unit?’

‘Well they have sociologists and psychiatrists and statistics people and they have money from various industrial foundations to investigate what they call “synthesized environment”.’

I said, ‘You’ve lost me now – without trying.’

‘Not surprisingly, for they hardly know what they are doing themselves, but the idea is this. Take German industry for an example. German industry has been short of labour for ages and they have imported workmen from almost every European country – with excellent results. That is to say – put an unskilled labourer from one of the Greek islands, who has never seen a machine before, in the German factory, he learns how to operate it just as quickly as a worker from Düsseldorf.’ Dalby looked up. ‘You are receiving me?’

‘Loud and clear,’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem – peachy for the West Germans.’

‘In that sort of situation – no problems, but if a West German builds a factory in Greece and employs local labour they can’t even teach them to switch on the lights in some cases.

‘Therefore, these boffins in Aargau feel that to be in an environment where everyone knows what they are doing, and attach no difficulty to doing it, means that the new arrival will adopt the same attitude. If on the other hand the individual finds himself among people lacking confidence, he will raise barriers to ever mastering his job – and so will the others. This is what “synthesized environment” means. It could be very important to industry, especially to industries being formed in countries with a rural population.’

‘It could be important from our point of view, too.’

‘We have a file on it,’ said Dalby dryly.

That’s about all that Dalby volunteered on the subject of Jay, but I had lots of other chatty topics of discussion ready as we walked back to the villa. I asked him about his new IBM machine, about the Chester Committee Report on the Intelligence Services, and how it was likely to affect us, and about my arrears of pay (now approaching four months) and whether I couldn’t have the whole of my expenses available to me in cash against petty cash vouchers instead of submitting accounts and settling down to a long wait as I did now.

It was Dalby’s day for proving that he could be one of the boys. He wore his short-sleeved shirt outside his denim trousers and an old pair of suède shoes, against which he kicked every small movable object we encountered. I asked him about Mr Adem, our host, and about him he was more forthcoming than he had ever been about pay and expenses.

Dalby had got him from Ross, who had got him from the US Anti-Narcotics Bureau (Mediterranean Div). He had run Indian hemp *across the Syrian border as a section of a chain to New York. The Americans had done a deal with him in 1951 and, although the pay wasn’t up to drug traffic rates, he had been happy to avoid a spell up the river. In the NATO Intelligence Service regroupings of ’53 Adem had come into British service. He was about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. He was a fine judge of horses, wines and heroin, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of an area stretching from Northern Turkey to Jerusalem. If you trod on a beetle for miles around you’d find he had it under contract. His role was a giver of information and understanding this, he had, or showed, no curiosity about the affairs of his employers. His salary was virtually unlimited, with one proviso – no cash. As Dalby put it, ‘We pay any reasonable bill he runs up, but he never handles a pound himself.’

‘It’s going to be difficult for him to retire,’ I said.

‘It will be damn well impossible if I have anything to do with it,’ said Dalby. ‘He’s hooked, we need him.’

‘You mean he never tries to re-channel some of his debts into cash?’ I asked, just to be provocative.

Dalby’s face cracked open in one of those big boyish laughs he gave out when he felt proud of his even teeth. ‘He does!

‘When we first gave him the Sud Aviation Jet helicopter,’ Dalby went on, ‘I told him to jazz it around somewhat. “Live it up and be proud of it,” I said. “Give a few of the big Government boys a ride around.” I wanted him to be seen up and down the shore line, occasionally riding out to sea. With a Lebanese big-wig aboard, inquiries were not going to be encouraged.’

We’d reached the sloping driveway, and beyond the lemon trees I could just see the light green Cadillac in which Adem had met us a few kilometres along the road in the small hours.

‘So?’ I said. ‘It worked?’

‘Worked?’ Dalby tilted his head, pulled his earlobe and smiled in admiration as he thought about it. ‘He brought twenty kilos of heroin across from Syria within seven days of getting his licence. Twenty kilos,’ Dalby said, his thin lips forming the words yet again in tacit joy at the sheer ambition of the old man.

‘At five shillings a dose that’s a lot of green,’ I agreed.

‘It was a big improvement on Indian hemp. The sort of ruffians he knows can get 100,000 doses from a kilo, and five shillings is the Beirut price, in London it’s going to be more like ten. A couple of runs like that and he could buy Cyprus as a weekend place. It gave me a problem, but I told him I’d break his head if he did it again, and in the long run it was beneficial. When the news of the shipment leaked out – it’s bound to in a place like this – well, people never trust a completely honest individual.’