Len Deighton - Yesterday’s Spy

‘And now we’re calling again, you old bag,’ growled Schlegel, but he took good care to keep his voice down. Already she’d made him apologize to one of the bar girls for saying goddamn.

‘That’s right,’ I told her.

‘Just as long as you don’t forget the money you’re spending, my darling.’

‘Darleeeng,’ growled Schlegel. ‘Will you believe that’s the first hearing-aid I’ve seen with sequins on it?’

He picked up his plastic case, put it on the bed and opened it. At first glance it might have been mistaken for a portable typewriter, permanently built into its case. It was the newest model of acoustic coupler. Schlegel began typing on the keys.

I said, ‘Anything fresh on the girl? Body been found, or anything?’

Schlegel looked up at me, sucked his teeth and said, ‘I’ll ask them what Missing Persons knows.’ When Schlegel finished typing his message he dialled the Paris number. He gave his real name. I suppose that was to save all the complications that would arise if he was phoning from a hotel that held his passport. Then he said, ‘Let’s scramble,’ and put the phone handpiece into the cradle switch inside the case. He pressed the ‘transmit’ button and the coupler put a coded version of what he’d typed through the phone cables at thirty or forty characters a second. There was a short delay, then the reply came back from the same sort of machine. This time Schlegel’s coupler decoded it and printed it on to tape in ‘plain English’. Schlegel read it, grunted, pushed the ‘memory erase’ button and rang off.

‘You ask those guys the time , and they’d tell you what trouble they’re having from the Records Office,’ he said. He burned the tape without showing it to me. It was exactly the way the textbook ordered but it didn’t make me want to open my heart to him about Champion’s version of the girl’s death.

But I told him everything Champion had said.

‘He’s right,’ said Schlegel. ‘He knows we wouldn’t be pussyfooting around if we had the evidence. Even if he enters the UK I doubt whether the department would let us hold him.’

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