Len Deighton - Yesterday’s Spy

Writing books is like a spell on a battlefield. For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes. To construct Yesterday’s Spy I decided to use a second character and thus create a dual leading role. Conan Doyle had shown us how Dr Watson could be a useful tool for explaining facts and theories to the reader. I was right to believe that Yesterday’s Spy would benefit from assigning to ‘Harry Palmer’ a belligerent American boss, Schlegel, but I didn’t include in my calculations the intimacy that would come from sending Harry back to fraternize with his old friends from the Resistance. This intimacy battled against the closeness between Harry and his boss. Perhaps it is a minor matter, and only applied to this special circumstance of this story, but I soon became aware of the limitations this put upon the crisscross relationships.

Dividing the number of major characters into the size of your typescript tells you how much space you have for character development. Yesterday’s Spy has quite a lot of major characters and that meant wasting no time when it came to describing each of them. The idea of having a group of Second World War Resistance workers who, some long time later, have different allegiances and different enemies provided an interesting writing problem. It was so interesting that I felt afterwards that I should have made it a far longer book.

Len Deighton, 2012

‘The Guernica network!’ said Steve Champion, holding up his glass.

I hesitated. White’s Club – sanctus sanctorum of Establishment London – seemed an inappropriate place to indulge in revolutionary nostalgia.

‘Let’s just drink to Marius,’ I said.

‘Marius,’ said Champion. He drank, and wiped his blunt military-style moustache with the back of his glove. It was a gesture I’d noticed that time we’d first met – Villefranche, landing from a submarine, one night when the war was young. It was as wrong for him then as it was now. In those days Regular Army captains of the Welsh Guards did not wipe the froth off their faces with the back of their hand. But then Regular captains of the Brigade of Guards, sent to France to set up anti-Nazi Intelligence networks, were not expected to meet newly arriving agents with a girl on each arm and an open bottle of champagne.

‘Marius,’ I said. I drank too.

‘What a comical crew we were,’ said Champion. ‘Marius the revolutionary priest, you straight from training school, with your terrible accent and your pimple ointment, and me. Sometimes I thought we should have let the Nazis catch us, and watched them die of laughing.’

‘It was Marius who reconciled that network,’ I said, ‘the Communists and the deserters and the hot-heads and us professionals. It was Marius who held the network together. When he went, we all went.’

‘He was past his prime by then,’ said Champion. ‘He’d had too much of it. He wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. None of us would have.’

‘Marius was young,’ I said. ‘Almost as young as I was.’

‘Marius died in a torture chamber,’ said Champion. ‘He died within six hours of being arrested … it was incredibly brave and he deserved the medal … but he could have saved himself by giving them some useless information. He could have deciphered some ancient codes and given them the names of people who’d already gone back to London. He could have bought a few days, and in a few days we could have rescued him.’

I didn’t argue. Even after all this time it was difficult to be objective about the death of Marius. His energy and his optimism had kept us going at times when it seemed that all was lost. And his reckless bravery had more than once saved us.

For Champion it was even more difficult. He’d always blamed himself for the young priest’s death. Perhaps that was partly why he’d married Marius’s younger sister. And perhaps it was partly why the marriage had now fallen apart.

We both watched the far end of the room, where two Socialist Cabinet Ministers exchanged jokes about their golf handicaps and tips about the stock exchange. Champion reached into the waistcoat of his beautifully cut chalk-stripe suit. He flipped back the cover of the gold hunter that had belonged to his father and his grandfather, looked at the time, and then signalled a club servant to bring more drinks.

‘The divorce came through,’ he said. ‘Caty and me – it’s all over. Nowadays I live all the time in France.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Why?’ said Champion.

I shrugged. There was no point in telling him that I liked them both, and enjoyed what had once been their happy marriage. ‘Those weekends at the house in Wales,’ I said. ‘Where will I go now to get French cooking like Caty’s?’

‘Well, Caty still lives there,’ said Champion. ‘And she’d love to see you again, I’m sure.’

I looked at him. I would have expected him to invite me to his new house in France rather than to that of his ex-wife in Wales, but Steve Champion was always unpredictable. Even more so since he’d become a wealthy businessman. He lit a fresh cigarette from the dog-end of his old one. His hand trembled; he had to steady it with the one on which he always wore a glove – to hide the absence of the fingertips he’d left behind in an interview room of St Roch prison in wartime Nice.

‘You never thought of going back?’ he said.

‘To live in France?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘To the department.’

‘Hah! It’s a thought, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t, Steve, and I’ll tell you why.’ I leaned a little closer to him, and he glanced round the room with no more than a flicker of the eye.

I said, ‘Because the department never asked me to, Steve.’

He smiled soberly.

‘And I’ll tell you something else, Steve,’ I added. ‘There are people who say that you never left the department. Whenever we get together like this in London I wonder whether you are going to try recruiting me .’

‘Now you’re laughing at me, boyo,’ said Champion, in his stage Welsh accent. He reached into his pocket and produced a clear plastic envelope. Inside it were five picture postcards. Each depicted an airship or a balloon, and in the foreground were men in straw hats and women in leg-of-mutton-sleeved dresses, inhabitants of an innocent world that had not quite learned to fly. On the other sides of the cards was a tangle of greetings to long-forgotten addressees, and curious old postage stamps.

‘A philatelic auction in Bond Street,’ said Champion. ‘That’s why I came to London. I just couldn’t resist these.’

I looked at his purchases. By now Champion should have realized that I was a lost cause as far as his obsession with airmail stamps was concerned. ‘And Billy?’ I asked. I handed his airships back to him.

‘Yes, I’m seeing a lot of Billy this week,’ said Champion, as if visiting his young son was no more than an afterthought. ‘Caty has been very good about letting me see Billy.’

He went through the postcards one by one and then put them away with exaggerated care. ‘The night Billy was born,’ he said, ‘I was up to the neck in bank loans, promissory notes and mortgages. I was sure I’d done the wrong thing … did I ever tell you how I started: with the uncut diamonds?’

‘I’ve heard stories,’ I admitted.

He inhaled carefully on his cigarette. ‘Do you know Accra?’

‘No.’

‘The arse-hole of West Africa. I was flat broke, and working hard to buy a ticket home. I was translating export permits for cocoa traders and wangling customs forms for importers – all of them Arabs. My Arabic has always been good, but by the time I finished working with those jokers I could have done the sports reports for Radio Cairo. When I think of it!’ He clasped his hands tight as if to stretch the joints. ‘I took the bumpf down to the customs sheds one day – June, it was, and bloody steamy, even by Accra standards. I made the usual golden obeisance to the officials and loaded ten crates of Renault spares on to the truck I’d hired. But when I uncrated them back in the cocoa warehouse, I find I’m knee-deep in French MAS 38s, complete with cleaning kits, and spares and instruction booklets.’