Len Deighton - The Spy Quartet - An Expensive Place to Die, Spy Story, Yesterday’s Spy, Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

It was getting hotter now, the sort of day that gives rheumatism a jolt and expands the Eiffel Tower six inches. ‘Wait a moment,’ I said to Datt. ‘I’ll go up and shave. Five minutes?’

‘Very well,’ said Datt. ‘But there’s no real need to shave, you won’t be asked to participate.’ He smiled.

I hurried upstairs, the courier was waiting inside my room. ‘They bought it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I repeated my conversation with M. Datt.

‘You’ve done well,’ he said.

‘Are you running me?’ I lathered my face carefully and began shaving.

‘No. Is that where they took it from, where the stuffing is leaking out?’

‘Yes. Then who is?’

‘You know I can’t answer that. You shouldn’t even ask me. Clever of them to think of looking there.’

‘I told them where it was. I’ve never asked before,’ I said, ‘but whoever is running me seems to know what these people do even before I know. It’s someone close, someone I know. Don’t keep poking at it. It’s only roughly stitched back.’

‘That at least is wrong,’ said the courier. ‘It’s no one you know or have ever met. How did you know who took the case?’

‘You’re lying. I told you not to keep poking at it. Nin; it colours your flesh. Jean-Paul’s hands were bright with it.’

‘What colour?’

‘You’ll be finding out,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of nin still in there.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Well who told you to poke your stubby peasant fingers into my stuffing?’ I said. ‘Stop messing about and listen carefully. Datt is taking me to the clinic, follow me there.’

‘Very well,’ said the courier without enthusiasm. He wiped his hands on a large handkerchief.

‘Make sure I’m out again within the hour.’

‘What am I supposed to do if you are not out within the hour?’ he asked.

‘I’m damned if I know,’ I said. They never ask questions like that in films. ‘Surely you have some sort of emergency procedure arranged?’

‘No,’ said the courier. He spoke very quietly. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t. I just do the reports and pop them into the London dip mail secret tray. Sometimes it takes three days.’

‘Well this could be an emergency,’ I said. ‘Something should have been arranged beforehand.’ I rinsed off the last of the soap and parted my hair and straightened my tie.

‘I’ll follow you anyway,’ said the courier encouragingly. ‘It’s a fine morning for a walk.’

‘Good,’ I said. I had a feeling that if it had been raining he would have stayed in the café. I dabbed some lotion on my face and then went downstairs to M. Datt. Upon the great bundle of play-money he had left the waiter’s tip: one franc.

Summer was here again; the pavement was hot, the streets were dusty and the traffic cops were in white jackets and dark glasses. Already the tourists were everywhere, in two styles: beards, paper parcels and bleached jeans, or straw hats, cameras and cotton jackets. They were sitting on benches complaining loudly. ‘So he explained that it was one hundred new francs or it would be ten thousand old francs, and I said, “Gracious me I sure can understand why you people had that revolution.”’

Another tourist said, ‘But you don’t speak the language.’

A man replied, ‘I don’t have to speak the language to know what that waiter meant.’

As we walked I turned to watch them and caught sight of the courier strolling along about thirty yards behind us.

‘It will take me another five years to complete my work,’ said Datt. ‘The human mind and the human body; remarkable mechanisms but often ill-matched.’

‘Very interesting,’ I said. Datt was easily encouraged.

‘At present my researches are concerned with stimulating the registering of pain, or rather the excitement caused by someone pretending to have sudden physical pain. You perhaps remember that scream I had on the tape recorder. Such a sound can cause a remarkable mental change in a man if used in the right circumstances.’

‘The right circumstances being that film-set-style torture chamber where I was dumped after treatment.’

‘Exactly,’ said Datt. ‘You have hit it. Even if they can see that it’s a recording and even if we tell them that the girl was an actress, even then the excitement they get from it is not noticeably lessened. Curious, isn’t it?’

‘Very,’ I said.

The house on the Avenue Foch quivered in the heat of the morning. The trees before it moved sensuously as though anxious to savour the hot sun. The door was opened by a butler; we stepped inside the entrance hall. The marble was cold and the curve of the staircase twinkled where sunbeams prodded the rich colours of the carpeting. High above us the chandeliers clinked with the draught from the open door.

The only sound was a girl’s scream. I recognized it as the tape-recording that Datt mentioned. The screams were momentarily louder as a door opened and closed again somewhere on the first floor beyond the top of the staircase.

‘Who is up there?’ said Datt as he handed his umbrella and hat to the butler.

‘Monsieur Kuang-t’ien,’ said the butler.

‘A charming fellow,’ said Datt. ‘Major-domo of the Chinese Embassy here in Paris.’

Somewhere in the house a piano played Liszt, or perhaps it was a recording.

I looked towards the first floor. The screams continued, muffled by the door that had now closed again. Suddenly, moving noiselessly like a figure in a fantasy, a young girl ran along the first-floor balcony and came down the stairs, stumbling and clinging to the banister rail. She half-fell and half-ran, her mouth open in that sort of soundless scream that only nightmares produce. The girl was naked but her body was speckled with patches of bright wet blood. She must have been stabbed twenty, perhaps thirty times, and the blood had produced an intricate pattern of rivulets like a tight bodice of fine red lace. I remembered M. Kuang-t’ien’s poem: ‘If she is not a rose all white, then she must be redder than the red of blood.’

No one moved until Datt made a half-hearted attempt to grab her, but he was so slow that she avoided him effortlessly and ran through the door. I recognized her face now; it was the model that Byrd had painted, Annie.

‘Get after her.’ Datt called his staff into action with the calm precision of a liner captain pulling into a pier. ‘Go upstairs, grab Kuang-t’ien, disarm him, clean the knife and hide it. Put him under guard, then phone the Press Officer at the Chinese Embassy. Don’t tell him anything, but he must stay in his office until I call him to arrange a meeting. Albert, get on my personal phone and call the Ministry of the Interior. Tell them we’ll need some CRS policemen here. I don’t want the Police Municipale poking around too long. Jules, get my case and the drug box and have the transfusion apparatus ready; I’ll take a look at the girl.’ Datt turned, but stopped and said softly, ‘And Byrd, get Byrd here immediately; send a car for him.’

He hurried after the footmen and butler who were running across the lawn after the bleeding girl. She glanced over her shoulder and gained fresh energy from the closeness of the pursuit. She grabbed at the gatepost and swung out on to the hot dusty pavement of the Avenue Foch, her heart pumping the blood patches into shiny bulbous swellings that burst and dribbled into vertical stripes.

‘Look!’ I heard the voices of passers-by calling.

Someone else called ‘Hello darling’, and there was a laugh and a lot of wolf-whistles. They must have been the last thing the girl heard as she collapsed and died on the hot, dusty Parisian pavement under the trees in the Avenue Foch. A bewhiskered old crone carrying two baguettes came shuffling in her threadbare carpet-slippers. She pushed through the onlookers and leaned down close to the girl’s head. ‘Don’t worry chérie, I’m a nurse,’ she croaked. ‘All your injuries are small and superficial.’ She pushed the loaves of bread tighter under her armpit and tugged at her corset bottom. ‘Just superficial,’ she said again, ‘so don’t make so much fuss.’ She turned very slowly and went shuffling off down the street muttering to herself.