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

‘Let’s say I have friends in the Signals Division,’ said Loiseau. ‘Your call will be monitored by us here in the command vehicle on our loop line.’ 9

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘Final wall going now,’ a voice called softly from the next cellar. Loiseau smacked me lightly on the back and I climbed through the small hole that his men had made in the wall. ‘Take this,’ he said. It was a silver pen, thick and clumsily made. ‘It’s a gas gun,’ explained Loiseau. ‘Use it at four metres or less but not closer than one, or it might damage the eyes. Pull the bolt back like this and let it go. The recess is the locking slot; that puts it on safety. But I don’t think you’d better keep it on safety.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’d hate it to be on safety.’ I stepped into the cellar and picked my way upstairs.

The door at the top of the service flight was disguised as a piece of panelling. Loiseau’s assistant followed me. He was supposed to have remained behind in the cellars but it wasn’t my job to reinforce Loiseau’s discipline. And anyway I could use a man with a shotgun.

I stepped out through the door.

One of my childhood books had a photo of a fly’s eye magnified fifteen thousand times. The enormous glass chandelier looked like that eye, glinting and clinking and unwinking above the great formal staircase. I walked across the mirror-like wooden floor feeling that the chandelier was watching me. I opened the tall gilded door and peered in. The wrestling ring had disappeared and so had the metal chairs; the salon was like the carefully arranged rooms of a museum: perfect yet lifeless. Every light in the place was shining bright, the mirrors repeated the nudes and nymphs of the gilded stucco and the painted panels.

I guessed that Loiseau’s men were moving up through the mouseholed cellars but I didn’t use the phone that was in the alcove in the hall. Instead I walked across the hall and up the stairs. The rooms that M. Datt used as offices – where I had been injected – were locked. I walked down the corridor trying the doors. They were all bedrooms. Most of them were unlocked; all of them were unoccupied. Most of the rooms were lavishly rococo with huge four-poster beds under brilliant silk canopies and four or five angled mirrors.

‘You’d better phone,’ said Loiseau’s assistant.

‘Once I phone the Prefecture will have this raid on record. I think we should find out a little more first.’

‘I think …’

‘Don’t tell me what you think or I’ll remind you that you’re supposed to have stayed down behind the wainscoting.’

‘Okay,’ he said. We both tiptoed up the small staircase that joined the first floor to the second. Loiseau’s men must be fretting by now. At the top of the flight of steps I put my head round the corner carefully. I put my head everywhere carefully, but I needn’t have been so cautious, the house was empty. ‘Get Loiseau up here,’ I said.

Loiseau’s men went all through the house, tapping panelling and trying to find secret doors. There were no documents or films. At first there seemed to be no secrets of any kind except that the whole place was a kind of secret: the strange cells with the awful torture instruments, rooms made like lush train compartments or Rolls Royce cars, and all kinds of bizarre environments for sexual intercourse, even beds.

The peep-holes and the closed-circuit TV were all designed for M. Datt and his ‘scientific methods’. I wondered what strange records he had amassed and where he had taken them, for M. Datt was nowhere to be found. Loiseau swore horribly. ‘Someone,’ he said, ‘must have told Monsieur Datt that we were coming.’

Loiseau had been in the house about ten minutes when he called his assistant. He called long and loud from two floors above. When we arrived he was crouched over a black metal device rather like an Egyptian mummy. It was the size and very roughly the shape of a human body. Loiseau had put cotton gloves on and he touched the object briefly.

‘The diagram of the Couzins girl,’ he demanded from his assistant.

It was obtained from somewhere, a paper pattern of Annie Couzins’s body marked in neat red ink to show the stab wounds, with the dimensions and depth written near each in tiny careful handwriting.

Loiseau opened the black metal case. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Just what I thought.’ Inside the case, which was just large enough to hold a person, knife points were positioned exactly as indicated on the police diagram. Loiseau gave a lot of orders and suddenly the room was full of men with tape-measures, white powder and camera equipment. Loiseau stood back out of their way. ‘Iron maidens I think they call them,’ he said. ‘I seem to have read about them in some old schoolboy magazines.’

‘What made her get into the damn thing?’ I said.

‘You are naïve,’ said Loiseau. ‘When I was a young officer we had so many deaths from knife wounds in brothels that we put a policeman on the door in each one. Every customer was searched. Any weapons he carried were chalked for identity. When the men left they got them back. I’ll guarantee that not one got by that cop on the door but still the girls got stabbed, fatally sometimes.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘The girls – the prostitutes – smuggled them in. You’ll never understand women.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Nor shall I,’ said Loiseau.

Saturday was sunny, the light bouncing and sparkling as it does only in impressionist paintings and Paris. The boulevard had been fitted with wall-to-wall sunshine and out of it came the smell of good bread and black tobacco. Even Loiseau was smiling. He came galloping up my stairs at 8.30 A.M. I was surprised; he had never visited me before, at least not when I was at home.

‘Don’t knock, come in.’ The radio was playing classical music from one of the pirate radio ships. I turned it off.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Loiseau.

‘Everyone’s at home to a policeman,’ I said, ‘in this country.’

‘Don’t be angry,’ said Loiseau. ‘I didn’t know you would be in a silk dressing-gown, feeding your canary. It’s very Noël Coward. If I described this scene as typically English, people would accuse me of exaggerating. You were talking to that canary,’ said Loiseau. ‘You were talking to it.’

‘I try out all my jokes on Joe,’ I said. ‘But don’t stand on ceremony, carry on ripping the place apart. What are you looking for this time?’

‘I’ve said I’m sorry. What more can I do?’

‘You could get out of my decrepit but very expensive apartment and stay out of my life. And you could stop putting your stubby peasant finger into my supply of coffee beans.’

‘I was hoping you’d offer me some. You have this very light roast that is very rare in France.’

‘I have a lot of things that are very rare in France.’

‘Like the freedom to tell a policeman to “scram”?’

‘Like that.’

‘Well, don’t exercise that freedom until we have had coffee together, even if you let me buy some downstairs.’

‘Oh boy! Now I know you are on the tap. A cop is really on the make when he wants to pick up the bill for a cup of coffee.’

‘I’ve had good news this morning.’

‘They are restoring public executions.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Loiseau, letting my remark roll off him. ‘There has been a small power struggle among the people from whom I take my orders and at present Datt’s friends are on the losing side. I have been authorized to find Datt and his film collection by any means I think fit.’

‘When does the armoured column leave? What’s the plan – helicopters and flame-throwers and the one that burns brightest must have been carrying the tin of film?’