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

Hudson. I’ve got a good memory for faces. I saw Hudson as soon as we turned the corner. He was sitting alone at a café table holding his paper in front of his face while studying the patrons with interest. I called to him.

‘Jack Percival,’ I called. ‘What a great surprise.’

The American hydrogen research man looked surprised, but he played along very well for an amateur. We sat down with him. My back hurt from the rough-house in the discothèque. It took a long time to get served because the rear of the café was full of men with tightly wadded newspapers trying to pick themselves a winner instead of eating. Finally I got the waiter’s attention. ‘Three grands crèmes,’ I said. Hudson said nothing else until the coffees arrived.

‘What about this young lady?’ Hudson asked. He dropped sugar cubes into his coffee as though he was suffering from shock. ‘Can I talk?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘There are no secrets between Monique and me.’ I leaned across to her and lowered my voice. ‘This is very confidential, Monique,’ I said. She nodded and looked pleased. ‘There is a small plastic bead company with its offices in Grenoble. Some of the holders of ordinary shares have sold their holdings out to a company that this gentleman and I more or less control. Now at the next shareholders’ meeting we shall …’

‘Give over,’ said Monique. ‘I can’t stand business talk.’

‘Well run along then,’ I said, granting her her freedom with an understanding smile.

‘Could you buy me some cigarettes?’ she asked.

I got two packets from the waiter and wrapped a hundred-franc note round them. She trotted off down the street with them like a dog with a nice juicy bone.

‘It’s not about your bead factory,’ he said.

‘There is no bead factory,’ I explained.

‘Oh!’ He laughed nervously. ‘I was supposed to have contacted Annie Couzins,’ he said.

‘She’s dead.’

‘I found that out for myself.’

‘From Monique?’

‘You are T. Davis?’ he asked suddenly.

‘With bells on,’ I said and passed my resident’s card to him.

An untidy man with a constantly smiling face walked from table to table winding up toys and putting them on the tables. He put them down everywhere until each table had its twitching mechanical figures bouncing through the knives, table mats and ashtrays. Hudson picked up the convulsive little violin player. ‘What’s this for?’

‘It’s on sale,’ I said.

He nodded and put it down. ‘Everything is,’ he said.

He returned my resident’s card to me.

‘It looks all right,’ he agreed. ‘Anyway I can’t go back to the Embassy, they told me that most expressly, so I’ll have to put myself in your hands. I’m out of my depth to tell you the truth.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I’m an authority on hydrogen bombs and I know quite a bit about all the work on the nuclear programme. My instructions are to put certain information about fall-out dangers at the disposal of a Monsieur Datt. I understand he is connected with the Red Chinese Government.’

‘And why are you to do this?’

‘I thought you’d know. It’s such a mess. That poor girl being dead. Such a tragedy. I did meet her once. So young, such a tragic business. I thought they would have told you all about it. You were the only other name they gave me, apart from her I mean. I’m acting on US Government orders, of course.’

‘Why would the US Government want you to give away fall-out data?’ I asked him. He sat back in the cane chair till it creaked like elderly arthritic joints. He pulled an ashtray near him.

‘It all began with the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests,’ he began. ‘The Atomic Energy Commission were taking a lot of criticism about the dangers of fall-out, the biological result upon wildlife and plants. The AEC needed those tests and did a lot of follow-through testing on the sites, trying to prove that the dangers were not anything like as great as many alarmists were saying. I have to tell you that those alarmists were damn nearly right. A dirty bomb of about twenty-five megatons would put down about 15,000 square miles of lethal radio-activity. To survive that, you would have to stay underground for months, some say even a year or more.

‘Now if we were involved in a war with Red China, and I dread the thought of such a thing, then we would have to use the nuclear fall-out as a weapon, because only ten per cent of the Chinese population live in large – quarter-million size – towns. In the USA more than half the population live in the large towns. China with its dispersed population can only be knocked out by fall-out …’ He paused. ‘But knocked out it can be. Our experts say that about half a billion people live on one-fifth of China’s land area. The prevailing wind is westerly. Four hundred bombs would kill fifty million by direct heat-blast effect, one hundred million would be seriously injured though they wouldn’t need hospitalization, but three hundred and fifty million would die by windborne fall-out.

‘The AEC minimized the fall-out effects in their follow-through reports on the tests (Bikini, etc.). Now the more militant of the Chinese soldier-scientists are using the US reports to prove that China can survive a nuclear war. We couldn’t withdraw those reports, or say that they were untrue – not even slightly untrue – so I’m here to leak the correct information to the Chinese scientists. The whole operation began nearly eight months ago. It took a long time getting this girl Annie Couzins into position.’

‘In the clinic near to Datt.’

‘Exactly. The original plan was that she should introduce me to this man Datt and say I was an American scientist with a conscience.’

‘That’s a piece of CIA thinking if ever I heard one?’

‘You think it’s an extinct species?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think, but it’s not a line that Datt will buy easily.’

‘If you are going to start changing the plan now …’

‘The plan changed when the girl was killed. It’s a mess; the only way I can handle it is my way.’

‘Very well,’ said Hudson. He sat silent for a moment.

Behind me a man with a rucksack said, ‘Florence. We hated Florence.’

‘We hated Trieste,’ said a girl.

‘Yes,’ said the man with the rucksack, ‘my friend hated Trieste last year.’

‘My contact here doesn’t know why you are in Paris,’ I said suddenly. I tried to throw Hudson, but he took it calmly.

‘I hope he doesn’t,’ said Hudson. ‘It’s all supposed to be top secret. I hated to come to you about it but I’ve no other contact here.’

‘You’re at the Lotti Hotel.’

‘How did you know?’

‘It’s stamped across your Tribune in big blue letters.’

He nodded. I said, ‘You’ll go to the Hotel Ministère right away. Don’t get your baggage from the Lotti. Buy a toothbrush or whatever you want on the way back now.’ I expected to encounter opposition to this idea but Hudson welcomed the game.

‘I get you,’ he said. ‘What name shall I use?’

‘Let’s make it Potter,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Be ready to move out at a moment’s notice. And Hudson, don’t telephone or write any letters; you know what I mean. Because I could become awfully suspicious of you.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I’ll put you in a cab,’ I said, getting up to leave.

‘Do that, their Métro drives me crazy.’

I walked up the street with him towards the cab-rank. Suddenly he dived into an optician’s. I followed.

‘Ask him if I can look at some spectacles,’ he said.

‘Show him some spectacles,’ I told the optician. He put a case full of tortoiseshell frames on the counter.