Spy Sinker. Len Deighton

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       2

       East Germany. January 1978.

      ‘Bring me the mirror,’ said Max Busby. He hadn’t intended that his voice should come out as a croak. Bernard Samson went and got the mirror and placed it on the table so Max could see his arm without twisting inside out. ‘Now take the dressing off,’ said Max.

      The sleeve of Max’s filthy old shirt had been torn back as far as the shoulder. Now Bernard unbound the arm, finally peeling back a pad that was caked with pus and dried blood. It was a shock. Bernard gave an involuntary hiss and Max saw the look of horror on his face. ‘Not too bad,’ said Bernard, trying to hide his real feelings.

      ‘I’ve seen worse,’ said Busby, looking at it and trying to sound unruffled. It was a big wound: deep and inflamed and oozing pus. Bernard had stitched it up with a sewing needle and fishing line from a survival kit but some of his stitches had torn through the soft flesh. The skin around it was mottled every colour of the rainbow and so tender that even to look at it made it hurt more. Bernard was pinching it together tight so it didn’t break right open again. The dressing – an old handkerchief – had got dirty. The side that had been against the wound was dark brown and completely saturated with blood. More blood had crusted in patches all down his arm. ‘It might have been my gun hand.’

      Max bent his head until, by the light of the lamp, he could see his pale face in the mirror. He knew about wounds. He knew the way that loss of blood makes the heart pound as it tries to keep supplying oxygen and glucose to the brain. His face had whitened due to the blood vessels contracting as they tried to help the heart do its job. And the heart pumped more furiously as the plasma was lost and the blood thickened. Max tried to take his own pulse. He couldn’t manage it but he knew what he would find: irregular pulse and low body temperature. These were all the signs: bad signs.

      ‘Put something on the fire and then bind it up tight with the strip of towel. I’ll wrap paper round it before we leave. Don’t want to leave a trail of blood spots.’ He managed a smile. ‘We’ll give them another hour.’ Max Busby was frightened. They were in a mountain hut, it was winter and he was no longer young.

      A one-time NYPD cop, he’d come to Europe in 1944, wearing the bars of a US Army lieutenant, and he’d never gone back across the Atlantic except for an attempted reconciliation with his ex-wife in Chicago and a couple of visits to his mother in Atlantic City.

      After Bernard had replaced the mirror and put something on to the fire, Max stood up and Bernard helped him with his coat. Then he watched as Max settled down carefully in his chair. Max was badly hurt. Bernard wondered if they would both make it as far as the border.

      Max read his thoughts and smiled. Now neither wife nor mother would have recognized Max in his filthy overcoat with battered jeans and the torn shirt under it. There was a certain mad formality to the way that he balanced a greasy trilby hat on his knees. His papers said he was a railway worker but his papers, and a lot of other things he needed, were at the railway station and a Soviet arrest team was there too.

      Max Busby was short and squat without being fat. His sparse hair was black and his face was heavily lined. His eyes were reddened by tiredness. He had heavy brows and a large straggly black moustache that was lop-sided because of the way he kept tugging at one end of it.

      Older, wiser, wounded and sick, but despite all that and the change in environment and costume, Max Busby did not feel very different to that green policeman who’d patrolled the dark and dangerous Manhattan streets and alleys. Then, as now, he was his own man: the wrongos didn’t all wear black hats. Some of them were to be found spooning their beluga with the police commissioner. It was the same here: no black and white, just shades of grey. Max Busby disdained communism – or ‘socialism’ in the preferred terminology of its practitioners – and all it stood for, with a zeal that was unusual even in the ranks of the men who fought it, but he wasn’t a simplistic crusader.

      ‘Two hours,’ suggested Bernard Samson. Bernard was big and strong, with wavy hair and spectacles. He wore a scuffed leather zip-front jacket, and baggy corduroy trousers, held up by a wide leather belt decorated with a collection of metal communist Parteitag badges. On his head there was a close-fitting peaked cap of the design forever associated with the ill-fated Afrika Korps. It was a sensible choice of headgear thought Max as he looked at it. A man could go to sleep in a cap like that, or fight without losing it. Max looked at his companion: Bernard was still in one piece, and young enough to wait it out without his nerves fraying and his mouth going dry. Perhaps it would be better to let him go on alone. But would Bernard make it alone? Max was not at all sure he would. ‘They have to get through Schwerin,’ Bernard reminded him. ‘They may be delayed by one of the mobile patrols.’

      Max nodded and wet his lips. The loss of blood had sapped his strength: the idea of his contacts being challenged by a Russian army patrol made his stomach heave. Their papers were not good enough to withstand any scrutiny more careful than a cop’s casual flashlight beam. Few false papers are.

      He knew that Bernard wouldn’t see the nod, the little room was in darkness except for the faint glimmer from an evil-smelling oil-lamp, its wick turned as low as possible, and from the stove a rosy glow that gave satin toecaps to their boots, but Qui tacet, consentire videtur, silence means consent. Max, like many a NY cop before him, had slaved at night school to study law. Even now he remembered a few basic essentials. More pertinent to his ready consent was the fact that Max knew what it was like to be crossing a hundred and fifty kilometres of moonlit Saxon countryside when there was a triple A alert and a Moscow stop-and-detain order that would absolve any trigger-happy cop or soldier from the consequences of shooting strangers on sight.

      Bernard tapped the cylindrical iron stove with his heavy boot СКАЧАТЬ