Berlin Game. Len Deighton

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      We’d arranged to visit Fiona’s Uncle Silas for the weekend. Old Silas Gaunt was not really her uncle; he was a distant relative of her mother’s. She’d never even met Silas until I took her to see him when I was trying to impress her, just after we’d first met. She’d come down from Oxford with all the expected brilliant results in philosophy, politics and economics – or ‘Modern Greats’ in the jargon of academe – and done all those things that her contemporaries thought smart: she studied Russian at the Sorbonne while perfecting the French accent necessary for upper-class young English-women; she’d done a short cookery course at the Cordon Bleu; worked for an art dealer; crewed for a transatlantic yacht race; and written speeches for a man who’d narrowly failed to become a Liberal Member of Parliament. It was soon after that fiasco that I met her. Old Silas had been captivated by his newly discovered niece right from the start. We saw a lot of him, and my son Billy was his godchild.

      Silas Gaunt was a formidable figure who’d worked for intelligence back in the days when such service was really secret. Back in the days when reports were done in copperplate handwriting and field agents were paid in sovereigns. When my father was running the Berlin Field Unit, Silas was his boss.

      ‘He’s a silly little fart,’ said Fiona when I related my conversation with Dicky Cruyer. It was Saturday morning and we were driving to Silas’s farm in the Cotswold Hills.

      ‘He’s a dangerous little fart,’ I said. ‘When I think of that idiot making decisions about field people …’

      ‘About Brahms Four, you mean,’ said Fiona.

      ‘“Bee Four” is Dicky’s latest contribution to the terminology. Yes, people like that,’ I said. ‘I get the goddamned shivers.’

      ‘He won’t let the Brahms source go,’ she said. We were driving through Reading, having left the motorway in search of Elizabeth Arden skin tonic. She was at the wheel of the red Porsche her father had bought her the previous birthday. She was thirty-five and her father said she needed something special to cheer her up. I wondered how he was planning to cheer me up for my fortieth, coming in two weeks’ time: I guessed it would be the usual bottle of Remy Martin, and wondered if I’d again find inside the box the compliments card of some office-supplies firm who’d given it to him.

      ‘The Economics Intelligence Committee lives off that banking stuff that Brahms Four provides,’ she added after a long silence thinking about it.

      ‘I still say we should have stayed on the motorway. That chemist in the village is sure to have skin tonic,’ I said. Although in fact I hadn’t the faintest idea what skin tonic was, except that it was something my skin had managed without for several decades.

      ‘But not Elizabeth Arden,’ said Fiona. We were in a traffic jam in the middle of Reading and there was no chemist’s shop in sight. The engine was overheating and she switched it off for a moment. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she admitted finally, leaning across to give me a brief kiss. She was just keeping me sweet, because I was going to be the one who leaped out of the car and dashed off for the damned jar of magic ointment while she flirted with the traffic warden.

      ‘Have you got enough space in the back, children?’ she asked.

      The kids were wedged each side of a suitcase but they didn’t complain. Sally grunted and carried on reading her William book, and Billy said, ‘How fast will you go on the motorway?’

      ‘And Dicky is on the committee too,’ I said.

      ‘Yes, СКАЧАТЬ