Charity. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ a sign that he wasn’t going to take the matter any further. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

      ‘Don’t use it again,’ said Frank. ‘Put it away with your Beatles records and that Nehru jacket.’

      ‘I won’t use it again, Frank,’ I said. I’d never worn a Nehru jacket or anything styled remotely like one, but I would always remain the teenager he’d once known. There was no way of escaping that.

      ‘You are senior staff now. The time for all those shenanigans is over.’ He picked up my report and shook it as if something might fall from the pages. ‘London will read this. There is no way I can sit on it for ever.’

      I nodded.

      ‘And you know what they will say?’

      I waited for him to say that London would suspect that I’d gone to Moscow only in order to see Gloria. But he said: ‘You were browbeating Jim Prettyman. That’s what they will say. What did you get out of him? You may as well tell me, so that I can cover my arse.’

      ‘Jim Prettyman?’

      ‘Don’t do that, Bernard,’ said Frank with just a touch of aggravation.

      If it was a chess move, it was an accomplished one. To avoid the accusation that I was grilling Prettyman I would have to say that I was there to see Gloria. ‘Prettyman was more or less unconscious. There was little chance of my doing anything beyond tucking him into bed and changing his bedpans, and there was a nurse to do that. What would I be grilling Prettyman about, anyway?’

      ‘Come along, Bernard. Have you forgotten all those times you told me that Prettyman was the man behind those who wanted your sister-in-law killed?’

      ‘I said that? When did I say it?’

      ‘Not in as many words,’ said Frank, retreating a fraction. ‘But that was the gist of it. You thought London had plotted the death of Fiona’s sister so that her body could be left over there. Planted so that our KGB friends would be reassured that Fiona was dead, and not telling us all their secrets.’

      Fortified by the way Frank had put my suspicions of London in the past tense, I put down my drink and stared at him impassively. I suppose I must have done a good job on the facial expression, for Frank shifted uncomfortably and said: ‘You’re not going to deny it now, are you, Bernard?’

      ‘I certainly am,’ I said, without adding any further explanation.

      ‘If you are leading me up the garden path, I’ll have your guts for garters.’ Frank’s vocabulary was liberally provided with schoolboy expressions of the nineteen thirties.

      ‘I’m trying to put all that behind me,’ I said. ‘It was getting me down.’

      ‘That’s good,’ said Frank who, along with the Director-General and his Deputy, Bret Rensselaer, had frequently advised me to put it all behind me. ‘Some field agents are able to do their job and combine it with a more or less normal family life. It’s not easy, but some do it.’

      I nodded and wondered what was coming. I could see Frank was in one of his philosophical moods and they usually ended up with a softly delivered critical summary that helped me sort it all out.

      ‘You are one of the best field agents we ever had working out of this office,’ said Frank, sugaring the pill. ‘But perhaps that’s because you live the job night and day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’

      ‘Do I, Frank? It’s nice of you to say that.’

      He could hear the irony in my voice but he ignored it. ‘You never tell anyone the whole truth, Bernard. No one. Every thought is locked up in that brain of yours and marked secret. I’m locked out; your colleagues are locked out. I suppose it’s the same with your wife and children; I suppose you tell them only what they should know.’

      ‘Sometimes not even that,’ I said.

      ‘I saw Fiona the day before yesterday. She annihilated some poor befuddled Ministry fogey, she made the chairman apologize for inaccurate minutes of the previous meeting and, using the ensuing awkward silence, carried the vote for some training project they were trying to kill. She’s dynamite, that wife of yours. They are all frightened of her; the FO people I mean.’

      ‘Yes, I know.’

      ‘It takes quite a lot to scare them. And she thrives on it. These days she’s looking like some glamorous young model. Really wonderful!’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. I would always have to defer to Frank in the matter of glamorous young models.

      ‘She said the children were doing very well at school. She showed me photos of them. They are very attractive children, Bernard. You must be very proud of your family.’

      ‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

      ‘And she loves you,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘So why keep stirring up trouble for yourself?’ Frank gave one of those winning smiles that half the women in Berlin had fallen prey to. ‘You see, Bernard, I suspect you planned the whole thing – your train ride from Moscow with Prettyman. I think you made sure that there would be no one else available from here to do it.’

      ‘How would I have made sure?’

      ‘Have you forgotten the assignments you arranged in the days before you went away?’ As he said this he toyed with his pipe and kept his voice distant and detached.

      ‘I didn’t arrange their assignments. I don’t know those people. I did as Operations suggested.’

      ‘You signed.’ Now he looked up and was staring at me quizzically.

      ‘Yes, I signed,’ I agreed wearily. His mind was made up, at least for the time being. My best course was to let him think about it all. He would see reason eventually; he always did. No reasonable person could believe that I’d carefully plotted and planned a way to get Prettyman alone in order to grill him about Tessa’s death. But if Frank suspected it, you could bet that London believed it implicitly; for that’s where all this crap had undoubtedly originated. And, in this context, ‘London’ meant Fiona and Dicky. Or at least it included them.

      ‘Did you try one of those fried potato things?’ he said, pointing to one of the silver dishes. ‘They are flavoured with onion.’

      ‘Curry,’ I said. ‘They are curry-flavoured. Too hot for me.’

      ‘Are they? I don’t know what’s happening to Tarrant lately. He knows how I hate curry. I wonder how they put all these different flavours into them. In my day things just tasted of what they were,’ he said regretfully.

      I got to my feet. When the conversation took this culinary turn I guessed Frank had said everything of importance to him. He rested his pipe in a heavy glass ashtray and pushed it aside with a sigh. It made me wonder if he smoked to provide some sort of activity when we had these get-togethers. For the first time it occurred to me that Frank might have dreaded these exchanges as much as I did; or even more.

      ‘You were late again this morning,’ he said with a smile.

      ‘Yes, but I brought a note from Mummy.’

      Surely СКАЧАТЬ