Charity. Len Deighton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ be drinking alcohol really, but I couldn’t face a lecture from Frank without a drink in my hand.

      ‘Stop by for a drink tonight,’ he said. ‘About nine. I’m having some people in … Unless you have something arranged already.’

      ‘I said I’d see Werner.’

      ‘We’ll make it another night,’ said Frank.

      ‘Yes,’ I said. I wondered if he’d taste one of the ‘potato things’ and find they were onion after all. I don’t know what made me tell him they tasted of curry, except in some vague hope that the hateful Tarrant would be blamed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mixed alcohol and pain-killers.

      By the time my official confirmation as Frank’s deputy came through I was settled into my comfortable office and making good use of my assistant and my secretary, as well as a personally assigned Rover saloon car and driver. I’d often remarked that Frank had kept the Berlin establishment absurdly high, but now I was reaping some of the rewards of his artful manipulations.

      Frank, having resisted appointing a deputy for well over two years, made the most of my presence. He attended conferences, symposiums, lectures and meetings of a kind that in the old days he’d always avoided. He even went to one of those awful gatherings in Washington DC to watch his American colleagues in CIA Operations trying to look cheerful despite the seemingly unending intelligence leaks coming from the top of the CIA tree.

      Although in theory Frank’s frequent absences made me the de facto chief in Berlin, I knew that his super-efficient secretary Lydia never missed a day without reporting to him at length, even when this meant phoning him in the middle of the night. So I never emerged from Frank’s shadow, which was perhaps something of an advantage.

      My new-found authority granted me the chance to put my old friend Werner Volkmann on a regular contract. Werner was always saying he needed money, although the fees we paid him wouldn’t go very far to meeting Werner’s lifestyle. His business – arranging advance bank payments for East German exports – was drying up. Things were becoming more and more difficult for him because the bankers were frightened that the DDR might be about to default on its debts to the West. But being on Departmental contract seemed to do something for his self-esteem. Werner loved what I once heard him call the ‘mystique of espionage’. Whatever that was, he felt himself a part of it and I was happy for him.

      ‘Having you here in Berlin, on permanent assignment, is like old times,’ Werner said. ‘Whose idea was it?’

      ‘Dicky sent me here to spy on Frank.’ I said it just to crank him up. We were sitting in Babylon, a dingy subterranean ‘club’. It was owned by an amusing and enigmatic villain named Rudi Kleindorf, who claimed to come from a family of Prussian aristocrats, and was jokingly referred to as der grosse Kleine. We were sitting at a hideous little gilt table, under a tasselled light fitting. We had been invited for a drink and a chance to see how everything was coming along. Our inspection had been quickly completed and now we were having that drink.

      The club wasn’t functioning yet; it was still in the process of being redecorated. The workmen had departed but there were ladders and pots of paint on the stage, and on the bar top too. There had been stories that it was to be renamed ‘Alphonse’, but the Potsdamerstrasse was not the right location for a club named Alphonse. Whatever name it was given, and whatever the colour of the paint, and the quality of the new curtains for the stage, and even some new, slimmer and younger girls, it would never be a place that tourists, or Berlin’s Hautevolee, would want to frequent, except on a drunken excursion to see how the lower half lives. I wondered if Werner had been enticed to put some money into Rudi Kleindorf’s enterprise. It was the sort of thing Werner did; he could be romantically nostalgic about dumps we’d frequented when we were young.

      Werner reached for the bottle on the table between us and poured another drink for me. He smiled in that strange way that he did when figuring the hidden motives and devious ways of men and women. His head slightly tilted back, his eyes were almost closed and his lips pressed together. It was easy to see why he was sometimes mistaken for one of the Turkish Gastarbeiter who formed a large percentage of the city’s population. It was not only Werner’s swarthy complexion, coarse black hair, large square-ended black moustache and the muscular build of a wrestler. He had a certain oriental demeanour. Byzantine described him exactly; except that they were Greeks.

      ‘And Frank?’ said Werner. There was nothing more he need say. Dicky was youthful, curly-haired, energetic, ambitious and devious; while Frank was bloodless, tired and lazy. But in any sort of struggle between them, the smart money was on Frank. Frank had spent a great deal of his long career being splashed in the blood and snot of Berlin, while Dicky was concentrating upon crocodile-covered Filofax notebooks and Mont Blanc fountain-pens. Werner and I both knew a side of Frank that Dicky had never seen. Never mind all that avuncular charm, we’d seen the cold-blooded way in which Frank could make life-and-death decisions that would have consigned ‘don’t-know Dicky’ to a psychiatrist’s couch in a darkened room.

      ‘What’s Dicky frightened of?’

      ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I can truthfully say he’s frightened of nothing except perhaps an audit of his expense accounts.’ There were voices from behind the tiny stage and then a man came out and played a few bars on the piano. I recognized it as an old Gus Kahn tune: ‘Dream a little dream of me’.

      ‘So it was Frank’s idea?’ Werner asked. Werner was an impressive piano player; I could see he was listening to the music with a critical ear.

      ‘It wasn’t anyone’s idea. Not the way you mean. The job was vacant; I came.’

      Werner said: ‘Frank has managed without a deputy for ages. Don’t you need to be in London … somewhere near Fiona and the kids? How are they doing?’

      ‘They are still with Fiona’s parents. Private school with extra tutoring as needed, a pony for Sally and a mountain bicycle for Billy, evenings with Grandpa and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.’

      ‘What are you going to do?’

      ‘Do? I can’t snatch them away from the bastard without providing something better, can I?’ I said, curbing my anger and frustration. The piano player suddenly ended his experimental tunes, stood up and shouted that the piano was no good at all. A disembodied voice shouted that there was no money to get another. The piano player shrugged, looked at us, shrugged again and then sat down and tried Gershwin.

      ‘Couldn’t they live in London with Fiona?’ said Werner.

      ‘It’s an apartment – not fifteen acres of rolling countryside … and Fiona works every hour God Almighty sends. How would we arrange things? I’d have them here if I could think of some feasible way of doing it.’ I looked down at my hands; I had clasped one fist so tight that a fingernail had cut my palm, and drawn blood.

      Werner watched me and tried to cheer me up: ‘Well, you don’t have to be in Berlin for ever and I’m sure there’s plenty to do here.’

      ‘Enough. A Deputy Head of Station is on the establishment. I suppose Frank was afraid that if the position remained unfilled too long it would be abolished. Anyway it gives Frank a chance to disappear whenever he likes.’

      ‘But it ties you down.’

      ‘The theory is: I get one long weekend in London a month.’

      ‘You’ll have to fight for it,’ said Werner.

      ‘That’s СКАЧАТЬ