Billion-Dollar Brain. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ and the other half is picture windows. The décor is all natural wood and copper and the place was crowded with young people shouting, flirting and drinking Coca-Cola.

      We sat down in the farthest corner staring out across a crowded car-park where every car was white with snow. With her heavy coat off the girl was much younger than I thought. Helsinki teems with fresh-faced girls born when the soldiers returned home. Nineteen forty-five was a boom year for gorgeous Finns. I wondered whether this girl was one of them.

      ‘I am Liam Dempsey, a citizen of Eire,’ I said. ‘I have been gathering material for Professor Kaarna in connexion with a transfer of funds between London and Helsinki. I live in London most of the year.’ She presented her hand across the table and I shook it. She said, ‘My name is Signe Laine. I am a Finn. You work for Professor Kaarna, then we shall get along swell because Professor Kaarna works for me.’

      ‘For you,’ I said without making it a question.

      ‘Not for me personally,’ she smiled at the thought. ‘For the organization that employs me.’

      She held her hands as though she’d seen too many copies of Vogue, picking up one hand with the other and holding it against her face and nursing it as if it was a sick canary.

      ‘What organization is that?’ I asked. The waitress came to our table. Signe ordered in Finnish without consulting me.

      ‘All in good time,’ she said. Outside in the car-park the wind was carrying the snow in horizontal streaks and a man in a woollen hat with a bobble on it was struggling along with a car battery, leaning into the wind and trying not to slip on the hard, shiny, grey ice.

      Lunch was open cold-beef sandwiches, soup, cream cake, coffee and a glass of cold milk, which is practically the national drink. Signe bit into it all like a buzz saw. Now and again she asked me questions about where I was born and how much I earned and whether I was married. She put the questions in the off-hand preoccupied way that women have when they are very interested in the answers.

      ‘Where are you staying? – You’re not eating your cream cake.’

      ‘I’m not staying anywhere and I’m not allowed cream cake.’

      ‘It’s good,’ she said. She dipped her little finger into the chocolate cream and held it to my lips. She put her head on one side so that her long golden hair fell across her face. I licked the cream from her finger-tip.

      ‘Did you like that?’

      ‘Very much.’

      ‘Then eat it.’

      ‘With a spoon it’s not the same.’

      She smiled and looped a long strand of hair around her fingers, then asked me a lot of questions about where I was going to stay. She said that she would like to take the documents intended for Kaarna. I refused to part with them. Finally we agreed that I would bring the documents to a meeting the next day and that meanwhile I wouldn’t re-contact Kaarna. She gave me five one-hundred-mark notes – over fifty-five pounds sterling – for immediate expenses, then we got down to serious conversation.

      ‘Do you realize,’ she said, ‘that if the material you are carrying got into the wrong hands it could do a great deal of harm to your country?’ Signe didn’t fully understand the distinction between Eire and the United Kingdom.

      ‘Really?’ I said.

      ‘I take it …’ she pretended to be very occupied with the lock on her brief-case, ‘… that you wouldn’t want to harm your own country.’

      ‘Certainly not,’ I said anxiously.

      She looked up and gave me a sincere look. ‘We need you,’ she said. ‘We need you to work for us.’

      I nodded. ‘Who exactly is “us”?’

      ‘British Military Intelligence,’ said Signe. She wound a great skein of golden hair around her fingers and secured it with a wicked-looking pin. She got to her feet. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said, and pushed the bill across to me before leaving the restaurant.

       3

      I checked into the Marski that afternoon. It’s a tasteful piece of restrained Scandinavian on Mannerheim. The lights are just bright enough to glint on the stainless steel, and sitting on the black leather at the bar is like being at the controls of a Boeing 707. I drank vodka and wondered why Kaarna had been smeared with raw egg and what had happened to the egg-shells. I had a quiet little laugh about being recruited for British Intelligence, but not a big laugh, for two reasons.

      First, it’s the usual practice of all intelligence organizations to tell their operatives that they are working for someone whom they will be happy to work for. A Francophile is told that his reports go to the Quai d’Orsay, a Communist is told that his orders come from Moscow. Few agents can be quite sure whom they work for, because the nature of the work precludes their being able to check back.

      The second reason that I wasn’t getting a big laugh was because Signe just might be working for Ross’s department at the War Office. Unlikely but possible.

      As a general rule – and all general rules are dangerous – agents are natives of the country in which they operate. I wasn’t an agent, nor was I likely to be one. I delivered, evaluated and handled information that our agents obtained, but I seldom met one except a cut-out, or go-between, like the Finn I had spoken with on the ferry. I was in Helsinki to do a simple task and now it was becoming very complex. I should follow up this strange opportunity, but I was not prepared. I had no communication arranged with London except an emergency contact that I dare not use unless world war were imminent. I had no system of contacts, for not only was I forbidden to interrupt the work of our resident people but, judging by the speed with which the grey-haired man answered the phone, that was a public call-box number.

      So I had another vodka and slowly read the expensive menu and felt in my pocket the five hundred marks the girl with the wide mouth had given me. Easy come; easy go.

      The next morning was blue and sunny but still a couple of degrees below. The birds were singing in the trees of the esplanade and I walked through the centre of town. I walked up the steep hill where the University buildings are painted bright yellow like boarding-house custard, and down on to Unioninkatu and the shop full of ankle-length leather coats.

      The girl Signe was standing outside the leather shop. She said good morning and fell into step beside me. At Long Bridge we cut off to the left without crossing it and walked alongside the frozen inlet. Under the bridge ducks were probing around among the debris that was scattered across the ice, soggy old cardboard cartons and dented cans. The bridge itself was pock-marked with bomb-splinter scars.

      ‘The Russians,’ said Signe. I looked at her.

      ‘Bombed Helsinki; damaged the bridge.’

      We stood there watching the lorries coming into the city. ‘My father was a trade unionist; he used to look at that damaged bridge and say to me, “Those bombs were made by Soviet workers in Soviet factories in the land of Lenin, remember that.” My father had devoted all his life to the trade-union movement. In 1944 he died broken-hearted.’ She walked ahead rather quickly and I saw the quick flash of a pocket handkerchief СКАЧАТЬ