Читать книгу Yesterday’s Spy - Len Deighton - Страница 10

Schlegel likes Southern California. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing he does like. You take Southern California by the inland corners, he says, jerk it, so that all the shrubbery and real-estate falls into a heap along the coast, and you know what you’ve got? And I say, yes, you’ve got the French Riviera, because I’ve heard him say it before.

Well, on Monday I’d got the French Riviera. Or, more precisely, I’d got Nice. I arrived in my usual neurotic way: ten hours before schedule, breaking my journey in Lyon and choosing the third cab in the line-up.

It was so easy to remember what Nice had looked like the first time I saw it. There had been a pier that stretched out to sea, and barbed wire along the promenade. Armed sentries had stood outside the sea-front hotels, and refugees from the north stood in line for work, or begged furtively outside the crowded cafés and restaurants. Inside, smiling Germans in ill-fitting civilian suits bought each other magnums of champagne and paid in mint-fresh military notes. And everywhere there was this smell of burning, as if everyone in the land had something in their possession that the Fascists would think incriminating.

Everyone’s fear is different. And because bravery is just the knack of suppressing signs of your own fear, bravery is different too. The trouble with being only nineteen is that you are frightened of all the wrong things; and brave about the wrong things. Champion had gone to Lyon. I was all alone, and of course then too stupid not to be thankful for it. No matter what the movies tell you, there was no resistance movement visible to the naked eye. Only Jews could be trusted not to turn you over to the Fascists. Men like Serge Frankel. He’d been the first person I’d contacted then, and he was the first one I went to now.

It was a sunny day, but the apartment building, which overlooked the vegetable market, was cold and dark. I went up the five flights of stone stairs. Only a glimmer of daylight penetrated the dirty windows on each landing. The brass plate at his door – ‘Philatelic Expert’ – was by now polished a little smoother, and there was a card tucked behind the bell that in three languages said ‘Buying and Selling by Appointment Only’.

The same heavy door that protected his stamps, and had given us perhaps groundless confidence in the old days, was still in place, and the peep-hole through which he’d met the eyes of the Gestapo now was used to survey me.

‘My boy! How wonderful to see you.’

‘Hello, Serge.’

‘And a chance to practise my English,’ he said. He reached forward with a white bony hand, and gripped me firmly enough for me to feel the two gold rings that he wore.

It was easy to imagine Serge Frankel as a youth: a frail-looking small-boned teenager with frizzy hair and a large forehead and the same style of gold-rimmed spectacles as he was wearing now.

We went into the study. It was a high-ceilinged room lined with books, their titles in a dozen or more languages. Not only stamp catalogues and reference books, but philosophy from Cicero to Ortega y Gasset.

He sat in the same button-back leather chair now as he had then. Smiling the same inscrutable and humourless smile, and brushing at the ash that spilled down the same sort of waistcoat, leaving there a grey smear like a mark of penitence. It was inevitable that we should talk of old times.

Serge Frankel was a Communist – student of Marx, devotee of Lenin and servant of Stalin. Born in Berlin, he’d been hunted from end to end of Hitler’s Third Reich, and had not seen his wife and children since the day he waved goodbye to them at Cologne railway station, wearing a new moustache and carrying papers that described him as an undertaker from Stettin.

During the Civil War in Spain, Frankel had been a political commissar with the International Brigade. During the tank assault on the Prado, Frankel had destroyed an Italian tank single-handed, using a wine bottle hastily filled with petrol.

‘Tea?’ said Frankel. I remembered him making tea then as he made it now: pouring boiling water from a dented electric kettle into an antique teapot with a chipped lid. Even this room was enigmatic. Was he a pauper, hoarding the cash value of the skeleton clock and the tiny Corot etching, or a Croesus, indifferent to his plastic teaspoons and museum postcards of Rouault?

‘And what can I do for you, young man?’ He rubbed his hands together, exactly as he had done the day I first visited him. Then, my briefing could hardly have been more simple: find Communists and give them money, they had told me. But most of life’s impossible tasks – from alchemy to squaring the circle – are similarly concise. At that time the British had virtually no networks in Western Europe. A kidnapping on the German–Dutch border in November 1939 had put both the European chief of SIS and his deputy into the hands of the Abwehr. A suitcase full of contact addresses captured in The Hague in May 1940, and the fall of France, had given the coup de grâce to the remainder. Champion and I were ‘blind’, as jargon has it, and halt and lame, too, if the truth be told. We had no contacts except Serge Frankel, who’d done the office a couple of favours in 1938 and 1939 and had never been contacted since.

‘Communists.’ I remembered the way that Frankel had said it, ‘Communists’, as though he’d not heard the word before. I had been posing as an American reporter, for America was still a neutral country. He looked again at the papers I had laid out on his writing table. There was a forged US passport sent hurriedly from the office in Berne, an accreditation to the New York Herald Tribune and a membership card of The American Rally for a Free Press, which the British Embassy in Washington recommended as the reddest of American organizations. Frankel had jabbed his finger on that card and pushed it to the end of the row, like a man playing patience. ‘Now that the Germans have an Abwehr office here, Communists are lying low, my friend.’ He had poured tea for us.

‘But Hitler and Stalin have signed the peace pact. In Lyon the Communists are even publishing a news-sheet.’

Frankel looked up at me, trying to see if I was being provocative. He said, ‘Some of them are even wearing the hammer and sickle again. Some are drinking with the German soldiers and calling them fellow workers, like the Party tells them to do. Some have resigned from the Party in disgust. Some have already faced firing squads. Some are reserving their opinion, waiting to see if the war is really finished. But which are which? Which are which?’ He sipped his tea and then said, ‘Will the English go on fighting?’

‘I know nothing about the English, I’m an American,’ I insisted. ‘My office wants a story about the French Communists and how they are reacting to the Germans.’

Frankel moved the US passport to the end of the row. It was as if he was tacitly dismissing my credentials, and my explanations, one by one. ‘The people you want to see are the ones still undecided.’

He looked up to see my reaction.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘The ones who have not signed a friendship treaty with the Boche, eh?’

I nodded.

‘We’ll meet again on Monday. What about the café in the arcade, at the Place Massena. Three in the afternoon.’

‘Thank you, Mr Frankel. Perhaps there’s something I can do for you in return. My office have let me have some real coffee …’

‘Let’s see what happens,’ said Frankel. But he took the tiny packet of coffee. Already it was becoming scarce.

I picked up the documents and put them into my pocket. Frankel watched me very closely. Making a mistake about me could send him to a concentration camp. We both knew that. If he had any doubts he’d do nothing at all. I buttoned up my coat and bowed him goodbye. He didn’t speak again until I reached the door. ‘If I am wearing a scarf or have my coat buttoned at the collar, do not approach me.’

‘Thank you, Mr Frankel,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch out for that.’

He smiled. ‘It seems like only yesterday,’ he said. He poured the tea. ‘You were too young to be a correspondent for an American newspaper, but I knew you were not working for the Germans.’

‘How did you know that?’

He passed the cup of tea to me, murmuring apologies about having neither milk nor lemon. He said, ‘They would have sent someone more suitable. The Germans had many men who’d lived in America long enough. They could have chosen someone in his thirties or forties with an authentic accent.’

‘But you went ahead,’ I reminded him.

‘I talked to Marius. We guessed you’d be bringing money. The first contact would have to bring money. We could do nothing without cash.’

‘You could have asked for it, or stolen it.’

‘All that came later – the bank hold-ups, the extortion, the loans. When you arrived we were very poor. We were offering only a franc for a rifle and we could only afford to buy the perfect Lebel pattern ones even then.’

‘Rifles the soldiers had thrown away?’ It was always the same conversation that we had, but I didn’t mind.

‘The ditches were full of them. It was that that started young Marius off – the bataillon Guernica was his choice of name – I thought it would have been better to have chosen a victory to celebrate, but young Marius liked the unequivocally anti-German connotation that the Guernica bombing gave us.’

‘But on the Monday you said no,’ I reminded him.

‘On the Monday I told you not to have high hopes,’ he corrected me. He ran his long bony fingers back into his fine white wispy hair.

‘I knew no one else, Serge.’

‘I felt sorry for you when you walked off towards the bus station, but young Marius wanted to look at you and make up his own mind. And that way it was safer for me, too. He decided to stop you in the street if you looked genuine.’

‘At the Casino tabac he stopped me. I wanted English cigarettes.’

‘Was that good security?’

‘I had the American passport. There was no point in trying to pretend I was French.’

‘And Marius said he might get some?’

‘He waited outside the tabac. We talked. He said he’d hide me in the church. And when Champion returned, he hid us both. It was a terrible risk to take for total strangers.’

‘Marius was like that,’ said Frankel.

‘Without you and Marius we might never have got started,’ I said.

‘Hardly,’ said Frankel. ‘You would have found others.’ But he smiled and was flattered to think of himself as the beginning of the whole network. ‘Sometimes I believe that Marius would have become important, had he lived.’

I nodded. They’d made a formidable partnership – the Jewish Communist and the anti-Fascist priest – and yet I remembered Frankel hearing the news of Marius’s death without showing a flicker of emotion. But Frankel had been younger then, and keen to show us what his time in Moscow had really taught him.

‘We made a lot of concessions to each other – me and Marius,’ Frankel said. ‘If he’d lived we might have achieved a great deal.’

‘Sure you would,’ I said. ‘He would be running the Mafia, and you would have been made Pope.’

Flippancy was not in the Moscow curriculum, and Frankel didn’t like it. ‘Have you seen Pina Baroni yet?’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘I see her in the market here sometimes,’ said Frankel. ‘Her little boutique in the Rue de la Buffa is a flourishing concern, I’m told. She’s over the other business by now, and I’m glad …’

The ‘other business’ was a hand-grenade thrown into a café in Algiers in 1961. It killed her soldier husband and both her children. Pina escaped without a scratch, unless you looked inside her head. ‘Poor Pina,’ I said.

‘And Ercole …’ Frankel continued, as if he didn’t want to talk of Pina, ‘… his restaurant prospers – they say his grandson will inherit; and “the Princess” still dyes her hair red and gets raided by the social division.’

I nodded. The ‘social division’ was the delicate French term for vice squad.

‘And Claude l’avocat?’

‘It’s Champion you want to know about,’ said Frankel.

‘Then tell me about Champion.’

He smiled. ‘We were all taken in by him, weren’t we? And yet when you look back, he’s the same now as he was then. A charming sponger who could twist any woman round his little finger.’

‘Yes?’ I said doubtfully.

‘Old Tix’s widow, she could have sold out for a big lump sum, but Champion persuaded her to accept instalments. So Champion is living out there in the Tix mansion, with servants to wait on him hand and foot, while Madame Tix is in three rooms with an outdoor toilet, and inflation has devoured what little she does get.’

‘Is that so?’

‘And now that he sees the Arabs getting rich on the payments for oil, Champion is licking the boots of new masters. His domestic staff are all Arabs, they serve Arab food out there at the house, they talk Arabic all the time and when he visits anywhere in North Africa he gets VIP treatment.’

I nodded. ‘I saw him in London,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a fez and standing in line to see “A Night in Casablanca”.’

‘It’s not funny,’ said Frankel irritably.

‘It’s the one where Groucho is mistaken for the Nazi spy,’ I said, ‘but there’s not much singing.’

Frankel clattered the teapot and the cups as he stacked them on the tray. ‘Our Mister Champion is very proud of himself,’ he said.

‘And pride comes before a fall,’ I said. ‘Is that what you mean, Serge?’

‘You said that!’ said Frankel. ‘Just don’t put words into my mouth, it’s something you’re too damned fond of doing, my friend.’

I’d touched a nerve.

Serge Frankel lived in an old building at the far end of the vegetable market. When I left his apartment that Monday afternoon, I walked up through the old part of Nice. There was brilliant sunshine and the narrow alleys were crowded with Algerians. I picked my way between strings of shoes, chickens, dates and figs. There was a peppery aroma of merguez sausages frying, and tiny bars where light-skinned workers drank pastis and talked football, and dark-skinned men listened to Arab melodies and talked politics.

From the Place Rosetti came the tolling of a church bell. Its sound echoed through the alleys, and stony-faced men in black suits hurried towards the funeral. Now and again, kids on mopeds came roaring through the alleys, making the shoppers leap into doorways. Sometimes there came cars, inch by inch, the drivers eyeing the scarred walls where so many bright-coloured vehicles had left samples of their paint. I reached the boulevard Jean Jaurès, which used to be the moat of the fortified medieval town, and is now fast becoming the world’s largest car park. There I turned, to continue along the alleys that form the perimeter of the old town. Behind me a white BMW was threading through the piles of oranges and stalls of charcuterie with only a fraction to spare. Twice the driver hooted, and on the third time I turned to glare.

‘Claude!’ I said.

‘Charles!’ said the driver. ‘I knew it was you.’

Claude had become quite bald. His face had reddened, perhaps from the weather, the wine or blood pressure. Or perhaps all three. But there was no mistaking the man. He still had the same infectious grin and the same piercing blue eyes. He wound the window down. ‘How are you? How long have you been in Nice? It’s early for a holiday, isn’t it?’ He drove on slowly. At the corner it was wide enough for him to open the passenger door. I got into the car alongside him. ‘The legal business looks like it’s flourishing,’ I said. I was fishing, for I had no way of knowing if the cheerful law student whom we called Claude l’avocat was still connected with the legal profession.

‘The legal business has been very kind to me,’ said Claude. He rubbed his cheek and chuckled as he looked me up and down. ‘Four grandchildren, a loving wife and my collection of Delftware. Who could ask for more.’ He chuckled again, this time in self-mockery. But he smoothed the lapel of his pearl-grey suit and adjusted the Cardin kerchief so that I would notice that it matched his tie. Even in the old days, when knitted pullovers were the height of chic, Claude had been a dandy. ‘And now Steve Champion lives here, too,’ he said.

‘So I hear.’

He smiled. ‘It must be the sunshine and the cooking.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And it was Steve who …’ He stopped.

‘Saved my life?’ I said irritably. ‘Saved my life up at the quarry.’

‘Put the réseau together, after the arrests in May,’ said Claude. ‘That’s what I was going to say.’

‘Well, strictly between the two of us, Claude, I wish I’d spent the war knitting socks,’ I said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I wish I had never heard of the lousy réseau, the Guernica network and all the people in it.’

‘And Steve Champion?’

‘Steve Champion most of all,’ I said. ‘I wish I could just come down here on holiday and not be reminded of all that useless crappy idiocy!’

‘You don’t have to shout at me,’ Claude said. ‘I didn’t send for you, you came.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. I regretted losing my cool if only for a moment.

‘We all want to forget,’ Claude said gently. ‘No one wants to forget it more than I want to.’

The car was halted while two men unloaded cartons of instant couscous from a grey van. In the Place St François the fish market was busy, too. A decapitated tunny was being sliced into steaks alongside the fountain, and a woman in a rubber apron was sharpening a set of knives.

‘So Steve is here?’ I said.

‘Living here. He lives out at the Tix house near the quarry.’

‘What a coincidence,’ I said. ‘All of us here again.’

‘Is it?’ said Claude.

‘Well, it sounds like a coincidence, doesn’t it?’

The driver’s sun-shield was drooping and Claude smiled as he reached up and pushed it flat against the roof of the car. In that moment I saw a gun in a shoulder holster under his arm. It wasn’t an impress-the-girlfriend, or frightened-of-burglars kind of instrument. The leather holster was soft and shiny, and the underside of the magazine was scratched from years of use. A Walther PPK! Things must have got very rough in the legal business in the last few years.

He turned and smiled the big smile that I remembered from the old days. ‘I don’t believe in anything any more,’ he confessed. ‘But most of all I don’t believe in coincidences. That’s why I’m here.’ He smoothed his tie again. ‘Where can I drop you, Charles?’