Читать книгу The Harry Palmer Quartet - Len Deighton - Страница 27

The next day I didn’t go into the office in the morning. I drifted up to the Charing Cross Road on a number 1 bus, then cut off across Soho. I wanted to get a few groceries, some coffee, aubergines, andouillettes, some black bread, that sort of thing. The girl in the delicatessen had trimmed her eyebrows – I didn’t like them so much like that. She looked constantly surprised. With the clientele in that shop perhaps she was. I decided to have a cup of coffee in Led’s. The coffee may not be so good there – but the cheesecake was fine and I like the customers.

It seemed gloomy inside after the hot sunshine. I kicked the threadbare section of carpeting and eased myself into one of their rickety wooden chairs. Two Cona coffee-pots were bubbling away noisily.

My coffee came. I relaxed with the Daily Express. A hearsay report from a reliable source said that a girl featured weekly in a badly made TV series was likely to have a child.

A policeman earning £570 p.a. attacked by youths with knives outside a cinema where a nineteen-year-old rock-an’-roll singer was making a personal appearance for £600.

‘Would Jim Walker play for Surrey?’ There was a picture of Jim Walker, and 600 words. It didn’t say whether he would or not.

‘Warm sunny weather expected to continue. Cologne and Athens record temperature for time of year.’

‘British heavy electrical gear still world’s best,’ some Briton in the electrical trade had said. I held a quiet requiem for so many trees that had died in vain.

I sat there for half an hour or so. I smoked my Gauloises and thought about Keightley and Ross, and how someone smarter than I would handle Chico. Murray was the only one of the whole setup I’d want as a personal friend, and he was only in on the deal by accident. He had neither screening nor training as an operative. I thought about my desk where there would be the usual run of junk to read and initial before getting to anything important. The sight of that desk haunted me.

Most mornings I had a rough file of material from Washington – Defense Dept DSO SD CIC.¹ Once a week I had what was called a ‘digest’ of the ‘National Intelligence Estimate’, the thing they give to the President. The ‘digest’ meant I got a copy of the parts of it that they decided to let me see.

Then there were six to eight foolscap sheets of translations of passages from the foreign papers – Pravda, People’s Daily, the main paper of the Chinese Communist régime, and Red Flag, the theoretical organ of the Chinese Central Committee, and perhaps a few Yugoslav, Latvian or Hungarian accounts.

All this stuff had piled up on me the last few days. I decided to let it go another day. This was a warm London summer’s day, the sooty trees were in sooty leaf, and the girls were in light cotton dresses. I felt relaxed and simple. I called for another cup of thin coffee and leaned back reflectively.

She came into Led’s old broken doorway and into my life like the Royal Scot, but without all the steam and noise. She was dark, calm and dangerous-looking. Under her pinned-back hair her face was childishly wide-eyed as she stood momentarily blinded by the change of light.

Slowly and unflinchingly she looked around, meeting the insolent intensity of Led’s loose-lipped Lotharios, then came to sit at my small, circular, plastic-topped table. She ordered a black coffee and croissant. Her face was taut like a cast of an Aztec god; everything that was static in her features was belied by the soft, woolly, quick eyes into which the beholder sank unprotesting. Her hair, coarse and oriental in texture, was drawn back into a vortex on the crown of her head. She drank the brown coffee slowly.

She was wearing that ‘little black sleeveless dress’ that every woman has in reserve for cocktail parties, funerals and first nights. Her slim white arms shone against the dull material, and her hands were long and slender, the nails cut short and varnished in a natural colour. I watched her even, very white teeth bite into the croissant. She could have been top kick in the Bolshoi, Sweden’s first woman ship’s captain, private secretary to Chouen-lai, or Sammy Davis’s press agent. She didn’t pat her hair, produce a mirror, apply lipstick or flutter her eyelashes. She opened a conversation in a tentative English way. Her name was Jean Tonnesen. She was my new assistant.

Alice, the cunning old doll, not missing a trick, had given Miss Tonnesen a file of urgent matter including a written note from Chico saying he’d ‘gone away for the day would phone in at teatime’. It was pretty infuriating, but I didn’t want to start the day’s business by getting mad.

‘Have another coffee.’

‘Black, please.’

‘Which department did you come to us from?’

‘I was already in Dalby’s – I was holding down Macao sub-office.’

She must have seen the ego in my face take a bend. ‘I suppose we’ll have to stop saying Dalby’s now that you’re running us.’

‘That won’t be necessary. He’s only temporarily detached. As far as anyone has told me, anyway.’

She smiled, she had a nice smile.

‘Must be terrible to be back in Europe – even on a fine summer’s day. I remember going to a restaurant in Macao. It was built over a gambling casino. An illuminated sign reported the results at the tables downstairs. The waitresses take the bets, take the money; you eat, the sign shows the results – Bingo! Indigestion!’

She smiled again while shaking her head. I liked sitting here watching her smile her clear white smiles. She managed to let me play at being boss without being obsequious about it. I dimly remember her being in Macao, that is to say I remembered the odd papers and reports from her.

‘I brought my transfer card,’ she said.

‘Let’s look.’ I was beginning to confirm the picture of me that Alice had sketched in roughly. Even though Led’s wasn’t the place, she passed me a pale-green filing card. It was about six by ten inches. It was a personnel-type card, such as any large commercial firm might employ, but in the space for name and address there was only an irregularly spaced series of rectangular holes. Under this in panels was information. Born twenty-six years ago in Cairo. Norwegian father, Scottish mother, probably not short of the stuff since she went to school in Zurich between ’51 and ’52, and decided to live there. Perhaps working for British Diplomatic Service in Switzerland – it wouldn’t be the first time an Embassy typist came into the department. Her brother holds Norwegian citizenship, works for a shipping firm in Yokohama – hence presumably HK then Macao – where she worked part-time for the tourist bureau there – a Portuguese set-up. The panel marked T was bursting with entries. She spoke Norwegian, English, Portuguese, German, French, ‘FSW’, that is ‘fluent in speech and writing’, and Mandarin, Japanese and Cantonese ‘SS, some speaking’. Her security clearance was GH7 ‘non stopped’ which means that nothing had been found to prevent her having a higher clearance if the department wanted to classify her higher.

‘It doesn’t say whether you can sew,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Can you?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Trousers?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You’re in.’

I thanked her and handed the card back. It was fine; she was fine, my very first beautiful spy, always presuming of course that this was Jean Tonnesen’s card, and presuming that this was Jean Tonnesen. Even if she wasn’t, she was still my very first beautiful spy.

She put the card back into her small, for a handbag, handbag.

‘What do you have there?’ I asked. ‘A small snub-nosed, pearl-handled .22 automatic?’

‘No, I’ve got that tucked in my garter. In here I have the flare pistol.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘What do you like for lunch?’

In London with a beautiful hungry girl one must show her to Mario at the Terrazza. We sat in the ground floor front under the plastic grapes and Mario brought us Campari-sodas and told Jean how much he hated me. To do this he had to practically gnaw her ear off. Jean liked it.

We ordered the Zuppa di Lenticchie and Jean told how this lentil soup reminded her of visits with her father to Sicily many years ago. They had friends there, and each year would coincide their visits with the Feast of San Giuseppe on 19th March.

On that day the wealthier families provide gigantic amounts of food and open house to the whole village. Always the feast begins with lentil soup and spaghetti, but on St Joseph’s day no cheese must be eaten, so, instead, a mixture of toasted bread-crumbs, sardines and fennel is sprinkled over the dish.

‘Those days in the hot sun were as perfect as anytime I remember,’ Jean mused.

We ate the Calamari and the chicken deep in which the butter and garlic had been artfully hidden to be struck like a vein of aromatic gold. Jean had pancakes and a thimbleful of black coffee without mentioning calories, and went through the whole meal without lighting a cigarette. This showed virtue enough, she must have some vices.

Mario, deciding that I was on the brink of a great and important seduction, brought us a bottle of cold sparkling Asti ‘on the house’. He filled and refilled Jean’s glass then turned with the bottle still in his hand. He pointed the neck at me. ‘Is good?’

It certainly was. The wine and Jean had conspired to produce in me a gentle euphoria. The sunlight fell in dusty bars across the table-cloth and lit her face as she grinned. I watched her image inverted in the clear coolness of the wine in her glass. Outside, the driver of a wet fish van was arguing violently with a sad traffic warden. The traffic had welded itself into a river of metal, and from a taxi a few yards up the road two men paid off their cab and continued their journey on foot. The glass of the cab permitted only a momentary glimpse, then the traffic moved together; closing like the shutter of a camera.

One of the two men had the build of Jay, the other Dalby’s style in shoes. I was suddenly very wide awake.

¹ Director of Special Operations: State Dept. Counter Intelligence Corps US Army.