Читать книгу Charity - Len Deighton - Страница 2

Some years ago, on visiting the Vienna office of famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, I was intrigued by the assortment of names on the building’s bell-push directory. Each button would lead to a separate encounter, a different life story. My photograph of this now serves as a further ominous device for this trilogy.

Readers will note that Bernard’s name appears in the third panel; is Bernard the “third man” in the story, an unreliable narrator who is more implicated in the shady doings and subterfuge than he has let on? Perhaps the third position equates to the third part of the third trilogy; after all, at crux of the whole series stands Bernard. Or perhaps it best suited the design. I shall leave it to you to decide.

Inspiration comes from the most unexpected places. This time it was from listening to a line from the lyrics of “These Foolish Things”, written Eric Maschwitz, a former colleague from my days in television (and no stranger to spy-craft himself): “A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces…” This brought to mind the idea of a lipstick-tipped East German cigarette overhanging an ashtray containing a cigarette lighter displaying the ever-present KGB badge.

At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and perhaps Bernard’s too, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI