Spy hook: a novel (14 page)

“What the hell is this?” I said, looking at the half-finished painting leaning against the table. It was quite different to anything we’d seen in the living room or the studio: a Renaissance street scene - a procession - painted on a large wooden panel about five feet long. The colours were weird but the drawings were exact. “What strange colouring,” I said. “It’s just the underpainting,” explained Gloria. “He’ll put coloured glazes over that to create deep luminous colours.” “You seem to know all about it.”

“I was an au pair girl in Nice. I used to come up here on my afternoons off. Sometimes I helped him. He’s a sweet man. Do you know what it is?” Gloria asked.

“Egg tempera painting, I suppose. But why on long panels?”

“Renaissance marriage chests.”

“I don’t get it.”

“He paints forgeries. He sells them through a dealer in Munich.”

“And buyers are fooled?”

“They are authenticated by international art experts. Often famous museums buy them.”

“And he gets away with that?”

“Now it’s new ... unfinished. It will be stained and varnished and damaged so that it looks very old.”

“And fool museums?” I persisted.

“Museum directors are not saints, Bernard.”

“And there goes another illusion! So Dodo’s rich?” “No, they take him a long time to do, and the dealers won’t pay much: there are other forgers ready and willing to supply them.”

“So why ... ?”

“Does he do it?” she finished the question for me. “The deception ... the fraud, the deceit is what amuses him. He can be cruel. When you get to know him better, perhaps you’ll see what makes him do it.”

The old man groaned and seemed about to wake up but he turned over and went back to sleep breathing heavily. Gloria bent over and stroked his head affectionately. “The dealers make the big profits. Poor Dodo.”

“You knew all along? You were teasing him about the eggs in his refrigerator?”

She nodded. “Dodo is notorious. He claims to have painted a wonderful “School of Uccello” marriage chest that ended up in the Louvre. Dodo bought dozens of coloured postcards of it, and used them as Christmas cards last year. I thought he’d end up in prison, but no one knows whether that was just Dodo’s idea of a joke. Hungarians have all got a strange sense of humour.”

“I wondered about that,” I said.

“He knows about chemistry. It amuses him to reproduce the pigments, and age the wood and the other materials. He’s awfully clever.”

The old man stirred again and put a hand to his head where he’d banged it in falling. “Oh my God” he groaned. “You’re all right,” I told him.

“He can’t hear you; he’s talking in his sleep,” said Gloria.

“You do that sometimes.”

“Oh yes,” I scoffed at the suggestion.

“Last week you woke up. You were calling out crazy things.”

She put an arm round me in a protective gesture.

“What things?”

“They’re killing him; they’re killing him.”

“I never talk in my sleep,” I said.

“Have it your own way,’ said Gloria. But she was right. Three nights in a row I’d woken up after a nightmare about Jim Prettyman. “They’re killing Jim!” is what I’d shouted. I remember it only too well. In the dream, no matter how urgently I shouted at the passers-by, none of them would take any notice of me.

“Look at these photos,” said Gloria, unrolling some old prints that had been curled up on a cluttered side-table. “Wasn’t he a handsome young brute?”

A slim youthful athletic Dodo was in a group with half a dozen such youngsters and an older man whose face I knew well. Three of them were seated on wicker chairs in front of a garden hut. A man in the front row had a foot upon a board that said “The Prussians”.

“Probably a tennis tournament,” explained Gloria. “He was a wonderful tennis player.”

“Something like that,” I said, although I knew in fact that it was nothing of the kind. The older man was an old Berlin hand named John “Lange” Koby - a contemporary of my father - and his “Prussians” were the intelligence teams that he ran into the Russian zone of Germany. So Dodo had been an agent. “Did Dodo ever work with your father?” I asked her.

“In Hungary?” I nodded. “Intelligence gathering?” She had such a delicate way of putting things. “Not as far as I know.” She took the photo from me. “Is that a team?”

“That s the American: Lange Koby,” I said. She looked at the photo with renewed interest now that she knew that they were field agents. “Yes, he’s much older than the others. He’s still alive isn’t he?”

“Lives in Berlin. Sometimes I run into him. My father detested Lange. But Lange was all right.” “Why?”

“He detested all those Americans who Lange ran. He used to say, “German Americans are American Germans.” He had an obsession about them.”

“I’ve never heard you criticize your father before,” said Gloria.

“Maybe he had his reasons,” I said defensively. “Let’s go.”

“Are you sure Dodo will be all right?”

“He’ll be all right,” I said.

“You do like him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

At that first meeting I did like him: I must have been raving mad.

“It went well, I thought,” Dicky Cruyer said with a hint of modest pride. He was carrying illustration boards and now he put them on the floor and leaned them against the leg of his fine rosewood table.

I came into the room still trying to read the notes I’d scribbled during the babble, indignation and dismay that were always the hallmark of Tuesday mornings. I wasn’t giving my whole attention to Dicky and that was the sort of thing he noticed. I looked up and grunted.

“I said,” Dicky repeated slowly, having given me a good natured smile, “that I thought it all went very well.” I must have looked puzzled. “In the departmental get-together.” He tapped the brass barometer that he’d lately added to the furnishings of his working space. Or maybe he was tapping the temperature, or the time in New York City.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Very well indeed.”

Well, why wouldn’t it go to his satisfaction? What Dicky

Cruyer, my immediate boss, called a “departmental get together took place in one of the conference rooms every Tuesday morning. At one time it took place in Dicky’s office, but the German Station Controller’s empire had grown since then: we needed a larger. room nowadays because Tuesday morning had become a chance for Dicky to rehearse the lectures he gave to the indefatigable mandarins of the Foreign Office. It was usually a mad scramble of last-minute paper-work but today he’d used satellite photos and had pretty coloured diagrams - pie-charts, stacked bars and line-graphs - prepared in the new “art department” and an “operator” came and put them on the projector. Dicky prodded the screen with a telescopic rod and looked round the darkened room in case anyone had lit a cigarette.

The get-together was also the opportunity for Dicky to allocate work to his subordinates, arbitrate between them and start thinking about the monthly report that would have to be on the Director-General’s desk first thing on Friday morning. That is to say he got me to start thinking about it because I always had to write it.

“It’s simply a matter of motivating them all,” said Dicky, sitting at his rosewood table and straightening out a wire paper-clip. “I want them to feel . .

“Part of a team,” I supplied.

“That’s right,” he said. Then, detecting what he thought might be a note of sarcasm in my voice, he frowned. “You have a lot to learn about being part of a team, Bernard,” he said. “I know,’ I said. “I think the school I went to didn’t emphasize the team spirit nearly enough.”

“That lousy school in Berlin,” he said. “I never understood why your father let you go to a little local school like that. There were schools for the sons of British officers weren’t there?” “He said it would be good for my German.” “And it was,” conceded Dicky. “But you must have been the only English child there. It made you into a loner, Bernard.” “I suppose it did.”

“And you’re proud of that, I know. But a loner is a misfit, Bernard. I wish I could make you see that.” “I’ll need your notes, Dicky.”

“Notes?”

“To do the D-G’s report.”

“Not much in the way of notes today, Bernard,” he said proudly. “I’m getting the hang of these Tuesday morning talks nowadays. I improvise as I go along.”

Oh my God! I should have listened to what he was saying.

“Any rough notes will do.”

“Just write it the way I delivered it.”

“It’s a matter of emphasis, Dicky.”

He threw the straightened wire clip into his large glass ashtray and looked at me sharply. “A matter of emphasis” was Dicky’s roundabout way of admitting total ignorance. Hurriedly I added, “It’s so technical.”

Dicky softened somewhat. He liked being “technical”. Until recently Dicky’s lectures had been a simple resume of the everyday work of the office. But now he’d decided that the way ahead was the path of hi-tech. So he’d become a minor expert and a major bore - on such subjects as “photo-interpretation of intelligence obtained by unmanned vehicles” and “optical cameras, line-scan and radar sensors that provide monochrome , colour, false-colour and infra-red imagery”. “I think I explained it all carefully,” Dicky said. “Yes, you did,” I said and bent over far enough to fflp through the cardboard-mounted pictures he’d used, in the hope that they would all be suitably captioned. To some extent they were:

“SLRR sideways-looking reconnaissance radar” the first -one said, and there was a neat red arrow to show which way was up. And “IRLS infra-red line scan photo showing various radiometric temperatures of target area at noon. Notice buildings occupied by personnel, and the transport vehicles at bottom right of photo. Compare with photo of same area at midnight.” “Don’t take that material away with you,” Dicky warned. “I’ll need those pictures tomorrow, and I promised the people at Joint Air Reconnaissance that they’d have them back in perfect condition: no fingerprints or bent corners.”

No, I won’t take them,” I promised and slid the illustrations back in place. I was hopeless at understanding such things. I began to wonder which one of Dicky’s staff, present at this morning’s meeting, might have remembered his discourse well enough to recapitulate and explain it to me. But I couldn’t think of anyone who gave Dicky their undivided attention during the Tuesday morning meetings. Our most assiduous note-taker, Charlie Billingsly, was now in Hong Kong and Harry Strang, with his prodigious memory, had artfully contrived an urgent phone call that granted him escape just five minutes into Dicky’s dissertation. I said, “But you used to be strongly opposed to all this stuff from JARIC, and the satellite material too.” “We have to move with the times, Bernard.” Dicky looked down at the appointments book that his secretary had left open for him. “Oh, by the bye,” he said casually. Too casually. “You keep mentioning that fellow Prettyman . .

“I don’t keep mentioning him,’ I said. “I mentioned him once.

You said you didn’t remember him.”

“ I don’t want to quibble,” said Dicky. “The point is that his wife has been making a nuisance of herself lately. She cornered Morgan when he was in the FO the other day. Started on about a pension and all that kind of stuff.”

“His widow,” I said.

“Verily! Widow. I said widow.”

“You said wife.”

“Wife. Widow. What damned difference does it make.” “It makes a difference to Jim Prettyman,” I said. “It makes him dead.”

“Whatever she is, I don’t want anyone encouraging her.”

“Encouraging her to do what?”

“I wish you wouldn’t be so otiose,” said Dicky. He’d been reading Vocabulary Means Power again, I noticed that it was missing from the shelf behind his desk. “She shouldn’t be button-holing senior staff. It would serve her right if Morgan made an official complaint about her.”

“She wields a lot of clout over there,” I reminded him. “I wouldn’t advise Morgan to make an enemy of her. He might end up on his arse.”

Dicky wet his thin lips and nodded. “Yes. Well. You’re right. Morgan knows that. Far better that we all close ranks and ignore her.”

“Jim Pettyman was one of us,” I said. “He worked downstairs.”

“That was a long time ago. No one told him to go and work in Washington DC. What a place that is! My God, that town has some of the worst crime figures in the whole of North America.” So Dicky had been doing his homework.

I said, “This is not official then? This ... this not encouraging Prettyman’s widow?”

He looked at me and then looked out of the window. “It’s not official,” he said with measured care. “It’s good advice. It’s advice that might save someone a lot of trouble and grief” “That’s what I wanted to know,” I said. “Shall we get the heading for the D-G’s report?”

“Very well,’ said Dicky. He looked at me and nodded again. I wondered if he knew that Cindy Matthews - one-time Mrs. Prettyman - had invited me to a dinner party that evening.

“And by the way, Dicky,” I said. “That lion looks very good on the floor in here.”

Mrs. Cindy Matthews, as she styled herself, lived in considerable comfort. There was new Italian furniture, old French wine, a Swiss dishwasher and the sort of Japanese hi-fi that comes with a thick instruction manual. They’d never faced the expense that children bring of course, and I suppose the rise in London house prices had provided them with a fat profit on the big house they’d been buying in Edgware. Now she lived in a tiny house off the King’s Road, a thoroughfare noted f6i its punks, pubs and exotic boutiques. It was no more than four small rooms placed one upon the other, with the lowest one - a kitchen and dining room - below street level. But it was a fashionable choice: the sort of house that estate agents called “bijou” and newly divorced advertising men hankered after. There were candies and pink roses on the dining table, and solid silver cutlery, and more drinking glasses than I could count. Through the front window we could see the ankles of people walking past the house, and they could see what we were eating. Which is perhaps why we had the sort of meal that women s magazines photograph from above. Three paper-thin slices of avocado arranged alongside a tiny puddle of tomato sauce and a slice of kiwi fruit. The second course was three thin slices of duck breast with a segment of mango and a lettuce leaf. We ended with a thin slice of Cindy’s delicious home-made chocolate roulade. I ate a lot of bread and cheese. Cindy was a small pale-faced young woman with pointed nose and little cupid’s bow mouth. She had her wavy brunette hair cut short. I suppose it was easier to arrange and more suited to her senior position. Her dress was equally severe: plain brown wool and simply cut. She’d always been brimful of nervous energy, and arranging this dinner party had not lessened her restless anxiety. Now she fussed about the table, asking everyone whether they wanted more champagne, Perrier or Chablis, wholemeal or white rolls, and making sure that everyone had a table napkin. There was a tacit sigh of relief when she finally sat down.