Charity - Len Deighton

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gravitas and intellect that Bernard respects so much. But Gloria wears my wife’s clothes – that fur hat and brown suede overcoat from Paris – and flaunts them with youthful abandon. Who can resist her? And yet these were not my characterizations. Like everyone and everything in the stories, each was seen through the eyes of Bernard Samson, whose sceptical bite is the essence of the whole series.

      It wasn’t just the characters; I also kept a file index for the places in the story. As with the people, photographs and my own sketches supplemented the on-going material. The Hennig Hotel goes through several changes in the Samson years and its origin, as family residence in the early years of the 20th century, was described in Winter. The furniture and furnishings of the Berlin home and office of Frank Harrington had pages of notes devoted to them. So did Dicky Cruyer’s home, changing frequently to the dictates of fashion, and more records were kept describing the offices and safe houses used by the SIS in London.

      One reader told me that the Bernard Samson books were a social chronicle of the final years of the communist empire seen from London, Berlin and Warsaw. I had never thought of them in that way and that certainly was never my primary intention. Only here and there have I touched upon the historical background. I didn’t want the books to become a political record so did not refer to such events as the travels and speeches of people such as President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev, all of whom played a vital part in the eventual fall of Russia’s communist empire, and thus in the lives of my characters.

      But history cannot be denied and finally the rumour mills proved right. The daily sequence of hints and tips we all received constantly, from both sides, came to fruition step by step. With no warning from the expensive intelligence organizations of the West, the Wall went down as it had gone up; in a muddled scramble of incompetence and confusion. But with that fine sense of proportion with which all apparatchiks are equipped, the Stasi, the Grepo, the East German politicians and all those who had manned the murder machines of the DDR got their pensions guaranteed in Western marks. In England and America people winked at me and said I’d forecast the most unexpected development. But few Germans hailed me as a prophet; they had seen what was coming and those who were surprised said I was lucky.

      Just as with the collapse of communism in Poland, Germany’s intellectuals and academics who had energetically supported the repressive regime to the very end, were the first to declare themselves the victors in a struggle for freedom and democracy. And because substantial numbers of these people spoke English, the news reporters and historians who flooded in to tell the story of freedom’s triumph gave them the role of heroes. The story of the Church, its valour, sacrifices and triumphs, was belittled by these belligerent secularists.

      It was Russia’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, (who remained a dedicated communist) who had the last word on the subject; ‘If there is one man responsible for the collapse of communism it is Pope John Paul II.’

      Len Deighton, 2011

      1

      January 1988. The Moscow-Paris express train

      A bloated vampire moon drained all life and colour from the world. The snow-covered land came speeding past the train. It was grey and ill-defined, marked only by a few livid cottages and limitless black forest grizzled with snow. No roads; the railway did not follow any road, it cut through the land like a knife. I had seen enough of this cheerless country. I tugged the window-blind down, grabbing at a brass rubbish bin to keep my balance as the clattering train argued with a badly maintained section of track.

      Sometimes, at night, people also succumbed. Jim Prettyman’s complexion, which had always been pale, was ashen under the dim overhead light. Inert on the top berth, a rosary dangling from his white-skinned hand; on the other a gold wedding ring and a massive gold Rolex wrist-watch indicating nine-thirty in the morning. It wasn’t nine-thirty here for us. His watch had stopped. Or perhaps that was the right time in Moscow. We were a long way from Moscow, and for us it was still night.

      Jim stirred, as if my stare had disturbed his sleep. But his eyelids didn’t move. He made a noise; a deep breath and then a stifled groan that ended in a subdued nasal snort as he snatched his arm down under the blanket and resumed his sleep. Jim was tough and wiry but his appearance had never been athletic. Now his white face, with the vestigial eyebrows, made him look like a corpse prettified and readied for the relatives.

      Jim had picked up some kind of infection of the liver, or maybe it was the kidneys. The Russian hospital doctors said they could treat it, but, since their diagnosis varied from day to day according to what they were drinking with lunch, no one believed them. Some doctor the American embassy had on call wouldn’t give a diagnosis; he just advised that Jim shouldn’t be subjected to a plane trip. Rather than have him face any more treatment by Moscow’s medics, Jim’s American wife had wired the money for him to be evacuated by train and attended by a nurse. Jim’s wife was a woman with considerable influence. She had arranged that her father in the State Department sent a night-action fax to make sure the embassy people jumped to it. She wasn’t with us; she had to host a Washington dinner party for her father.

      Although the paperwork for Jim’s passage was being handled by the Americans, someone in London Central ordered that I should accompany him as far as Berlin. I was in Moscow at the time, and their message said it simply meant delaying my return by twenty-four hours. But going from Moscow to West Berlin by air was quite different to doing the same trip by train. By train I was going to encounter whole armies of nosy customs officials, security men and frontier police. Jim had a US passport nowadays, the nurse was Canadian and I was stuck with the German passport that I had used for my entry. With this cosmopolitan party I would have to cross Poland, and then travel across a large section of the German Democratic Republic, before getting to anywhere I could call home. Perhaps the people in London didn’t appreciate that. There was sometimes good reason to think pen-pushers in the Foreign Office in Whitehall were still using nineteenth-century maps.

      I was looking at Jim, trying to decide how ill he really was, when there came a sudden sound, like a shovelful of heavy mud hitting a wall. The compartment rocked slightly. With no lessening of speed, the express thudded the air and sped between some empty loading platforms, leaving behind no more than an echoed gasp and a whiff of burned diesel. The train was packed. You could feel the weight of it as it swayed, and hear the relentless pounding of the bogies. The compartments of the wagon-lit had been booked for weeks. The cheaper coach seats were all filled and there were people sleeping amid the litter on the floor and propped between baggage in the corridors. Five rail cars were reserved for the army: hardy teenagers with cropped heads and pimples. Their kitbags and rifles were under guard in the freight car. Returning to training camps after playing the sort of war games that didn’t include time for sleep. Exhausted draftees. The fighting battalions had forsaken rifles long ago. Rifles were only for clumsy youngsters learning to drill.

      Further back in the train there were East European businessmen in plastic suits and clip-on ties; shrivelled old women with baskets heavy with home-made vodka and smoked pork sausage; stubble-chinned black-market dealers with used TV sets crammed into freshly printed cardboard boxes.

      Coming half-awake, Jim stretched out a red bony foot so that his toes pressed upon the metal divider that formed the side of a tiny clothes closet. Then he grabbed the edge of the blanket, turned away and curled up small. ‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ he growled drowsily. So he wasn’t asleep and dreaming; he simply had his eyes closed. Perhaps that was the way Jim Prettyman had always fooled me. Long ago we’d been very close friends, one of a foursome made up with his petulant first wife Lucinda and my wife Fiona. We’d all worked for the Department in those days. Then Jim had been selected for special jobs and sent to work in corporate America as a cover for his real tasks. He’d changed jobs and changed wives, changed nationality and changed friends in rapid succession. He was not the sort of wavering wimp who let a good opportunity slip past while worrying who might get hurt.

      ‘There’s someone standing outside in the corridor,’ I told him.

      ‘The conductor.’

      ‘No, not him. Our bad-tempered conductor has assumed tenancy of compartment number fifteen. And he’s stinking fall-down

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