Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

Chapter Eleven

It took forty-eight hours to trace the car registration. It belonged to a very old four-door Fiat that for over eight years had been owned by Madame Lucie Simone Valentin, a nurse, born in Le Puy in the Haute-Loire, now residing in Paris, at Porte de la Villette, across the canal from one of the biggest abattoirs in Europe.

This particular part of north-east Paris is not noted for its historical monuments, cathedrals or fine restaurants. 'Madame Valentin's home was in a nineteenth-century slum, with echoing staircases, broken light-fittings and an all-pervading smell of stale food. It was just beginning to snow when we got there. Across the street two yellow monsters were eating walls and snorting brick-dust. Number ninety-four was at the very top. It was a garret. Painted up, crowded with antique furniture and sited so as to overlook Notre Dame, it would have been the sort of place that Hollywood set-designers call Paris. But this apartment had no such view. It faced another block, twice as tall and three times as gloomy. There was no chance that Gene Kelly would answer the door.

'Yes?' She had been beautiful once. She wore a handmade sweater that was less than perfectly knitted, and her hair was styled into the sort of permanent wave that you can do at home.

'We would like to talk to you about your car, Madame Valentin,' I said.

'I can explain about that,' she said. 'I thought it would need only new sparking plugs. By the end of the month it will all be paid.' She paused. From the floor below came the sound of tango music.

'We are not from the service station,' said Mann. 'We want to talk to you about Mr Henry Dean.'

'You are Americans?' She said it in good English.

'Cheri,' she called to someone behind her. 'Cheri, it is for you.' To us she said, 'Henry has to be at work at six o'clock.' She pronounced his name in the French manner: Henri.

The concierge had mentioned that a man lived with her. I had expected someone quite different to the pink-faced youngster who now smiled and offered his hand. He was dressed in a newly pressed set of working clothes, a Total badge sewn over the heart.

'I'm Major Mann, U.S. Army, Retired. I work for the State Department in Washington. I'd like to come in and speak with you.'

'I know all about you,' said the boy. 'Dad sent a message. He said he's being held in custody by the police. He said it was all a misunderstanding, but that you guys were straight and you'd do the right thing by him.'

'You're Hank Dean's son?' said Mann.

'Yes, sir, I certainly am,' said the boy. He grinned. 'Henry Hope Dean. Do you want to see my passport?'

'That won't be necessary,' said Mann.

'Come in, come in,' said the boy. 'Lucie darling, get the bottle of Scotch whisky that we were saving for my birthday.'

The room was very clean, and almost unnaturally tidy, like a holiday cottage prepared for new arrivals. And, like such rented places, this was sparsely furnished with cheap bamboo chairs and unpainted cupboards. There were some Impressionist reproductions tacked to the faded wallpaper and a lot of books piled on the floor in stacks.

The boy indicated which were the best chairs and got out his precious bottle of whisky. I sat down and wondered when I'd have enough strength to get up again. It was four nights since either of us had had a full night's sleep. I saw Mann sip his Scotch. I poured a lot of water into mine.

'Who would want to get your father into trouble?' Mann asked.

'Well, I don't know much about the work he once did for the Government,'

'We'll talk to other people about that,' said Mann. 'I mean, amongst the people you know, who would want to see your father in trouble, or in prison or even dead?'

'No one,' said the boy. 'You know Dad… he can be ex asperating at times, he can be pretty outspoken, and stubborn with it. I suppose I could imagine him getting into a brawl — but not this kind of scrape. Dad was swell company… is swell company. No one would go to all the trouble of planting a quarter of a million dollars in cash. Why, that's just impossible?'

'It's supposed to look impossible,' said Mann. 'You send a man a bundle of money so big he can't bear to turn it in — then you tell the cops he's got it.' I watched Mann's face, trying to decide whether he already pronounced Hank Dean innocent. He saw me watching him, and turned away.

'Gee, a quarter of a million bucks,' said the boy. 'You'd have to be really sore at someone to leave that kind of bread in his mail box.'

Lucie Valentin came into the room with coffee for us. The cheap crockery was brightly polished and there was a crisply starched linen tray-cover. She put it on the bamboo table, and then sat on the arm of the chair the boy occupied. She put her arm around him in a maternal gesture. 'Perhaps you should go and see your father, darling,' she said. 'You can take the car.'

'If I may be personal,' I said to the woman. 'How did you get along with Hank Dean?'

'I met him only twice,' said Lucie Valentin.

'Lucie wanted to get the whole thing out in the open,' said the boy. 'Lucie and I are going to be married, and real soon, but I've got to make it O.K. with Dad.'

'And he objects to Lucie?'

'He liked her,' said the boy. 'I know he did, and still does'. He patted her arm, looked at her and smiled. 'But the truth is that Dad would like me to marry an American girl.'

'Really?' I said.

'Oh, sure, Dad comes on very strong about how cosmopolitan he is, but Dad is an American, his French marks him as an American, and he's very self-conscious about that.'

'And your French is fluent?'

'I've grown up here. Most of the people I work with think I am a Parisian. And I think like a Frenchman — it hurts Dad when I say that, but it's true — I could never be really happy in the United States… nor married to an American girl.'

He smiled. The way that he'd said 'girl' was a way of saying that he preferred a 'woman'. Lucie Valentin was a lot older than the boy; he didn't have to say that Hank Dean didn't like that either.

'And there is Lucie's divorce,' said the boy. 'That is the real difficulty. The Church doesn't recognize it' — he shrugged — 'and neither does Dad.'

'But your father divorced your mother,' I said.

For a moment I thought the boy was angry that I had mentioned it, but he smiled at Lucie, and then said to me, 'He wrote that he was divorced on all the official forms and stuff but the truth of it is that he's always refused to give my mother a divorce — that's what caused all the bad feeling.'

'On religious grounds?'

'Mom said it was easy for Dad to have religious scruples — he didn't want to get married again.'

'But your mother did?'

They never got on. They separated too long ago for me to remember anything about it but I can never imagine them getting along together. Mom digs the high-life. This guy Reid-Kennedy is just rolling in money. He's always wanted me to take an allowance but I wouldn't feel right about that; after all, he's not even my stepfather.'

'What does he do for a living?'

'He's in electronics.'

I said, 'That can mean anything from repairing a broken TV to walking on the moon.'

'His factories make complicated junk for communications satellites. They did a lot of work for this one French TV use to get live news coverage from the States. And there are the weather satellites too… I guess it's not military secrets, if that's what you guys are thinking.'

'You'll be too late for the hospital, cheri,' said the woman.

'I'll skip it today,' said the boy. 'I was due to give blood at the hospital on the Boulevard but I can easily do that tomorrow.'

Mann nodded. 'You keep in touch with your mother?'

'We write.'

'When was the last time you saw her?'

'One,' said the boy, 'no, what am I saying, two years ago.'

Lucie Valentin got up from the arm of the chair and walked over to the window and took a sudden interest in the falling snow.

'And she doesn't write or phone?' Mann persisted.

'A couple of times in this last year,' said the boy. 'She's beginning to accept the situation for what it is.'

Lucie Valentin walked back to him and slipped a hand into the pocket of the overalls he was wearing, took his cigarettes out and lit one. It was an intimate gesture and yet it lacked the spontaneity that such actions usually have. He felt it too. 'What's the matter, darling?'

She turned away from him and shrugged. She puffed the cigarette and said, 'Your mother was here yesterday.'

'Are you sure?' he said incredulously.

Lucie still didn't turn. 'Of course I'm sure. She came here looking for you. Of course I'm sure.'

'Take it easy, baby.'

'I'm sorry, darling,' she said in a voice that showed no sign of regret. 'She hasn't accepted anything. She's determined to part us. I dreamed about her last night.'

'You're being silly.'

Lucie Valentin rounded on him. 'I'm not being silly, and don't call me baby.' She opened the handbag that was on the window-sill and produced from it a slip of paper. 'Call her!' said Lucie. 'That's what you want to "do, isn't it?'

He didn't take the slip of paper. 'I love you, Lucie.'

She shrugged and turned away.

It was Major Mann who took the slip of paper from her. He didn't pass it on to the boy. He read it himself. Neither of them were aware of us any more.

'You should have told me, Lucie.'

Lucie dabbed at her eyes with a tiny handkerchief. 'She only stayed in France for three hours. She was going back to the airport again. It seemed silly to risk all we have when she was only here for a few minutes.'

'She didn't cross the Atlantic just to pay one short visit,' said the boy. He was flattered by the idea, and his voice betrayed it.

'No,' she said. 'They are in Europe.'

'This is hotel stationery,' said Mann holding up the note. 'No message, just "Please phone" and the printed note-paper. The Gresham Hotel, Dublin. What would she be doing in Ireland, do you know?'

'No,' said the boy.

'Well, think about it!' said Mann angrily. The tension in the room had got to all of us, and now Mann became unreasonably impatient with the boy. 'Think about it. Is she interested in stud farms or shark fishing? What's she doing in Ireland in the depths of winter?'

The boy shook his head, and Lucie Valentin answered on his behalf. 'His mother had come on the Irish Airlines direct flight: Dublin-Paris. She said not to tell her husband about the trip. He thought she was shopping in Dublin, and going on to the theatre in the evening.'

'So where the hell was he?' said Mann. 'Crazy kind of vacation where you send your wife to a show alone.'

'She didn't say anything about that,' said Lucie Valentin.

Major Mann reached for his hat and buttoned his coat 'You're not planning to leave town, are you?'

Neither of them answered but as we went through the door that Lucie held open for us, the boy said, 'She's not trying to part us, baby. Quit worrying about that. It's having secrets from each other… that's what does the damage,' and after the door closed they switched to a gabble of French.

From below there came the music of the same tango that we'd heard when we arrived. Either the autochange was stuck, or they were learning to dance. Mann didn't talk as we went down the narrow stone stairs. Some of the light bulbs were missing and the ones that worked gave no more than a glimmer of light. There is a false gaiety to the tango: it's really a very melancholy rhythm.

It was late afternoon but the low clouds darkened the street so that some of the cars had their lights on. We walked until we got to our rented Mercedes. The thin layer of snow that had collected on it was coloured yellow by the brick-dust of the demolition, and someone had drawn a hammer and sickle in it. Mann defaced it before getting in. Then he operated the wipers to make a clear patch of glass but even as he did so there was a thunderous crash from a collapsing wall and a great cloud of dust enveloped us. We were tightly boxed but Mann shunted us clear and joined the traffic that sped along the rue de Flandres towards central Paris. We were in the Place de Stalingrad before Mann said anything. 'Suppose the kid really is the courier?' he said.

'I can't believe that was all an act. Those two weren't doing all that for us?'

'And the kid's mother?'

'When a professional network makes a mistake, it's always this kind of mistake,' I said. 'It's always a jealous lover or a suspicious wife.'

'Or a cast-off wife who wants to remarry. So you think the wife framed Hank?'

'It was a way of putting pressure on you,' I said. 'It was a way of making you vulnerable.'

'But was it intended to get us off Bekuv's tail? Or is this a red herring — this junk about Dublin?'

'A good question,' I said. He nodded. We both knew that we'd got to go to Dublin — an investigator follows his lead, no matter how much he suspects it might be a false trail.

By the time we got back to the hotel, near the Ministry of the Interior, the snow was getting a grip upon the city. Major Mann strode into- the hotel shaking the ice from his raincoat. There was a message awaiting him. It was via the French police. Someone had been trying to reach us urgently. There was a contact phone number. I recognized it as one of the accommodation numbers used by the C.I.A. floor of the Paris embassy. Mann rang it, and the messenger arrived within ten minutes. It had been through the cipher machine but it was still enigmatic enough to require explanation.

Fabian was the code name for Andrei Bekuv, and Jonathan was the C.I.A. man responsible for the safety of the two Russians while we were away. 'Bring cognac' was the check code that Mann had arranged with Jonathan personally (different for every message and committed to memory by the three of us). How Red had persuaded security to add a personal message of love was beyond my understanding.

'Did you decode Boston, Mass., for me?' Mann asked.

'Yes, sir,' said the courier. He was a diffident young man. 'I looked it up. It's a little town in Ireland — Drogheda, if that's the way you pronounce it.'

'Drogheda,' said Mann, and nodded. 'And I suppose the code for Boston, Mass., is Drogheda, Ireland.' The courier smiled politely. Mann took the message sheet, and a packet of matches, and made a thorough job of burning the paper to ash. Mann was like that: he liked a chance to show what a well-trained operator he was.

'Is there anything else?' said the courier.

'Henry Hope Dean; I want his blood group,' said Mann. 'He's a blood donor, so it shouldn't be difficult.'

'Drogheda in Ireland,' he said again when the courier had departed. 'Well, the Bekuvs are really talking.'

'Are you going to tell me what Bettercar is, or are we going to play secret agents all evening?'

'Easy baby,' he said, imitating Henry Hope Dean's anxious voice.

'I'm going to eat,' I said. 'See you later.'

'Bettercar Car Rentals is the agreed code for the 1924 Society,' said Mann, 'and I'm buying the drinks.'