Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

Chapter Sixteen

It wasn't the same when we went back: it never is. The gardener was having trouble with the sprinklers, one of the cars had scraped the fencing and taken away a section of bougainvillaea. Crab grass was in the lawn, the humidity was high and there was haze over the sun.

'Mr and Mrs Reid-Kennedy are not at home,' said the Spanish lady slowly and firmly and for the third time.

'But that's not what we were asking,' explained Mann patiently. 'Are they in? Are they in?'

I suppose even the ladies who guard rich people's doors learn to recognize the ones who can't be stopped. She let Mann push her to one side but she failed to look as if she liked it.

'You know we're cops,' said Mann. 'Let's not fool about, shall we.'

'They are not here,' said the woman sullenly.

He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. He ran his fingers up his cheeks as if trying to force himself to smile. 'Listen, did I ever tell you that I moonlight for the immigration department?' he said. 'You don't want us to run all through the house, checking out whether all these people have got permission to work in Florida. You don't want that, do you?'

The lady went as pale as an illegal Mexican immigrant without working papers can go, and then shut the door gently, behind us.

'Now, where are they?'

'On the Sara Lee,' said the woman pointing to the big motor-boat that was moored to the jetty at the end of the enormous garden.

'Sara Lee!' said Mann very respectfully. 'And there's me been calling it the Aunt Jemima all this time.' He smiled at her and she forced a smile back at him. 'Well, you just make sure no one leaves the house, Duchess, or…'

We walked through the breakfast-room. It faced the lawn and the water. The remains of a breakfast were still on the white marble table. There were half a dozen different kinds of bread, a couple of uneaten boiled eggs and a silver dish loaded with crisp rashers. Mann picked up a piece of bacon and ate it. 'Still warm,' he said, 'they must be there.' He went out on the balcony and looked at the boat. There was no sign that it was about to depart. In the distance across the water I could see the Goodyear airship glinting silver against the clear blue sky.

'What the hell would they be doing down there in that boat,' muttered Mann. 'They aren't the kind of couple who enjoy decoking diesels together.'

I said, 'If you've got a dozen servants in the house, I guess you need a long garden, and a moored boat, to go and have an argument.'

I was opening the fly-screen that separates the polished oak balcony from the raked gravel back-drive, when I heard a woman shout. Then I saw Mrs Reid-Kennedy. She had already come down the gangway from the boat, and was hurrying towards us across the lawn. She was shouting.

'Hey there, what do you want? What do you want?' She almost tripped. She was wearing the same sort of silk lounging pyjamas that we'd seen her wearing last time, except that these were pale green, like the silk scarf she had tied round her head. But a lot of that Southern belle had disappeared. That you-all eyelash fluttering, and help yourself to the candied-yams gesturing, had now been replaced by a nasal tone and shrillness that was saurbraten, schweinkotelett and sour cream, and all the way from Eighty-Second Street.

She was speechless when she reached us. She put a hand on her chest while she caught up on her breathing.

'You shouldn't run like that, Mrs Reid-Kennedy,' said Mann. 'A woman of your age could do herself a permanent injury running across the lawn like that.'

'You will have to come back,' she said. 'Come back another day. Any day you like. Phone me and we'll fix it.'

'Unless of course the kind of injury that you might do yourself by not running across the lawn is even more permanent. Then, of course, it would make sense.'

'We'll talk in the house,' she said. 'We'll have coffee.'

'That's mighty civil of you, Ma'am,' said Mann. 'That's right hospitable of you.' He touched his hat at the end of the peak. 'But I think I'm going to just mosey down to the levee there, and see if I recognize anyone aboard the paddle-steamer. You see, I've always been a gambling man.'

'You're too late, Major Mann,' she said. Her voice was neither frightened nor boastful. She said it as if she was stating a fact that could not be argued, like the number of kilogrammes in a ton, or the weight of a cubic metre of water.

'You had better tell us all about it, Mrs Reid-Kennedy.' His voice was gentle, and he took her arm, to support her weight.

'If I talk to you, will you promise that it is in confidence? Will you promise not to do anything… at least for the time being?'

'Well, I couldn't promise that, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. No one could. I mean, suppose you told us about a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. You think we could listen to you and keep a promise about doing nothing?'

'My husband was a good man, Major.' She looked up, into Mann's face. "I mean Douglas was… Mr Reid-Kennedy.'

'I know that's who you mean,' said Mann. 'Go on.'

'He's in the boat,' she said. She didn't turn round far enough to see the twelve-ton cabin-cruiser, but she pointed vaguely at the waterfront. 'Douglas went down to the boat about half an hour ago. I thought something was wrong, so after the bacon was almost cold… Douglas loves bacon when it's crisp and warm but he never eats it when it's cold…'

'O.K., Mrs Reid-Kennedy,' Mann patted her arm.

'And bacon is so expensive nowadays. The servants could have it, of course, but none of them eat it either.'

'Go on, about Douglas.'

'Well, that's all,' she said. 'I found him on the boat, just now. He's shot himself. He's lying there in the engine-room… the top of his head… l don't Know who will clear it up. There's blood everywhere. Will the police know someone who will do it? I couldn't go down there again.'

'No need, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. No need to go down there again. My friend will take a look in the boat just to make sure that there are no valves open, or anything like that. While you and me go up to the house, and get you a stiff brandy.'

'Do you think I should, Major? It's not even eleven thirty yet.'

'I think you need one,' said Mann firmly.

She shivered. 'My, but it's turned cold suddenly,' she said.

'Yes it has,' agreed Mann, trying to look suddenly cold.

'It's telling the servants that's the real trouble,' she confided.

'Don't worry about that,' said Mann briskly. 'My friend will do that. He's British; they're terribly, terribly good at speaking to servants.'

Many American soldiers kept their guns after the war. It was bad luck for the woman who found him that one-time Master Sergeant Douglas Reid-Kennedy, U.S. Army Military Police, had been equipped with the M 1911 automatic pistol. Even if you can't take it with you, a.45-inch bullet still makes an expensive way to blow your head apart.

He was a big man, and it was easy to imagine him as a military cop, in white helmet liner, swinging a stick. Now his body was twisted, face up, his arms spread as if to keep himself from falling into the oily bilges between the beautifully maintained twin diesels, where he now lay sprawled. The floral patterned Hawaiian shirt was open to reveal a tanned hairy chest. He wore smart canvas shoes with the yachtsman's grip-sole, and around his tailored shorts there was an ancient leather belt with a sailor's clasp-knife hanging from it.

The back of his skull had exploded, so. that there was blood, brain and bone fragments everywhere, but most of his jaw was still there, complete with enough teeth to get a positive identification from his dental records. He must have been standing in the lounge at the fatal moment, with one hand on the stair-rail and the pistol in his mouth. The force of it had thrown him down the steps into the engine-room. I suppose he'd been taking a last look at the mansion, and the gardens, and perhaps at his wife breakfasting. I looked at the jetty and the lie of the land and tried to stop thinking of the different ways I could have come and killed him unobserved.

I went to the forward end and sorted through the radar and depth-sounding gear. It was all very new and there were screw-holes and paint-lines to show where previous models had once been. Owning the most modern electronics had now become more prestigious for a yachtsman than having a few extra feet of hull or even a uniformed crew, providing of course there was a distinctive aerial for it somewhere in view.

Douglas Reid-Kennedy had left his zipper jacket draped over the throttles. It was blue nylon, with an anchor design and the word 'captain' embroidered on the chest. And it had two special oilskin pockets, in case you were the sort of captain who fell overboard with the caviar in your pocket. In one of the pockets there was a briar pipe, with a metal windguard, and a plastic tobacco pouch with a Playboy bunny on it. In the other pocket there was a wallet containing credit cards, yacht-club membership cards, a weather forecast from the yacht club, dated the same day, a notebook with some scribbled notes, including radio wavelengths, and a bunch of keys.

Keys can be of many different shapes and sizes, from the large ones that wine waiters wear round their necks in pretentious restaurants, to the tiny slivers of serrated tin that are supplied with suitcases. The keys from Douglas Reid-Kennedy's yachting jacket were very serious keys. They were small, circular-sectioned keys, made from hard, bronzed metal, each with a number but without a manufacturer's name, so that only the owner knew where to apply for a replacement. It was one of these keys that fitted into the writing-desk in the boat's large, carpeted lounge.

I sat down at the desk, and went through the contents carefully but he wasn't the sort of man who was likely to leave incriminating evidence in his writing-desk. There was a selection of papers that one might need for a short voyage. There were photostats of the insurance, and several licences and fishing permits. In a small, and rather battered, leather frame there was the sepia-coloured photograph that Mann had remarked upon during our previous visit. It was a glimpse of a world of long ago. Reid-Kennedy's father, dressed in a dark suit, with a gold pin through his tie, sat in front of a photographer's painted backdrop. One wrinkled hand rested upon the shoulder of a smiling child dressed in Lederhosen. I took the photograph from its frame. It was mounted on a stiff card that bore the flamboyant signature and address of a photo studio in New York City. It had the superb definition of a contact print; the sort of quality that disappeared with the coming of miniature cameras and high-speed films.

I looked at the photo for a long time. The informality of the child's clothes could not conceal the care and attention that had preceded this visit to the photographer. Nor could the stern expression on the face of the man conceal an immense pride in his handsome son. And yet the shutter had caught a moment of tension in the boy's face as he stiffened in the embrace of his autocratic father. There was an element of tragedy in the gulf between them and I wondered why this was the picture that the son had carried in his personal baggage for so many years.

There was a book-shelf above the desk. I flipped through the usual array of books about knots and flags, and 'vessels running free giving way to vessels that are close-hauled'. There was a visitors' book, too: a beautiful leather-bound volume, kept in neat handwriting and dutifully signed by the Reid-Kennedys' guests. Some of the pages had been roughly torn from it, and I noted those dates.

Then I replaced everything I'd moved, and wiped the things I'd touched, and walked back to the house where Mrs Reid-Kennedy was nursing a treble brandy, and Mann was pouring himself a soda-water on the rocks.

'I told Douglas,' she said.

'Told him what?' Mann asked.

'Hello,' she said to me. 'Told him not to go to Europe this time.'

'Why'd you tell him that?'

'I want to phone my lawyer. You've got no right to stop me.'

'No sense in phoning your lawyer,' said Mann. While she was looking at the phone, he caught my eye. I gave him the least amount of nod I could manage.

'Did you wipe your feet?' she asked me suddenly.

'Yes,' I said.

'When the sprinklers are on, the grass-marks tread in to the carpet,' she said. It was a tired voice that had explained that problem many times before.

'I know,' I said. I smiled. Perhaps that was a mistake.

'Maybe you could talk to your friend about coming back tomorrow or the next day,' she suggested to me. 'I don't want to offend you but a couple of days to recover would be worth so much to me.' I didn't answer, and Mann didn't say anything either.

'I'll phone my lawyer,' she said. She opened her handbag. It was made from a couple of yards of the Bayeux Tapestry, and had gold handles, and a leather strap that went over the shoulder. She searched through it to find a plastic smile but finally she closed the bag with a lot of sighs and tut-tutting. 'I'll phone the yacht-club, the people there will know a good lawyer.'

'Mrs Reid-Kennedy,' said Mann. 'A real good lawyer might be able to reduce the fifty-year sentence you are liable to get, by ten years. But I have the kind of authority that could leave you out of this investigation altogether…'

She misinterpreted Mann's offer. I suppose rich people have to develop sharp ears for subtle offers of corruption. She said, 'A couple of days to recover from…' she lifted a limp hand '… all this, would be worth anything to me. Let me send you away with some little gift for your wives. I have lovely things in the house — porcelain and gold, and all kinds of little things — your wife would probably love some little treasure like that to add to her collection. Wouldn't she?' She was looking at me now.

'To tell you the truth, Mrs Reid-Kennedy,' I said, 'my complete collection of porcelain and gold is here in my dental work. And right now, I don't have a wife.'

'You mind if I take this jacket off?' said Mann. She didn't answer but he took it off anyway.

'My husband hated air-conditioning. He said he'd rather put up with the heat than have the endless noise of it.'

She went over to the small unit in the window and adjusted the controls.

Mann said, 'You'd better face up to it, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. There's not going to be any yacht-club lawyer who can get you off the hook. And if you don't spill it to us right now, there's not going to be any yacht-club. Not for you, anyway. Even yacht-club secretaries get sticky about espionage.'

She flinched at the word espionage but she didn't argue about it. She took a deep draught of her brandy and when she next spoke her voice was angry. 'Ask this one,' she said, jabbing a thumb at me. 'Ask him — he's been down to the boat, hasn't he. He can see what happened.'

'I wish you'd understand that I'm trying to help you,' Mann told her in his wanting-to-help-you voice. I recognized that voice, because he'd used it on me so often. 'Sure, my colleague can tell me a lot of the answers, because he's been down to the boat. But if you tell me the same thing, I'll be able to write it down as coming from you. I don't have to tell you how much that could help you, do I?'

'You're a couple of schnorrers,' she said bitterly, but it was the last of her resentment. She sighed. 'You ever been to Berlin?' she said.

Probably every life has a moment when it reaches its very lowest: for Mrs Marjorie Dean it was Berlin in the summer of 1955. Physically she had completely recovered from the miscarriage, but psychologically she was far from well. And Berlin made her feel rootless. Her fluent German made no difference to the way that Berliners regarded her, as a prosperous American of the occupying army. Yet the other Americans could not forget her German-born grandparents and were always reminding her that she should feel at home here. But Berlin was a claustrophobic city, 'the island' Berliners called it, a tiny bastion of capitalism in the vast ocean of Soviet Zone Germany. And for her, the wife of a senior intelligence official, there could be no jaunts into Berlin's Eastern Sector, and the long ride down the autobahn to the western half of Germany required the special permission of the commanding general.

And she hated this old house, it was far too big for just the two of them, and the Steiners who looked after the place lived in the guest house at the far end of the overgrown garden, with its dilapidated greenhouses, dark thickets and high hedges. It was easy to see why the U.S. Army had taken over the house as V.I.P. accommodation, and then as a school for agents learning radio procedures before going over to the East, but it wasn't really suitable for housing Major Dean and his wife. The furniture was still the same as it had been when this was the home of a fashionable Nazi neurologist. The hall still had the paintings of men in Prussian uniforms, and, on the piano, there was a vignetted photograph of a woman wearing a tiara. The Deans had decided that it must have been the Nazi doctor's mother.

That Thursday, Marjorie Dean stayed in bed until almost noon. Her husband was away for a few days — these trips of his seemed to be getting more and more frequent — and there was nowhere to go until the ladies' bridge tournament at tea-time in the officers' club at Grunewald. But she bathed and put on her favourite linen dress because at one o'clock the courier would arrive from the barracks.

The coffee that Frau Steiner had brought her was now cold, but Marjorie sipped at it just the same, staring at herself as she applied make-up as slowly as she could to spin out the time. On the bedside table there was a tall pile of novels, about romance in America's deep South. She despised herself for reading such books but it helped to numb the mind that otherwise would think about the way the marriage was going, her husband's terrible disappointment at the miscarriage, and the all-pervading boredom.

Suddenly from the drawing-room she heard the piano. Someone was playing an old German song about a farmer and a rich merchant. Her father used to sing it to her. She thought her mind was wandering until she remembered that she'd told the Steiners that their daughter could practise on the piano for an hour each morning. She could hear the Steiners talking. It was so hot that the kitchen window was open wide. She could also hear the voice of Steiner's brother-in-law. Marjorie hoped that the brother-in-law wouldn't stay too long. What had started out as only one weekend had now become frequent visits. He claimed to be a master bookbinder from Coburg in Thuringia but Marjorie's ear for German accents put him in Saxony, now in the Russian Zone. The lilt was unmistakable and slightly ridiculous. As she heard him again through the open window, she could hardly suppress a smile. But as she listened more carefully to what was being said, the smile faded. The argument flared up, and the brother-in-law's voice was threatening and abusive. The tempo of his speech, the shrill Saxon accent and the use of much German soldier's slang made the conversation difficult for Marjorie to follow, but suddenly she was afraid. Her intuition told her this visitor was not a relative of the Steiners, and that his presence — and his anger — was in some awful way connected with her husband and the secret work he was engaged in. She heard the window being closed, and could hear no more. Marjorie put the matter from her mind. It was too easy to let one's imagination run away in a town like this.

The courier arrived at one o'clock every day, bringing classified paperwork in a locked metal case. He was always punctual. She looked forward to his visit, and she knew that he enjoyed it too. Usually he would find time to have coffee and a snack. He liked the old-fashioned German Sussgeback, and Frau Steiner was an expert at making a whole range of spice and honey breads and sometimes more intricate examples, with marzipan inside and a thick coating of toasted almonds. There is a tradition that Lebkuchen are exchanged by lovers, and although the relationship between Marjorie Dean and the young corporal was proper almost to the point of being staid, there was some times an element of tacit flirtation in the choice of these breads and cakes.

On this particular day, Frau Steiner had cooked hazel-nut biscuits. There was a plate of them on the kitchen table, covered with a starched napkin. Alongside she had left the coffee and the percolator and a tray set with one of the antique lace tray-cloths that were on the inventory of this old house. Usually, she found Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy brought some new snippet of small-talk or rumour with him. Sometimes they would talk of their childhood in New York. They had both grown up there and Douglas insisted that he had noticed the pretty girl who sat always in the same church pew with two parents and a brother. Once he had told her all about himself and his family. His father was born in Hamburg. He'd emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1925, after losing everything in the inflation period. His father had changed the name to Reid-Kennedy after meeting some neighbours who didn't like Germans, and said so. And yet in the 'thirties it became an advantage to be German. The Jewish man from the U.S. Army procurement office who in 1940 gave them a contract to manufacture radio tuners for B — I7 bombers, assumed that they were refugees from Hitler.

The army contract brought a change in the fortunes of the Reid-Kennedys. His father rented more space and took on extra workers. From being a four-man radio component sub-contractor, they ended the war with a turn-over only a few hundred dollars short of two million. Douglas was sent to a swanky private school, and acquired a million-dollar accent but was still unable to pass the U.S. Army officers' selection board. He'd been annoyed at the time but now he had decided they were probably right; he was too irresponsible and too lazy to be an officer. Look at Major Dean, for instance, he seemed to work twenty-four hours a day, and had no time for getting drunk, chasing women or mixing with the real Berliners.

Mixing with 'real Berliners' was one of Douglas's very favourite occupations. It was quite amazing the people he knew; a selection of German aristocracy, a Nazi film star, a professional lion-tamer, sculptors and painters, radical playwrights and ex-Gestapo officers with a price on their heads. And if you were after a new camera or some priceless antiques, Douglas knew where the newly impoverished sold their wares at knock-down prices. Douglas was young and amusing, he was a raconteur, a gambler who could lose a little money without crying too hard. He'd been too young for the war, he didn't give a hoot about politics, and for the army he did only what he had to do to stay out of trouble until the happy, happy day when he went back home. In short, Douglas was as different to Hank Dean as any man could get.

And so it was surprising to find this day a changed Corporal Reid-Kennedy who was serious and downcast. Even his clothes were different. His job with the army permitted him to wear civilian clothes and he liked to dress in the slightly ostentatious style of a newly rich Berliner. He chose silk shirts and soft leather jackets and the sort of hand-made hunting clothes that looked good in a silver Porsche. But today he was wearing a cheap blue suit, shiny on the elbows and baggy at the knees. And he wasn't wearing his gold wrist-watch, or the fraternity ring, or the heavy gold identity bangle. He looked like one of the Polish refugees, who went from door to door offering to do odd jobs in exchange for a meal.

He sat down in the kitchen and left the coffee and hazel-nut biscuits untouched. He asked her if she could let him have a Scotch. Marjorie was amazed at such a suggestion but she tried not to show it. She put the bottle on the table and Douglas poured himself a treble measure and swallowed it down hastily. He looked up and asked her if she knew what Major Dean's job was in intelligence. Marjorie knew that Dean had 'the police desk' but she didn't know what a police desk was. She'd always assumed that he was a liaison officer between the U.S. Army and the West Berlin police; getting drunken G.I.s out of jail and dealing with all those German girls who wanted to be a wife in the U.S.A. but found themselves alone in Berlin and pregnant. Douglas told her what the police desk really was: Major Dean assembled all the accumulating intelligence material to build a complete picture of the East German Volks polizei. The trouble was that he'd become so interested in his work that he had gone across to the East for a firsthand look.

She drank some of the fresh coffee and tried the biscuits. Douglas let her have a few minutes to think about the situation before he spoke again. Marjorie, he said finally, you'd better understand that they are holding your husband in East Berlin, and the charge is spying. And they don't fool about over there, they could shoot him. He took her wrist across the table as he said it. It was a sudden change in the relationship. Until now he'd always called her Mrs Dean, and treated her with all the deference due to the wife of his major. But now the problem they shared, and the fact that they were very nearly the same.age, unified them, just as it separated them from the older man who was at the centre of the problem. Suddenly Marjorie began to cry, softly at first and then with the terrible racking sobs of hysteria.

The events that came after had been repressed and repressed until she no longer had a clear idea of the order in which they happened. Douglas made long telephone calls. People arrived at the house and departed. There was a chance, he said. The East German police had not transferred custody of Major Dean to the Russians at Berlin-Karlshorst. They offered to exchange Dean for a document stolen from the East Berlin police H.Q. the previous week. She hesitated. The safe was built into the wall and concealed at the back of the desk in the library. She told Douglas that she didn't have the key and didn't know the combination. Douglas didn't take her seriously. It's your husband, Mrs Dean! Eventually she opened the safe and got it. They looked through the document that the East Germans wanted. There were forty-nine pages of it; mimeographed on poor quality pulp paper, tinted pink. There had been file numbers on it but these were now obliterated with black ink. The edges of the paper had faded in the sunlight and Marjorie felt that it couldn't be all that secret if it had been lying around in the sun long enough to fade.

She wondered if she shouldn't telephone Dean's senior officer but Douglas reminded her of what he was like. Can you imagine him taking the responsibility? He wouldn't give the O.K. to hand over even a used Kleenex tissue to the East Germans. No, he'll shuffle the responsibility to Frankfurt, and we'll wait a week for an answer. By that time Major Dean will be in Moscow.

But how can you be certain that this document isn't of vital importance? Douglas laughed and said it was only of vital importance to the East German official who'd had it stolen from his safe. Now he wanted to get it back and forget the whole thing as soon as possible. These things happen all the time. Marjorie was still worried about how important it was. Look for yourself, said Douglas, but Marjorie couldn't understand the jargon-heavy officialese of this report on police organization in the Eastern Zone. Do you imagine that someone like your husband would keep any really important stuff in his safe at home? Marjorie didn't answer but she finally decided that it was unlikely.

Marjorie remembered Douglas making her go to a cinema. She sat through Jolson Sings Again. The dialogue was dubbed into German but the songs were the original recordings. She didn't get home until late. There was a glorious sunset behind the trees in the Grunewald. When she came through the garden to the front door she thought that the roses had bloomed. It was only when she went to look at them that she discovered that behind the rosebushes the whitewash had been spattered with blood. She became hysterical. She blundered through the back garden to the apartment the Steiners used but there was no answer to her rings at the doorbell. Then Douglas arrived in a black Opel Kapitan and persuaded her to spend the night in the V.I.P. quarters at the barracks. He had arranged the necessary permission.

She didn't go back to the house until after Major Dean arrived from the East. The Volkspolizei had kept their word: as soon as the returned papers had been verified, Major Dean was brought to the crossing checkpoint. From there he took a taxi. She never again saw the Steiners. At her insistence the Deans moved to a smaller and more modern house in Spandau. Soon after that, Marjorie became pregnant, and for a time the marriage seemed to go very well but there was now an abyss separating Hank Dean and his young wife.

The perfunctory inquiry was held behind closed doors and its findings were never made public. It was agreed that the document passed to the Volkspolizei was a document originating from that East German force. It had already passed across the desk of Dean's analysers and was in any case of a grading no higher than confidential. Steiner's brother-in-law was found dead and floating in the River Spree, having sintered severe wounding 'by a person or persons unknown' prior to death. He was described on the record as 'a displaced person'. Mrs Dean's evidence about the man's argument with Steiner was rejected as 'inadmissible hearsay'. Major Dean was reprimanded for taking official documents home, and was removed from his job. Mrs Dean was totally exonerated. Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy took much of the blame. It was inevitable that he should face the inquiry's wrath, for he was a draftee. Reid-Kennedy had no military career at stake; he wasn't even an officer. However, his quiet acceptance of the findings was rewarded by a transfer to a U.S. Army recruitment depot in New Jersey, promotion and an early release.

And yet, for Douglas Reid-Kennedy and the Deans, the events of that week in Berlin were traumatic. Hank Dean knew he would never again be given a job so important and so sensitive as the one he lost. A couple of times fellow officers snubbed him. He drank. When Hank Dean's drinking became bad enough for the army to send him to a special military hospital near Munich to dry out, Marjorie took the newly born son, Henry Hope, back to her parents in New York. She met Douglas. The first time it was by chance but eventually the relationship became serious and then permanent.

It seemed as if the nightmare were over, but in fact it was only just beginning. At college Douglas had been a heavyweight boxer of considerable skill. He had been well on the way to a State championship when by an unlucky Mow he severely hurt a fellow contender. Douglas never went into the ring again. It was the same sort of bolo punch that he used to fell the Steiners' bogus brother-in-law. The fact that the man was a blackmailer and an East German spy persuaded the inquiry to skirt round that happening. But the Russians were not prepared to kiss and make up. Three years after the incidents in Berlin, Douglas was visited by a baby-faced young man who presented the card of a Polish company that made transistors. After the usual polite small-talk he said that through nominee holdings, the company for which he worked now owned 37 per cent of Douglas's company. He realized that 37 per cent was not 51 per cent — the baby-faced man smiled — but it was enough for them to have a real control over what was going to happen. They could pump money into the company, or turn it over to making razor-blades or tear it down and go into real estate. The young man reminded Douglas that he had killed one of their 'employees' and Douglas realized that his company was now owned by the K.G.B. They offered to pay Douglas off each year in his own shares, if he would work for them. They would tell him exactly which U.S. Government electronics contracts to bid for, and their agents would be able to discover exactly what his business rivals were bidding. In return, they wanted a steady supply of technical information about the whole U.S. electronics industry. If Douglas refused to work with them, the young man told him, they would bankrupt his company and 'execute' all of the people implicated in the events of that night: Marjorie, the Steiners, the Steiners' daughter and Douglas himself. Douglas asked for a week to think it over. They agreed. They knew the answer must be 'yes'.

As she finished her story, she poured herself another large brandy and sipped some. Major Mann went over to the air-conditioner and moved the control from medium to coldest. He stood there letting the cold air hit him. He turned round and gave her his most engaging smile. 'Well, it's great,' he said. 'I want you to know I think it's just great. Of course, you've had about twenty years to goose it up, and work in some interesting details, but then so did Tolstoy — thirty years Tolstoy had, if I remember correctly.'

'What?' she said, frowning hard.

That story,' said Mann. 'My buddy here is crazy about all that kind of spy fiction.'

'It's true,' she said.

'It's literature,' said Mann. 'It's more than just a lousy collection of lies and evasions; it's literature!'

'No.'

'Douglas Reid-Kennedy joined the Communist Party when he was still at school. I guessed that as soon as I knew that his two closest buddies joined the C.P. and he remained aloof from that gay group of fun-loving raconteurs — am I pronouncing that right, Mrs Dean?… raconteurs. That's what your friend Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy was on his days off with these Gestapo guys and film stars? Well, as soon as I hear about a guy at school who doesn't go along and sing "The Red Flag" with his closest buddies, I think to myself either this guy isn't the kind of young amusing raconteur that everybody is cracking him up to be, or else the Communist Party have given him a secret number, and told him to keep his mouth shut. They do that when they spot a kid who has a job in the State Department, or a trade union, or has a father who makes electronic equipment for the U.S. Army.'

Mann walked across the room and picked up the photo of Douglas being nursed by his father. 'Great kid you got there, Pop, but just watch out for that bolo punch.' He put the photo down. 'Yeah, you were right about Douglas's boxing career at school… too modest in fact. See, Douglas crippled three kids with that body punch — a bolo is an upper cut to the body, I guess you already knew that, Mrs Dean, or you wouldn't have used that exact technical word — and Douglas didn't give up as easy as you say he did. He was forbidden to box again, not only by the school but also by the State boxing authority. And don't let's imagine that our Douglas was the kind of guy who didn't develop his natural talents. He graduated from crippling people to killing people. The K.G.B. spotted that more quickly than the U.S. Army spotted it; they knew that he'd like assignments to kill people. Those murder assignments were his rewards, not his work.'

'No!' she said.

Mann looked at her as she poured herself another drink. I had watched her drinking all this time and thought that she was using all her will-power to avoid getting drunk. Now I realized that it was just the reverse of that; she wanted to be drunk more than she wanted anything else in the world, but in her present state of mind no amount of drink seemed to do the trick for her.

'Yes,' said Mann softly. 'While you went on your round trip to Paris, your Douglas stayed in the Emerald Isle. He went to a little farm off the highway, and hacked a German family to death with a spade. Three of them; we dug them up from the garbage. It was a wet day hi Ireland, so if we're pressing decomposing tissue into your wall-to-wall pile carpet, I apologize, but you've got Douglas to blame for it.'

'No,' she said again but it was softer this tune, and not so confident.

'And all that crap about that police report. In the middle 'fifties, the East Germans were using their "barrack police" as P. nucleus of their new army. Let's define our terms. Those police we're talking about had tanks and MiG fighter planes, Mrs Dean. The police desk was just about the most important work the C.I.A. did hi Germany at that time. That's why Hank Dean was assigned to it and that's why he gave it everything he'd got, until he was mentally, and physically, exhausted.'

Mann paused for a long time. I suppose he was hoping that she would argue or confess or simply blow her top but she did nothing except sink lower in the soft furnishings and continue to drink. Mann said, 'Douglas Reid-Kennedy was a Communist agent, and he was wearing that cheap blue suit because he'd just come over from the East where he'd been talking to his pals about putting your husband on the rack. And your cock-and-bull story about Steiner's argument was disregarded because the man who pretended to be Steiner's brother-in-law wasn't an East German agent, he was one of Dean's best men. He was one of the German Communists who fled to Soviet Russia in 1938.

Stalin handed him back over the frontier to the Gestapo in 1940 as part of the deal of slicing Poland down the middle and sharing it with the Nazis. That's the man who had his blood spattered over your rose-bushes by Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy. He had important things to tell Hank, and when he was delayed Hank was so worried that he went across there to help him. The agent got back but Hank went into the bag.'

The inquiry didn't know anything about his being an agent for the Americans,' she said.

'You think the inquiry is going to blow a network because an agent is murdered. No, they let it go, and were happy not to inquire too far into it. And that was a lucky break for Reid-Kennedy.'

'Yes,' she said.

'And you tell us that the inquiry reprimanded Major Dean, and exonerated you. Why do you think they did that? They did it because Hank stood up and took all the shit that they were throwing at you. Sure he was reprimanded for leaving the papers unsafeguarded, because he wouldn't tell them that you and your goddamned boyfriend opened his safe and betrayed him in every possible way…'

'No, they said…'

'Don't argue with me,' said Major Mann. 'I just got through reading the transcript. And don't tell me you believed Douglas Reid-Kennedy and all that crap about returning the papers to the police authority. You saw that the file numbers were blacked out. That's the first thing an agent does with secret papers, so that they can't be traced back to the place where they were stolen. And even the police chief of East Berlin is going to have a hard time explaining why the papers in his safe have got all the file numbers blacked out. Arid you knew that as well as anyone, so don't give me any of that stuff.'

He walked up to where she was sitting but she didn't raise her eyes to him. His face was flushed and his brow shiny. It would have been easy to believe that he was the one being interrogated, because the woman seemed relaxed and unheeding.

'But it wasn't anything to do with the papers,' said Mann. 'This was all a carefully planned caper designed in Moscow solely to compromise Hank Dean. I'd bet everything I own that he was offered every kind of chance to hush this thing up. Both when he was in the East Berlin prison, and after he got back. But Hank Dean knew that it was just the first step into being doubled, and Hank Dean wasn't the kind of man who ends up a double agent. He'd sooner end up an alcoholic. At least a lush keeps his soul. Right, Mrs Dean? It's your husband we're talking about, remember him?' He walked away from her. 'Or maybe you'd rather not remember, after all you did to him. Because wrecking his career wasn't enough for you, was it? You had to go screwing your way through the barracks. And you were no snob. You didn't stop at the officers' club, did you. You even had to screw the little creep who came delivering the official mail. Of course you didn't realize then that Douglas had drawn you as an assignment from Moscow…'

'What?'

'And Reid-Kennedy eventually got orders to make his relationship with you as permanent as possible: a wife isn't permitted to testify against her husband, right?'

'Hank would never give me a divorce.'

'And I think we know why. He suspected the truth about Reid-Kennedy and was not going to give him that final bit of protection.'

'No,' she said.

'You think it was your good breeding, or all that old-fashioned etiquette you gleaned from those cheap novels. Douglas Reid-Kennedy took the high ground — your bed — and he didn't have to fight all the way. I'd guess that that little conversation over the coffee and Sussgeback took place, not in the kitchen, but in Hank Dean's bed. That's where you first heard that those bastards were holding your husband.'

'No,' she said. 'No, no, no.'

'And I'll tell you something else that Hank Dean kept to himself…'

He paused. She must have known what was coming, for I

she lowered her head as one might if expecting a blow about the ears. 'Henry Hope is Reid-Kennedy's child.'

'He is not,' she said. 'I swear it! You say that in front of witnesses and I'll sue you for every penny you possess. I'll make you pay!'

'Yeah, well, I can't prove it, but I looked up Hank's army records to find his blood group. And Henry Hope was easy because he donates blood at the local hospital…' Mann scowled and shook his head.

'Did you tell him?' she asked. 'Did you tell Henry-Hope that?'

'No, I didn't, Mrs Dean, because it would be nicer for your son to grow up thinking that a great guy like Hank is his father than that a murderous creep like Reid-Kennedy might be. So we'll keep that to ourselves, Mrs Dean. On that you got a deal.'

'Poor Henry-Hope,' she said softly. Her voice was slurred: at last the alcohol was getting to her.

'You entertained on the boat last week,' I said. 'Who was it who came aboard on Monday?' She gave me a venomous glare.

She said, 'So he speaks, your friend. I was beginning to think he was one of those inflatable dolls they advertise in the back pages of the sex magazines.'

I passed to her the piece of paper on which I noted the dates of the pages missing from the boat's visitors book.

She scowled at it and said, 'You get a tax deduction for the days when you entertain businessmen on a boat. Douglas always made people sign, so he could claim his proper deduction. He was obsessional about that.'

'Who was it?' I said.

She scrabbled to find the spectacles tucked down the side of the armchair. Having put them on, she read the dates with studied concentration. 'I couldn't tell you,' she said. 'My memory isn't so good these days, Douglas was always ribbing me about that.'

I said, 'I'd hate you to make a mistake about how important this is to us.'

'That's right,' said Mann. He pointed a finger down to the boat moored beyond where the palm trees were whipping about in the wind. 'You got a time bomb down there, Mrs Dean. At ten thirty I'm going to have to blow the whistle on you. This place will be filled with cops, reporters and photographers, and they will all be yelling at you — right?' He looked at his watch. 'So you got just eighteen minutes to decide how you play it — and the decisions you make are going to decide whether you live out the rest of your life as a millionairess, or spend it upstate in the women's prison with a "no parole" sticker on your file.'

She looked at Mann for a moment and then looked at her own wrist-watch just to check him out.

'Seventeen minutes,' Mann said.

'Douglas ran a legitimate business,' she said. 'You start thinking it was all mixed up with the other business and you will never unravel it.'

'You let us worry about that,' I said.

'You don't get these big government contracts by sitting on your butt, waiting for the phone to ring. Douglas went out of his way to look after his contacts, and they expected that.'

'Who was it?'

'People from some Senate Committee.'

'Which Senate Committee?'

'International Scientific Co-operation — or some such name. You must have heard of it.'

'We've heard of it,' I said. 'So who came here?'

'Only for fishing trips, and you wouldn't get me on that boat when they are fishing. I didn't get to meet any of them. They were just fishing cronies of Douglas. Like I told you, it was just social. Douglas only put it down as business so he could get the tax deductions.'

'Names!' said Mann. 'Names, goddamnit!'

She spilled her drink. 'Mr Hart. Mr Gerry Hart. He's helped my husband get other government contracts.'

'Mind if I use your phone, Mrs Reid-Kennedy?' said Mann.