Mexico Set

Some years ago I attended a design congress in Oaxaca, Mexico, where for a few pesos I purchased some wonderful papier mâché masks, my favourite being the umbrella salesmen, a moustachioed gentleman with a gold tooth. This image seemed to fit perfectly as a matching half to Len Deighton’s protagonist Bernard Samson’s face in Mexico Set. This two-faced quality seemed, to me, to speak volumes for the nature of the business that Bernard is in, and also to the conflicted nature of his character.

Some time later I was invited to speak at a design conference in Queretaro, Mexico. To my delight the event took place during the festival of ‘Día de los Muertos’, ‘The Day of the Dead’, during which time many wonderful related artefacts are sold. One of these items comes from the folk art of ‘papel picado’, the brightly coloured tissue paper-cuts. I thought that the image of a skeleton reading a book would be a most appropriate illustration for this book’s back cover.

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 are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

Contents

Cover

Cover Designer’s Note

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

During the First World War the neutral Netherlands had been the arena in which the rival spy services brawled. In the Second World War it was Portugal that served that purpose. In the Cold War the arena eventually became Mexico. It was in safe houses in Mexico City where the officers of the GRU and those of the KGB clashed, reasoned or sometimes socialized with their Allied opposite numbers. For Moscow, Washington and London these contacts were vital, but for the personnel stationed there the job was a consignment to the promotional rubbish heap. No interesting memoirs were written by the men who spent the Cold War years in Mexico. No indiscreet revelations were spilled into the well-paid serializations that sold the newspapers of that time. Mexico City only came into the headlines as a stopover for Lee Harvey Oswald when the assassination of President John Kennedy was being investigated.

The very first time I visited Mexico I was staying at the YMCA in Los Angeles. I was a penniless art student; well, perhaps that overstates it: let’s say I was living from hand to mouth and being saved from starvation by the care and consideration given me by the mother of an American artist I knew in London. Left to my own devices on my last day I ate supper from a hot-dog stand. Los Angeles was not the gourmet’s paradise that it later became, and street food was America’s answer to the fugu fish. I spent the night groaning in the toilets and when daylight finally arrived I was feeling very ill. In my pocket I had a Greyhound Bus ticket that would take me a few hundred miles into a country I knew nothing about and, with that physical stamina and grim determination that is the currency of the young and foolish, I dragged myself down to the bus depot, threw myself across the back seat and closed my eyes. You may wish to note that the back seat of a Greyhound Bus is not the best place to be if you are alternately praying for help and wishing to die. The sort of buses that are built for Mexico are fitted with robust and unyielding suspensions. The rearmost part of the chassis takes an undue proportion of the punishment that comes with loose surface roads and pot-holes. I recall every jolt of that journey but towards the end of it I was sitting upright and looking out of the window trying to see through the grime and the dust. As always, the Greyhound Bus got me there. During the nineteen fifties I did so many thousands of miles on Grey Buses that they used me in their advertising.

I survived the journey. I climbed down from the bus into the sweaty noon of Mexico’s west coast, spotted a bench and a Coca Cola stand and I started writing some notes for my diary. I’m told that nowadays this region of Mexico is packed with luxury hotels, motor-yachts and marinas but back in the nineteen fifties it was just a succession of small villages punctuating empty stretches of bleak, cactus strewn landscape. But the traveller counting the pennies gets a far more authentic impression of a country than any luxury tour can provide. The Mexicans were kind and generous to me and, if the steady diet of beans and tortillas I ate became monotonous, I knew that was only because I wasn’t as hungry as those around me. I felt at home. From that time I have always enjoyed being with Mexicans, and nowadays I am delighted to have become a part of a kind and joyful Mexican family.

I have always contrived to visit places at their least attractive time. Ski resorts in high summer, Asia when the monsoons come, Algeria in the annual rainstorms and the French Riviera when the restaurants are shuttered and the casinos being renovated. It may sound perverse but I can only get under the skin of foreign destinations when the lipstick and powder has been set aside and the spots and pimples are there for all to see. So, when I researched Mexico Set I saw it in the stormy season when the steely thunderclouds reach down lower and lower upon the thirsty earth until torrential rain arrives to lash the streets with fury.

Mexico Set opens with Bernard Samson and Dicky Cruyer in Mexico City. For Bernard the problems are piling higher and higher. While Berlin Game saw Bernard battered by professional dilemmas we now see the complex uncertainties of his private life. In this book I am able to do a few of the things that made the whole nine-book project so worthwhile for me. Instead of going back to start all over again with a new story I could take my characters deeper and deeper into the lives that, while being so weird and wonderful, are burdened with the domestic everyday events that we all endure.

Every writer wants to maximize everything: intriguing characters, labyrinthine plot, humorous asides, unfolding landscape, crisp dialogue. But now I didn’t have to cram all that tightly together; having the space granted by the planned future books gave me a freedom to do something better than I had ever done before. Of course every story worth reading has all of the above. Berlin Game with its dénouement set the scene. After that Mexico Set used arguments, anger and confidences to reveal new sides of the characters and their shifting attitudes to each other. Many important characters arrive in subsequent volumes but by the end of this book all the stars are on the stage. Yet in this book – and I know this is going to sound corny – Mexico is the star. It is a wonderful country, its cruel landscape tormented by its amazing weather patterns. With the ever-present danger of ending up writing a travel guide dominated by weather reports, I have kept Mexico as a persistent backdrop to the story of Bernard Samson.

Are the stories based on real people? Scott Fitzgerald argued with Ernest Hemingway about the nature of fiction. Writing to a friend who was deeply offended by the way she was depicted in his book, Fitzgerald said: ‘In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction i.e. that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character – in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender [is the Night].’ And so it is that most writers take manners and gestures and other bits and pieces from the people they meet, they steal slices from the landscape, relive the pain and joy of their experience. In this way the writer pushes beyond reality in pursuit of some sort of truth.

Len Deighton, 2010

1

‘Some of these people want to get killed,’ said Dicky Cruyer, as he jabbed the brake pedal to avoid hitting a newsboy. The kid grinned as he slid between the slowly moving cars, flourishing his newspapers with the controlled abandon of a fan dancer. ‘Six Face Firing Squad’; the headlines were huge and shiny black. ‘Hurricane Threatens Veracruz.’ A smudgy photo of street fighting in San Salvador covered the whole front of a tabloid.

It was late afternoon. The streets shone with that curiously bright shadowless light that precedes a storm. All six lanes of traffic crawling along the Insurgentes halted, and more newsboys danced into the road, together with a woman selling flowers and a kid with lottery tickets trailing from a roll like toilet paper.

Picking his way between the cars came a handsome man in old jeans and checked shirt. He was accompanied by a small child. The man had a Coca Cola bottle in his fist. He swigged at it and then tilted his head back again, looking up into the heavens. He stood erect and immobile, like a bronze statue, before igniting his breath so that a great ball of fire burst from his mouth.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Dicky. ‘That’s dangerous.’

‘It’s a living,’ I said. I’d seen the fire-eaters before. There was always one of them performing somewhere in the big traffic jams. I switched on the car radio but electricity in the air blotted out the music with the sounds of static. It was very hot. I opened the window but the sudden stink of diesel fumes made me close it again. I held my hand against the air-conditioning outlet but the air was warm.

Again the fire-eater blew a huge orange balloon of flame into the air.

‘For us,’ explained Dicky. ‘Dangerous for people in the cars. Flames like that, with all these petrol fumes … can you imagine?’ There was a slow roll of thunder. ‘If only it would rain,’ said Dicky. I looked at the sky, the low black clouds trimmed with gold. The huge sun was coloured bright red by the city’s ever-present blanket of smog, and squeezed tight between the glass buildings that dripped with its light.

‘Who got this car for us?’ I said. A motorcycle, its pillion piled high with cases of beer, weaved precariously between the cars, narrowly missing the flower seller.

‘One of the embassy people,’ said Dicky. He released the brake and the big blue Chevrolet rolled forward a few feet and then all the traffic stopped again. In any town north of the border this factory-fresh car would not have drawn a second glance. But Mexico City is the place old cars go to die. Most of those around us were dented and rusty, or they were crudely repainted in bright primary colours. ‘A friend of mine lent it to us.’

‘I might have guessed,’ I said.

‘It was short notice. They didn’t know we were coming until the day before yesterday. Henry Tiptree – the one who met us at the airport – let us have it. It was a special favour because I knew him at Oxford.’

‘I wish you hadn’t known him at Oxford; then we could have rented one from Hertz – with air-conditioning that worked.’

‘So what can we do …’ said Dicky irritably ‘… take it back and tell him it’s not good enough for us?’

We watched the fire-eater blow another balloon of flame while the small boy hurried from driver to driver, collecting a peso here and there for his father’s performance.

Dicky took some Mexican coins from the slash pocket of his denim jacket and gave them to the child. It was Dicky’s faded work suit, his cowboy boots and curly hair that had attracted the attention of the tough-looking woman immigration officer at Mexico City airport. It was only the first-class labels on his expensive baggage, and the fast talking of Dicky’s Counsellor friend from the embassy, that saved him from the indignity of a body search.

Dicky Cruyer was a curious mixture of scholarship and ruthless ambition, but he was insensitive, and this was often his undoing. His insensitivity to people, place and atmosphere could make him seem a clown instead of the cool sophisticate that was his own image of himself. But that didn’t make him any less terrifying as friend or foe.

The flower seller bent down, tapped on the window glass and waved at Dicky. He shouted ‘Vamos!’ It was almost impossible to see her face behind the unwieldy armful of flowers. Here were blossoms of all colours, shapes and sizes. Flowers for weddings and flowers for dinner hostesses, flowers for mistresses and flowers for suspicious wives.

The traffic began moving again. Dicky shouted ‘Vamos!’ much louder.

The woman saw me reaching into my pocket for money and separated a dozen long-stemmed pink roses from the less expensive marigolds and asters. ‘Maybe some flowers would be something to give to Werner’s wife,’ I said.

Dicky ignored my suggestion. ‘Get out of the way,’ he shouted at the old woman, and the car leaped forward. The old woman jumped clear.

‘Take it easy, Dicky, you nearly knocked her over.’

‘Vamos! I told her; vamos. They shouldn’t be in the road. Are they all crazy? She heard me all right.’

‘Vamos means “Okay, let’s go”,’ I said. ‘She thought you wanted to buy some.’

‘In Mexico it also means scram,’ said Dicky driving up close to a white VW bus in front of us. It was full of people and boxes of tomatoes, and its dented bodywork was caked with mud in the way that cars become when they venture on to country roads at this rainy time of year. Its exhaust-pipe was newly bound up with wire, and the rear panel had been removed to help cool the engine. The sound of its fan made a very loud whine so that Dicky had to speak loudly to make himself heard. ‘Vamos; scram. They say it in cowboy films.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t go to cowboy films,’ I said.

‘Just keep looking at the street map.’

‘It’s not a street map; it’s just a map. It only shows the main streets.’

‘We’ll find it all right. It’s off Insurgentes.’

‘Do you know how big Mexico City is? Insurgentes is about thirty-five miles long,’ I said.

‘You look on your side and I’ll look this side. Volkmann said it’s in the centre of town.’ He sniffed. ‘Mexico, they call it. No one here says “Mexico City”. They call the town Mexico.’

I didn’t answer; I put away the little coloured town plan and stared out at the crowded streets. I was quite happy to be driven round the town for an hour or two if that’s what Dicky wanted.

Dicky said, ‘Somewhere in the centre of town would mean the Paseo de la Reforma near the column with the golden angel. At least that’s what it would mean to any tourist coming here for the first time. And Werner Volkmann and his wife Zena are here for the first time. Right?’

‘Werner said it was going to be a second honeymoon.’

‘With Zena I would have thought one honeymoon would be enough,’ said Dicky.

‘More than enough,’ I said.

Dicky said, ‘I’ll kill your bloody Werner if he’s brought us out from London on a wild-goose chase.’

‘It’s a break from the office,’ I said. Werner had become my Werner I noticed and would remain so if things went wrong.

‘For you it is,’ said Dicky. ‘You’ve got nothing to lose. Your desk will be waiting for you when you get back. But there’s a dozen people in that building scrambling round for my job. This will give Bret just the chance he needs to take over my work. You realize that, don’t you?’

‘How could Bret want to take your job, Dicky? Bret is senior to you.’

The traffic was moving at about five miles an hour. A small dirty-faced child in the back of the VW bus was staring at Dicky with great interest. The insolent stare seemed to disconcert him. Dicky turned to look at me. ‘Bret is looking for a job that would suit him; and my job would suit him. Bret will have nothing to do now that his committee is being wound up. There’s already an argument about who will have his office space. And about who will have that tall blonde typist who wears the white sweaters.’

‘Gloria?’ I said.

‘Oh? Don’t say you’ve been there?’

‘Us workers stick together, Dicky,’ I said.

‘Very funny,’ said Dicky. ‘If Bret takes over my job, he’ll chase your arse. Working for me will seem like a holiday. I hope you realize that, old pal.’

I didn’t know that the brilliant career of Bret was taking a downturn to the point where Dicky was running scared. But Dicky had taken a PhD in office politics so I was prepared to believe him. ‘This is the Pink Zone,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you park in one of these hotels and get a cab?’

Dicky seemed relieved at the idea of letting a cab driver find Werner Volkmann’s apartment but, being Dicky, he had to argue against it for a couple of minutes. As he pulled into the slow lane the dirty child in the VW smiled and then made a terrible face at us. Dicky glanced at me and said, ‘Are you pulling faces at that child? For God’s sake, act your age, Bernard.’ Dicky was in a bad mood, and talking about his job had made him more touchy.

He turned off Insurgentes on to a side-street and cruised eastwards until we found a car-park under one of the big hotels. As we went down the ramp into the darkness he switched the headlights on. This was a different world. This was where the Mercedes, Cadillacs and Porsches lived in comfort, shiny with health, smelling of new leather and guarded by two armed security men. One of them pushed a ticket under a wiper and lifted the barrier so that we could drive through.

‘So your school chum Werner spots a KGB heavy here in town. Why did Controller (Europe) insist that I come out here at this stinking time of year?’ Dicky was cruising very slowly round the dark garage, looking for a place to park.

‘Werner didn’t spot Erich Stinnes,’ I said. ‘Werner’s wife spotted him. And there’s a departmental alert for him. There’s a space.’

‘Too small; this is a big car. Alert? You don’t have to tell me that, old boy. I signed the alert, Remember me? Controller of German Stations? But I’ve never seen Erich Stinnes. I wouldn’t know Erich Stinnes from the man in the moon. You’re the one who can identify him. Why do I have to come?’

‘You’re here to decide what we do. I’m not senior enough or reliable enough to make decisions. What about there, next to the white Mercedes?’

‘Ummmmm,’ said Dicky. He had trouble parking the car in the space marked out by the white lines. One of the security guards – a big poker-faced man in starched khakis and carefully polished high boots – came to watch us. He stood arms akimbo, staring, while Dicky went backwards and forwards trying to squeeze between the white convertible and a concrete stanchion that bore brightly coloured patches of enamel from other cars. ‘Did you really make out with that blonde in Bret’s office?’ said Dicky as he abandoned his task and reversed into another space marked ‘reserved’.

‘Gloria? I thought everyone knew about me and Gloria,’ I said. In fact I knew her no better than Dicky did but I couldn’t resist the chance to needle him. ‘My wife’s left me. I’m a free man again.’

‘Your wife defected,’ said Dicky spitefully. ‘Your wife is working for the bloody Russkies.’

‘That’s over and done with,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk about my wife or my children or any other problems. And if I did want to talk about them Dicky would be the last person I’d choose to confide in.

‘You and Fiona were very close,’ said Dicky accusingly.

‘It’s not a crime to be in love with your wife,’ I said.

‘Taboo subject, eh?’ It pleased Dicky to touch a nerve and get a reaction. I should have known better than to respond to his taunts. I was guilty by association. I’d become a probationer once more and I’d remain one until I proved my loyalty all over again. Nothing had been said to me officially, but Dicky’s little flash of temper was not the first indication of what the department really felt.