Yesterday’s Spy

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1975

Copyright © Len Deighton 1975

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2012

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2012

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007458417

Version: 2017-05-23

All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Table of Contents

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

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Cover designer’s note

About the Author

By Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

They say that New York City is the place to enjoy when you are young and Paris is the city for those of mature years. Maybe it depends how much money you spend.

It is not true that I prefer to stay in broken-down dumps rather than grand hotels. I love grand hotels but I also find certain sorts of dumps, and the people who frequent them, intriguing. Back in the distant past I had a room in the Adlon in Communist East Berlin, or at least in that hotel’s ruined remains. It was so dilapidated that it seemed as if a violent sneeze would be enough to make it fall apart. But looking down from this back room I could see the East German border guards and their barrack rooms, their armoury, kennels and guard dogs. The noise from the dogs being brought out gave notice of some new drama at the nearby Wall. It was rather like standing in the wings for a Grand-Guignol show.

A quite different and more enjoyable time came when my family squeezed into the attic of a Gasthof not far from Munich. The discomfort was more than made up for by the friendliness of the Swabian couple who worked so hard and kept so cheerful and let us into the kitchen to learn some secrets of south German cooking. We stayed in that lakeside village for months. My two sons went to school nearby and my understanding of the German south and its people proved valuable for my book Winter, which I wrote there using one of the earliest laptop computers. We were all sorry to depart.

When Charlie Kasher, the executive producer of the film of The Ipcress File, visited me in the Hotel Chelsea – on West 23rd Street NYC – he was appalled at what he described as its ‘squalour’. He dragged me away to somewhere he felt more salubrious: a small smart luxury hotel on Fifth Avenue. It was more convenient and more comfortable but only half the fun. In the fifties, in several tiny Japanese villages I found clean accommodation so cheap that my Japanese friends refused to believe the low prices I had paid and thought I didn’t understand the money. When I first booked into the famous Hotel Sacher in Vienna it had not fully recovered from its occupation by some of the more uncaring, and trigger-happy, elements of the Red Army infantry, and I looked in vain for the Schlagobers and Sachertorte.

As I see it, it is the task of a writer to seek the truth and truth is not to be found in the silky indulgence of grand hotels, which tend to be the same in all parts of the world. Truth is found where people work and suffer. As a base for my research for Yesterday’s Spy I rented a room in a flea-bitten little hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. It was an establishment that I have depicted realistically in this story. The Princess was much as I have described.

Why Villefranche? The bay of Villefranche has water deeper than any other such port anywhere in the Mediterranean. From 350 feet near the shore the ocean bed slopes away steeply to 1,700 feet of dark water. It was this unique deep-water anchorage that brought the US Sixth Fleet here regularly: carriers, cruisers and even big battleships such as the USS Missouri. In those frantic years of the Cold War, France was in love with its American protectors. Americans were subject to the draft and these little streets and alleys were packed with high-spirited young sailors on brief shore leave looking for action of one kind or another.

When the dollar was high, France fondly embraced all American visitors, but love affairs can cool and lovers prove unkind. France switched its affections to Teutonic neighbours brandishing Deutschmarks, and the Sixth Fleet found other spots to drop anchor. By the time I was researching this book Villefranche was going through a period of quiet. Visitors of any kind were not much in evidence and the whole place had a hushed spooky feeling, as if the lonely little town was waiting for the sailors to return.

The Savoy is one of the most attractive regions that I have ever known. I have returned to it time and time again. Eventually – and long after this book was written – it became home to my wife’s parents, and in a comfortable rented house nearby we made it our home too. My children went to the local village school, learned to speak French like the natives, enjoyed long-lasting friendships and, like us, count it among the happiest times of their lives. The inhabitants of the Savoy are unique for their welcoming ways, neighbourliness and love of food and cooking. During our time there I wrote much of a book later published as the ABC of French Food. Cooking provides the lingua franca of this region, and while the affable sociability is – like so many of the family names – Italian, the cooking is French. The winter hereabout is not always mild. The Alps and the River Rhone both bring winds and cold weather but that in turn means heartwarming food and roaring log fires. In summary it is an excellent place in which to settle back and write a book.

Writing books is like a spell on a battlefield. For the first two or three books you survive largely by luck. After that the odds are against you, and you have to learn quickly and learn by narrow escapes. To construct Yesterday’s Spy I decided to use a second character and thus create a dual leading role. Conan Doyle had shown us how Dr Watson could be a useful tool for explaining facts and theories to the reader. I was right to believe that Yesterday’s Spy would benefit from assigning to ‘Harry Palmer’ a belligerent American boss, Schlegel, but I didn’t include in my calculations the intimacy that would come from sending Harry back to fraternize with his old friends from the Resistance. This intimacy battled against the closeness between Harry and his boss. Perhaps it is a minor matter, and only applied to this special circumstance of this story, but I soon became aware of the limitations this put upon the crisscross relationships.

Dividing the number of major characters into the size of your typescript tells you how much space you have for character development. Yesterday’s Spy has quite a lot of major characters and that meant wasting no time when it came to describing each of them. The idea of having a group of Second World War Resistance workers who, some long time later, have different allegiances and different enemies provided an interesting writing problem. It was so interesting that I felt afterwards that I should have made it a far longer book.

Len Deighton, 2012

1

‘The Guernica network!’ said Steve Champion, holding up his glass.

I hesitated. White’s Club – sanctus sanctorum of Establishment London – seemed an inappropriate place to indulge in revolutionary nostalgia.

‘Let’s just drink to Marius,’ I said.

‘Marius,’ said Champion. He drank, and wiped his blunt military-style moustache with the back of his glove. It was a gesture I’d noticed that time we’d first met – Villefranche, landing from a submarine, one night when the war was young. It was as wrong for him then as it was now. In those days Regular Army captains of the Welsh Guards did not wipe the froth off their faces with the back of their hand. But then Regular captains of the Brigade of Guards, sent to France to set up anti-Nazi Intelligence networks, were not expected to meet newly arriving agents with a girl on each arm and an open bottle of champagne.

‘Marius,’ I said. I drank too.

‘What a comical crew we were,’ said Champion. ‘Marius the revolutionary priest, you straight from training school, with your terrible accent and your pimple ointment, and me. Sometimes I thought we should have let the Nazis catch us, and watched them die of laughing.’

‘It was Marius who reconciled that network,’ I said, ‘the Communists and the deserters and the hot-heads and us professionals. It was Marius who held the network together. When he went, we all went.’

‘He was past his prime by then,’ said Champion. ‘He’d had too much of it. He wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. None of us would have.’

‘Marius was young,’ I said. ‘Almost as young as I was.’

‘Marius died in a torture chamber,’ said Champion. ‘He died within six hours of being arrested … it was incredibly brave and he deserved the medal … but he could have saved himself by giving them some useless information. He could have deciphered some ancient codes and given them the names of people who’d already gone back to London. He could have bought a few days, and in a few days we could have rescued him.’

I didn’t argue. Even after all this time it was difficult to be objective about the death of Marius. His energy and his optimism had kept us going at times when it seemed that all was lost. And his reckless bravery had more than once saved us.

For Champion it was even more difficult. He’d always blamed himself for the young priest’s death. Perhaps that was partly why he’d married Marius’s younger sister. And perhaps it was partly why the marriage had now fallen apart.

We both watched the far end of the room, where two Socialist Cabinet Ministers exchanged jokes about their golf handicaps and tips about the stock exchange. Champion reached into the waistcoat of his beautifully cut chalk-stripe suit. He flipped back the cover of the gold hunter that had belonged to his father and his grandfather, looked at the time, and then signalled a club servant to bring more drinks.

‘The divorce came through,’ he said. ‘Caty and me – it’s all over. Nowadays I live all the time in France.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Why?’ said Champion.

I shrugged. There was no point in telling him that I liked them both, and enjoyed what had once been their happy marriage. ‘Those weekends at the house in Wales,’ I said. ‘Where will I go now to get French cooking like Caty’s?’

‘Well, Caty still lives there,’ said Champion. ‘And she’d love to see you again, I’m sure.’

I looked at him. I would have expected him to invite me to his new house in France rather than to that of his ex-wife in Wales, but Steve Champion was always unpredictable. Even more so since he’d become a wealthy businessman. He lit a fresh cigarette from the dog-end of his old one. His hand trembled; he had to steady it with the one on which he always wore a glove – to hide the absence of the fingertips he’d left behind in an interview room of St Roch prison in wartime Nice.

‘You never thought of going back?’ he said.

‘To live in France?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘To the department.’

‘Hah! It’s a thought, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I didn’t, Steve, and I’ll tell you why.’ I leaned a little closer to him, and he glanced round the room with no more than a flicker of the eye.

I said, ‘Because the department never asked me to, Steve.’

He smiled soberly.

‘And I’ll tell you something else, Steve,’ I added. ‘There are people who say that you never left the department. Whenever we get together like this in London I wonder whether you are going to try recruiting me.’

‘Now you’re laughing at me, boyo,’ said Champion, in his stage Welsh accent. He reached into his pocket and produced a clear plastic envelope. Inside it were five picture postcards. Each depicted an airship or a balloon, and in the foreground were men in straw hats and women in leg-of-mutton-sleeved dresses, inhabitants of an innocent world that had not quite learned to fly. On the other sides of the cards was a tangle of greetings to long-forgotten addressees, and curious old postage stamps.

‘A philatelic auction in Bond Street,’ said Champion. ‘That’s why I came to London. I just couldn’t resist these.’

I looked at his purchases. By now Champion should have realized that I was a lost cause as far as his obsession with airmail stamps was concerned. ‘And Billy?’ I asked. I handed his airships back to him.

‘Yes, I’m seeing a lot of Billy this week,’ said Champion, as if visiting his young son was no more than an afterthought. ‘Caty has been very good about letting me see Billy.’

He went through the postcards one by one and then put them away with exaggerated care. ‘The night Billy was born,’ he said, ‘I was up to the neck in bank loans, promissory notes and mortgages. I was sure I’d done the wrong thing … did I ever tell you how I started: with the uncut diamonds?’

‘I’ve heard stories,’ I admitted.

He inhaled carefully on his cigarette. ‘Do you know Accra?’

‘No.’

‘The arse-hole of West Africa. I was flat broke, and working hard to buy a ticket home. I was translating export permits for cocoa traders and wangling customs forms for importers – all of them Arabs. My Arabic has always been good, but by the time I finished working with those jokers I could have done the sports reports for Radio Cairo. When I think of it!’ He clasped his hands tight as if to stretch the joints. ‘I took the bumpf down to the customs sheds one day – June, it was, and bloody steamy, even by Accra standards. I made the usual golden obeisance to the officials and loaded ten crates of Renault spares on to the truck I’d hired. But when I uncrated them back in the cocoa warehouse, I find I’m knee-deep in French MAS 38s, complete with cleaning kits, and spares and instruction booklets.’

‘Sub-machineguns,’ I said.

‘Go to the top of the class.’

‘But could you get the Long cartridge?’

‘Am I glad you weren’t involved, old boy! No, you couldn’t get them. But the kids who bought them were too young to remember the MAS 38, so they think they are MAT 49s, for which there is 9 mm stuff ready to be nicked from a local police or army unit. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘But I’m getting ahead of the story. Imagine me – the only man in Accra who’d sooner have Renault spares than sub-machineguns, sitting on ten cases of them. All of them customs cleared, rubber stamped and signed for. It was tempting.’

‘But you didn’t succumb?’

‘Oh, but I did.’ He took a drag on his cigarette and waved the smoke away. ‘Two hundred and thirty-five dollars each – American dollars – and I could have doubled it, had I sold them to the loudmouths with the fuzzy-wuzzy haircuts.’

‘Ten to a case?’ I said. ‘About ten thousand pounds profit.’

‘I had to stop my client going down to the customs and raising hell about his Renault spares. I owed a bit of money, I had to get an exit permit, and clearance from the tax office: it all costs money.’

‘You came home?’

‘I went to buy my air ticket from a crooked little Portuguese travel agent. I started bargaining with him, knowing that he could unload my US dollar bills at a big premium. To cut a long story short, I ended up giving him all my American money in exchange for a bag of uncut diamonds from Angola and a boat ticket to Marseille.’

‘You went to Marseille?’

‘Old man Tix had just died, his whole set-up was for sale. Caty’s sister told me about it. But the Algerian fighting was still on, and the Tix fruit and vegetable importing was no more than a ream of headed notepaper and a couple of fleabitten offices in Constantine.’

‘And the quarry was defunct.’

‘The quarry – yes.’ Champion smiled. We’d both hidden in the quarry during a big German round-up, when old man Tix had chased a German officer out of the house shouting ‘Sale Boche’ at him, crossing himself as he did so. ‘The quarry was finished. They’d mined, too, but it was costing so much to dig that the old boy did better on unemployment benefit.’

‘But you sold your diamonds and bought the Tix place from his widow?’

‘That was only a down payment,’ said Steve, ‘but Madame Tix wanted me to have it. She waited a long time for the rest of the money. It was a gamble for all concerned. We were betting on a peaceful settlement of the Algerian war.’

‘You were always a good guesser, Steve,’ I said.

‘The peace between France and Algeria meant immigrant labourers – that got the mine back into profit.’

‘Lower wages,’ I said.

‘But still higher than any they could get in their own country.’

‘But you closed the mine and the quarry – you sent the men home.’

Champion smiled. He said, ‘It was the idea of cheap labour in the mine. That’s what enabled me to get my capital. Avaricious little hairdressers with their hands in the till … contractors fiddling their tax, and hard-eyed old bastards from the merchant banks. They came to see my quarry and the Arabs sweating their guts out. They liked it – that was the kind of investment those little sods could understand. That was the way their grandfathers – and their friends’ grandfathers – had made a fortune in Africa a hundred years ago.’

‘And you put that money into the fruit and veg.’

‘Much more than money … soil analysis, a professor of botany, a programme of seeding techniques, long-term contracts for the farmers, minimum price guarantees for seasonal workers, refrigerated warehouses, refrigerated transport and contracted refrigerated shipping. I put a lot of money into the Arab countries.’

‘And now they have oil as well.’

‘Oil is a one-crop economy,’ said Champion.

‘A gilt-edged one,’ I said.

‘That’s what they said about coffee and tea and rubber,’ said Champion. ‘I truly believe that North Africa must trade with Europe, right across the board. The Arab countries must have a stake in Europe’s well-being. The economics must link, otherwise Africa will let Europe die of inflation.’

‘I never thought of you as a crusader, Steve.’

Champion seemed disconcerted at the idea. He picked up his glass to hide behind it.

Two men came downstairs: one was a famous poet, the other a peer of the realm. They were arguing quietly and eruditely about the lyrics of an obscene Eighth Army song about the extra-marital activities of King Farouk.

A club servant came to tell Champion that a lady was waiting at the entrance. ‘Come along,’ said Champion. ‘This is someone I’d like you to meet.’

A servant helped Champion into the lightweight vicuna coat, designed like a British warm, and handed him the bowler hat that made him look like a retired general. Someone unseen gave a perfunctory brush to the shoulder of my dirty raincoat.

The snow obliterated the view through the doorway, like static on an old TV. Outside in St James’s Street, London’s traffic was jammed tight. Champion’s girl gave no more than the nod and smile that manners demanded. Her eyes were devoted to Champion. She watched him with the kind of awe with which an orphan eyes a Christmas tree. It was always the same girl. This one had the same perfect skin that Caty had, and the same soft eyes with which Pina had looked at him. Except that decades had passed since Caty or Pina had been this kid’s age.

‘Melodie,’ said Champion. ‘It’s a nice name, isn’t it: Melodie Page.’

‘It’s a lovely name,’ I said, in my usual sycophantic way.

Champion looked at his watch. ‘It’s a long time since we jawed so much,’ he told me. ‘My God, but you would have been bored, Melodie. We must be getting old.’ He smiled. ‘Melodie and Billy are taking me to the theatre tonight. They are going to repair one of the gaps in my musical education.’

The girl hit his arm in mock anger.

‘Rock music and pirates,’ Champion told me.

‘A potent mixture,’ I said.

‘Billy will be glad I’ve seen you. You always remember his birthday, he told me.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘That’s damned nice of you.’ Champion patted my arm.

At that moment, exactly on schedule, a black Daimler drew level with the entrance. A uniformed driver hurried across the pavement, opening an umbrella to shelter Champion and the girl from the weather. He opened the door, too. As the girl slid into the real leather seating, Champion looked back to where I was standing. The snow was beating about my ears. Champion raised his gloved hand in a regal salute. But when only three of your fingers are able to wave, such a gesture can look awfully like a very rude Anglo-Saxon sign.

2

I could see my report about Champion on Schlegel’s desk. Schlegel picked it up. He shook it gently, as if hoping that some new information might drop out of it. ‘No,’ said Schlegel. ‘No. No. No.’

I said nothing. Colonel Schlegel, US Marine Corps (Air Wing), Retired, cut a dapper figure in a lightweight houndstooth three-piece, fake club-tie and button-down cotton shirt. It was the kind of outfit they sell in those Los Angeles shops that have bow windows and plastic Tudor beams. He tapped my report. ‘Maybe you can shaft the rest of them with your inscrutable sarcasm and innocent questions, but me no likee – got it?’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Champion was just seeing his kid, and buying stamps – there’s no other angle. He’s a rich man now: he’s not playing secret agents. Believe me, Colonel. There’s nothing there.’

Schlegel leaned forward to get a small cigar from a box decorated with an eagle trying to eat a scroll marked Semper Fidelis. He pushed the box to me, but I’m trying to give them up.

‘He’s in deep,’ said Schlegel. Puckered scar tissue made it difficult to distinguish his smiles from his scowls. He was a short muscular man with an enviable measure of self-confidence; the kind of personality that you hire to MC an Elks Club stag night.