Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy

‘And will it get your secrets back if you keep me a prisoner here?’ yelled Bekuv. ‘Not allowed to go out … Not allowed to make phone calls.’

Mann walked quickly to the door, as if frightened he would lose his temper. He turned. ‘You’ll stay here as long as I think fit,’ he said. ‘Behave yourself and I’ll send you a packet of phonograph needles and a subscription to Little Green Men Monthly.’

Bekuv spoke quietly. ‘You don’t like cosmology, you don’t like high-fidelity, you don’t like Shostakovich, you don’t like blinis …’ Bekuv smiled. I couldn’t decide whether he was trying to needle Mann or not.

‘I don’t like Russians,’ explained Mann. ‘White Russians, Red Russians, Ukrainians, Muscovite liberals, ballet dancers or faggy poets – I just don’t like any of them. Get the picture?’

‘I get it,’ said Bekuv sulkily. ‘Is there anything more?’

‘One thing more,’ said Mann. ‘I’m not an international expert on the design of electronic masers. All I know about them is that a maser is some kind of crystal gimmick that gets pumped up with electronic energy so that it amplifies the weakest of incoming radio signals. That way you get a big fat signal compared with the background of electronic static noise and interference.’

‘That’s right,’ said Bekuv. It was the first time he’d shown any real interest.

‘I was reading that your liquid helium bath technique, that keeps the maser at minus two hundred and sixty-eight degrees centigrade, will amplify a signal nearly two million times.’

Bekuv nodded.

‘Now I see the day when every little two-bit transistor could be using one of these gadgets and pulling in radio transmissions from anywhere in the world. Of course, we know that would just mean hearing a DJ spinning discs in Peking, instead of Pasadena, but a guy collecting a royalty on such a gadget could make a few million. Right, Professor?’

‘I didn’t defect for money,’ said Bekuv.

Major Mann smiled.

‘I didn’t defect to make money,’ shouted Bekuv. If Mann had been trying to make Bekuv very, very angry, he’d discovered an effective way to do it.

Mann took my arm and led me from the room, closing the door silently and with exaggerated care. I didn’t speak as we both walked downstairs to my sitting-room. Mann took off his dark raincoat and bundled it up to throw it into a corner. From upstairs there came the sudden crash of Shostakovich. Mann closed the door to muffle it.

I walked over to the window, so that I could look down into Washington Square. It was sunny: the sort of New York City winter’s day when the sun coaxes you out without your long underwear, so that the cross-town wind can slice you into freeze-dried salami. Even the quartet echo-singing under the Washington arch had the hoods of their parkas up. But no street sounds came through the double-glazing; just soft Shostakovich from upstairs. Mann sat in my most comfortable chair and picked up the carbon of my report. I could tell that he’d already been to his office and perused the overnights. He gave my report no more than a moment or two, then he lifted the lid of my pigskin document case and put a fingertip on the Hart and Greenwood files that had arrived by special messenger in the early hours. They were very thin files.

‘The car had a foreign consul plate?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you read that stuff on the telex?’

‘The two Russians are staying in a house leased to the Second Secretary of the Soviet Trade Delegation … Yes, I read it, but that doesn’t make them KGB or even diplomatic. They might just be visiting relatives, or subtenants or squatters or something.’

Mann said, ‘I’d like to bring in the owners of that car and sweat them.’

‘And what would you charge them with? Leaving the scene of an accident?’

‘Very funny,’ said Mann. ‘But the foreign consul plate on that car ties them to the stick-up artists.’

‘You mean KGB heavies lend their official car to three hoods?’

Mann pouted and shook his head slowly, as if denying a treat to a spoiled child. ‘Not the way you’d arrange it, maybe,’ he said. ‘But there was no reason for them to think it would all foul up. They figured it would be a pushover, and the official car would provide them with the kind of getaway that no cop would dare stop. It was a good idea.’

‘That went wrong.’

‘That went wrong.’ He ran his fingers through the urgent paperwork inside my document case. ‘Are we going to get some of this junk down the chute today?’

‘Does that “we” mean you’re about to break the seal on a new box of paper-clips?’

Mann smiled.

I put the case beside me on the sofa and began to sort it into three piles: urgent, very urgent and phone.

Mann leaned over the sofa back. He lifted a corner of the neatly stacked documents, each one bearing a coloured marking slip that explained to me what I was signing. Mann sucked his teeth. ‘Those typewriter commandos downstairs don’t know a microdot from a Playboy centrefold but give them a chance to bury you in paperwork and – goddamn, what an avalanche!’ He let the paperwork slip out of his hands with enough noise to illustrate this theory.

I moved the trayful of papers before Mann decided to repeat his demonstration; already the slips and paper-clips were falling apart.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ Mann said. ‘I’ve got to catch an airplane. Anybody wants me tell them to try the Diplomat Hotel, Miami, Florida.’

‘Don’t use your right name,’ I said.

‘I won’t even be there, bird-brain. That’s just being set up.’

I reached for the first pile of paperwork.

‘Before I go,’ Mann said still standing in the doorway watching me, ‘Bessie says will you spend Christmas with us.’

‘Great,’ I said without looking up from my desk work.

‘I’d better warn you that Bessie is asking that girl Red Bancroft along … Bessie is a matchmaker …’

‘You’re checking out a place to hide Bekuv, aren’t you?’ I said.

Mann bared his teeth in the sort of fierce grimace that he believes is a warm and generous smile.

I worked on until about noon and then one of the I-Doc people looked in. ‘Where’s Major Mann?’

‘Out.’ I continued to go through the documents.

‘Where did he go?’

‘No idea,’ I said without looking up.

‘You must know.’

‘Two little guys in white coats came in and dragged him out with his feet kicking.’

‘There’s a phone call,’ said the man from downstairs. ‘Someone asking for you.’ He looked round the room to be sure I wasn’t hiding Mann anywhere. ‘I’ll tell the switchboard to put it through.’

‘There’s a caller named Gerry Hart coming through on the Wall Street line,’ the operator told me. ‘Do you want us to patch it through to here, and connect you?’

‘I’ll take it,’ I said. If it had taken Hart only twenty-four hours to winkle-out the phone number of the merchant bank in Wall Street that I was using as my prime cover, how long would it take to prise open the rest of it? I pushed the police documentation to one side. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ suggested Hart. His voice had the sort of warm resonance contrived by men who spend all day speaking on the telephone.

‘Why?’