Billion-Dollar Brain

I enjoyed depicting characters, places and situations through the eyes, mind and prejudices of the main character. And I enjoyed undermining him by means of authorial asides, nudges and winks to the reader. He was an overdrawn egoist, I suppose. He jumped to conclusions, derided his fellow workers, ridiculed his superiors, exaggerated his successes and edited his failures and demanded far too much of his long-suffering friends. Despite his self-restraint he sometimes lost his temper; or almost lost it. Yet he gave his loyalty as readily as he demanded it, and he was fundamentally honest and adequately truthful. Was it a self portrait? No. A wishful one perhaps? Maybe it was.

When Conan Doyle created his Sherlock Holmes, he provided him with a Watson. I suppose this device was an old one, most story-telling devices are. But Doyle established the advantage of having a serious figure who, by means of dialogue, kept the plot on the rails and kept the reader informed. In previous books Dawlish, the boss, had been an austere icon of English middle-class probity. I had no Dawlish available for these world-wide wanderings. Harvey Newbegin, a minor character from Funeral in Berlin, my previous book, provides the second half of the double act for explanatory purposes. But few readers will hold hands with Harvey in the way that they would with Doyle’s Watson or my Dawlish. So who was there to like? The reader had only the hero. But as it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Despite his many faults the readers liked the hero, who after the films was called Harry Palmer. And Michael Caine’s brilliant depiction of him did a great deal to effect that.

Len Deighton, 2009

Billion-Dollar Brain (#ulink_6e5e0c2c-a4c3-5aad-b3bc-a7567b830d81)

SECTION 1 London and Helsinki (#ulink_3e4c2e1b-633f-5dbd-9cb9-f8678cacbada)

See-saw, Margery Daw,

Jacky shall have a new master.

NURSERY RHYME

1 (#ulink_3a3b03b7-ffb1-5b0e-a31d-d46f7a00c153)

It was the morning of my hundredth birthday. I shaved the final mirror-disc of old tired face under the merciless glare of the bathroom lighting. It was all very well telling oneself that Humphrey Bogart had that sort of face; but he also had a hairpiece, half a million dollars a year and a stand-in for the rough bits. I dabbed a soda-stick at the razor nicks. In the magnifying mirror it looked like a white rocket landing on the uncharted side of the moon.

Outside was February and the first snow of the year. At first it was the sort of snow that a sharp PR man would make available to journalists. It sparkled and floated. It was soft yet crisp, like some new, sugar-coated breakfast cereal. Girls wore it in their hair and the Telegraph ran a picture of a statue wearing some. It was hard to reconcile this benign snow with the stuff that caused paranoia among British Railways officials. That Monday morning it was building up in crunchy wedges under the heels of shoes and falling in dry white pyramids along the front hall of the Charlotte Street office where I worked. I said ‘Good morning’ to Alice, and she said, ‘Don’t tread it in’ to me, which summed up our relationship nicely.

The Charlotte Street building was an ancient creaking slum. The wallpaper had great boils full of loose plaster and there were small metal patches in the floor where the boards were too rotten to repair. On the first-floor landing was a painted sign that said ‘Acme Films. Cutting Rooms’, and under that a drawing of a globe that made Africa too thin. From behind the doors came the noise of a moviola and a strong smell of film cement. The next landing was painted with fresh green paint. On one door a dog-eared piece of headed notepaper said ‘B Isaacs Theatrical Tailor’, which at one time I had considered very funny. Behind me I heard Alice puffing up the stairs with a catering-size tin of Nescafé. Someone in the dispatch department put a brass-band record on the gramophone. Dawlish, my boss, was always complaining about that gramophone, but even Alice couldn’t really control the dispatch department.

My secretary said, ‘Good morning.’ Jean was a tall girl in her middle twenties. Her face was as calm as Nembutal and with her high cheekbones and tightly drawn-back hair she was beautiful without working at it. There were times when I thought that I was in love with Jean and there were times when I thought that she was in love with me, but somehow these times never coincided.

‘Good party?’ I asked.

‘You seemed to enjoy it. When I left you were drinking a pint of bitter while standing on your head.’

‘You do exaggerate. Why did you go home alone?’

‘I have two hungry cats to support. Two thirty is definitely my bedtime.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Don’t be.’

‘Truly.’

‘Going with you to a party is to be there alone. You plant me down, go around chatting with everyone, then wonder why I haven’t met them all.’

‘Tonight,’ I said, ‘we’ll go to some quiet place for dinner. Just us.’

‘I’m taking no chances. Tonight I’m cooking you a birthday feast at the flat. I’ll give you all your favourite things.’

‘You will?’

‘To eat.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

‘You’d better be.’ She gave me a perfunctory kiss – ‘Happy birthday’ – and leaned across and put a glass of water and two Alka Seltzer tablets on my blotter.

‘Why not put the tablets into the water?’ I asked.

‘I wasn’t sure if you could bear the noise.’

She unlocked my trays and began to work steadily through the great pile of paper-work. By midday we hadn’t made much impression upon it. I said, ‘We aren’t even keeping up with the incoming.’

‘We can start a “pending” tray.’

‘Don’t be so female,’ I said. ‘All that does is call some of it another name. Why can’t you go through it and handle some of it without me?’

‘I already did.’

‘Then sort out the “information onlys”, mark them for return to us and pass them on. That would give us a breathing space.’

‘Now who’s kidding himself?’

‘Can you think of something better?’

‘Yes. I think we should get a written directive from Organization to be sure we’re handling only files that we should handle. There may be things in this tray that are nothing to do with us.’

‘There are times, my love, when I think none of it is anything to do with us.’

Jean stared at me in an expressionless way that might have indicated disapproval. Maybe she was thinking about her hair.

‘Birthday lunch at the Trat,’ I said.

‘But I look awful.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I must do my hair. Give me five minutes.’

‘I’ll give you six,’ I said. She had been thinking about her hair.

We lunched at the Trattoria Terrazza: Tagliatelle alla carbonara, Osso buco, coffee. Pol Roger throughout. Mario complimented me on having a birthday and kissed Jean to celebrate it. He snapped his fingers and up came Strega. I snapped my fingers and up came more Pol Roger. We sat there, drinking champagne with Strega chasers, talking, snapping fingers and discovering ultimate truth and our own infinite wisdom. We got back to the office at three forty-five and I realized for the first time how dangerous that loose lino on the stairs can be.

As I entered my office the intercom was buzzing like a trapped bluebottle. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Right away,’ said Dawlish, my boss.

‘Right away, sir,’ I said, slowly and carefully.

Dawlish had the only room in the building with two windows. It was a comfortable room, although overcrowded with pieces of not very valuable antique furniture. There was a smell of wet overcoats. Dawlish was a meticulous man who looked like an Edwardian coroner. His hair was grey moving towards white and his hands long and thin. When he read he moved his fingertips across the page as though getting a finer understanding from the sense of touch. He looked up from his desk.

‘Was that you falling down the stairs?’