Faith Read online

  Len Deighton

  Faith

  Contents

  Cover designer’s note

  Introduction

  1

  ‘Don’t miss your plane, Bernard. This whole operation depends upon…

  2

  Magdeburg, where we were headed, is one of the most…

  3

  ‘I have your report,’ said Frank Harrington. ‘I read it…

  4

  ‘You just leave it to me, Mr Samson,’ said the…

  5

  There was a time when Zurich was my back yard.

  6

  ‘So – here is pain?’ I felt the dental probe…

  7

  Fiona loved to go to bed ridiculously early and then…

  8

  Dicky arrived at work only thirty minutes after I did.

  9

  On Tuesday morning, as if to confirm Gloria’s theory –…

  10

  Those grey and stormy days were, like my life, punctuated…

  11

  I’ve often suspected that my father-in-law had sold his soul…

  12

  I ordered a car to collect me from the office…

  13

  ‘Your new hair-do looks nice, Tante Lisl,’ I said, in…

  14

  Whatever trauma may have been troubling the deeper recesses of…

  15

  I don’t know how long it was before I was…

  16

  Had I persisted with my plan to return to the…

  17

  I often thought that Daphne’s life with Dicky must have…

  18

  When we were driving home from the Cruyers’ that Saturday…

  19

  I got to the office a few minutes before eleven.

  20

  Werner went back to Berlin and began making all the…

  21

  ‘Why have you got all this paper in your office?’…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Len Deighton

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cover designer’s note

  As Bernard Samson is now on an assignment in Poland I searched through my collection of photographs for a suitable image that would evoke that part of the world, and Bernard’s involvement with the women in his life.

  I remembered that, while on location for one of my documentaries in Poland, I had come across a window with a lace curtain adorned with a pair of ladies; the image of this would now provide a subtle visual analogy for the Iron Curtain.

  I discovered that by placing a larger than life photograph of Samson in the window it created a rather surreal effect. Rather like Kong peering in at an unsuspecting Fay Wray, Bernard looms behind the curtain, an unwilling outsider ostracized from domestic comfort.

  For a further reference to the two women in Bernard’s life, the back cover displays a heart-shaped traditional Polish Wycinanki, an intricate design carefully cut from folded paper. Here, the heart is torn in two, separated by the sword of a KGB badge. You will note that the Western half features a very elegant gold wedding ring.

  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

  Introduction

  ‘Is this going to go into a book, Len?’ my friend asked. He was a close and trusted friend and also an important functionary of the communist government. But he was armed with a healthy scepticism for all authority and this provided a bond and, at times, much merriment. I can’t remember which year it was; sometime in the mid-nineteen sixties probably. We were sitting on a bench in what had once been the site of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  ‘Because when I read your books I suddenly come across a description of something we have seen or done together and it brings it all back to me.’

  To write these introductions I have been reading my books and this has revived many memories. Some memories have been happy ones but some are painful and now and again I have had to put the book aside for a moment or two. It is only now, with this re-reading, that I see how much of what I wrote was based on people, facts and experiences. I have often claimed that my books were almost entirely created from my imagination but now I see that this was something of a delusion. Now, as I read and recall events half-forgotten, brave people and strange places come crowding into my memory. Many of these people and places no longer exist. I can’t offer you the past world but here is a depiction of it; here are my impressions of that world as I recorded it.

  I had asked my friend to take me to the Sachsenhausen site, which was in the ‘Zone’ thirty miles from Berlin and outside the limits of its Soviet Sector. We went in his ancient Wartburg car with its noisy two-stroke engine that left a trail of smoke and envy. For even this contraption represented luxury to the average citizen in the East. Since neither of us had permission to enter the Zone we enjoyed the childish thrill of breaking the law. Sachsenhausen had been the Concentration Camp nearest to Berlin, and for that reason it was haunted by the ghosts of Hitler’s specially selected victims. Eminent German generals had been locked up here before being tortured and executed for participation in the ‘July 20th’ attempt to overthrow the Führer. Some notable British agents passed through these bloodstained huts including Best and Stevens, who were senior SIS agents and whose capture and interrogation crippled the British Secret Intelligence Service for the whole war. Peter Churchill, an agent of the British SOE, was brought here. Martin Niemoller was imprisoned here too, so was Josef Stalin’s son and Bismarck’s grandson. Paul Reynaud, the PM of France, the prominent former Reichstag member Fritz Thyssen, Kurt Schuschnigg the Austrian chancellor and countless other anti-Nazis were locked away here. So were the Prisoners of War who escaped from Colditz, German Trade Union leaders, Jews and anyone who stepped out of line.

  The camp had been set up in 1933 by Hitler’s brown-shirted hooligans, the Sturmabteilung, but the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ had seen fortunes reversed; the SA leaders were murdered by Himmler’s SS ‘Death’s Head’ units, which took control of the camps and of much else. It was while under SS control that the camp installed a forgery unit for Operation Bernhard, for which imprisoned printing and engraving experts were sought from camps far and wide. These prisoners forged documents of many kinds and produced counterfeit currency – notably British five-pound notes – that even the Swiss bankers could not distinguish from the authentic ones. But more horribly, this camp was notorious for the systematic murder by gassing of many thousands of innocent Jews. My friend, in an official capacity, had interrogated one of the camp’s Nazi commanders during his postwar captivity, and recalled the chilling way in which he had spoken of the killings without remorse or regret.

  After the war, the Sachsenhausen camp was used by the Russians. Called ‘Special Camp No. 1’, they imprisoned here anyone they considered to be enemies of the Soviet occupation authorities or anyone who opposed the communist system of totalitarian government. After the Wall fell, and the Russians departed, excavations revealed more than 12,000 bodies of people who died during the period of Soviet control.

  In fact, I never did use my visit to the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg camp complex in my books but it was another lesson in my attempt to understand Germany and the Germans. German history has always obsessed me and in my writ
ing a well-researched historical background provides a necessary dimension to the Berlin where Bernard Samson has lived since childhood. Although my asides about German history are subordinate to the plot and to the characterizations, they are researched with care and attention. And the story is not confined to Berlin. Faith quickly moves into Magdeburg, which the German secret police and their Russian colleagues made the centre of their operations. My brief aside about Adolf Hitler’s mortal remains being held there was based upon reliable evidence. Despite what is widely written, Hitler’s body was not completely consumed by flame in a shallow trench outside the Berlin bunker. The amount of gasoline used could not ignite a fresh corpse, so much of which is water. When the Soviet Russian Army arrived in Berlin, the army’s secret police seized what remained of Hitler’s body as a macabre trophy, and have held on to it ever since. After Magdeburg this collection of dried flesh and scorched bone was taken to Moscow where, as far as my research can discover, it remains, kept in a glass-sided cabinet like the revered body fragments of medieval saints.

  Discovering facts or a sequence of events that others have missed is the great joy of research. Some such discoveries can be confirmed given a little digging, some cross-references and some whispered confidences. Even such well-turned over soil as the Battle of Britain revealed to me some remarkable revelations and in Fighter became a cause of argument and anger. Now, however, the ‘surprises’ in my history books have been accepted as facts. But some research brings surprises more difficult to confirm. Even when I am quite sure about the truth of them I have abstained from declaring them as history. But ‘fiction’ brings an opportunity to say things that are difficult to prove. That’s how it stands with the revelations about the Russian Army’s electronics and hardware being stolen and shipped from Poland in exchange for CIA money. There were historical finds, too. I discovered that, during the Nazi regime, all extermination camps were situated just outside the German border so that the insurance companies could avoid payment to the relatives of people murdered in the camps, but I failed to find written evidence. Other than the maps that showed how deliberately systematic the siting of the camps was, proof was beyond me. My recourse was to use that undoubtedly true discovery in Winter together with other lesser-known facts of history.

  I work hard to make each book of the Samson series complete, and I contrive a story that does not depend on knowledge of the other books. The story of Faith continues directly from Sinker, which is devoted mainly to the events seen through the eyes of Bernard’s wife, Fiona. Fiona’s secret assignment was to establish financial links between London and the Lutheran Church in the German Democratic Republic, i.e. communist Germany. It was an important task and a notable success. Of the 20 million people living in communist East Germany about ninety per cent remained members of the Christian Church. As Bret remarks, they provided a ‘powerful cohesive force’ that would eventually break down the Wall.

  But the plot, and the strategy of the British intelligence service, is not the most important thread in the series. The characters were at the heart of my labours. The social exchanges of Faith demonstrate Bernard’s painful dilemma when Fiona confronts Gloria, and the love affair which Bernard stumbles into when he believes that he will never see his wife again. The reactions of both women, and such events as Dicky Cruyer’s dinner party which both women attend, is vital to the development of the plot and the interaction between all the major characters.

  Writing ten books about the same small group of people is a strange and demanding task. I am a slow worker and I don’t take regular vacations or set work aside for prolonged periods. Ten books meant about fifteen years during which these people, their hopes and fears and loves and betrayals were constantly whirling around in my brain. They disturbed my sleep and invaded my dreams in a way I did not always enjoy. Because the story line was such a long one, the characters became well-defined and were not easily bent to the needs of the plot. Unlike the content of my other books, Bernard Samson and his circle became imprinted in my mind and remain there today. I confess to you that I find this unremitting concern for these fictional people disturbing. That long period of concentration seemed to be a brain-washing. Do other writers suffer the same problems? I don’t know; not many writers produce ten books about the same people so it is not easy to find out.

  Len Deighton, 2011

  1

  ‘Don’t miss your plane, Bernard. This whole operation depends upon the timing.’ Bret Rensselaer peered around to spot a departures indicator; but this was Los Angeles airport and there were none in sight. They would spoil the architect’s concept.

  ‘It’s okay, Bret,’ I said. He would never have survived five minutes as a field agent. Even when he was my boss, driving a desk at London Central, he’d been like this: repeating the instructions, wetting his lips, dancing from one foot to the other and furrowing his brow as if goading his memory.

  ‘Just because Comrade Gorbachev is kissing Mrs Thatcher and spreading that glasnost schmaltz in Moscow, it doesn’t mean those East German bastards are buying any of it. Everything we hear says the same thing: they are more stubborn and vindictive than ever.’

  ‘It will be just like home,’ I said.

  Bret sighed. ‘Try and see it from London’s point of view,’ he said with exaggerated patience. ‘Your task was to bring Fiona across the wire as quickly and quietly as possible. But you fixed it so your farewell performance out on that Autobahn was like the last act of Hamlet. You shoot two bystanders, and your own sister-in-law gets killed in the crossfire.’ He glanced at my wife Fiona, who was still recovering from seeing her sister Tessa killed. ‘Don’t expect London Central to be waiting for you with a gold medal, Bernard.’

  He’d bent the facts but what was the use of arguing? He was in one of his bellicose moods, and I knew them well. Bret Rensselaer was a slim American who’d aged like a rare wine: growing thinner, more elegant, more subtle and more complex with every year that passed. He looked at me as if expecting some hot-tempered reaction to his words. Getting none, he looked at my wife. She was older too, but no less serene and beautiful. With that face, her wide cheekbones, flawless complexion and luminous eyes, she held me in thrall as she always had done. You might have thought that she was completely recovered from her ordeal in Germany. She was gazing at me with love and devotion and there was no sign she’d heard Bret.

  Sending me to do this job in Magdeburg was not Bret’s idea. I’d caught sight of the signal he sent to London Central telling them that I was no longer suited to field work, particularly in East Germany. He’d asked them to chain me to a desk until pension time rolled round. It sounded considerate, but I wasn’t pleased. I needed to do something that would put me back in Operations; that was my only chance of being promoted and getting a senior staff position in London. Unless my position improved I would wind up with a premature retirement and a pension that wouldn’t pay for a cardboard box to live in.

  I nodded. Bret always observed the niceties of hospitality. He had driven us to Los Angeles airport through a winter rainstorm to say goodbye. They could watch me climb on to the plane bound for Berlin, and my assignment. Then he would put Fiona on the direct flight to London. The Wall was still there and people were getting killed while climbing over it. Now Bret was just repeating all the things he’d told me a thousand times before, the way people do when they are saying goodbye at airports.

  ‘Keep the faith,’ said Bret, and in response to my blank look he added: ‘I’m not talking about timetables or statistics or training manuals. Faith. It’s not in here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘It’s in here.’ Gently he thumped his heart with a flattened palm so that the signet ring glittered on his beautifully manicured hand, and a gold watch peeped out from behind a starched linen cuff.

  ‘Yes, I see. Not a headache; more like indigestion,’ I said. Fiona watched us and smiled.

  ‘They are calling the flight,’ said Bret.

  ‘Take care, darling,’ she said. I took Fio
na in my arms and we kissed decorously, but then I felt a sudden pain as she bit my lip. I gave a little yelp and stepped back from her. She smiled again. Bret looked anxiously from me to Fiona and then back at me again, trying to decide whether he should smile or say something. I rubbed my lip. Bret concluded that perhaps it was none of his business after all, and from his raincoat pocket he brought a shiny red paper bag and gave it to me. It was secured with matching ribbon tied in a fancy gift-wrap bow. The package was slightly limp; like a paperback book.

  ‘Read that,’ said Bret, picking up my carry-on bag and shepherding me towards the gate where the other passengers were standing in line. It seemed as if it would be a full load today; there were women with crying babies and long-haired kids with earrings, well-used backpacks and the sort of embroidered jackets that you can buy in Nepal. Fiona followed, observing the people crowding round us with that detached amusement with which she cruised through life. With one phone call Bret could have arranged for us to use any of the VIP lounges on the airport, but the Department’s guidelines said that agents travelling on duty kept to a low profile, and so that’s what Bret did. That’s why he’d left his driver behind at the house and taken the wheel of the Accord. Like other Americans before him, he had exaggerated respect for what the people in London thought was the right way to do things. We reached the gate. I couldn’t go through until he handed over my carry-on bag.

  ‘Maybe all this hurry-hurry from London will work out for the best, Bernard. Your few days chasing around East Germany will give Fiona a chance to get your London apartment ready. She wants to do that for you. She wants to settle down and start all over again.’ He looked at her and waited until she nodded agreement.

  Only Bret would have the chutzpah to explain my wife to me while she was standing beside him. ‘Yes, Bret,’ I said. There was no sense in telling him he was out of line. Another few minutes and I’d be rid of him for ever.