World War 2 Thriller Collection Read online

  LEN DEIGHTON

  The Spy Quartet

  Copyright

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London, SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  An Expensive Place to Die first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1967

  Spy Story first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1974

  Yesterday’s Spy first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1975

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1976

  An Expensive Place to Die copyright © Len Deighton 1967

  Spy Story copyright © Len Deighton 1974

  Yesterday’s Spy copyright © Len Deighton 1975

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy copyright © Len Deighton 1976

  Introductions copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2012

  Cover designer’s notes © Arnold Schwartzman 2012

  Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2012

  E-bundle cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

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

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American 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.

  Source ISBN: 9780007458349, 9780007458363, 9780007458370, 9780007458356

  Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007563401

  Version: 2014-12-02

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Expensive Place to Die

  Spy Story

  Yesterday’s Spy

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

  About the Author

  By Len Deighton

  About the Publisher

  LEN DEIGHTON

  An Expensive Place to Die

  Do not disturb the President of the Republic

  except in the case of world war.

  Instructions for night duty officers

  at the Élysée Palace

  You should never beat a woman,

  not even with a flower.

  The Prophet Mohammed

  Dying in Paris is a terribly expensive

  business for a foreigner.

  Oscar Wilde

  The poem ‘May’ quoted here is from Twentieth Century Chinese Poetry, translated by Kai-yu Hsu (copyright © Kai-yu Hsu 1963) and reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Co. Inc., New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Cover designer’s note

  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

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Footnotes

  Cover designer’s note

  On a visit to Paris to produce a book on that charming city’s Art Deco architecture, my first stop was to locate the Folies Bergère, the legendary music hall where music would become just one of the many entertainments on offer to patrons. It was the author’s suggestion that I introduce an image that evoked ‘Gay Paree’. I believed that this image would fit the bill perfectly, and indeed it does. The dancing figure of the woman very much symbolizes one of the femmes fatales plying their trade so artfully for Monsieur Datt, and the multitude of swirling patterns behind her lead the eye on many a confusing journey – just like those endured by our intrepid hero.

  I was also inspired by the book’s inclusion of a quotation from the poem ‘May’:

  ‘… If she is not a rose, a rose all white,

  Then she must be redder than the red of blood.’

  A rose has come to symbolize many things in the arts, and here the contrast between the virginal and the sinful taint of blood is particularly apposite. The juxtaposition of the blood-stained rose over the Folies facade provided me with the key design element.

  On each front cover of this latest quartet, I have placed a photograph of the eyes of the bespectacled unnamed spy, in this instance overlaid with calibration marks from a hypodermic syringe. Why a syringe? Well, that will become all too apparent as you delve deeper into the seedy world of An Expensive Place to Die.

  A final touch to the front cover was the choice of a typeface that would present an elegant facade beneath which the elements of corruption would appear. The reason for my use of red for the final word is three-fold: it helps to draw attention to the blood on the rose; it creates the tricolour of the French flag; and it offers a cheeky sense of melodrama – humour is always important, especially in the works of this author.

  Readers who have been faithfully building their collection of these reissues will by now have become familiar with my use of a linking motif on the spines of the books. Being the final foursome in the entire series of reissues, and books in which violence is never too far away, I thought it a good idea to ‘go out with a bang’, as it were. This quartet’s spines accordingly display a different handgun, as mentioned in each of the books’ texts. The example here is a 6.35mm Mauser automatic, which was an antique even during the period of this story.

  Another recurring feature in this quartet, to be found within each back cover’s photographic montage, is a pair of ‘our hero’s’ glasses, which look suspiciously like those worn by ‘Harry Palmer’ in The Ipcress File and other outings...

  For this book’s montage, in order to evoke communist China’s involvement in the plot, I included a bust of Mao that I purchased some time ago in Shanghai. Like many of my objets from another time, it has found a new life helping to tell a story that the Chairman no doubt would have frowned upon.

  A souvenir ashtray featuring the Eiffel Tower becomes the receptacle for a lipstick-traced remnant of one of our hero’s Gauloise cigarettes, plus a Parisian Gendarme’s badge. Further pieces of ephemera are a vintage Folies Bergère programme plus a pair of Paris postcards. The top hat from a Monopoly set is a nod to the elite of Parisian society who are caught in Monsieur Datt’s web, and the dic
e and ace of spades card tell us that to enter his world is a gamble, which can lead to death. Lastly, the quarter-inch magnetic tape underneath the top hat is of a recording that I produced of Mick Jagger promoting one of The Rolling Stones albums for Radio Luxembourg!

  Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

  Hollywood 2012

  Introduction

  France beckons to every lonely misfit, and most novelists answer to that description at some time or another. Many authors have responded to France’s call with enthusiasm; notably during those years between the two world wars when the exchange rates favoured those with US dollars, and Prohibition at home made the noble vintages of France irresistible. But most of those writers were prudent. Writing primarily for English-speaking readers they wrote stories about English-speaking people. Most of those stories were vaguely autobiographical ones about the wealthy English and American visitors with whom the writers fraternized. France provided the mountains and the Mediterranean but the French people in the stories were mostly waiters.

  Many of the resulting books were dazzling; some became classics but many of the stories could have taken place in Gloucestershire or Long Island. This was a practical restraint, but writing about France without depicting French people (however inaccurate or untypical the characterizations might be) is like eating a chocolate bar without first removing the wrapper. I am not prudent. I wanted to tell my story with French men and women playing major roles.

  It was this need to bring French people into An Expensive Place to Die that led to my including some chapters in the third person. This gave me a chance to show their thoughts and motivation and an opportunity to have action beyond that of the first person. This was not a planned device, it came naturally to the telling of the story and no one criticized it.

  No doubt every writer has their own method of writing and this is something that writers enjoy talking about. Most important is whether to write after making a careful plan or to simply invent each new chapter as it comes. Many writers have told me that they don’t know what the end of their books will be when they are writing the first page. The argument against this is the uncertainty that comes of consigning the plot to the vagaries of the writer’s day-to-day temperament. My experience is that there comes a stage in the planning when it is best to start writing and leave some room to develop your characters. Whatever method is chosen, some element of your story is likely to assume an importance beyond your plan. In XPD a character named Charles Stein became that sort of element. He wrestled to take control of my story and nearly did so. Looking back on it, the book was much enhanced by him. For An Expensive Place to Die it was Paris that took on an unplanned importance, and this gives the book an atmosphere rather different to all the other books I have written.

  I was a teenager when I first went to Paris. It was not ‘warm and gay’ as the Hammerstein lyric recalled; rather it was ‘old and grey’ as in the lyric that Sinatra was crooning at that time. The war was scarcely ended and I stepped from the train into a dense aroma of Gauloises and garlic. I found myself alone and without contacts standing on the noisy concourse of the Gare du Nord. Packed tight, there were beggars, whores and black-market traders all plying their trades with appropriate subtlety. Heavily burdened infantrymen displayed the silence of the weary while polished and blancoed military police patrols sifted continually through the multitude. My parents had only agreed to this expedition because someone was to meet me and take care of me. That friend was posted away at short notice and I was left to my own devices. Someone put a card into my hand and I plodded along, suitcase in hand, to Place Blanche, a seedy district adjacent to Montmartre. Using the advertisement card, I found a tiny attic room in an old, cheap, threadbare hotel near the Moulin Rouge.

  It was all exactly like the little room in which Jean Gabin fought off the flics in that wonderful old film Le Jour se Lêve. All that night I waited for the ‘daybreak’ as I had waited for Santa Claus to arrive on so many Christmas mornings. When light came through the shabby curtains I looked out of the window at the roofs of Paris. This remains one of the most memorable moments of my long, eventful and happy life. I was a teenager, and entirely unsupervised, with this great foreign city laid at my feet. I could scarcely believe my good fortune. I tramped around the city; stood alone at the tomb of Napoleon and inspected the burned-out German tanks that the French were in no hurry to clear away. The fighting had ended but the smell of war lingered. I walked all the way to the Etoile and then back across town to the Place Bastille, only to be sadly disappointed that the grim old prison was no longer there. The Folies Bergère is just for tourists, the concierge at the hotel told me; the Concert Mayol is far more risqué and the girls far, far more naked. I went to the Concert Mayol. I went to the Louvre, where they also had naked girls, to Notre Dame and to that most spectacular of Paris sights – the Sainte Chapelle. I climbed the steep, slippery, and seemingly unending iron steps to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower, and was spattered with red lead primer paint as I passed workers restoring it to good condition.

  Although I was in civilian clothes, my youth and London accent caused me to be mistaken for a soldier and I capitalized on this by eating in the military facilities such as the Montgomery Club near the Place de la Concorde. In some places I was eyed with suspicion and twice I was detained on suspicion of being an army deserter. I soon made sure I carried my passport everywhere I went. I must have walked many miles during that time in Paris and by saving my money I was able to afford a lunch at the renowned Tour d’Argent, which had resumed its production of the famous roast duck, prepared at the tableside in a massive silver press.

  After that first visit, I returned to Paris many times. For short periods I lived there in varying degrees of comfort. My wife’s parents enjoyed a lovely home there and we relished their hospitality. The idea of writing about this Paris I discovered never went away. I knew several fashion photographers and in the early 1960s I started notes for a book using as a background the Paris collections. I continued my lengthy stay there but I didn’t continue with this project. I also abandoned a story about a symphony orchestra because I didn’t know enough about music and musicians. Finally I met a Paris policeman who wanted to practise his English and I knew I was going to write An Expensive Place to Die.

  Together with my family I have lived in many countries, but I never became one of the dedicated exiles who cluster in the sunshine and snow. Perhaps the France I depict in An Expensive Place to Die is not a land you recognize. Yet this is what France, or more particularly Paris, seemed like back in the sixties when I lived there and wrote this book.

  It was the chance introduction to a detective serving with the police judiciaire that gave me the chance to write about the underside of Paris. This friend served in the brigade mondaine, which is the quaint title the French give to what in London was called the vice squad. My policeman knew everything and everyone. People high and low, people in bars and those in exclusive clubs knew him and so did those who went to sleep on the pavement, hugging smelly ventilation grills for the sake of the warmth. In late evening, hundreds of big trucks brought fresh produce into the old market area, and not all the drivers curled up in their cab with a blanket and a bottle of beer. Around the market whole streets of bars and brothels came to life at midnight and plain-clothes policemen, such as my friend, were an inevitable addition to the cast. Muscular doormen and girls with too much make-up greeted him like an old friend. He showed me the flea markets where stolen goods sometimes came to light. He showed me establishments in the swanky arrondissements that do not feature in any tourist guidebooks. It is ‘down these mean streets’ that a fiction writer can venture protected by the armour of disguise that all storytellers wear. I kept close to his side and kept my mouth shut as we walked his beat. Without his unstinting help and good-natured guidance (and did I say protection?) An Expensive Place to Die would have been a different, and rather more conventional, book.

  It happens like that sometimes. You en
counter a promising source and suddenly a torrent of information comes pouring down all over you. Now the problem becomes knowing where to stop. Research is always more fun than writing and there is always a temptation to go on with it for ever. I enjoy using foreign locations in my stories but feel I should carefully absorb the places I write about; live in them long enough to meet my neighbours, buy from the local shops, sit around in the local cafes and suffer the bus services and the Metro. For some books I went beyond that. My children attended local schools and we almost became natives. Only probing beyond the tourist trails will give a writer the environment in which convincing characters can roam. In An Expensive Place to Die I probed, but the Paris into which I dug was somewhat bleak. Looking back now, perhaps a more generous portion of the glamour of that much-maligned city would have given my story more optimism.

  But there was a mysterious epilogue to An Expensive Place to Die. On 24th April 1967 the New York Times carried a story concerning two Russian nationals; both identified by the US Government as officers of the KGB. At Kennedy International Airport they boarded Air France Flight 702 scheduled to depart for Paris at 7.00pm. Ten minutes before the flight was due to leave a man who identified himself as an FBI agent went to Gate 29, handed an Air France official a package and asked him to give it to one of the Russians. Curious about the last-minute arrival of the package, the chief stewardess, Marguerite Switon, gave it to the pilot, Michel Vachey. By this time he was moving his plane from the gate to the runway for take-off.