Spy Line

'The Duchess?'

'The Englishwoman. The woman you said was a busybody.'

Werner looked at me and grinned selfconsciously. 'What did she want?'

'The Duchess likes it here,' I interjected. 'She hopes it's becoming a sort of club for the people she knows.'

Werner's face tightened. Ingrid was watching him as I spoke but her face showed no emotion, not even reflecting that of Werner. Werner looked at me and said, 'Ingrid thinks there is more to it than that.'

'What sort of more?'

'I told her about Frank,' said Werner as if that would explain everything. When I didn't react he added, 'Frank wants to use this place. It's obvious.'

'It's not obvious to me, Werner,' I said. 'Use it how?'

Werner poured himself more soda water and added no more than a drop of Underberg which only just coloured it. He took a sip of it and said, 'I think Frank has ordered his people to come here. They'll return to the office and report to him every word they hear and everything they see. It will all go on file.' This mild paranoia – complete with his rather endearing picture of Frank's rigorous and capable administration – provided a perfect example of Werner's ingrained Germanic thinking. In fact, Frank was typically English. Idle and congenial, Frank was an easygoing time-server who'd muster neither the energy nor the inclination to organize such a venture.

Werner on the other hand was provincial and narrow-minded in the way that Germans are prey to being. These differing attitudes were fundamental to their enmity, but I would never tell either of them what I thought. Werner would have been horrified: he always thought of himself as a cosmopolitan liberal. But of course all wealthy well-travelled bigots make that claim.

'As long as they pay cash for their drinks,' I said.

This flippancy did not please Werner. 'I don't mind Frank's people coming here but I don't want them to monopolize the place and try to turn it into some awful sort of English pub. And anyway, Bernie,' he added in a very quiet measured voice, as if talking to a small child, 'if you're here, they'll spy on you.'

Any difficulty I might have had in answering Werner was removed by Ingrid. I had a feeling she was not listening to us very carefully. Perhaps she was already familiar with Werner's suspicions about the Departmental personnel transmogrifying his bar. During a lapse in the conversation she said, There is something else. I heard them talking about Bernard. And about his wife.'

My wife! My wife! Now she had all my attention, and I wanted to hear all about it. She said that the Duchess had come into the bar in the early evening. She'd ordered a gin and tonic and read the Daily Express. Werner had recently started to provide the hotel with French and English, as well as German, daily papers, impaling them upon wooden Zeitunghälter and hanging them alongside the coat rack. Two other Department people – a man and a woman – came in soon afterwards and invited the Duchess to join them.

I recognized Ingrid's description of the second woman of this trio. The voice, the Burberry scarf, the horseshoe-shaped diamond brooch. It was Pinky: there was only one Pinky, and thank God for that. Her daddy owned race horses, mumsie hunted foxes, and her brother's nightclub adventures were regularly chronicled in the gossip columns. I remembered her when she'd come to work in the Department. She was newly divorced from 'Bang-bang' Canon, a captain in the Horse Guards who went into insurance. She said she couldn't stand the sight of him in mufti but that might have been her sense of humour. Pinky started using her maiden name again when Bang-bang went to prison for fraud.

From across the other side of the bar Ingrid had heard Pinky say in her shrill Home-Counties voice, 'When a man loses his wife it looks like carelessness, darling.' And laughing loudly and calling for another drink.

'What about the telephone?' the man asked. Long fair wavy hair parted high, almost centre. Check-patterned suit and mustard-coloured shirt. Larry Bower, taking Pinky in for a drink on their way back from a hard day's work at the safe house in Charlottenburg.

Pinky said, 'His phones were tapped from the first moment she walked out. That's the drill. The transcripts go to Frank.'

'Eventually they'll fire him,' said Bower.

Pinky said, 'You know how the Department works, darling: they have to make sure about him. It will take time. They'll get rid of him when it suits them.'

'I never met her,' said Bower. 'What sort of woman was she?'

The Duchess answered the question, 'Very beautiful. But I could never understand why she married him. Every man who clapped eyes on her wanted her, she has a sort of magic I suppose. Some women are lucky like that.'

'I never got to know her,' said Pinky. 'No one did. She wasn't a woman's woman, if you know what I mean.'

'I think she spent a lot of money on clothes,' said the Duchess. 'But in all fairness I have to say that she could wear an old sweater and jeans and make herself look like…'

'A film star?' supplied Bower.

'No,' said Pinky. 'Never like a film star. She wasn't brainless, darling! Men can't abide the notion that beautiful women can be brainy. But they can.'

'Yes, but what sort of woman was she really?' said Bower. 'Everyone's talking about her but no one seems to really know her.'

'An absolute cow!' answered Pinky.

'Sometimes an absolute cow can be a good wife,' said the Duchess.

'Oh no!' said Pinky. 'She made his life a misery. Everyone knew that.'

'He seems to be managing without her,' said Bower.

'He's something of a play-actor,' said the Duchess sadly. 'He always has been.'

'He can put down a few,' said Bower.

'I've never seen him drunk,' said the Duchess.

'Have you not, darling? My goodness yes but he can hold it. Let's face it, he was never really one of us, was he?' said Pinky.

'He hasn't got a bean, you know,' said the Duchess.

'But there were no papers missing?' said Bower.

Pinky said, 'Not as far as anyone can see… But who knows what was copied?'

'She phoned Frank, you say?' the Duchess asked.

'Early this morning, at his home,' said Pinky, who seemed to know everything. 'I don't know how she had that number. It's changed regularly.'

'You don't think that she… and Frank…' said Bower.

'Having it off with Frank?' Pinky's laugh ended in a giggle. 'Good old Frank! Not my type, darling, but it's astounding how the ladies zero in on the poor old thing.' Then in a more serious voice, 'No, I don't think there could be anything like that.'

'Not in the dim and distant past?' said Bower.

'No, not even in the dim and distant past.' This time the Duchess answered, firmly closing that door.

'So did Frank tell him?' said Bower.

'Tell hubbie?' Pinky said. 'About the phone call… No. And no one knows what she said. We just know that Frank cancelled all his appointments and ordered his car brought round the front… driving himself. No one knows where he went. Of course Frank's sudden departure may have nothing to do with it. You know what Frank is like. He might have just decided to spend the day with his army cronies or play golf or something.'

'I just hope,' said the Duchess, 'that it's not all going to start all over again.'

'Drinky for Pinky, darling,' said Pinky to Bower.

Bower said, 'All what start all over again?'

'You'll soon know,' said the Duchess. 'Life becomes hell for everyone once one of these security purges begin. Internal Security arrive and it's questions, questions, questions.'

'Drinky for Pinky, darling. Drinky for Pinky.'

'The same again three times,' Bower called across the bar to Ingrid. Then five cheerful Australians came in. They were on some government-financed jaunt; buying ten thousand hospital beds or something of that sort. They'd spent all day at a huge residential complex where internationally renowned architects had competed to produce the world's ugliest apartment blocks. The Aussies needed a drink and, pleased to hear English spoken after a long day, joined the Duchess and her friends for a boozy evening. The conversation turned to lighter matters, such as why the Germans invaded Poland.