Len Deighton - Catch a Falling by Catch a Falling Spy

Author:Catch a Falling Spy [Spy, Catch a Falling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

FROM THE AIR, IT LOOKS LIKE A CLUTTER OFfancy boxes washed up onto a tropical shore. But Miami’s ocean was blue and inviting and its sky cloudless. Regardless of all those jokes about the Bahamas being where Florida’s rich people spend the winter, arrive in Miami straight from an Irish January and you begin to realize that the oranges are not so stupid.

Downtown Miami may be the usual gridiron of office buildings, shopping plazas, City Hall, and War Memorial. Downtown Miami may be like that, if you ever find it among the tower hotels. But the Reid-Kennedys didn’t live in downtown Miami, and they didn’t live in any of the hotel towers, either. They enjoyed a five-acre spread of waterfront, with a Spanish-style eight-bedroom house—and an appropriate number of Spanish-style retainers to keep it polished—a garden filled with tropical flowers, and a place to moor the fifty-foot motor cruiser, and if it was the right sort of conversation they needed, they could summon the light blue Rolls-Royce with the uniformed driver and go to the Yacht Club, which was about one hundred and fifty yards along the waterfront. Mr. Reid-Kennedy was still “on business in Europe,” but Mann decided to spread some alarm and despondency through the household.

“If you are a friend of Henry Hope, we are just delighted to see you,” said his mother. She called her son “Henry Hope.” If he’d come back here to live with them, he would have become Henry Hope Reid-Kennedy, which sounds like a good reason for staying in Paris.

There was soft music playing, and the woman reached behind her to a fluffy pink toy dog, and the music became very quiet. I wondered whether that was a product of the Reid-Kennedy radio company. She smiled at us. She was in her middle forties, but a lot of expensive facials, lotions, massages, and steam baths had been devoted to keeping her thirty-nine. It had almost succeeded. For some people, middle age brought a softening of the features, but her skin was tight rather than flabby, and there were white lines along the bone of her nose and her jaw. Yet there was no mistaking the beauty that she had once been, and her imperious manner suggested that she hadn’t forgotten it, either. She stroked the head of a white poodle. “Yes, if you are friends of Henry Hope, we are just delighted to see you.”

She said it in such a way that we knew that if it turned out that we were not friends of her son, she would arrange for us to be roasted in hell—very slowly. She smiled again as she looked at the heavy woolen suits that Mann and I had chosen for a Christmas in Virginia, and at the shapeless tweed hat that Mann had bought at the Dublin Airport. She was wearing pale pink silk lounging pajamas, with a Dior label twisted to face outward. The poodle’s collar was Gucci.

“You were a major in the American army?” She took a delicate sip at the bright red drink that was in a cocktail glass at her elbow.

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