Len Deighton - Spy 09 - Charity by Charity

Author:Charity [Charity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

She lit the cigarette with an elegant flourish and, with the cigarette in her mouth, used both hands to close her handbag. She threw her head back and half-closed her eyes as the smoke crawled up her face. Then she removed the cigarette and said: ‘Would it be possible to have a glass of champagne?’

She wrinkled her nose in a way that Jim Prettymah once told me was cute.

On the TV screen over the bar two white-coated doctors argued in silence.

‘What about the house wine?’ I said. ‘Hungarian, but not bad. They lock up the best stuff in the chilling cabinet when the barman is off duty.’

I went behind the bar, helped myself to an opened bottle of wine, and returned with a glass for each of us. I poured it carefully, knowing that she was studying me to decide how much older I was looking. ‘Gesundheit!’ she said, and smiled before sipping her wine. Then, as if in reaction to the taste of it, she hunched her shoulders. ‘When does it get lively?’ she asked, looking around at the empty bar. The Hennig Hotel had seen some notably boisterous days and nights, but overall it was a place frequented by less-successful business travellers, tourists who didn’t mind going along the hall to find the bathroom, and mysterious men and women who, for reasons of their own, preferred the obscurity such unfashionable accommodation affords. Most abstemious of all there were the elderly long-term residents who eked out their fixed incomes by rationing their eating and drinking. All in all such clientele were not lively in the way that Cindy sought.

‘It varies a lot,’ I said, sinking down on the sofa next to her.

‘It would have to vary quite a lot before getting rowdy,’ said Cindy, and laughed, giving a hint of the sort of schoolgirl shrieks that I remembered from the old days.

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘Why are you always such a bastard?’ she said, without much change of demeanour. She leaned forward, slipped off her shoes and massaged her feet with delicate movements of her long fingers. Through the toe of her stocking I could see that her nails were painted gold.

‘Me?’ I said.

‘Let me see my husband,’ she demanded fiercely. ‘How can you be such a brute?’

‘Jim, you mean? Jim, your ex-husband?’

‘You came to Berlin with him. You brought him here. I know. Don’t deny it.’

I would have denied even that, but that would have brought more difficult questions, and it would have been bad security to tell her how I’d been hauled off the Moscow Express and locked up by the Polish secret police.

‘I was on the same train that he was on,’ I admitted. ‘But that was just a coincidence.’

‘Mother of God: don’t lie to old liars, Bernard.’ She touched her foot again. Far above us in the gloom, a muscular doctor went running athletically across a field and climbed into a helicopter with a red cross painted on it. The pilot was female and blonde and young.

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