The Harry Palmer Quartet

The little major gave me a millionth of a microsecond smile and said, ‘Yes – sir, we had to select a jumbo size atoll for this baby. We’re not commuting between here and the shot island every day for the ride. OK?’ I said it was OK, by me.

Next, Battersby stood up and the little major collected his notes together, lit up a two-bit cigar and sat down while a provost lieutenant came in with a little compressed air machine and sprayed water over the blackboard before giving it a thorough cleaning. Other officers told of detection methods used to judge the size and positions of explosions, and how they intended to jam the Russian detection devices like the radar that detects changes in the electric charges in the ionosphere, and the recording barometers that record air and sound waves and produce microbarographs, and the radio signals that are picked up from the release of radio energy at the time of the explosion. The standard and most reliable detection system of analysing fallout residue to find the substances from which the bomb had been constructed was ruled out in this case because it was to be a ‘clean’ bomb.

Battersby told us the structure of the security arrangements, the echelon of command, the dates the firing was likely to take place, and showed us some beautiful diagrams. Then the meeting broke up into sub-meetings. I was to go off with Skip Henderson and a Lt Dolobowski and Jean, while Dalby went into secret session with Battersby’s assistant. Skip said that we may as well go across to his quarters where the fans worked properly and there was a bottle of Scotch. A few of the eager beavers down the other end of the table were destroying notes they had made, by burning them with Messrs Pestpruf’s matches.

Skip had a comfortable little den in the section of camp that came nearest to the sea. A tin cupboard held his uniforms, and an old air-conditioning unit sat astride the window-sill beating the air cold. On the army table were a few books; German grammar; Trial by Ordeal, by Caryl Chessman; two paperback westerns, Furnace Installation – a Guide, and A Century of Ribald Stories. On the window-sill was a bottle of Scotch, gin, some assorted mixes, a glass containing a dozen sharpened pencils, and an electric razor.

From the window I could see a mile or so up the beach one way, and nearly half a mile the other. In both directions the beach was still encrusted with debris, and a flimsy jetty limped painfully into the water. The sun was a dark red fireball, just like the one we were trying to create on tower island a few miles north.

Skip poured us all a generous shot of Black Label, and even remembered to leave the ice out of mine.

‘So that’s the way it is,’ he said. ‘You and this young lady here decide to catch a little sunshine at John Government’s expense?’ He waited for me to speak.

I spoke. ‘It’s just that I have so many unsolved crimes on my hands that I have become the unsolved crime expert – anyone with an unsolved crime on their hands, they send for me.’

‘And you solve it?’

‘No, only file it.’

Skip poured me another drink, looked at the dark-eyed little lieutenant, and said, ‘I hope you’ve got a large family economy size file with you this trip.’ He sat down on the bed and unlocked his brief-case. I noticed the steel liner inside it. ‘No one can tell you the whole picture because we haven’t put it together yet. But we are in a spot; the stuff we are getting back from EW 192 is verbatim stuff we are putting in our files. Verbatim. No sooner is a discovery made in our labs than it is broadcast to the other side of the world.’

The CIA numbers its rooms with a prefix telling which wing it’s situated in. Room 192 in the East Wing is really a large suite of rooms and its job is relaying information from the heart of foreign governments. It deals only with agents getting stuff from sacrosanct crevices available to highest-level foreign officials. It would certainly be the best possible way of checking the US’s loss of its own information.

‘It’s from labs? It’s strictly scientific information then?’

Skip pinched his nostrils. ‘Seems to be at present.’

Jean had made herself comfortable in the nonarmy-style wicker chair. She had that quiet, composed, rather stupid look that I had noticed before. It meant she was committing the bulk of the conversation to memory. She came back slowly to life now.

‘You said “at present”. I take it the volume of this stuff is increasing. How fast?’

‘It’s increasing, and fast enough for the whole department to be very worried – can I leave it at that?’ It was a rhetorical question.

Jean asked, ‘When did you first suspect there was a multiple leak? It is a multiple?’

‘A multiple? I’ll say it is – it’s a multiple multiple. It’s from a range of subjects so vast there isn’t one college, let alone one lab, that could have access to it.’

The dark-eyed Dolobowski went for some more ice from the fridge. Skip produced one of those vast cartons of cigarettes and talked Jean into trying a Lucky. He lit his own and Jean’s, and the dark-eyed one gave us more ice and Scotch all round.

‘The first leaks,’ Skip mused. ‘Yes.’

Dolobowski sat himself back in the chair and it was suddenly clear to me that he had some sort of authority over Skip. That was why he’d said nothing while the dark-eyed one was out of the room. He was here to make sure that Jean and I came away with just the amount of information we were allowed. I didn’t blame anyone for this, after all we hadn’t told the Americans that we were having the same problem. In fact, goodness knows what cock-and-bull story Dalby had cooked up to get along here. Skip was staring defensively into space and blowing gently on the ember of his cigarette.

‘With these international conferences it’s difficult,’ the dark-eyed one had decided to answer. His voice, pitched low, came from far away. ‘Scientists use the same sort of jargon, and anyway, discoveries tend to run parallel. We think that eight months cover the broad front leaks. Before that there may have been the odd thing here and there, but now it covers the whole scientific programme – even non-military.’

You could see that the non-military bit really hurt; that was below the belt.

I said that I wouldn’t mind if it was a small one, but that then I had better go, no really – perhaps another time. We fenced off a few questions about leaks in the UK, to persuade them that we didn’t know what was happening. It wasn’t difficult. Skip saw us off down to the little white-painted fence by means of which a considerate army enabled him to feel he had never left New Jersey. He was going back to the States the next day – I said to give my regards to Barney, and he said he would, and did I have plenty of cigarettes. We shook hands and I remembered Skip Henderson as he used to be; with hair to spare for barbers, and a fund of stories upon which every barman in town would refuel. I remember him carrying his old camera, and stopping every pretty girl he saw, saying he was from Life magazine, and how he hoped they didn’t think him rude for speaking to them without being introduced. The pictures he took with that old camera, ‘And now perhaps a really sophisticated shot in case we make the cover again this week.’ I don’t think Skip knew how the film fitted into it even. Everyone in town knew that Skip was always good for a laugh and a couple of dollars.

‘I’m sorry,’ Skip said, ‘for not having sherry. I mean I know you hate whisky before dinner really.’ Skip kicked the toe of his elegant, hand-tooled Italian pointed non-army brogues in the sand. I knew that Skip knew that I knew who dark-eyes was.

I gave him the two-handed pump-handle grip that in the old days we used as a joke. ‘That’s OK, Skip. You’ll find yourself in London anytime, and our liquor supply isn’t all it should be. You know?’ He brightened up a bit and as he said good-bye to Jean I saw a flash of the old technique for an instant. It was almost dusk now. Here and there in the dingy sun-charred palm trees a bird fidgeted, and the waves hit, dragged at and sank into the shingle beach and wore the pebbles smoother. We walked across the sandy compound in silence, Jean and I, and the sun was leaving us to go to India, and the sand was red and the sky was mauve and Jean was beautiful and the wind was in her hair and her hand was in mine.

From half a mile away the juke-box in the officers’ club rubbed the smooth night sky with sandpaper sounds. Inside, the tension bubble of the hard day had burst into the inconsequent chatter of martini-lubricated relaxation. From the far corner a barbecue fire sent up spluttering spitting sounds like a thousand captive kittens to accompany the bright flashes of flame. A white-clad Mephistopheles poked, prodded and mothered the thick slabs of prime American beef, and dabbed at them with the contents of a can of ‘CHARKOL Barbecue flavor dressing’.

A pink-faced boy in a white jacket found us a little check table-cloth in the corner. There was some very old Ellington that some very old fan like me had selected from the juke-box murmuring low. A candle in a chianti bottle flickered across Jean’s pale flat face, and I wondered how many US Officers’ Clubs in France had a Pacific-style décor. Outside, the night was clear and warm.

‘I like your friend Skip.’ Men’s friendships are something that women wonder at and fear slightly. ‘He seemed a little withdrawn, as though …’

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Say it.’

‘I don’t know what I was going to say really.’

‘You know, so say it. We can use a few extra opinions as things are.’ The candlelight swerved across Jean’s face as the candle was lifted away. We both turned to see Dalby lighting a cheroot from it. He drew deeply on the small black leaf. Dalby had changed into a red Hawaiian shirt with large blue and yellow flowers across it; put on a pair of lightweight trousers, and gone to the barber’s shop. Dalby had this knack, or art, or charm for sinking into such a combination without looking different from all the Americans wearing it.

‘You’re making with the native costume.’

He dragged on the cheroot before replying, then carefully put it to rest in an ashtray. It was his claim to a seat at the table. He was just crazy about symbolism, Dalby. He finished looking casually round the room and directed his attention back to us.

‘Are you sure I’m not intruding?’ he said, sliding into the seat beside Jean.

‘Jean was going to give me her opinion of Skip Henderson.’

‘I would be most interested to hear it,’ said Dalby, his small bright eyes looking over the menu carefully. He gave me the creeps when he did this. It was almost Yogi the way he diverted his eyes to an object or a piece of paper to enable him to concentrate. Jean had a similar habit. I wondered if I did the same thing and I wondered if Ross had managed to get hold of him about the file.

‘Well, he looked frightened almost,’ I was watching Dalby; his eyes were fixed on one place on the menu. He was listening.

At the next table I could hear a loud American voice. ‘Soldier, I said, that’s my wife’s personal baggage and you’ll move your tail back into that baggage-room …’

‘Frightened? Of me, you mean?’ I always seemed to get embroiled in nutty conversations when Dalby was with me. I wished Jean would drop it. She just didn’t know a thing about Skip Henderson. Skippie Henderson who went to Korea and let himself be captured just so he could find out about collaborating in the prison camps; who came back to Washington with three bayonet wounds, a lungful of TB and a dossier that put a lot of exprisoner brass into the hot-seat. In a court-martial hot-seat. Skip stayed a captain for a long time after that. Prisoners’ friends had friends. But frightened? Skip? who had the only Negro officer in the CIA as his assistant – Barney Barnes, and kept him against every sort of opposition that could be mustered. She just didn’t know what Skip was like. Smooth smiling Skip. Twenty years and they’d finally made him a major, and detailed a major to listen to his nightmares.

‘No,’ said Jean. ‘And I don’t mean frightened of his tame policeman either. I don’t mean frightened of anything. Sort of frightened for. He kept looking at you like he wanted to save you up, remember you very thoroughly for some reason. A last look almost.’

‘So you thought that he was … Skip had a strong-arm man with him,’ I said to Dalby. ‘Did your boyo have one, too, or did he have enough rank to be trusted?’

Dalby spoke without looking up from the menu. ‘I don’t think you should get too paranoiac on Henderson’s behalf. He’s done a lot of silly things in his time. They are pretty worried about this situation and my personal opinion is that Skip Henderson’s policeman is at least there with his “OK”, and may even be his idea. They don’t want to spread the word too wide, and this way they stopper up the information without offence to old buddy buddies.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I can hear McCone laying awake all night worrying whether Skip and I have lost a beautiful friendship.’

‘Oh, I can understand that,’ said Jean. ‘It’s well worth a little trouble to see that valuable contacts are not lost when a little trouble could preserve them.’

‘I’m still not convinced. Skip would have no difficulty in closing the questioning. He’s never had any trouble with a “no” in his life.’

‘That’s true,’ said Dalby. ‘If he’d been just a little more parsimonious with his “no’s” he’d be a lieutenant-general by now.’

I wondered if this meant that Dalby had said a clear unequivocal ‘yes’ to Ross’s offer of the Gumhuria file. I tried to catch Dalby’s eye, but if it was intended as a hint he was doing nothing to confirm it. Dalby was giving all his attention to landing a waiter, and in so doing succeeded.

‘Well, folks, what’s it gonna be?’ The young muscular army steward rested his hands gently on the table top. ‘We have a really nice porter-house on the menu tonight; there’s a fresh lobster salad all frozen and flown out from the mainland. OK then, three porter-house steaks it is, one rare, two medium. How you folks gonna start? A Collins, Rob Roy or Mint Julep, or how about one of the Bar Specialities – a “Manhattan Project” or a “Tokwe Twist”?’

‘You wouldn’t kid me would you?’ I asked.

‘No, sir,’ said the young waiter. ‘They are two really fine drinks, and we have another called “Greenback”3 and another …’

‘Enough of these complexities of modern living,’ said Dalby. ‘We will have a simple gin and vermouth combination called, if my memory serves me well, a martini.’

The waiter clawed his way back into the crowd and smoke. The vibration of a plane coming over the main runway told me the wind had swung round to SSE. One or two of the women army officers had been persuaded to dance, and after a decent interval, some of the civilian girl secretaries would condescend a slow gyrating movement.

The laughs were louder now, and our waiter used his elbows skilfully in protection of our martinis. Dalby had half-turned in his seat and was watching the room in a casual way of business. The waiter put down the large glasses heavily; the huge green olives rolled like eyes. ‘Like t’pay for the drinks, folks?’

I had the wallet open and reached my fingers for the fresh dollar bills. ‘One twenty-five.’ My fingers touched the hard plastic edge of my security card as I paid him.

I sipped the icy drink. In spite of the air-conditioning the club was getting quite warm. More couples were dancing now and I was idly watching a dark girl in a translucent chiffon gown. She was teaching me things of which Arthur Murray never dreamed. Her partner was several inches shorter than she was. As she leaned forward to listen to something he said I caught sight of Barney Barnes through the crowd.

Skip had let me infer that Barney was still Stateside, and Barney wasn’t the sort of man it was possible to miss on a small island. The music had stopped now and the couples were dissolving away. Barney was holding a handbag, while the girl he was with slipped out of a red and gold Thai-silk evening coat. The pink-faced boy took the coat over his arm and showed them both to a table under the vast map mural with the rotund cherubims blowing winds upon golden galleons.

‘Barney Barnes – Skip Henderson’s friend – him I must see.’ Jean lifted a beautifully manicured eyebrow at me round the edge of an enamel compact with Tutankhamen’s tomb pictured on it in gilt.

Dalby said, although I hadn’t once seen him look in that direction, ‘The lieutenant in uniform sitting under Australia.’

‘I didn’t know he was a Negro,’ Jean said. ‘You do mean the tall Negro with a crew-cut. The one sitting with the Statistics captain?’

Statistics, I thought. There are an awful lot of Stats people on this atoll. I began to wonder if Carswell hadn’t had something after all, and whether it didn’t all connect up. ‘You know her?’ I asked Jean.

‘She was attached to the Tokyo Embassy last year and went to just about every party there ever was. She was on the verge of marrying somebody mostly.’

‘Can I get you a saucer of milk?’

‘But it’s true and you should tell your friend Barney Barnes if you really are a friend of his,’ said Jean.

‘Listen Jeannie, Barney has done all right for a number of years and has never needed any help of the sort that I would be able to give, so take your elbow out of his friend’s eye.’

‘If I wait any longer for this steak,’ Dalby joined the conversation.

‘Hey there, welcome back to the human race,’ I said. ‘I thought we’d left you way back there taking orders from Lt-General Skip Henderson.’

‘The next table but one has emptied and filled up twice while we’ve been sitting here drinking this terrible gin that’s probably distilled by some avaricious procurement corporal in one of the battery huts.’

‘Stop getting excited,’ Jean said. When off duty, she had a knack of reverting to a domineering feminine role in life without being noticeably insubordinate. ‘You know there’s just nothing you would be doing if we’d finished dining except arguing with the waiter that the brandy isn’t what you’re used to back at the castle.’

‘I’ll be dashed if I’ve ever encountered a more mordant pair.’

‘You can’t say “dashed” in an Hawaiian shirt,’ I said to Dalby.

‘Most especially not out of the side of a mouth ninety per cent occupied by a twenty-five-cent black cheroot,’ said Jean.

‘But since the waiter is having trouble getting the cows to stand still I’ll dive across for a word with Barney – about stats.’

‘You just sit still where you are. Social life can come to a standstill till I’ve eaten.’ I knew Dalby by now, and I could recognize moods in his voice. He wasn’t kidding and he hadn’t enjoyed us fooling with him. To make Dalby happy you had to listen to and commiserate with him, just every little thing that marred his day and then make with the feet to rectify things. By Dalby’s understanding of life I should be standing in the kitchen now making sure that only the finest fermented wine vinegar went into his salad-dressing. It doesn’t take much to make the daily round with one’s employer work smoothly. A couple of ‘yessirs’ when you know that ‘not on your life’ is the thing to say. A few expressions of doubt about things you’ve spent your life perfecting. Forgetting to make use of the information that negates his hastily formed but deliciously convenient theories. It doesn’t take much but it takes about 98.5 per cent more than I’ve ever considered giving.

‘Be back in a minute,’ I said, and edged past a red-faced colonel who was saying to a waiter, ‘You just tell your officer that this young lady here says that none of these Camembert cheeses are ripe, she knows what she’s talking about. Yes, sir, and just as long as I’m paying the bill around here I just don’t intend to have any more arguments …’

I didn’t look back at Dalby but I imagined that Jean was trying to placate him in some way.

A long bar filled one end of the restaurant. The lighting was low and arranged to shimmer translucently through the bottles of drink that stood back to back with their reflections across the mirror wall. At the far end, the ‘Parisian décor’ was completed with the largest size in Espresso machines, which stood silent with the message ‘No Steam’ glowing blue from its navel. Behind the bar, spaces between the bottles were found for wooden slats with decorative serrated edges that held prefabricated jokes in Saxon lettering. Under one: ‘Spit on the ceiling. Any fool can spit on the floor’ stood a little knot of flyers in uniform. I moved slowly through them. A young sun-bronzed pilot was doing a trick on the counter that involved a glass of water and fifty matches. My guess was that the pay-off was likely to be the distribution of the water and matches among his not altogether unsuspecting colleagues. I moved a little faster. Barney was lighting a cigarette for the blonde now. I walked across the handkerchief-sized dance floor. The enormous juke-box glowed like a monkey’s bottom, and the opening bars of a cha cha cha rent the smoke. A fat man in bright Hawaiian shirt lumbered laughingly towards me, his fists shadow boxing in time to the music, the perspiration sitting heavily across his face. I negotiated the floor ducking and weaving. At closer quarters one could see how much older Barney had got since I last saw him. His crew-cut was a little frayed on top.

Barney saw me across the floor and gave me the big-smile treatment. He spoke suddenly and quickly to the blonde who nodded. I smiled inside as I thought I detected another little Barney ‘If-anybody-asks-you’re-my-assistant-and-we’ve-been working-till-late-and-we-are-finishing-the-last-details-now’ sort of conversation.

I was sufficiently English to find it difficult to say nice things to people I really liked, and I really liked Barney.

Barney’s blonde leaned forward, face close against the table-cloth as she ran a forefinger round the heel of her shoe to ease it on. She was losing a hair grip from the ocean of hair drawn tight against her neck. Barney looked anxiously into my face.

‘Pale-face I love,’ Barney said.

‘Red man, him speak with forked tongue.’

‘So what’s the good word, kid?’ His rich bluey-brown face was lit by a smile. His crisp uniform shirt carried the insignia of a lieutenant of Engineers, and a plastic-faced white card showing two photographs of him and a large pink letter ‘Q’ hung from the button on the pocket of his shirt. According to this card he was Lieutenant Lee Montgomery, and I could make out the word ‘Power’ against unit. Barney had come to his feet now and I felt dwarfed by his bulk.

‘Just through eating, man.’ He fed a dollar bill under the ashtray. ‘Must be stepping, just about shot with these early morning, late night routines.’

The waiter was helping the blonde back into her silk coat. Barney fidgeted his way around the table tightening his tie, and rubbing the palms of his hands against his hips.

‘I saw an old friend of yours the other day from Canada. We were talking about how much dough we spent in that bar in King Street, Toronto. He was reminding me about that song you always sang when you were plastered.’

‘Nat?’ I said.

‘That’s him,’ agreed Barney. ‘Nat Goodrich. What’s that old song you were always singing, how’d the words go now? Shoot, I know. “Be first to climb the mountain and climb it alone”.’

I said, ‘I sure do, I sure do,’ a couple of times, and Barney was rattling on in a cheerful sort of way, ‘Maybe we’ll do a night out sometime real soon. What were those things you were drinking in that bar next door to the Embassy that time? Remember those vodka benedictine concoctions that you christened E-mc2? Oooh man, but lethal. But can’t do the night out, pal, for a little while. I’m shipping out in a day or so. Must go.’

His blonde had been standing listening in a bored sort of way, but now she was getting impatient eyes. I put it down to a hunger. A sudden belt of laughter fanned from the bar. I guessed that one of those transport pilots had collected the glassful of water. It was the only correct guess I made that puzzling day, for about the only thing less likely than me drinking a mixture of benedictine and vodka was me singing. And I’d never been in Toronto with Barney, I knew no one named Nat, and I don’t suppose Barney knew anyone named Goodrich.