The Harry Palmer Quartet

I’ll always associate Charlotte Street with the music of the colliery brass bands that I remember from my childhood. The duty drivers and cipher clerks had a little fraternity that sat around in the dispatch office on the second floor. They had a very loud gramophone and they were all brass band fanatics; that’s a pretty esoteric failing in London. Up through the warped and broken floorboards came the gleaming polished music. Fairey Aviation had won the Open Championship again that year and the sound of the test piece reached through to every room in the building. It made Dalby feel he was overlooking Horse Guards Parade; it made me feel I was back in Burnley.

I said ‘Hello, Alice,’ and she nodded and busied herself with a Nescafé tin and a ruinous cup of warm water. I went through to the back office, saw Chico – he’d got a step beyond Alice, his Nescafé was almost dissolved. Chico always looked glad to see me. It made my day; it was his training, I suppose. He’d been to one of those very good schools where you meet kids with influential uncles. I imagine that’s how he got into the Horse Guards and now into WOOC(P) too, it must have been like being at school again. His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap. He stood 5ft 11in in his Argyll socks, and had an irritating physical stance, in which his thumbs rested high behind his red braces while he rocked on his hand-lasted Oxfords. He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it.

I walked right through the Dalby Inquiry Bureau and down the back stairs. For this whole house belonged to WOOC(P) even though each business on each floor had its own ‘front’ for our convenience. By 9.40 A.M. each morning I was in the small ramshackle projection room of Acme Films.

The sickly sweet smell of film cement and warm celluloid was so strong that I think they must have sprayed it around. I threw my English B-picture raincoat across a pile of film tins, clean side up, and sank into one of the tip-up cinema seats. As always it was seat twenty-two, the one with the loose bolt, and always by that time I didn’t feel much like moving.

The Rheostat made that horrible squeaking noise. The room lights dimmed tiredly and the little projector clattered into action. A screaming white rectangle flung animated abstract shapes of scratch marks at my eyes, then darkened to a business-like grey flannel suit colour.

In crude stick-on letters the film title said JAY. LEEDS. WARREN THREE. (Warren Three was the authority upon which it was filmed.) The picture began. Jay was walking along a crowded pavement. His moustache was gigantic, but cultivated with a care that he gave to everything he did. He limped, but it certainly didn’t impair his progress through the crowd. The camera wobbled and then tracked swiftly away. The van in which the movie camera had been hidden had been forced to move faster than Jay by the speed of the traffic. The screen flashed white and the next short, titled length began. Some of the films showed Jay with a companion, code-named HOUSEMARTIN. He was a six feet tall handsome man in a good-quality camel-hair overcoat. His hair was waved, shiny and a little too perfectly grey at the temples. He wore a handful of gold rings, a gold watch strap and a smile full of jacket crowns. It was an indigestible smile – he was never able to swallow it.

Chico operated the projector with tongue-jutting determination. Once in a while he would slip into the programme one of those crisp Charing Cross Road movies that feature girls in the skin. It was Dalby’s idea to keep his ‘students’ awake during these viewings.

‘Know your enemies,’ was Dalby’s theory. He felt if all his staff knew the low-life of the espionage business visually they would stand a better chance of predicting their thought. ‘Because he had a picture of Rommel over his bed Montgomery won Alamein.’ I don’t necessarily believe this – but this was what Dalby kept saying. (Personally I ascribe a lot of value to those extra 600 tanks.)

Dalby was an elegant languid public school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury. He was a little taller than I am: probably 6ft 1in or 6ft 2in. He had long fine hair, and every now and then would grow a little wispy blond moustache. At present he didn’t have it. He had a clear complexion that sunburnt easily and very small puncture-type scar tissue high on the left cheek to prove he had been to a German University in ’38. It had been a useful experience, and in 1941 enabled him to gain a DSO and bar. A rare event in any Intelligence group but especially in the one he was with. No citations of course.

He was unpublic school enough to wear a small signet ring on his right hand, and whenever he pulled at his face, which was often, he dragged the edge of the ring against the skin. This produced a little red weal due to excessive acidity in the skin. It was fascinating.

He peeped at me over the toes of his suède shoes which rested in the centre of a deskful of important papers, arranged in precise heaps. Spartan furniture (Ministry of Works, contemporary) punctured the cheap lino and a smell of tobacco ash was in the air.

‘You are loving it here of course?’ Dalby asked.

‘I have a clean mind and a pure heart. I get eight hours’ sleep every night. I am a loyal, diligent employee and will attempt every day to be worthy of the trust my paternal employer puts in me.’

‘I’ll make the jokes,’ said Dalby.

‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘I can use a laugh – my eyes have been operating twenty-four frames per second for the last month.’

Dalby tightened a shoe-lace. ‘Think you can handle a tricky little special assignment?’

‘If it doesn’t demand a classical education I might be able to grope around it.’

Dalby said, ‘Surprise me, do it without complaint or sarcasm.’

‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ I said.

Dalby swung his feet to the floor and became deliberate and serious. ‘I’ve been across to the Senior Intelligence Conference this morning. Home Office are worried sick about these disappearances of their top biochemists. Committees, subcommittees – you should have seen them over there, talk about Mother’s Day at the Turkish Bath.’

‘Has there been another then?’ I asked.

‘This morning,’ said Dalby, ‘one left home at 7.45 A.M., never reached the lab.’

‘Defection?’ I asked.

Dalby pulled a face and spoke to Alice over the desk intercom, ‘Alice, open a file and give me a code-name for this morning’s “wandering willie”.’ Dalby made his wishes known by peremptory unequivocal orders; all his staff preferred them to the complex polite chat of most Departments as especially did I as a refugee from the War Office. Alice’s voice came over the intercom like Donald Duck with a head cold. To whatever she said Dalby replied, ‘The hell with what the letter from the Home Office said. Do as I say.’

There was a moment or so of silence then Alice used her displeased voice to say a long file number and the code-name RAVEN. All people under long-term surveillance had bird names.

‘That’s a good girl,’ said Dalby in his most charming voice and even over the squawk-box I could hear the lift in Alice’s voice as she said, ‘Very good, sir.’

Dalby switched off the box and turned back to me. ‘They have put a security blackout on this Raven disappearance but I told them that William Hickey will be carrying a photo of his dog by the midday editions. Look at these.’ Dalby laid five passport photos across his oiled teak desk. Raven was a man in his late forties, thick black hair, bushy eyebrows, bony nose – there were a hundred like him in St James’s at any minute of the day. Dalby said, ‘It makes eight top rank Disappearances in …’ he looked at his desk diary, ‘… six and a half weeks.’

‘Surely Home Office aren’t asking us to help them,’ I said.

‘They certainly are not,’ said Dalby. ‘But if we found Raven I think the Home Secretary would virtually disband his confused little intelligence department. Then we could add their files to ours. Think of that.’

‘Find him?’ I said. ‘How would we start?’

‘How would you start?’ asked Dalby.

‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I said. ‘Go to laboratory, wife doesn’t know what’s got into him lately, discover dark almond-eyed woman. Bank manager wonders where he’s been getting all that money. Fist fight through darkened lab. Glass tubes that would blow the world to shreds. Mad scientist backs to freedom holding phial – flying tackle by me. Up grams Rule Britannia.’

Dalby gave me a look calculated to have me feeling like an employee, he got to his feet and walked across to the big map of Europe that he had had pinned across the wall for the last week. I walked across to him. ‘You think that Jay is master minding it,’ I said. Dalby looked at the map and still staring at it said, ‘Sure of it, absolutely sure of it.’

The map was covered with clear acetate and five small frontier areas from Finland to the Caspian were marked in black greasy pencil. Two places in Syria carried small red flags.

Dalby said, ‘Every important illegal movement across these bits of frontier that I have marked are with Jay’s OK.

‘Important movement. I don’t mean he stands around checking that the eggs have little lions on.’ Dalby tapped the border. ‘Somewhere before they get him as far as this we must …’ Dalby’s voice trailed away lost in thought.

‘Hi-jack him?’ I prompted softly. Dalby’s mind had raced on. ‘It’s January. If only we could do this in January,’ he said. January was the month that the Government estimates were prepared. I began to see what he meant. Dalby suddenly became aware of me again and turned on a big flash of boyish charm.

‘You see,’ said Dalby. ‘It’s not just a case of the defection of one biochemist …’

‘Defection? I thought that Jay’s speciality was a high-quality line in snatch jobs.’

‘Hi-jack! Snatch jobs! all that gangland talk. You read too many newspapers that’s your trouble. You mean they walk him through the customs and immigration with two heavy-jowled men behind him with their right hands in their overcoat pockets? No. No. No,’ he said the three ‘noes’ softly, paused and added two more. ‘… this isn’t a mere emigration of one little chemist,’ (Dalby made him sound like an assistant from Boots) ‘who has probably been selling them stuff for years. In fact given the choice I’m not sure I wouldn’t let him go. It’s those—people at the Home Office. They should know about these things before they occur: not start crying in their beer afterwards.’ He picked two cigarettes out of his case, threw one to me and balanced the other between his fingers. ‘They are all right running the Special Branch, HM prisons and Cruelty to Animal Inspectors but as soon as they get into our business they have trouble touching bottom.’1 Dalby continued to do balancing tricks with the cigarette to which he had been talking. Then he looked up and began to talk to me. ‘Do you honestly believe that given all the Home Office Security files we couldn’t do a thousand times better than they have ever done?’

‘I think we could,’ I said. He was so pleased with my answer that he stopped toying with the cigarette and lit it in a burst of energy. He inhaled the smoke then tried to snort it down his nostrils. He choked. His face went red. ‘Shall I get you a glass of water?’ I asked, and his face went redder. I must have ruined the drama of the moment. Dalby recovered his breath and went on.

‘You can see now that this is something more than an ordinary case, it’s a test case.’

‘I sense impending Jesuitical pleas.’

‘Exactly,’ said Dalby with a malevolent smile. He loved to be cast as the villain, especially if it could be done with schoolboy-scholarship. ‘You remember the Jesuit motto.’ He was always surprised to find I had read any sort of book.

‘When the end is lawful the means are also lawful,’ I answered.

He beamed and pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. I had made him very happy.

‘If it pleases you that much,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t muster it in dog-Latin.’

‘It’s all right, all right,’ said Dalby. He traversed his cigarette then changed the range and elevation until it had me in its sights. He spoke slowly, carefully articulating each syllable. ‘Go and buy this Raven for me.’

‘From Jay.’

‘From anyone who has him – I’m broadminded.’

‘How much can I spend, Daddy?’

He moved his chair an inch nearer the desk with a loud crash. ‘Look here, every point of entry has the stopper jammed tightly upon it.’ He gave a little bitter laugh. ‘It makes you laugh, doesn’t it. I remember when we asked HO to close the airports for one hour last July. The list of excuses they gave us. But when someone slips through their little butter-fingers and they are going to be asked some awkward questions, anything goes. Anyway, Jay is a bright lad; he’ll know what’s going on; he’ll have this Raven on ice for a week and then move him when all goes quiet. If meanwhile we make him anything like a decent offer …’ Dalby’s voice trailed off as he slipped his mind into over-drive, ‘… say 18,000 quid. We pick him up from anywhere Jay says – no questions asked.’

‘18,000,’ I said.

‘You can go up to twenty-three if you are sure they are on the level. But on our terms. Payment after delivery. Into a Swiss bank. Strictly no cash and I don’t want Raven dead. Or even damaged.’

‘OK,’ I said. I suddenly felt very small and young and called upon to do something that I wasn’t sure I could manage. If this was the run of the mill job at WOOC(P) they deserved their high pay and expense accounts. ‘Shall I start by locating Jay?’ It seemed a foolish thing to say but I felt in dire need of an instruction book.

Dalby flapped a palm. I sat down again. ‘Done,’ he said. He flipped a switch on his squawk-box. Alice’s voice, electronically distorted, spoke from the room downstairs. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

‘What’s Jay doing?’

There was a couple of clicks and Alice’s voice came back to the office again. ‘At 12.10 he was in Lederer’s coffee-house.’

‘Thanks, Alice,’ said Dalby.

‘Cease surveillance, sir?’

‘Not yet, Alice. I’ll tell you when.’ To me he said, ‘There you are then. Off you go.’

I doused my cigarette and stood up. ‘Two other last things,’ said Dalby. ‘I am authorizing you for 1,200 a year expenses. And,’ he paused, ‘don’t contact me if anything goes wrong, because I won’t know what the hell you are talking about.’

1 The Denning report published September, 1963 revealed that the Home Secretary is in control of British Counter Intelligence.

2

[Aquarius (Jan 20–Feb 19) New business opportunities begin well in unusual surroundings that provide chance of a gamble.]

I walked down Charlotte Street towards Soho. It was that sort of January morning that had enough sunshine to point up the dirt without raising the temperature. I was probably seeking excuses to delay; I bought two packets of Gauloises, sank a quick grappa with Mario and Franco at the Terrazza, bought a Statesman, some Normandy butter and garlic sausage. The girl in the delicatessen was small, dark and rather delicious. We had been flirting across the mozzarella for years. Again we exchanged offers with neither side taking up the option.

In spite of my dawdling I was still in Lederer’s coffee-house by 12.55. Led’s is one of those continental-style coffee-houses where coffee comes in a glass. The customers, who mostly think of themselves as clientele, are those smooth-rugged characters with sun-lamp complexions, half a dozen 10in by 8in glossies, an agent and more time than money on their hands.

Jay was there, skin like polished ivory, small piggy eyes and a luxuriant growth of facial hair. Small talk ricocheted around me as reputations hit the dust.

‘She’s marvellous in small parts,’ an expensive gingery-pink rinse was saying, and people were dropping names, using one-word abbreviations of West End shows and trying to leave without paying for their coffee.

The back of Jay’s large head touched the red flocked wallpaper between the notice that told customers not to expect dairy cream in their pastries and the one that cautioned them against passing betting slips. Jay had seen me, of course. He’d priced my coat and measured the pink-haired girl in the flick of an eyelid. I waited for Jay to stroke his eyebrow with his right index finger and I knew that he would. He did. I’d never seen him before but I knew him from the flick of the finger to the lopsided way he walked downstairs. I knew that he’d paid sixty guineas for each of his suits except the flannel one, which by some quirk of a tailor’s reasoning had cost fifty-eight and a half guineas. I knew all about Jay except how to ask him to sell me a biochemist for £18,000.

I sat down and burnt my raincoat on the bars of the fire. An unassisted thirty-eight with a sneer under contract eased her chair three-sixteenths of an inch to give me more space, and nosed deeper into Variety. She hated me because I was trying to pick her up, or not trying perhaps, but anyway, she had her reasons. On the far side of Jay’s table I saw the handsome face of Housemartin, his costar in the Charlotte Street film library. I lit a Gauloise and blew a smoke ring. The thirty-eight sucked her teeth. I noticed Housemartin lean across to Jay and whisper in his ear while they both looked at me. Then Jay nodded.

The waitress – a young fifty-three with imitation pastry cream on her pinafore – came across to my table. My friend with Variety stretched out a hand, white and lifeless like some animal that had never been exposed to daylight. It touched the glass of cold coffee and dragged it away from the waitress. I ordered Russian tea and apple strudel.

Had it been Chico sitting there he would have been making time with the Minox camera, and dusting the waitress for Jay’s prints, but I knew we had more footage on Jay than MGM have on Ben Hur, so I sat tight and edged into the strudel.

When I had finished my tea and bun I had no further excuse for delay. I searched through my pockets for some visiting cards. There was an engraved one that said ‘Bertram Loess – Assessor and Valuer’, another printed one that said ‘Brian Serck Inter News Press Agency’, and a small imitation leather folder that gave me Right of Entry under the Factories Act because I was a weights and measures inspector. None of those suited the present situation so I went across to Jay’s table, touched a forelock and said the first thing that came into my head – ‘Beamish,’ I said, ‘Stanley Beamish.’ Jay nodded. It was the head of a Buddha coming unsoldered. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ I said. ‘I have a financial proposition to put to you.’ But Jay was not going to be hurried; he took out his thin wallet, produced a white rectangle and passed it to me. I read – ‘Henry Carpenter – Import Export’. I’d always favoured foreign names on the ground that there is nothing more authentically English than a foreign name. Perhaps I should tell Jay. He picked up his card and delicately with his big scarred finger-tips on the points returned it to his crocodile-skin wallet. He consulted a watch with a dial like the control panel of a Boeing 707, and eased himself back in his chair.

‘You shall take me to lunch,’ said Jay, as though he were conferring a favour.

‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I have three months’ back pay outstanding and my expense account was only confirmed this morning.’ Jay was thunderstruck at striking this rich vein of honesty. ‘How much,’ said Jay. ‘How much is your expense account?’

‘1,200,’ I said.

‘A year?’ said Jay.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Not enough,’ said Jay, and he jabbed my chest to emphasize it. ‘Ask them for 2,000 at least.’

‘Yes,’ I said obediently. I didn’t think Dalby would stand for it, but there seemed no point in contradicting Jay at this stage of the proceedings.

‘I know somewhere very cheap,’ said Jay. As I saw it, a finer way out of the situation was for Jay to buy me lunch, but I know that this never even occurred to him. We all paid our bills, and I picked up my groceries, and then the three of us trailed out along Wardour Street, Jay in the lead. The lunch hour in Central London – the traffic was thick and most of the pedestrians the same. We walked past grim-faced soldiers in photo-shop windows. Stainless-steel orange squeezers and moron-manipulated pin-tables metronoming away the sunny afternoon in long thin slices of boredom. Through wonderlands of wireless entrails from the little edible condensers to gutted radar receivers for thirty-nine and six. On, shuffling past plastic chop suey, big-bellied naked girls and ‘Luncheon Vouchers Accepted’ notices, until we paused before a wide illustrated doorway – ‘Vicki from Montmartre’ and ‘Striptease in the Snow’ said the freshly-painted signs. ‘Danse de Desir – Non Stop Striptease Revue’ and the little yellow bulbs winked lecherously in the dusty sunlight.

We went inside. Jay was smiling and tapping Housemartin on the nose and the usherette on the bottom at the same time. The manager gave me a close scrutiny but decided I wasn’t from West End Central. I suppose I didn’t look wealthy enough.

I closed my eyes for a moment to accustom myself to the dark. On my left was a room with about sixty seats and a stage as big as a fireplace – it looked a slum in total darkness. I’d hate to see it with a window open.

In the cardboard proscenium a fat girl in black underwear was singing a song with the mad abandon that fitted 2.10 P.M. on a Tuesday afternoon.

‘We’ll wait here,’ said the handsome Housemartin, and Jay went up the staircase near the sign that said – ‘Barbarossa – club members only’ – and an arrow pointing upwards. We waited – you wouldn’t have thought that I was trying to do an £18,000 deal. The garlic sausage, the Statesman, the Normandy butter, had become a malleable shapeless lump. I didn’t think Dalby would wear that on my expenses, so I decided to hang on to it a little longer. Drums rolled, cymbals ‘zinged’, lights and gelatines clicked and clattered. Girls came on and went off. Girls thin, fat, tall and short. Girls in various stages of dress and undress; pink girls and green girls, little girls and old girls, and still more girls, relentlessly. Housemartin seemed to like it.

Finally he went to the gents, excusing himself with one of the less imaginative vulgarisms. A cigarette-girl, clad in a handful of sequins, tried to sell me a souvenir programme. I’d seen better print jobs on winkle bags, but then it was only costing twelve and six, and it was made in England. She offered me a pink felt Pluto, too. I declined gratefully. She sorted through the other things on the tray. ‘I’ll have a packet of Gauloises,’ I said. She smiled a crooked little smile – her lipstick was lopsided – she seemed to have very little skill at putting things on. She dropped her head to grope for the cigarettes. ‘Do you know what the packet looks like?’ she said. I helped her look. While her head was close to mine she said, in her pinched Northumberland accent, ‘Go home. There’s nothing to be gained here.’ She found the cigarettes and gave them to me. I gave her a ten-shilling note. ‘Thanks,’ she said, offering no change.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’ I watched her as she made her journey through the wispy audience of middle-aged tycoons. When she reached the rear of the auditorium she sold something to a plump man at the bar. She moved on out of my range of vision.

I looked around me; no one seemed to be watching. I walked up the stairs. It was all velveteen and tinsel stars. There was only one door on this landing – it was locked. I went up another floor. A notice said, ‘Private – Staff Only’; I pushed through the swing door. There was a long corridor ahead of me. Four doors opened to the right. None to the left. I opened the first door. It was a toilet. It was empty. The next door in the line-up said ‘Manager’; I tapped and opened it. There was a comfortable office: half a dozen bottles of booze, large armchair, a studio couch. A television set said ‘… begin to feel the tummy muscles stretching and relaxing …’