“Alors, blondie, je t’emmène? Tu veux monter, non?”
Edward, who had been to Harrow, of course did not understand a word, but the sense was clear enough. It was a warm night, their dresses were minimal, and their bosoms jacked up to resemble party balloons. I settled up with the taxi and ushered him inside.
There was a bar, then a bead curtain, and the dining area behind it. We penetrated the curtain and joined Armand at the table in the far corner, where he was toying with a citron pressé (he did not drink alcohol).
Introductions made, we had a civilized dinner. Armand spoke no English and Edward schoolboy French, which is to say very little indeed. I interpreted. With his innate manners, Edward asked no really embarrassing questions, so there were no tense moments, until the end.
And that was not the fault of any of us. Word had spread to the bar area and thence to the street that there was a film star dining inside. The French are film crazy, and the idea of a real film star a few yards away was to the streetwalkers as a large fly to a salmon. They invaded the dining area, shoving their figures at us both until they realized that only Edward was in films. Then they were making him some very bawdy suggestions.
The future Jackal was pink as a traffic light, the underworld executioner was laughing his head off, and I was trying to get the headwaiter so that I could settle up and escape. Then Armand was gone, out the back via the kitchens, and I have not seen him since. The bar owner summoned a cab by phone and I was able to deliver Edward back to the Warwick and Fred Zinnemann pretty much intact.
Forty years later, at a garden lunch party at my home, I told the anecdote to a merry audience to explain how we met. Edward was there with his wife, Joanna David, who had never heard it. I ended by saying that in forty years I had never told him what it was the girls were saying to him. He leaned across the table.
“No,” he said, “you never did. What was it?”
“They were offering you freebies
. Whatever you wanted. On the house. And in their world, that is a very serious compliment indeed.”
He thought it over.
“I don’t suppose there is any point in going back?”
As we are both well into our seventies, I very much doubt it.
PERFECT JOY
If you were to ask ten people for their definition of perfect joy, you might well get ten definitions or a few less than that. Pretty high on the list would be that moment when a father gazes down at his newborn child, the tiny face puckered in outrage at having been expelled from a safe, warm womb into a world of troubles. Of these, it knows nothing and from them must be protected, which is where the lovelorn father comes in.
There will be other choices, including palm-fringed lagoons or a hole in one while winning the U.S. Open. Reject all of these, for I know what is perfect joy, because I have seen it.
The call, when it came in summer 1973, was as always terribly diffident. Could we possibly get together for a chat? Of course we could. They did not want me to come to Century House in case someone saw me. And a lunch booth in a restaurant, however expensive and discreet, can always be bugged by a waiter working for the other side.
So it was a safe house, in reality an apartment in a block, scanned daily and certainly before every use. It was so discreet that I have forgotten where it was, save only it was in Mayfair, London. There were three of them and they were not from the Africa Desk, but concerned with operations in East Germany, so I did not know them. But they knew me, or at least the contents of my file.
“There is no question of trying to pass for a German, so no refresher course. Just a question of a British tourist slipping inside and bringing something out.”
I still reckoned the voice on the phone that got me out of Hamburg just in time was that of a Friend, someone from the Firm, and one good turn deserves another. Besides, it all seemed so simple.
There was an asset, a Russian colonel, working for us deep inside East Germany, and he had a package that we needed brought out. No, not in East Berlin, but based outside Dresden. He could not get farther than a meet in Dresden. It began to be not quite so simple. Dresden was a long way in.
The proposed plan had been minutely studied long before the meeting at the safe house and appeared to have the fewest flaws. It would have to be by car, because the package, which in deference to Alfred Hitchcock I always called the McGuffin, would have to be concealed far from prying hands and eyes on the way out. Besides, there was another package for the asset that had to go in. So, a swap. One in and one out.
They knew I had a car, at that time a Triumph Vitesse drophead convertible. Could they borrow it for a day or so? Of course.
I had to leave the Triumph outside my apartment with the keys under the floor mat. I never saw who took it or returned it. No need to. It just vanished and reappeared, but slightly different.
The battery in the Vitesse was in the engine bay. It sat on a tray beside the left-hand engine wall. Two metal clips prevented it from moving and a thick rubber pad prevented vibrations. The pad had been removed, slit open, and a cavity created.
To get at the cavity, one had to use a spanner to release the positive and negative leads, then undo the two retaining clips. Lift the battery out and place it to one side. Peel the rubber pad open. And inside was the fat wad of papers destined for the asset and the cavity in which his reports (whatever they were, I would never know) would ride out of the workers’ paradise.
I spent a day by the curbside in the warm summer sun practicing until I had it all down to less than thirty seconds. And there was more.
The “cover” was a visit to the Albertinum Museum, East Germany’s cultural jewel, amazingly untouched by the Anglo-American bombing of February 1945, which had flattened most of the city. Greco-Roman treasures were my new enthusiasm, and there were books to study as if for an exam. Finally, it seemed I was ready to roll.
It was a long drive across France and West Germany to the East German border, but under the Four-Power Agreement, my British passport entitled me onto the autobahn running across East Germany to the enclave of West Berlin. Once there, I avoided all contacts I had made during my time ten years earlier.
But there was a travel agency permitted by the East German authorities to be the conduit for visas for genuine Western tourists whom the Politburo was keen to entice into East Germany for the foreign currency they brought.