The Harry Palmer Quartet. Len Deighton

France. Right?’

      ‘Right,’ I said. I was beginning to recognize my cue.

      ‘You.’ I wondered what I sold. Jay switched on the grill and the lobster, lit bright red on one side by the electric element, began to revolve very very slowly. ‘You,’ said Jay again, ‘sell loyalty.’ He stared at me. ‘I don’t do that: I wouldn’t do it.’ For a moment I thought even Jay thinks I have changed sides, but I realized that it was Jay’s way of talking. He went on, ‘I sell people.’

      ‘Like Eichmann?’ I asked.

      ‘I don’t like that sort of joke,’ said Jay like a Sunday-school teacher at the Folies Bergères. Then his face cracked into a little grin. ‘More like Eichelhauer let’s say.’ That was the German name for Jay. Jay, I thought. Garrulus glandarius rufitergum. Jay: egg thief, bully of birds and raider of crops, lurking, cautious Jay who flies in clumsy undulating hops. ‘I deal in talented men exchanging employment of their own free will.’

      ‘You’re a talent scout from the Kremlin?’ I said.

      Jay began to baste the lobster that he didn’t like to kill with the champagne that he didn’t like to drink. He was thinking about what I said. I could see why Jay was such a big success. He took everything at its face value. I still don’t know if Jay thought he was a talent scout from the Kremlin because the wall phone rang in the kitchen. Jay stopped basting long enough to wipe his hands. He listened on the phone. ‘Put him through.’ A pause. ‘Then say I am at home.’ He moved round and fixed me with that basilisk’s stare that people holding phones have. He suddenly said to me, ‘We don’t smoke in the kitchen,’ then, uncupping the phone, ‘This is Maximilian speaking. My dear Henry.’ His face split open in a big smile. ‘I won’t say a word, my dear friend, just carry on. Yes, very well.’ I saw Jay push the ‘scramble’ button. Jay just listened, but his face was like Gielgud doing ‘The Seven Ages of Man’. Finally Jay said, ‘Thanks,’ and he hung up the phone thoughtfully, and began to baste the lobster again.

      I puffed my cigarette. Jay watched me but said nothing. I decided the initiative in this conversation had passed to me. ‘Is it time to talk about the head-shrinking factory at Wood Green?’ I asked.

      ‘Head shrinking?’ Jay asked.

      ‘Brain Washing Incorporated: the place I jumped out of. Isn’t that what we’re leading up to?’

      ‘You think that I’m something to do with that?’ his face was 11 A.M. November 11th.

      There was a knock on the door and Maurice brought a slip of paper to Jay. I tried to read it, but it was impossible. There may have been about fifty typewritten words there. Maurice left. Then I followed Jay across the big sitting-room. Near the radio and TV was a small machine like a typewriter carriage. It was a paper shredder. Jay fed the sheet in and pressed a button. It disappeared. Jay sat down.

      ‘Did they treat you badly at Wood Green?’ he said.

      ‘I was getting to like it,’ I said, ‘but I just couldn’t keep the payments up.’

      ‘You think it’s terrible.’ It was neither a question nor a statement.

      ‘I don’t think about it. I get paid to encounter all manner of things. I suppose some of them are terrible.’

      ‘In the Middle Ages,’ Jay went on as though he hadn’t heard, ‘they thought the cross-bow was the most terrible thing.’

      ‘That wasn’t because of the weapon itself, but because it threatened their system.’

      ‘That’s right,’ Jay said. ‘So we let them use the terrible weapon, but only upon Moslems. Right?’

      ‘That’s right,’ I said; now I was using his lines.

      ‘What you might call a policy of limited war upon subversive elements,’ Jay told me. ‘Yes, and now we have another terrible weapon; more terrible than nuclear explosions, more terrible than nerve gas, more terrible than the anti-matter bomb. But with this terrible weapon no one gets hurt; is that so terrible?’

      ‘Weapons aren’t terrible,’ I said. ‘Aeroplanes full of passengers to Paris, bombs full of insecticide, cannons with a man inside at a circus – these aren’t terrible. But a vase of roses in the hands of a man of evil intent is a murder weapon.’

      ‘My boy,’ said Jay, ‘if brain-washing had come to the world before the trial of Joan of Arc she would have lived to a happy old age.’

      I said, ‘Yes, and France would still be full of mercenary soldiers.’

      ‘I thought you’d like that,’ said Jay. ‘You’re the English patriot.’

      I was silent. Jay leaned forward from where he was sitting in the big black-leather armchair. ‘You can’t really believe that the Communist countries are going to collapse, and that this strange capitalist system will march proudly on.’ He tapped my knee. ‘We are both sensible, objective men, with, I think I might say, wide political experience. Neither of us could deny the comfort of it all,’ he stroked the rich leather, ‘but what has capitalism to offer? Its colonies that once were the goose that laid the golden egg, they are vanishing. The goose has found out where to sell the egg. The few places where a reactionary government has suppressed the socialist movement, why, in those places those governments are merely propped up by Fascist force, paid for in Western gold.’

      Behind Jay’s voice I could hear the radio playing very quietly. An English jazz singer was even now Gee Whizzing, Waa Waa and Boop boop booping in an unparalleled plethora of idiocy. He noticed that I was listening, and his attack veered. What of the capitalist countries themselves? What of them then, racked with strikes, with mental illness, with insular disregard for their fellow men. On the brink of anarchy, their police beset by bribes, and by roving bands of overfed cowards seeking an outlet for the sadism that is endemic to capitalism, which is in any case licensed selfishness. Who do they pay their big rewards to? Musicians, aviators, poets, mathematicians? No! Degenerate young men who gain fame by not understanding music or having talent for singing. He’d timed his speech well, or he had luck, for he switched the radio across to the Home Service. It was time for the news. He went on talking, but I didn’t hear him. I could only hear the announcer saying. ‘The police are anxious to interview a man seen near the scene of the crime.’ There followed a fairly good description of me.

      ‘Cut out all this,’ I said to Jay. ‘Who killed Charlie Cavendish?’

      Jay got up from his chair and went to look out of the window. He beckoned to me and I went to look out. There were two taxis parked across the street. At the bottom of the street was a single-decker bus. Jay switched on the FM radio, and tuned it to the police wave-length. A police walkietalkie outside the Victoria and Albert Museum was co-ordinating the movements.

      ‘We all did,’ said Jay. ‘You, me and them.’

      One of the three men across the street leaned into the taxi-cab and we heard his voice saying, ‘I’m going across there now – pay particular attention to the back and the roofs. Street blocks! Hold everyone until further notice.’ It was Ross’s voice. The three men came across the road.

      Jay turned to me. ‘One of these days, brainwashing will be the acknowledged method of dealing with anti-social elements. Criminals can be brain-washed. I’ve proved it. Nearly 300 people I’ve processed. It’s the greatest step forward of the century.’ He picked up the phone. ‘Maurice, we have callers.’ Jay gave me a broad calm smile. ‘Show them up, but tell them that I am already in custody.’ And I remembered other things about garrulus glandarius rufitergum – alert, tireless, excitable, vociferous, pairs for life, sociable in the spring but solitary at all other times.

      Maurice let Ross and the two policemen in, and everyone shook hands with everyone. I’d never been pleased to see Ross before. They were taking no chances and the street blocks were kept in position for another hour. Ross was pretty cool with Jay, and he was searched and taken off to Carshalton, which was a house that Ross’s