wanted to be drunk more than she wanted anything else in the world, but in her present state of mind no amount of drink seemed to do the trick for her.
'Yes,' said Mann softly. 'While you went on your round trip to Paris, your Douglas stayed in the Emerald Isle. He went to a little farm off the highway, and hacked a German family to death with a spade. Three of them; we dug them up from the garbage. It was a wet day hi Ireland, so if we're pressing decomposing tissue into your wall-to- wall pile carpet, I apologize, but you've got Douglas to blame for it.'
'No,' she said again but it was softer this tune, and not so confident.
'And all that crap about that police report. In the middle 'fifties, the East Germans were using their 'barrack police' as P. nucleus of their new army. Let's define our terms. Those police we're talking about had tanks and MiG fighter planes, Mrs Dean. The police desk was just about the most important work the C.I.A. did hi Germany at that time. That's why Hank Dean was assigned to it and that's why he gave it everything he'd got, until he was mentally, and physically, exhausted.'
Mann paused for a long time. I suppose he was hoping that she would argue or confess or simply blow her top but she did nothing except sink lower in the soft furnishings and continue to drink. Mann said, 'Douglas Reid- Kennedy was a Communist agent, and he was wearing that cheap blue suit because he'd just come over from the East where he'd been talking to his pals about putting your husband on the rack. And your cock-and-bull story about Steiner's argument was disregarded because the man who pretended to be Steiner's brother-in-law wasn't an East German agent, he was one of Dean's best men. He was one of the German Communists who fled to Soviet Russia in 1938.
Stalin handed him back over the frontier to the Gestapo in 1940 as part of the deal of slicing Poland down the middle and sharing it with the Nazis. That's the man who had his blood spattered over your rose-bushes by Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy. He had important things to tell Hank, and when he was delayed Hank was so worried that he went across there to help him. The agent got back but Hank went into the bag.'
The inquiry didn't know anything about his being an agent for the Americans,' she said.
'You think the inquiry is going to blow a network because an agent is murdered. No, they let it go, and were happy not to inquire too far into it. And that was a lucky break for Reid-Kennedy.'
'Yes,' she said.
'And you tell us that the inquiry reprimanded Major Dean, and exonerated you. Why do you think they did that? They did it because Hank stood up and took all the shit that they were throwing at you. Sure he was reprimanded for leaving the papers unsafeguarded, because he wouldn't tell them that you and your goddamned boyfriend opened his safe and betrayed him in every possible way…'
'No, they said…'
'Don't argue with me,' said Major Mann. 'I just got through reading the transcript. And don't tell me you believed Douglas Reid-Kennedy and all that crap about returning the papers to the police authority. You saw that the file numbers were blacked out. That's the first thing an agent does with secret papers, so that they can't be traced back to the place where they were stolen. And even the police chief of East Berlin is going to have a hard time explaining why the papers in his safe have got all the file numbers blacked out. Arid you knew that as well as anyone, so don't give me any of that stuff.'
He walked up to where she was sitting but she didn't raise her eyes to him. His face was flushed and his brow shiny. It would have been easy to believe that he was the one being interrogated, because the woman seemed relaxed and unheeding.
'But it wasn't anything to do with the papers,' said Mann. 'This was all a carefully planned caper designed in Moscow solely to compromise Hank Dean. I'd bet everything I own that he was offered every kind of chance to hush this thing up. Both when he was in the East Berlin prison, and after he got back. But Hank Dean knew that it was just the first step into being doubled, and Hank Dean wasn't the kind of man who ends up a double agent. He'd sooner end up an alcoholic. At least a lush keeps his soul. Right, Mrs Dean? It's your husband we're talking about, remember him?' He walked away from her. 'Or maybe you'd rather not remember, after all you did to him. Because wrecking his career wasn't enough for you, was it? You had to go screwing your way through the barracks. And you were no snob. You didn't stop at the officers' club, did you. You even had to screw the little creep who came delivering the official mail. Of course you didn't realize then that Douglas had drawn you as an assignment from Moscow…'
'What?'
'And Reid-Kennedy eventually got orders to make his relationship with you as permanent as possible: a wife isn't permitted to testify against her husband, right?'
'Hank would never give me a divorce.'
'And I think we know why. He suspected the truth about Reid-Kennedy and was not going to give him that final bit of protection.'
'No,' she said.
'You think it was your good breeding, or all that old-fashioned etiquette you gleaned from those cheap novels. Douglas Reid-Kennedy took the high ground — your bed — and he didn't have to fight all the way. I'd guess that that little conversation over the coffee and
'No,' she said. 'No, no, no.'
'And I'll tell you something else that Hank Dean kept to himself…'
He paused. She must have known what was coming, for I
she lowered her head as one might if expecting a blow about the ears. 'Henry Hope is Reid-Kennedy's child.'
'He is not,' she said. 'I swear it! You say that in front of witnesses and I'll sue you for every penny you possess. I'll make you pay!'
'Yeah, well, I can't prove it, but I looked up Hank's army records to find his blood group. And Henry Hope was easy because he donates blood at the local hospital…' Mann scowled and shook his head.
'Did you tell him?' she asked. 'Did you tell Henry-Hope that?'
'No, I didn't, Mrs Dean, because it would be nicer for your son to grow up thinking that a great guy like Hank is his father than that a murderous creep like Reid-Kennedy might be. So we'll keep that to ourselves, Mrs Dean. On that you got a deal.'
'Poor Henry-Hope,' she said softly. Her voice was slurred: at last the alcohol was getting to her.
'You entertained on the boat last week,' I said. 'Who was it who came aboard on Monday?' She gave me a venomous glare.
She said, 'So he speaks, your friend. I was beginning to think he was one of those inflatable dolls they advertise in the back pages of the sex magazines.'
I passed to her the piece of paper on which I noted the dates of the pages missing from the boat's visitors book.
She scowled at it and said, 'You get a tax deduction for the days when you entertain businessmen on a boat. Douglas always made people sign, so he could claim his proper deduction. He was obsessional about that.'
'Who was it?' I said.
She scrabbled to find the spectacles tucked down the side of the armchair. Having put them on, she read the dates with studied concentration. 'I couldn't tell you,' she said. 'My memory isn't so good these days, Douglas was always ribbing me about that.'
I said, 'I'd hate you to make a mistake about how important this is to us.'
'That's right,' said Mann. He pointed a finger down to the boat moored beyond where the palm trees were whipping about in the wind. 'You got a time bomb down there, Mrs Dean. At ten thirty I'm going to have to blow the whistle on you. This place will be filled with cops, reporters and photographers, and they will all be yelling at you — right?' He looked at his watch. 'So you got just eighteen minutes to decide how you play it — and the decisions you make are going to decide whether you live out the rest of your life as a millionairess, or spend it upstate in the women's prison with a 'no parole' sticker on your file.'
She looked at Mann for a moment and then looked at her own wrist-watch just to check him out.
'Seventeen minutes,' Mann said.
'Douglas ran a legitimate business,' she said. 'You start thinking it was all mixed up with the other business and you will never unravel it.'
