I should have obeyed orders. I didn’t, and what happened subsequently was all my fault. I don’t mean that I could have influenced events, it was far too late for that, but I could have protected myself from the horror of it.
(Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy, page 183)
All Deighton’s narrators wear glasses, presumably a jokey reference to the author’s own trademark specs. The third of his 1970s spy novels, Twinkle features another first-person narrator, unnamed but no relative of the Ipcress narrator, who is working closely with loudmouth American Intelligence officer, Major Mann (a clone of loudmouth American Intelligence officer Colonel Schlegel, from the previous novels).
Be warned: this plot is long and convoluted and deeply confusing.
In the desert of southern Algeria, the pair along with their local guide and old Algeria hand Percy Dempsey, rendezvous with a Russian defector – scientist Professor Andrei Bekuv, an expert in masers (?) and a member of the secretive 1924 Club (supposedly set up to research the possibility of extra-terrestrial life). To remind us we are in a spy novel a Russian helicopter gunship pursues them and blows up the car Bekuv had been driving up until he transferred to the one with the narrator and American, who all escape unscathed. Phew.
Cocktails in New York
They take Bekuv to New York, where the English and the American agent (who are paired for the duration of the novel) chaperone and guard the defector. There is a lengthy cocktail party at Tony Lowak’s in which a room is set aside for serious backgammon playing, and where the narrator meets Red Bancroft, a dazzlingly beautiful brunette and international backgammon champion (‘So pleased to meet you, Mr Bond’). In its relaxed social observation, it’s reminiscent of the long and urbane dinner party scene in Spy Story. Just in case we thought we were in a Kingsley Amis or maybe David Lodge novel, the scene ends in violence as the narrator, Red and Bekuv are held up in the foyer by three armed men. Fortunately, they’re rescued by one of the other party guests with a handy gun, who shoots the muggers. Was it a ‘normal’ crime, or were they KGB assassins waiting for Bekuv?
More interrogating Bekuv – our guys want to find out where security leaks from US science are coming from – but he refuses to talk without his wife, left behind in Russia. The narrator goes to meet the slippery CIA operative Gerry Hart and, during a tricksy conversation, discovers that Bekuv’s wife is already here. After some horse-trading between agencies, they are reunited.
Christmas in the Catskills
Mann decides he must take the Bekuvs, his own wife, the narrator and Red somewhere safe, so they drive to an obscure resort in upstate New York for Christmas. There’s more affable low-key banter for a score of pages until the Russians want to go to the local church for Midnight Mass when, caught in the exiting crowd, they are attacked by someone with a flick knife who badly wounds Bekuv’s wife.
But not before she’s passed on to them that Bekuv’s contact in the 1924 Club was one Henry (Hank) Dean. Turns out, in the kind of coincidence that only happens in fiction, that this Hank was a good friend of Mann’s – they grew up in the same town, Hank had a promising career as a baseball player, cut short, transferred to the military then CIA career. This ended badly in Berlin, after which he turned to drink and retired to a shabby old house in France.
Hank in France
Which is where the narrator and Mann promptly fly to confront him. After drinking and reminiscing with Hank they find him in the middle of the night trying to burn large amounts of foreign currency. He’s arrested by the French police. Either the currency is payment for betraying his country, or someone is framing him to make it look like he’s betraying his country. He disappears from the narrative and we never find out what happens to him.
Without stopping to clarify just what this retired drunk could be selling, our heroes quiz the locals and get a list of registration numbers of the cars which used to come visiting Hank. They trace the most persistent caller to a Frenchman in a slum part of Paris. Surprisingly, it’s Hank’s son, in his twenties. In a completely unconvincing scene, his much older fiancée reveals to the son that Hank’s first wife – i.e. the son’s mother – called round just yesterday on a trip from America, leaving a number at a Paris hotel. Coincidentally, our pair receive a CIA coded message that this woman and her husband, one Douglas Reid-Kennedy, had been staying in Ireland, near Drogheda, and that this location was the source of the leaks from the 1924 Club. Aha.
Buried in Ireland
The duo fly to Dublin, rendezvous with local police and motor out to the farm, on the face of it owned by a local family but leased out to a consortium of German investors, where Douglas Reid-Kennedy was reported to be based. It has been completely abandoned. The fire is warm where the inhabitants have tried to burn all incriminating papers. But still in it is a wodge of half-melted microfilms containing US scientific secrets. The narrator suddenly realises the dogs howling outside in the rain are howling at the graves of the family who own it. They have been murdered and buried.
Death on the yacht
The duo fly on to Miami, to the luxury home of Mr and Mrs Reid-Kennedy ie Hank’s ex-wife and the man she fell for. In a confusing scene the wife tells a long complex scenario about being married to Hank and lonely in Berlin and ‘comforted’ by Doug who inherited a successful electronics company from his dad, about Hank being kidnapped by the East Germans and held for ransom until Doug promised to spy for them. But Major Mann counters with an anti-account which matches the first one for facts but with a completely different interpretation of who promised to become a spy for the communists.
So where is Doug, anyway? Doug is dead in the luxury yacht in the dock at the bottom of the luxury lawn, his head blown off by a powerful semi-automatic gun. While the narrator checks the crime scene, Mann interrogates Mrs R-K. I think the idea is that she killed him, possibly because she, Mrs R-K, is the Soviet spy; certainly Mann threatens her with life in prison. She incriminates Gerry Hart, the smooth Washington operator we met earlier.
Meet the senator
Cut to the duo in the luxury office of a US Senator who chairs a high-powered Senate Committee on Science. They try to persuade him Gerry Hart is a KGB spy but he throws them out on their asses. News comes through that Bekuv has tried to commit suicide. Mann has been acting without consulting the English narrator because, as he now reveals, the woman he’s fallen head over heels in love with, Red Bancroft, is herself a high-ranking CIA operative.
Mann has separated the Russian couple, Bekuv in a safe house, his wife taken to a separate location and supervised by Red. The narrator promises Mann to forget about Red and fly back to Miami to continue the investigation. He completely disobeys (see quote above) and drives to the safe house containing Red and Mrs Bekuv to find out what the hell is going on.
My lesbian lover
When the narrator arrives at the safe house in the middle of nowhere, guarded by numerous CIA security heavies, and is frisked and goes into the house, he hears cries from upstairs, runs up and discovers – his one true love on her knees pleasuring the naked Mrs Bekuv sprawled across the bed. Hmmm. Didn’t expect that. Not only is his love for Red crushed at source, but the entire investigation is thrown into a new light.
Red follows him downstairs (now wearing a kimono) and explains that all of the duo’s traipsing around Europe and Florida was a red herring, purely to distract from Red and Mrs Bekuva being alone together long enough for Red to seduce her. By doing so she has confirmed that Mrs B is a hard core KGB agent and Gerry Hart is also a KGB agent. Hence his ability to swing it, back before Christmas, for Mrs to come out to join her husband. Hence the way – which everybody noticed – that as soon as she arrived, Mrs B took the whip hand over her husband: the Soviets let her leave and come to his side in order to muzzle and control him.
Shootout at the airport
Suddenly the narrator is called to airport where Hart has taken the senator hostage and is insisting on the Bekuvs joining him on a flight to Algeria. Mann is there supervising the CIA side, as the Bekuvs arrive and are handed over to Hart, who makes his way across the airfield with a gun in the Senator’s side. Of course it all goes wrong, with a rooftop sniper letting off a shot which misses and, in the ensuing chaos a) Mann makes a run for it and is shot in the head b) the narrator fires but misses everything c) Hart fires and shoots the Senator in half d) Mrs Bekuv seizes the gun and shoots Hart. Mrs and Mrs Bekuv scramble up the steps into the plane which takes off overhead. Ooops.
Back to the desert
A patched-up Mann and narrator fly back to Algiers where they hook up with pukka old Brit Percy Dempsey, who we met in the opening chapter. The Air Algeria flight was forced to refuel in London, which has given our guys the time to fly direct to Algiers and be ahead of them. Percy has hired a car and they wait at the airport. The baddies have their own people there, who smuggle them out the back way and into a LandRover which sets off at speed into the desert, pursued by our team.
A high-speed chase through the desert, tricky slippery driving at a hundred miles an hour, leads to the inevitable end of all high-speed chases i.e. they turn a corner and head straight into a flock of sheep blocking the road, take evasive action, crash against rocks, lose their wheels, hurtle down a precipice, mangled metal, breaking glass, juddering to a halt, moans of pain, sound of petrol gurgling etc.
More chase
The narrator comes round in an Arab hospital where he finds all of them have survived and been patched up. As soon as Mann is conscious he insists on hiring another car and setting off in pursuit. They finally reach the point where the Bekuv team turned off into the desert and follow their tracks till they are intercepted by armed guards just before reaching a vast camp in the middle of nowhere. It’s a former Roman fort which has been reinforced and modified and is bristling with aerials and antennae.
The narrator meets and talks with Bekuv: he realises Bekuv did a deal with the Soviet authorities: he got his money to build a vast centre capable of sending and receiving signals to outer space (in pursuit of Bekuv’s cranky belief that he can contact alien civilisations) and in return Bekuv promised to use the resources created for him to intercept signals from all the West and NATO’s spy satellites. That’s where the leaked science information was leaking from – not a human contact: the entire chase to the south of France, Paris and Miami, all of it with its trail of human wreckage seems irrelevant.
Ends with a bang
The narrator points out that, after the débâcle at Washington airport, the Russians will want to close down the centre, in fact to obliterate Bekuv and all his activities. Bekuv refuses to believe him. In a final rather strained betrayal, Red persuades Mrs Bekuv to pretend to her husband that she, Red, is dead, murdered on his orders. While they’re having a big scene in the main square of the compound the narrator and Red – who now have only sad, non-lover feelings for each other – slip out a back window and catch up with Mann and Percy, who are trudging over the sand back towards the main trans-Sahara Highway.
In the last sentences of the novel they see a flash of light and then hear the bang – as the narrator expected, a Soviet plane has vapourised the tracking centre, taking Professor and Mrs Bekuv along with it.
Comment
For once a Deighton novel doesn’t end with a chuckle. Improbable and tangled though the plot has been, the tone has been far more business-like, sober and hard than in the previous books. The appearance of a lesbian sex scene might be interesting to historians of LGBT themes in literature, or novels. But the entire ‘love story’ between Red and the narrator, like almost all the human relationships in the text, are thin as cardboard.
Looking back I don’t understand lots of things which happened and don’t know what became of all kinds of supporting characters, such as Mrs Reid-Kennedy, or Hank or his son in Paris, in the headlong rush to get to the final pages. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But then, why care about any of it?
Books & Boots 