I looked at him for a long time. ‘The days of the entrepreneur are over, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Now it’s the organisation man that gets the Christmas bonus and the mileage allowance. People like you are just called “heroes”, and don’t mistake it for a compliment. It just means has-beens, who’d rather have a hunch than a computer output. You are yesterday’s spy, Steve.’
(Yesterday’s Spy, page 49)
Backstory
The improbably-named Steve Champion was a successful British spy in Nazi-occupied France during World War Two, where he ran one of the few resistance networks that lasted, based in Nice, in the south of France. A 19-year-old newbie SIS agent was secretly landed from a British submarine to join the group and work undercover, eventually witnessing the arrest of Champion and other key members, who are tortured or killed.
The present day
Thirty years later, that newbie is the narrator, Charlie, who is meeting Champion for drinks in a London club. All very sociable and chatting about the old times – but from there he goes to report to his superior, Major Schlegel, an American seconded to British Intelligence. (This is the same Schlegel who we met in this novel’s predecessor, Spy Story, but this narrator, with his war spent in the French Resistance, is definitely different from the narrator of the Ipcress novels and Spy Story.) For whereas Champion left the Service, the narrator didn’t, and he has been tasked with investigating rumours which have begun to circle around his old idol.
The first half of the novel consists of a series of encounters with figures from Champion’s and Charlie’s pasts:
- Charlie travels to Wales to meet Champion’s ex-wife, Caty, and son Billy (Champion married her partly out of guilt because she was sister to Marius, the Catholic priest who was in their cell but who was eventually caught, tortured and murdered by the Nazis).
- In Champion’s London flat he joins Schlegel and Special Branch men stripping it for evidence that Champion has killed and disposed of his girlfriend, Melodie Page…
Then, traveling to the south of France, specifically Nice, location of their wartime cell, Charlie meets:
- Pina, the embittered daughter of one of the members of the cell, whose husband and two children were murdered in Algeria
- Claude l’avocat, part of the wartime cell who is revealed as having been a German spy all along, and has continued on into peacetime, now working for German Intelligence
- Serge Frankel, a passionate Jewish communist
Through this network of characters Deighton is able to explore the way wartime loyalties have evolved and changed and cost their characters very dearly. Frankel in particular has made the long journey from committed communist to avowed Jew and supporter of Israel, prompted by the vicious antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the USSR’s support of the Arabs in their wars against Israel. Now, he tells a surprised Charlie, Champion is working to supply the Arabs with a nuclear warhead. He has even accepted a military rank in the Egyptian Army; a fact apparently confirmed when Charlie travels to Geneva to meet a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat who is, in fact, a double-agent for British Intelligence.
So far, so rational but, in a confusing sequence, Charlie is ‘arrested’ by two French Security policemen who drive him to the abandoned quarry a) where the wartime cell used to hide out b) which Champion bought, along with the neighbouring house, after the war and has made his home. As they pull into the quarry, there’s an unexpected shoot-out between Pina, who was being held hostage in a quarry building, and her captors. The French ‘security’ men join in, at which point Charlie pulls his gun and shoots them. Pina and Charlie survive, hide the bodies, and beat a hasty retreat in the car. The whole thing was a set-up but why? Were they going to frame Charlie for murdering Pina? Why?
Barely has he returned Pina to her flat, than, back at his hotel, Charlie is arrested by real French police but – in the deus ex machina manoeuvre which we’ve encountered in numerous previous Deighton thrillers – an authority figure (either good old Colonel Stok or, as here, his boss Major Schlegel) intervenes to persuade the French that Charlie is wanted for the murder of Melodie Page back in London.
Hiatus in prison
What happens now is a little improbable. The Department agrees with Charlie that he will be prosecuted for Melodie’s murder and sent to prison, but in a case so badly managed that his appeal lawyer should be able to get him released. And this is what happens. He outs up with a few weeks in Wormwood Scrubs before his (frustratingly incompetent) lawyer gets him release. And then Charlie goes on the tramp, sleeping rough, hanging out with other vagrants.
Why? Well, this unconvincing charade is designed to signal to Champion that Charlie has now well and truly severed his ties with the Department. Hmmm. a) I don’t believe it, it seems a wildly elaborate and unconvincing strategy b) Champion does contact him after a week or so, but he doesn’t believe it either c) the whole agent-going-to-prison-to-prove-he-no-longer-works-for-the-Service thing was done much better by John le Carré in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold ten years earlier.
Working for Champion
So Champion picks him up in his chauffeur-driven car and says, ‘Right boyo, do you want to come and work for me?’ The narrator melodramatises this as him ‘disappearing from view’ and ‘going off the grid’ which also doesn’t make much sense because as soon as Charlie is ensconced in Champion’s base (the big house by the Tix Quarry outside Nice) he immediately starts using his days off to pop in on his old mates – Serge, Claude, the Falstaffian restaurateur Ercole and, of course, his boss and ‘control’, Major Schlegel. All in all, the opposite of disappearing.
Charlie spends his time running low-level chores for Champion, the most interesting of which is handling low-grade intelligence from a worker at the nearby French Army test range; playing with Champion’s son, Billy; and screwing the nanny with the James Bond name Topaz, who one night came to his bedroom wearing only a skimpy shift which, in James Bond fashion, fell to the floor…
It’s on one of these visits that Frankel surprises Charlie by announcing Champion is scheming to get hold of a nuke and sell it to the Arabs. Can that be right? Or is it Frankel’s anti-Arab paranoia? Either way, travelling back from Nice in the chauffeur-driven car with Champion and Billy, the car is pursued by a motorbike rider with a pillion passenger who abruptly shoots the driver, causing Champion et al to have a very high-speed crash. Charlie crawls from the wrecked vehicle, rescues Billy, then saves Champion’s life by unobstructing his windpipe and giving him the kiss of life. Who the hell did it? And why?
Few days later, and back at the mansion where the comatose Champion has been transferred, Topaz arrives in Charlie’s bedroom at dusk and offers sex but when Charlie demurs pulls a gun and keeps him under guard while lots of Arabs clump around the house. Are they kidnapping Champion? Removing precious documents or jewels or what? Into the darkened room comes an Arab and when Topaz talks to him, he opens fire with a shotgun and blasts the sexy Topaz in half, while Charlie keeps absolutely still in the blacked out room…
When things have quietened down he sneaks down to the garden where he finds Billy hiding, and drives the back way into Nice, where he deposits Billy with Pina and tells her to fly to London then travel to Wales to be with Caty.
Then Charlie continues on to Frankel’s flat, where he finds Claude l’avocat in attendance as French police deal with Frankel’s corpse. And that of the low-level contact from the Army base. More murders. By who? And why? It is here that Claude tells Charlie that although he, Claude, was a double agent within the wartime cell, it wasn’t him but Champion who betrayed them all, the betrayal which led to the arrest and death of Marius.
Finale
The ending is also confusing. Charlie finds himself summoned and flying by helicopter to the German border, there to find Schlegel interrogating two hitch-hiking hippies who are carrying detonators and ammunition across the border. After some chat they realise this is a diversion. Schlegel tells Charlie five heavy-duty superlorries unloaded a large consignment from Nice docks and are driving up the Autobahn into Germany. Is the hitch-hiker thing a ploy by Champion to distract from that? Is there a plot to carry out some kind of Arab terrorist outrage in Germany? They helicopter over to where the trucks have been pulled over by French police at the border. No. The trucks are empty.
Maybe both were ploys, two levels of distraction, to decoy away from the real scam which is happening back in Nice? Cut back to the Tix mansion which Schlegel and Charlie find full of lights and activity. Charlie creeps in, using his knowledge of the house, and discovers a secret lift in a room he was never allowed to enter. It goes down into the old mine workings. After a few scrapes, Charlie follows a tunnel which emerges into the main bowl of the old quarry to find it filled with the inflated body of an airship! Melodie Page had sent messages back to the Department on postcards with images of airships crashing in flames. Topaz, the randy nanny, had a PhD in thermo-chemistry. Lots of pieces of the puzzle start clicking together. Sort of.
In a very James Bond climax, the floodlights go on and Charlie is caught like a rat in a trap. ‘Put down the gun, Charlie.’ Champion then comes forward and, while his minions make the final preparations to the airship, explains the whole plot. They have tunnelled under and up into the French Army base stores and stolen nuclear shells (not bombs). These they are going to load into the airship which will carry them across the Med to an Arab country. ‘It is too late, Mr Bond, nothing can stop me now.’
Charlie suddenly realises Champion has been bluffing him, they have already loaded the shells and are about to take off. With sudden desperation he pushes Champion down the stairs and empties all the bullets from his gun into the petrol tanks of the engines of the airship, then runs as fast as he can back into the tunnel and up the mine workings before he hears an enormous explosion and the blast and flames follow him up the tunnel, lifting and burning him. The airship is destroyed, all the Arabs and Champion incinerated.
Epilogue and explanation
Recovering in hospital (just as the narrator of the previous novel ends up recovering in hospital) Charlie explains it all to Schlegel. Champion never even broke into the French Army store, never touched a nuke. He was going to fly to an Arab country and claim to have sold them to Egypt, which would confirm the sale. The more the French authorities denied it, the more no-one would believe them. Champion would technically have committed no crime and been free to return to France, but the Egyptians would have gained a big psychological bargaining chip with Israel.
I don’t believe a word. It just isn’t convincing, in a world and a milieu which thrives on real threat and violence, I don’t believe Champion’s plan was feasible. To put it mildly, Israel would check. And the French would devise some way of throwing Charlie in prison. All this cunning and violence has been expended on what seems like a very dumb scheme.
I think the complex of double crosses, the description of the way wartime loyalties had been compromised, the revelations of past and present betrayals, as well as the deaths of Topaz and Frankel, were meant to move the reader. But they don’t. They feel like lifeless tokens being moved about on a Monopoly board.
Deighton’s novels have many virtues – namely his understated humour and technical expertise – but genuine tension and psychological depth are not among them.
I opened the car door, and began to get out. I said, ‘I’ve no inclination for all this play-acting, late-night TV spy stuff.’ (p.140)
Books & Boots 