for the major roles. But for changes over a long period of time character notes would not be enough. So for the major characters in the Bernard Samson series I used real people as my reference. I don’t mean that each is an exact portrait of someone I know; each is an assembly of several people I know, or ones I met a few times. The Germans had to be German in thought and action; their clothes and mannerisms, their shape and syntax are rooted in observations. But in appearance, both the avuncular Frank Harrington and formal Bret Rensselaer are slightly aged versions of old friends. Werner is a fondly recalled business partner of long-ago and Lisl Hennig’s hurried judgment and rather oblique reasoning is sometimes that of my dear Irish mother. As for George Kosinski, his characterization was simple. At grammar school, at art school and again at college I had many cherished Polish friends. George was the unforgettable father of one of them. The origin of that modest charmer Dicky Cruyer and his arriviste nature is best left unaccounted for. Fiona and Gloria are two contrasting facets of my wife, Ysabele. But these are also modified and changed by the addition of other observations. Along with passing time, plot development brings stresses and strains and changes in character so that each person soon became quite different to the original description. Everything changes as writing continues, as Napoleon is said to have declared about battle. I didn’t mean to fall in love with the character of Gloria. I fought against it every step of the way. I gave her plenty of faults and failings but it was no use, she came through every test with a radiant glow. I loved Fiona too; she has the sophistication, gravitas and intellect that Bernard respects so much. But Gloria wears my wife’s clothes – that fur hat and brown suede overcoat from Paris – and flaunts them with youthful abandon. Who can resist her? And yet these were not my characterizations. Like everyone and everything in the stories, each was seen through the eyes of Bernard Samson, whose sceptical bite is the essence of the whole series.
It wasn’t just the characters; I also kept a file index for the places in the story. As with the people, photographs and my own sketches supplemented the on-going material. The Hennig Hotel goes through several changes in the Samson years and its origin, as family residence in the early years of the 20th century, was described in Winter. The furniture and furnishings of the Berlin home and office of Frank Harrington had pages of notes devoted to them. So did Dicky Cruyer’s home, changing frequently to the dictates of fashion, and more records were kept describing the offices and safe houses used by the SIS in London.
One reader told me that the Bernard Samson books were a social chronicle of the final years of the communist empire seen from London, Berlin and Warsaw. I had never thought of them in that way and that certainly was never my primary intention. Only here and there have I touched upon the historical background. I didn’t want the books to become a political record so did not refer to such events as the travels and speeches of people such as President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev, all of whom played a vital part in the eventual fall of Russia’s communist empire, and thus in the lives of my characters.
But history cannot be denied and finally the rumour mills proved right. The daily sequence of hints and tips we all received constantly, from both sides, came to fruition step by step. With no warning from the expensive intelligence organizations of the West, the Wall went down as it had gone up; in a muddled scramble of incompetence and confusion. But with that fine sense of proportion with which all apparatchiks are equipped, the Stasi, the Grepo, the East German politicians and all those who had manned the murder machines of the DDR got their pensions guaranteed in Western marks. In England and America people winked at me and said I’d forecast the most unexpected development. But few Germans hailed me as a prophet; they had seen what was coming and those who were surprised said I was lucky.
Just as with the collapse of communism in Poland, Germany’s intellectuals and academics who had energetically supported the repressive regime to the very end, were the first to declare themselves the victors in a struggle for freedom and democracy. And because substantial numbers of these people spoke English, the news reporters and historians who flooded in to tell the story of freedom’s triumph gave them the role of heroes. The story of the Church, its valour, sacrifices and triumphs, was belittled by these belligerent secularists.
It was Russia’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, (who remained a dedicated communist) who had the last word on the subject; ‘If there is one man responsible for the collapse of communism it is Pope John Paul II.’
Len Deighton, 2011
1
January 1988. The Moscow-Paris express train
A bloated vampire moon drained all life and colour from the world. The snow-covered land came speeding past the train. It was grey and ill-defined, marked only by a few livid cottages and limitless black forest grizzled with snow. No roads; the railway did not follow any road, it cut through the land like a knife. I had seen enough of this cheerless country. I tugged the window-blind down, grabbing at a brass rubbish bin to keep my balance as the clattering train argued with a badly maintained section of track.
Sometimes, at night, people also succumbed. Jim Prettyman’s complexion, which had always been pale, was ashen under the dim overhead light. Inert on the top berth, a rosary dangling from his white-skinned hand; on the other a gold wedding ring and a massive gold Rolex wrist-watch indicating nine-thirty in the morning. It wasn’t nine-thirty here for us. His watch had stopped. Or perhaps that was the right time in Moscow. We were a long way from Moscow, and for us it was still night.
Jim stirred, as if my stare had disturbed his sleep. But his eyelids didn’t move. He made a noise; a deep breath and then a stifled groan that ended in a subdued nasal snort as he snatched his arm down under the blanket and resumed his sleep. Jim was tough and wiry but his appearance had never been athletic. Now his white face, with the vestigial eyebrows, made him look like a corpse prettified and readied for the relatives.
Jim had picked up some kind of infection of the liver, or maybe it was the kidneys. The Russian hospital doctors said they could treat it, but, since their diagnosis varied from day to day according to what they were drinking with lunch, no one believed them. Some doctor the American embassy had on call wouldn’t give a diagnosis; he just advised that Jim shouldn’t be subjected to a plane trip. Rather than have him face any more treatment by Moscow’s medics, Jim’s American wife had wired the money for him to be evacuated by train and attended by a nurse. Jim’s wife was a woman with considerable influence. She had arranged that her father in the State Department sent a night-action fax to make sure the embassy people jumped to it. She wasn’t with us; she had to host a Washington dinner party for her father.
Although the paperwork for Jim’s passage was being handled by the Americans, someone in London Central ordered that I should accompany him as far as Berlin. I was in Moscow at the time, and their message said it simply meant delaying my return by twenty-four hours. But going from Moscow to West Berlin by air was quite different to doing the same trip by train. By train I was going to encounter whole armies of nosy customs officials, security men and frontier police. Jim had a US passport nowadays, the nurse was Canadian and I was stuck with the German passport that I had used for my entry. With this cosmopolitan party I would have to cross Poland, and then travel across a large section of the German Democratic Republic, before getting to anywhere I could call home. Perhaps the people in London didn’t appreciate that. There was sometimes good reason to think pen-pushers in the Foreign Office in Whitehall were still using nineteenth-century maps.
I was looking at Jim, trying to decide how ill he really was, when there came a sudden sound, like a shovelful of heavy mud hitting a wall. The compartment rocked slightly. With no lessening of speed, the express thudded the air and sped between some empty loading platforms, leaving behind no more than an echoed gasp and a whiff of burned diesel. The train was packed. You could feel the weight of it as it swayed, and hear the relentless pounding of the bogies. The compartments of the wagon-lit had been booked for weeks. The cheaper coach seats were all filled and there were people sleeping amid the litter on the floor and propped between baggage
