“Do I have a choice?”
“I’m afraid you don’t.”
“What are you, five or six?”
“MI5, thank you, kindly. Six thinks you’re radioactive, wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”
Martin could see three other men in trench coats closing in on him as he limped behind the young man across the arrival hall and up a flight of steps to a balcony overlooking the hall. Peaches-and-cream stopped before an opaque glass door with the word “Perishables” stencilled on it. He rapped on the glass twice with his knuckles, opened the door and politely stepped aside. Inside, a middle-aged woman dressed in a man’s pinstriped suit and tie was busy calling up file folders on a computer terminal. Without looking up, she inclined her head toward an inner door with the words “Supervisor, Perishables” stencilled on the glass. In the inner office, Martin discovered a black man with a shaven head studying the baggage carousels below through the slats of a partly closed venetian blind. The black man swiveled around in his seat and sank back into it. “I’ll admit it, you don’t look like your average serial killer to me,” he said in a soft purr.
“What does an average serial killer look like?”
“Glassy stare as he avoids your eye, bitten finger nails, mouth drooping open, saliva drooling down the stubble of his chin. Bela Lugosi sort of role.”
“Are you a cop or a movie critic?”
Snickering at Martin’s question, the Supervisor, Perishables began reading from a yellowing index card. “Last trace we had on you, you were a bloke with two incarnations. In the first, you were Pippen, Dante, an Irishman who declined to help us with our inquiries after the IRA blew open a bus in central London. In the second, you were Dittmann, Lincoln, an American arms merchant peddling his wares to the highest bidder in the Triple Border area of Latin America.”
Martin said, “Case of mistaken identity. You’re confusing me with the antiheroes of B films.”
“Don’t think we are,” the Supervisor, Perishables allowed. He arched his brows and took a long look at Martin, who was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “If we had chairs, I’d invite you to rest your arse on one of them. Sorry ‘bout that.”
“Been sitting from Tel Aviv to here,” Martin said. “Glad to stretch my legs.”
“Yes, well, in Israel you were passing yourself off as Martin Odum, a ruck of a private detective working out of the New York borough of”—he checked his file card—“Brooklyn. That’s quite inventive, actually. Some nonsense about hunting for a missing husband so his wife could get a religious divorce. It goes without saying, knowing your track record, neither our antenna in Israel nor our Perishables division here in London swallowed the cover story. So what are you hawking this time round, Mr. Dittmann? Used one-owner Kalashnikovs? That Ukrainian-manufactured passive radar system they say can detect Stealth aircraft at five hundred miles distance? Nerve gas masquerading as talcum powder? Seed stock for biological agents that cause cholera or camelpox?”
“None of the above.” Martin smiled innocently. “Search me.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” He touched a button on a console. Martin could hear a buzzer wheeze in the outer office. The young man with the peaches-and-cream complexion and the woman who had been working on the computer terminal entered the room. “Would you be so kind as to give us the key to your valise, Mr. Dittmann,” the woman asked, “and then disrobe.” The black man came around the desk. Martin could see he was the kind who worked out at a gym often enough to hope the man who was supposed to help the police with their inquiries would resist.
Martin glanced at the woman. “I’m the timid type,” he remarked.
“Nothing you ’ave, guv’nor, she ’asn’t seen,” snapped peaches-and-cream in a mock cockney accent.
The two men concentrated on Martin, stripping him to the skin and going over every square inch of his three piece suit, underwear and socks. The Supervisor, Perishables paid particular attention to his shoes, inserting them one at a time into a contraption that projected an X-ray image of the shoe onto a glass plate. The woman emptied the contents of the valise onto the desk and began examining each item. Toothpaste was squeezed out of its tube into a plastic container that had Chinese writing on the side. Cold capsules were split open and inspected. The small container of shaving cream was emptied and then cut in half with a hacksaw. Standing in the middle of the room, stark naked, Martin tried to imagine the anti-British joke that Stella would concoct out of the episode, but he couldn’t come up with a punch line. Stella was surely right when she said he didn’t have a sense of humor. “I suppose you are going to compensate me for property destroyed,” he ventured as he started to pull on his clothing.
The Supervisor, Perishables took the question seriously. “You go ahead and replace the items in question and send us the bill,” he said. “If you address it to Heathrow, Perishables, it should get here, shouldn’t it, lads and ladies? Everyone knows who we are. Mind if I ask how long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”
“No. Ask.”
Supervisor, Perishables didn’t crack a smile. “How long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”
“My name is Odum. Martin Odum. I’m in Britain to tell anti-English jokes that will spread across the country like wildfire and take people’s minds off the drudgery of day-to-day life. I plan to stay as long as folks keep laughing.”
“He’s certainly original,” the black man told his associates.
Peaches-and-cream accompanied Martin down to the arrival hall. “No hurt feelings, I hope, gov’nor,” he said, falling back into his phony cockney accent and trying to sound ironic.
Following the signs leading to the underground, Martin quickly spotted the two men who were following him, one about fifteen paces behind, the other ten paces behind the first. What gave them away was their habit of concentrating on the windows of the boutiques every time he turned in their direction. As Martin reached the escalator down to the train level, the first man peeled away, the second closed the gap and a third hove into view behind him. The resources they were devoting to keep track of Lincoln Dittmann made Martin feel important; it had been a long time since anyone thought he was interesting enough to lay on a staggered tail. As always in situations like this, Martin was more preoccupied with the agents he didn’t see than the ones he was meant to spot. He took the Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and the escalator to the street, then leaned against the side of a kiosk to give his game leg a rest. After awhile he strolled toward Tottenham Court Road, stopping at a chemist shop to buy toothpaste and shaving cream, eventually at a pub with a neon sign sizzling over the door that brought back memories of the Beirut waterfront and Dante’s Alawite prostitute named Djamillah. He settled onto a stool at the dimly-lit end of the bar and sipped at his half pint of lager until half of it was down the hatch. Opening his valise, he slipped the packet of false identity papers into the white silk bandanna, then mopped his brow with it and stuffed it into the pocket of his suit jacket. Hefting his small valise onto the bar, folding his Burberry across it, he asked the bartender to keep an eye on his things while he used the loo in the back. Martin didn’t even bother checking the tails, two outside in the street, one at a corner table in the front of the pub; they were all young, and young meant green, so they would fall for the oldest trick on the books: They would keep their eyes glued to the half consumed glass of lager and the valise with the raincoat on it, and wait for him to return. Depending on their relationship with the Supervisor, Perishables, they might or might not report that Martin had gone missing when he failed to come back.
Martin remembered this particular men’s lavatory from a stint in London a lifetime ago. He’d been on his way to the Soviet Union and stopped off for a briefing from MI6’s East European desk. What cover had he been using then? It must have been the original Martin Odum legend because Dittmann and Pippen came later, or so it seemed to him. In a remote corner of a lobe of his brain he had filed away one of those tradecraft details that field hands collected as if they were rare stamps: This particular lavatory had a fire door that was locked, but could be opened in an emergency by breaking a glass and removing the key hanging on a hook behind it. To Martin’s way of thinking, this clearly qualified as an emergency. He found the glass and retrieved the key and opened the fire door. Moments later he found himself in a narrow passage that gave onto a side street and, as luck would have it, a taxi stand.