Discovering that this difficult German shared his taste for growing cactus came as a revelation to Sir Sydney Ryden who was a well-known member of the Cactus and Succulent Society of Great Britain.
‘As a general rule,’ Sir Sydney was saying, his coffee neglected, ‘it is common enough to find flowers larger than the plant, with the exception perhaps of Mammillaria and Rhipsalis. If you had seen my Echinocactus tabularis with three flowers-each one of them larger than the plant itself-my goodness, I think you would have been amazed.’ Sir Sydney slapped the arm of his leather chair hard enough to have a member across the room look up from his newspaper.
‘Mealy bug is the worst,’ said the German. ‘The only thing that will kill it is paraffin, but often I have found that the plant dies too.’
‘I never resort to paraffin,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘As soon as you see those little grey fluffy specks, get them off with a pin. I’d rather cut away a large piece of the plant than put paraffin on it.’
‘That is most interesting,’ said the German. ‘I shall remember too your advice concerning seeds.’
‘Yes, it’s not difficult at all. Wait until the flower stem has completely died before removing the seeds, of course. The Mammillaria seeds are in pods; keep them all until the following spring and don’t sow before late April unless you can be sure the temperature won’t drop below sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit.’
‘I shall try it,’ said the German.
‘It’s a damned pity that you can’t spare the time to come down to my place in the country.’
‘Next time, perhaps.’
‘Excellent.’
‘I only wish that there was something I could do for you in return, Sir Sydney.’
A sudden thought struck the DG. ‘Well, perhaps there is, my dear chap. This is a top-secret matter, but I want to check up on the likelihood of a young fellow working for the London branch of a Hamburg bank being able to get something from their central computer. As I say, it’s top secret. It would have to be a very discreet inquiry.’
‘That’s a simple matter, Sir Sydney,’ said the BND man. ‘No need to put it through my department at all. I’ll handle it personally. Tomorrow I’ll be in Bonn lunching with my wife and an old friend who runs one of our very best private security companies. He knows all about German banks.’
‘Excellent,’ said Sir Sydney Ryden. ‘I’d rather not have it made official. I’ll give you the details.’
The German took out his pocket diary and turned the pages to find the following day’s entry: Wednesday, July 18. He wrote ‘retention inquiry Sir SR’ under the name of his luncheon companion-Willi Kleiber.
25
All the efforts of British Secret Intelligence Service employees in the Los Angeles area to erase Paul Bock’s message from Charles Stein’s answering machine had come to nothing. The machine itself, manufactured by a small factory in San Diego, was advertised as the most reliable domestic machine on the market. One aspect of this reliability, upon which the copywriter expended much care, was the impossibility of accidental erasure of any incoming message. The ‘Executive Type II’ even had an erase head that could be unplugged and locked away elsewhere. It was a facility that appealed to Charles Stein, who believed his son Billy only too likely to erase vital messages accidentally. As for the attempt to get a field agent posing as a telephone repairman into the Stein residence, this too was doomed to failure. Stein’s housekeeper had long since discovered that the best way to live in peace with her employer was to take his instructions literally. So when a young man, bedecked with tweezers, pliers and reels of wire, spoke to her over the voice box at the front entrance, she told him that he could not come in. He told her that her telephone was not working properly and, when she proved indifferent to this, insisted that the fault was going to affect all the phones in Cresta Ridge Drive. ‘You’ll have to come back some other day,’ she told him. Charles Stein had said let no one in the house, and that is exactly what she intended to do. When the bogus telephone man persisted, she threatened to call the telephone company and complain of his behaviour. It was at that stage of the operation that all attempts to interfere with the answering machine were abandoned.
Charles Stein arrived home at eleven a.m. He was in a bad mood and his housekeeper did not ask him about anything except what he would like to eat. It was only after she served his soup that Stein confided to her that he had been arrested for drunken driving by the California Highway Patrol while moving decorously along the number two lane of the Harbor Freeway at no more than forty miles an hour.
The housekeeper nodded and remained silent except for some sympathetic noises that semanticists call ‘purr sounds’.
‘Me drunk!’ said Stein indignantly.
‘Did they put you on the breathalyzer?’
‘And it registered nothing. I’d had only two glasses of white wine with an old pal. You know me, Mrs Svenson, did you ever see me drunk? I practically never touch hard liquor. I don’t even like the taste of it any more.’
‘And they said you were speeding?’
‘They said going at a careful forty miles an hour is the sure sign of a drunk, that’s what they said.’
The housekeeper made some more tutting sounds.
‘Erratic driving, unsafe lane change… took me down to the county jail near Union Station… how do you like that?’
‘It’s terrible, Mr Stein.’
‘I demanded a blood test. I know the law. I demanded a blood test. They said they couldn’t get the damned police doctor. Maybe he’s drunk too, I told them. Finally the new shift came on, and the watch commander had me released.’ Stein looked at his housekeeper and shook his head. ‘I’m mad, Mrs Svenson. I’m telling you, I’m really sore about the way I’ve been treated.’
‘Eat your meal, Mr Stein,’ she said. ‘Try and forget the whole thing.’
Stein tore his bread roll to pieces and began to eat it with his soup.
‘Those CHP guys can never admit they’re wrong, you know,’ Stein told his housekeeper. ‘They held me overnight, threatening me with all kinds of driving charges. Then, this morning, they released me. Big deal. I go to jail for doing nothing and they’re kind enough to release me.’ He finished his soup in silence. ‘Where’s Billy?’ he said as he pushed the plate away. Stein always pushed empty plates away. He needed a space on the table in front of him; he found plates and glasses-especially empty ones-constricting.
‘Gone down to the boat,’ said the housekeeper.
‘Again?’
‘He’s practising for the race next month. It’s the championship. You know that, Mr Stein. Billy never misses that.’
Stein looked up, realizing that Billy Stein had converted another female to his cause, whatever that might be. ‘Time that kid got a job,’ said Stein.
‘I’ll get you the rest of your lunch,’ said the housekeeper.
Stein soon finished the grilled lamb chops and hashed brown potatoes which his housekeeper had calculated would provide the fastest satisfactory meal, and thus the fastest way to return her employer to his usual calm demeanour. But Stein had pushed aside the fried potatoes, choosing instead to eat the grilled tomato flavoured with some fragments of basil from the garden. But now his resolution weakened as he recalled the indignity of being handcuffed, stripped, searched, photographed and fingerprinted. He put the potatoes into his mouth with nervous rapidity. ‘And then tossed into the drunk tank like a common criminal.’