Spy hook: a novel by Len Deighton

murmurs of approval before pouring some coffee for himself. Then he went and sat down behind the big rosewood table that he used as his desk before he tasted the coffee appreciatively. “Damn good!” he pronounced and drank some more. “Pour yourself a cup,” he said when he was quite sure it was okay I took one of the warmed cups, poured some for myself and added cream. It always came with cream, even though Dicky drank his coffee black. I often wondered why. For a moment we drank our coffee in silence. I had the feeling that Dicky needed five minutes to recover from his meeting.
    “He’s become an absolute despot lately,” said Dicky at, last. Having devoured a large cup of coffee he took a small cigar from his pocket, lit it and blew smoke. “I wish I could make him understand that it’s not like running-his law firm. I can’t get a book down from the shelf and read the answers to him.” “He’ll get the hang of it,” I said.
    “In time, he will,” agreed Dicky. “But by then I’ll be old and grey.” That might be quite a long time, for Dicky was young and fit and two years my junior. He flicked ash into the big cutglass ashtray on his desk and kept looking at the carpet as if lost in thought.
    I pulled my paper-work from its cardboard folder and said, “Do you want to run through this stuff?” I brandished it at him but he continued to stare at the carpet.
    “He’s talking about vertical reorganization.”
    I said, “What’s that?”
    Dicky, short-listed for the Stalin Prize in office politics, said, “Jesus Christ, Bernard. Vertical planning! Dividing the German Desk up into groups region by region. He told me that I’d have Berlin, as if that would make me overjoyed. Berlin! With other desks for Bonn and Hamburg and so on. A separate unit would liaise with the Americans in Munich. Can you imagine it!”
    “That idea has been kicking around for ages,” I said. I began to sort out the work I’d brought for him. I knew that getting him to look at it would be difficult in his present agitated mood, so I put the papers that required a signature on top. There were five of them.
    It’s ridiculous!” said Dicky so loudly that his secretary looked in through the door to see if everything was all right. She was a new secretary or she would have made herself scarce when there was a chance of encountering Dicky’s little tantrums. “It will happen sooner or later I suppose,” I said. I got my pen out so that Dicky could sign while he talked about something else. Sometimes it was easier like that.
    “You’d heard about it before?” said Dicky incredulously, suddenly realizing what I’d said.
    “Oh, yes. A year or more ago but it had some other name then.”
    “Ye gods, Bernard! I wish you’d told me.”
    I put the papers on his desk and gave him the ballpoint pen and watched him sign his name. I hadn’t heard of the vertical planning scheme before, of course, but guessed that the Deputy had simply invented something that would goad Dicky into more energetic action, and I thought it better not to let the old boy down. “And these you should look at,’ I said, indicating the most important ones.
    “You’ll have to go and see Frank,” he said as he signed the final one and plucked at the corners of the rest of the stuff to see if anything looked interesting enough to read.
    “Okay,” I said. He looked up at me. He’d expected me to object to a trip to Berlin but he’d caught me at a good time. It was a month or more since I’d been to Berlin and there were reasons both official and social for a trip there. “And what do I tell Frank?” I wanted to get it clear because we had this absurd system in which Dicky and Frank Harrington - the Berlin “resident” and as old as Methuselah - had equal authority. He looked up from the carpet and said, “I don’t want to rub Frank up the wrong way. It’s not up to me to tell him how to run his Berlin Field Unit. Frank knows more about the