Free Triple by Ken Follett Page A

you staying?"
    'The Alfa, opposite the raflway station."
    Pfaffer saw him to the door. "Enjoy Luxembourg."
    "I'll do my best," Dickstein said, and shook his hand.
    Tle memory thing was a trick. Dickstein had picked it up as a small child,
    sitting with his grandfather in a smelly room over a pie shop in the Mile
    End Road, struggling to recognize the strange characters of the Hebrew
    alphabet. The idea was to isolate one unique feature of the shape to be
    remembered and ignore everything else. Dickstein had done that with the
    faces of the Euratom staff.
    He waited outside the Jean-Monnet building in the late afternoon, watching
    people leave for home. Some of them interested him more than others.
    Secretaries, messengers and coffee-makers were no use to him, nor were
    senior administrators. He wanted the people in between: computer pro-
    grammers, office managers, heads of small departments, personal assistants
    and assistant chiefs. He had given names
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TRIPLE .
    to the likeliest ones, names which reminded him of their memorable
    feature: Diamante, Stiffcollar, Tony Curtis, Nonose, Snowhead, Zapata,
    Fatbum.
    Diamante was a plump woman in her late thirties without a wedding ring.
    Her name came from the crystal glitter on the rims of her spectacles.
    Dickstein followed her to the car park, where she squeezed herself into
    the driving seat of a white Fiat 500. Dickstein!s rented Peugeot was
    parked nearby.
    She crossed the Pont-Adolphe, driving badly but slowly, and went about
    fifteen kilometers southeast, finishing. up at a small village called
    Mondorf-les-Bains. She parked in the cobbled yard of a square
    Luxembourgeois house with a nailstudded door. She let herself in with a
    key.
    The village was a tourist attraction, with thermal springs. Dickstein
    slung a camera around his neck and wandered about, passing Diamante's
    house several times. On one pass he saw, through a window, Diamante
    serving a meal to an old woman.
    The baby Fiat stayed outside the house until after midnight, when
    Dickstein left.
    She had been a poor choice. She was a spinster living with ter elderly
    mother, neither -rich nor poor-the house was probably the mothees--and
    apparently without vices. If Dickstein had been a different kind of man
    he might have seduced her, but otherwise there was no way to get at her.
    He went back to his hotel disappointed and frustrated-unreasonably so,
    for he had made the best guess he could on the Information he bad.
    Nevertheless he felt he had spent a day skirting the problem and he was
    impatient to get to grips with it so he could stop worrying vaguely and
    start worrying specifically.
    He spent three more davs getting nowhere. He drew blanks with Zapata,
    Fatburn and Tony Curtis.
    But Stiffcollar was perfect.
    He was about Dickstein's age, a slim, elegant man in a dark blue suit,
    plain blue tie, and white shirt with starched collar. His dark hair, a
    little longer than was usual for a man of his age, was graying over the
    ears. He wore handmade shoes.
    He walked from the office across the Alzette River and uphill into the
    old town. He went down a narrow cobbled
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Ken Folleff
    street and entered an old terraced house. Two minutes later a light went on
    in an attic window.
    Dickstein hung around for two hours.
    -When Stiffcollar came out he was wearing close-fitting light trousers and
    an orange scarf around his neck. His hair was combed forward, making him
    look younger, and his walk was jaunty.
    Dickstein followed him to the Rue Dicks, where he ducked into an unlit
    doorway and disappeared. Dickstein stopped outside. The door was open but
    there was nothing to indicate what might be inside. A bare flight of stairs
    went down. After a moment, Dickstein heard faint music.
    Two young men in matching yellow jeans passed him and went in. One of them
    grinned back at him and said, 'Tes, this is the place." Dickstein followed
    them down the stairs.
    It was an ordinary-looking nightclub with tables and