Free Yesterday's Spy by Len Deighton Page A

clipping.’
    â€˜About Claude?’
    â€˜He got a medal – an iron cross or something – he was working for the German police all the time. His real name is Claude Winkler, or some name like that. His mother was French, they say. He betrayed Marius and old Madame Baroni and poor Steve Champion, too.’
    I drank my whisky. ‘All that time and he was working for the Abwehr.’
    â€˜The Abwehr – how could I forget that word,’ said the Princess.
    â€˜And they let us go on functioning,’ I said. ‘That was cunning.’
    â€˜Yes, if they’d arrested us all, others would have replaced us. It was clever of them to let us continue.’
    â€˜So Claude was a German,’ I said. ‘When I think of all those months …’
    â€˜And the RAF escape-route,’ said the Princess. ‘They let that continue, too.’
    I nodded. ‘As long as the flyers came through here, London would be convinced that all was well.’
    â€˜I would kill him,’ said the Princess. ‘If he came in this bar now, I’d kill him.’
    â€˜Claude Winkler,’ said Schlegel, as the Princess got up from the bar stool in order to pour more drinks for us. ‘Do you know what he does now?’
    â€˜Yes,’ said the Princess. ‘He still works for the Boche Secret Police.’ She poured drinks for us. ‘The nerve of the man! To come back here again.’
    I put my hand over my glass. She poured whisky for herself, and this time Schlegel too had whisky.
    â€˜I’ll kill him if he comes in here,’ she said again. ‘People think I’m a silly old woman, but I’ll do it, I promise you.’
    â€˜Claude
l’avocat
,’ I said. There were more tourists now, peering into the bars, reading the menus and looking at the crude daubs that the ‘artists’ sold on the waterfront. None of them came into this bar: it was a dump, just as Schlegel said. Fly-specked old bottles of watered-down cognac, and re-labelled champagne. Bar girls with fat legs and unseeing eyes. And upstairs, broken beds, dirty counterpanes and a ‘badger man’ who came in and shouted ‘That’s my wife!’ before even your pants were down.
    â€˜So Claude betrayed us,’ I said.
    â€˜Are you all right?’ said the Princess.
    â€˜I’m all right,’ I said. ‘Why?’
    â€˜You look like you are going to be sick,’ she said. If you work in a bar for thirty years, you develop a sharp eye for people who feel sick.

8
    â€˜We didn’t just
want
to murder him; we planned the killing.’
    Serge Frankel did not look up. He put the big magnifying glass over the envelope and examined the stamps carefully. Then he moved it to look at the franking marks. ‘Yes, we planned it,’ he said. He rubbed his eyes and passed the envelope to me. ‘Take a look at that cancellation. What does it say?’
    I leaned across the desk, careful not to disturb the trays and the tweezers and the small fluorescent lamp that he used to detect paper repairs and forgeries. I looked closely at the envelope. The stamping machine had not been applied evenly. One side of the circular mark was very faint. ‘“Varick St Sta …” Could it be Varick Street Station?’
    â€˜Can you make out the date?’
    â€˜May something nineteen thirty.’
    â€˜Yes, well that’s what it should be.’ He picked it up, using only the tips of his fingers. It was a foolscap-size cream envelope, with three large US stamps on it and a big diamond-shaped rubber stamp that said ‘First Europe Pan-America Round Flight.
Graf Zeppelin
’.
    â€˜Is it very valuable?’ I asked.
    He slid it into a clear plastic sleeve and clipped it into a large album with others. ‘Only for those who want such things,’ he said. ‘Yes, we planned to kill Claude
l’avocat
. That was in 1947. He gave evidence at one