Spy hook: a novel by Len Deighton

address.”
    “Take a day or so to think it all over,” I suggested. Willi was coming this way now, carrying the desserts and the coffees and some Kipferl - sweet crescent-shaped biscuits - that always marked the end of any of Werner’s diets. “It’s a big step.” “I’ve thought it over,” said Werner firmly and with just a trace of sadness. “It’s what I’ve got to do.”
    France, I thought. Why do I have to say such silly things? How the hell am I going to get time off and go to France to trace a sister who is undoubtedly long since dead and gone? And anyway wasn’t one Lisl in my life enough?
    “We could have bought a micro-wave oven,” said Gloria suddenly and spontaneously.
    “Is that what you want? A micro-wave oven?” “With the money this damned flight is costing us,” she explained bitterly.
    “Oh,’ I said.’ Yes.’ She was making a list in her head. She did this sometimes. And the longer the list got the more bitter hatred she had for the air line and its management. Fortunately for the air line’s management none of them were sitting in the seat next to Gloria on the flight to Nice. I was sitting there. “It’s a rip-off,” she said.
    “Everyone knows it’s a rip-off,” I said. “So drink the nice warm cafe, unwrap your processed fromage and enjoy the ambiance.”
    The Plexiglass windows were scratched so that even the dense grey cloud looked cross-hatched. Gloria did not respond, nor eat the items set before her on the tiny plastic tray. She got nail varnish from the big handbag she always carried, and began doing something with her fingernails. This was always a dire portent.
    I suppose I should have told her, right from the beginning, that our journey was made to fulfil a promise I’d made about finding Lisl Hennig’s sister. I should have realized that Gloria would be angry when the truth was revealed, and that I’d have to tell her sooner rather than later.
    Looking back on it, I don’t know why I chose the airport departure lounge to tell Gloria the real reason for the trip. She was unhappy to hear that this was not actually the “mad lovers” weekend” that I’d let her think of it as. She called me names, and did it so loudly that some people on the next seat took their children out of earshot.
    It was at times like that I tried to analyse the essence of my relationship with Gloria. My contemporaries - married men in their forties - were not reluctant to give me their own interpretations of my romance with this beautiful twenty-two year-old. Sometimes these took the form of serious “talks”, sometimes anecdotes about mythical friends, and sometimes they were just lewd jokes. Oddly enough it was the envious comments that offended me. I wished they would try- to understand that such relationships are complex and this love affair was more complex than most.
    Sitting on the plane, with no work to do and nothing to read except the “flight magazine”, I thought about it. I tried to compare this relationship with Gloria to the one I’d had with Fiona, my wife whose fortieth birthday would be coming up soon. She’d always said she dreaded her fortieth birthday. This “dread” had begun as a-sort of joke, and my response was to promise that we’d celebrate it in style. But now she’d be celebrating it in East Berlin with Russian champagne no doubt, and perhaps some caviar too. Fiona loved caviar.
    Would I have got as far as London Heathrow with Fiona and still been trying to pretend that we were embarking on some madcap romantic escapade? No. But the fact of the matter was that such a romantic escapade would have had a very, very limited appeal to my wife Fiona. Wait a moment! Was that true? Surely the real reason I wouldn’t have told her that this was a “surprise getaway” was that my wife would not have believed for one instant that a sudden invitation to fly to Nice would be a romantic escapade. My wife Fiona knew all too well; that was the truth of