and rocky ride. My whole Bernard Samson series was based upon the belief that the Berlin Wall would fall before the end of the century. There were many times when I went to bed convinced that this assumption had been a reckless gamble, and there were many people asking me where the plot was going. Sometimes I thought I heard a measure of Schadenfreude. More than one expert advised me to forget the Wall, tear my plan down, and radically change its direction. I didn’t yield to my fears. I stuck to my lonely task and to the original scenario and eventually was vindicated.
It is unlikely that the true and complete story of the collapse of the Wall and the whole communist system will ever be told. But the overall pattern is now fairly clear and the signs were there long before the newspapers and the TV camera crews arrived for the finale. The election of Karol Wojtyla to be John Paul II, a Polish Pope, changed the world’s history. Here was a fearless man not afraid to declare that communism was a vile and repressive tyranny that denied the freedom that everyone deserved. His outspoken challenge, unlike those of most politicians, did not vary from time to time and place to place, no matter how unwelcome it was to some of his audiences. His words frightened the dictators, disturbed the apparatchiks, and made Poland’s Catholics into a network of frontline activists. The Polish-American Catholics of Chicago provided a great deal of the money; the CIA added more and worked with the Vatican to route it to Poland’s anti-communist networks. George Kosinski personifies the muddled, almost schizophrenic, mindset of many Poles. His fears and double-dealing provide us with a glimpse of the struggle, and Hope depicts the vital days when the USSR was deciding whether to move with military force against its recalcitrant ally or hold still and hope for the best. Warsaw was deeply in debt to Western banks and Moscow was in no position to pick up the bill. Bernard Samson is in Poland and near the frontier when the Soviet Union was poised and ready to occupy its politically unreliable but strategically essential neighbour. The events depicted here reflect the tension as the Poles waited for the tanks to come rolling westwards.
As Poland’s communist regime was being undermined by the bravery of the Polish Pope, the Lutheran Church in communist Germany became more and more important in the struggle against Moscow. In Hope Bernard’s journeys to the East record the fierce repressive measures the German regime resorted to when it became the final outpost of the communist empire.
Tying a story to events is not something to be undertaken lightly. But having a timescale for the stories provided some benefits. Hope was bountiful: with the astonishing Hurricane that tore a path through London, minor asides such as the Swiss elections and the devastating collapse of the world’s stock exchanges. At the end of the year the Pope and Gorbachev met in the Vatican. What more eventful background could any writer wish for?
I was lucky to find so much of my story in Poland where communism collapsed so suddenly. The attractions of Warsaw are there for anyone to inspect but I was lucky to find the hideous Rozyckiego market so perfect for my purpose. Explorations into the countryside brought me to the Kosinki’s grand old family mansion, a place even more mysterious than I had envisioned. Both places are faithfully described here in the book; there was no need to change a thing. As with many of the research trips I have made for my books I found it very beneficial to return to the location at the season it was to be depicted in my story. The Polish countryside in winter is not to be found in the tourist brochures but despite the discomfort and inconvenience I liked this strange fairy-tale mix of dreams and nightmares.
Every writer has different priorities, which makes reading fiction so rewarding. After the basic idea, my own priority has always been dialogue. From dialogue characterization must follow and from characterization comes motivation and plot. For all of the above reasons I try to inform the reader by dialogue and, when I read and reread the drafts of my books prior to publication, I search for ways of transforming authorial comment and description into dialogue.
At a creative writing school in California the students read (and enjoyed) studying the Bernard Samson books in reverse order. They noted and analyzed the changing character of Bernard and were kind enough to show me some of the results. By assigning various specific fictional characters to student teams the class unravelled the complex weave of the plot. Even without such close examination most readers immediately see that Bernard – without telling outright lies – is inclined to bend the truth to his own advantage.
But dialogue and characterization is more important than truth and plot. The purpose of characterization is to demonstrate the changes that take place as the story proceeds. I consider this process vital. Whether the time span is short as it is in Bomber (when there is only 24 hours from cover to cover) or long as in Winter (a family story lasting half a century) the characters must be seen to change, and that means to change in response to the events of the story. The Bernard Samson books take the characters through several years and the man we join in the first chapter of this book, Hope, is older, wiser and more psychologically battered than the man in the first book, Berlin Game. But Bernard, whatever his shortcomings, is always a loyal friend to us.
Len Deighton, 2011
1
Mayfair, London. October 1987.
A caller who wakes you in the small dark silent hours is unlikely to be a bringer of good news.
When the buzzer sounded a second time I reluctantly climbed out of bed. I was at home alone. My wife was at her parents’ with our children.
‘Kosinski?’
‘No,’ I said.
The overhead light of the hallway shone down upon a thin, haggard man in a short waterproof flight-jacket and a navy-blue knitted hat. In one hand he was carrying a cheap briefcase of the sort that every office worker in Eastern Europe flaunts as a status symbol. The front of his denim shirt was bloody and so was his stubbly face, and the outstretched hand in which he held the key to my apartment. ‘No,’ I said again.
‘Please help me,’ he said. I guessed his command of English was limited. I couldn’t place the accent but his voice was muffled and distorted by the loss of some teeth. That he’d been badly hurt was evident from his hunched posture and the expression on his face.
I opened the door. As he tottered in he rested his weight against me, as if he’d expended every last atom of energy in getting to the doorbell and pressing it.
He only got a few more steps before twisting round to slump on to the low hall table. There was blood everywhere now. He must have read my mind for he said: ‘No. No blood on the stairs.’
He’d taken the stairs rather than the lift. It was the choice of experienced fugitives. Lifts in the small hours make the sort of sound that wakens janitors and arouses security men. ‘Kosinski,’ he said anxiously. ‘Who are you? This is Kosinski’s place.’ If he had been a bit stronger he might have been angry.
‘I’m just a friendly burglar,’ I explained.
I got him back on his feet and dragged him to the bathroom and to the tub. He rolled over the edge of it until he was full length in the empty bath. It was better that he bled there. ‘I’m Kosinski’s partner,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Sure.’ It was a preposterous claim.
I got his jacket off and pushed him flat to open his shirt. I could see no arterial bleeding and most of the blood was in that tacky congealed state. There were a dozen or more deep cuts on his hands and arms where he had deflected the attack, but it was the small stab wounds on his body that were the life-threatening ones. Under his clothes he was wearing a moneybelt. It had saved him from the initial attack. It wasn’t the sort of belt worn by tourists and backpackers, but the heavy-duty type used by professional smugglers. Almost six inches wide, it was made of strong canvas that from many years of use was now frayed and stained and bleached to a light grey colour. The whole belt was constructed of pockets that would hold ingots of the size and shape of small chocolate bars. Now it was entirely empty. Loaded it would have weighed a ton, for which reason there were two straps that went over the shoulders. It was one of these shoulder straps that had no doubt saved this man’s life, for there was a fresh and bloody cut in it. A knife-thrust had narrowly missed the place where a twisted blade floods the lungs with blood and