Game 3

By John Skow

A pretty good spy thriller can be spotted now and then, ducking around a corner or disappearing into a manhole, as Len Deighton slowly brings his three-volume tale of find-the-mole to a close. Readers who have stayed with the author from the beginning may have forgotten that Berlin Game, the first book in the trilogy, begins with British Intelligence Agent Bernard Samson and his old friend Werner Volkmann doing a bit of surveillance near the Berlin Wall. Samson, sour and middle-aged, asks, "How long have we been sitting here?" and Volkmann, an ironist, replies, "Nearly a quarter of a century."

Just so. Still, there have been moments worth the thousand-and-some pages of skulk and murk. Berlin Game should have been dedicated to divorced men everywhere, because in it Samson's supercilious, upper-class wife Fiona not only defects to the Soviets, but is revealed to be a KGB colonel. Samson and the dreaded Fiona skirmish at a distance in Mexico Set, the second book. At the end he appears to be ahead in this contest that seems a parody of postmarital discord, as he takes in hand Stinnes, a high-ranking Soviet defector.

London Match brings Samson, the weather-beaten fieldman, back from Mexico City and Berlin to fester among intelligence bureaucrats in England. Stinnes must be debriefed if he is not a plant and foiled if he is. Samson, under suspicion because of Fiona's bad behavior, gets the assignment. He is impeded not so much by Stinnes and his ex-wife, though she is threatening to grab their children, as by his superiors. These careerists are, variously, twits, fops, climbers and pooh-bahs whose entire interest is in position, perks and, after they have dithered and muddled for a sufficient number of decades, knighthoods. Samson's boss Dicky Cruyer is a particularly loathsome species of well-connected idler, and Deighton takes great pleasure in demonstrating this. " 'Let me tell you something, Bernard,' said Dicky, leaning well back in the soft leather seat and adopting the manner of an Oxford don explaining the law of gravity to a delivery boy . . . 'It could get messy; people with a history of bad decisions are going to be axed very smartly.' Dicky smiled. He could afford to smile; Dicky had never made a decision in his life. Whenever something decisive was about to happen, Dicky went home with a headache."

Samson's exasperation at these self-important triflers and their chirping Oxbridge accents is funny and justified, but it is also somewhat obsessive. He cannot stay away from the subject. He mentions an American agent who dresses too well, and this reminds him of Dicky Cruyer's kind: "The public-school senior staff at London Central spent just as much money on their Savile Row suits' and handmade shirts and Jermyn Street shoes, but they wore them with a careless scruffiness that was a vital part of their snobbery. A real English gentleman never tries; that was the article of faith." His complaints about silly and selfish women, notably Fiona's vacant sister and Volkmann's troublemaking wife, also deserve to be heard. But when all this grouchiness becomes the dominant element in the novel, the sensation of having been backed into a corner at a cocktail party is vivid.

The measure of Deighton's considerable skill is that despite Samson's chronic grousing, anyone who starts Berlin Game is likely to persist through to the end of London Match. The story could have been brilliant if some ferocious editor had slashed it ruthlessly to one taut volume. Even so, the texture is wonderfully gray and grainy, and the scenes between Volkmann and Samson in the first and third novels are authoritative. Samson's predicament is a metaphor of middle age, if anyone should need one. And in the days of constant spy revelations, the central questions continue to haunt: Was nasty Fiona the only mole in the British secret service? In this most devious of games, can any side truly win game, set and match? --By John Skow Best Sellers

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