YESTERDAY'S SPY

Yesterday's spies, a lot more recognizable than today's acronym ciphers, neither die nor fade away; often they're just too hard to kill. Even if they're as flagrant as Steve Champion, who thirty years ago had been a legendary part of a Resistance reseau and lost three fingers, one by one, to the Germans. Now, having converted guns into cash, Steve is said to be living in a fortified villa in Nice surrounded by quietly footpadding Arabs; he wears a fez. . . he's selling a nuclear device to the Middle East? Charlie Bonnard, a former confederate whose life he once saved, is recruited by British Intelligence where Dawlish still presides. Charlie is supposed to flush him out and bring him in after a pretty young British operative is killed. But Champion has enemies all over: the old Jew from the reseau who deals in stamps and other kinds of cancellations; Steve's ex-wife's sister who hates him or loves him or more probably both. Only Charlie manages to retain a certain loyalty toward Champion compounded with a kind of disbelief, because of the man that he once was. This is a much better justification for the book than the hyped-up action and sophisticated automated equipment. It also lends an aura of acrid romanticism to Deighton's impregnable loner in a devalued modern world. Yesterday's spy is more of an agent for all seasons than any Deighton has used in recent years, adding a certain dimension to the form-fitting genre.