‘Hitler?’ said the coordinator, his face reflecting his incredulity. ‘Adolf Hitler and Churchill?’

Sir Sydney Ryden stood up and closed the locks on his document case with a loud click. ‘Let’s not meet trouble halfway, gentlemen. Pray that my people get their hands on these wretched files before the press see them.’

The MI5 director also got to his feet. ‘I think we’ll have to point out that these documents are not authenticated.’ He looked at Sir Sydney meaningfully.

‘I take your point,’ said Sir Sydney. ‘I think it would be as well if we talked about the preparation of a couple of items.’

‘Forge them, and then prove to the press that they are forgeries, to discredit the rest of the material?’ The MI5 man nodded. He had a department which employed some of the most meticulous engravers, paper technicians and handwriting experts in the world. ‘Tomorrow lunch, eh? The Travellers’ suit you?’

Sir Sydney Ryden hesitated. It would mean rearranging his morning but this was urgent. He was not an inveterate clubman and he would have preferred a private dining room in his own building, but he nodded his agreement. At least they would get a decent claret at the Travellers’ Club. ‘One o’clock then. I dare say we’ll find somewhere to hide ourselves away, after we’ve eaten.’

The MI5 man noted the appointment in his tiny diary and replaced it into his waistcoat pocket.

‘It’s damnable timing,’ said the coordinator looking at the calendar. ‘Suppose it all leaked out while the Queen and Mrs Thatcher were both in Africa. Could it possibly be a plot with exactly that in mind?’

‘I don’t believe so,’ said Sir Sydney.

The deputy secretary picked up the agenda sheets and fed them into a shredder with a hand which visibly trembled. Like all shredders for top-secret waste, it reduced the papers to narrow worms then cross-chopped them before dropping the confetti into a large transparent plastic bag. ‘Churchill discredited. It would mean the end of the Tory Party,’ he said miserably. ‘That’s what I can’t bear thinking about.’

Charles Stein was a happy man. The son of a Polish-born trade union official in the garment industry in New York City ’s West Side, Stein had grown up in a house where a strike meant a bare dinner table. In such times the young Steins were fed on left-overs from the table of their equally penurious next-door neighbours.

Charles had never shared the interest in books that his father had stimulated in his brother Aram, but that did not mean that he grew up illiterate. Charles-or Chuck, as he was more usually called at the garment factory where he was eventually employed as an assistant to a senior salesman-could find his way through an order book or an account sheet with the natural ease that some untutored men bring to the intricacies of horse-racing. And he was a generous boy who never begrudged the money that he paid each week into the family expenses, which in turn enabled his mother to send Aram cinnamon khvorost and some money to supplement his meagre scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. But Chuck was not entirely benign. From his father, Chuck Stein got an all-pervading hatred of Hitler and on Pearl Harbor day he joined the long line of men in Times Square who waited patiently to join the US army. So did his young brother.

Charles Stein’s political convictions had now faded, but his natural ability to read an account book remained. It was this facility, together with the unmistakable power of his personality and the energy that even his immense bulk could not disguise, that had made Stein the leader of the men who called themselves ‘the Kaiseroda Raiders’. In spite of the military etiquette, the nostalgia and the respect that all of them showed towards Colonel John Elroy Pitman the Third, every last man of them knew that the important decisions were made by Charles Stein. And they preferred it that way.

‘You’ll like the bau,’ Charles Stein told his son. ‘They have shrimp inside. The chicken ones are not so tasty.’ He wiped his mouth on his napkin. That was the worst of eating ‘small chow’, one always got fingers and face covered in soy and sauce and bits of food. At least, Charles Stein always did.

‘I’ve had enough, thank you, dad. Why don’t you finish it?’

‘They’ll wrap it if you want to take it home.’

‘You have it, dad.’

‘I hate to see food wasted,’ said Stein. He wrestled with temptation. ‘I’ve had enough to eat really, but it’s a crime to see food wasted.’ He gulped a little of his jasmine tea and then filled the tiny cup again. ‘Paper-wrapped shrimp?’

‘No thanks, dad. I couldn’t eat another thing.’

‘These little eateries in Chinatown are the only places where you find the real thing. The Breslows took me to eat in a fancy Chink joint on La Cienega last Monday. Waiters in claw-hammer coats, finger bowls with lemon slices, linen bibs to protect your necktie, and everything. But at the end of the line, what have you got?’

Stein’s son shook his head to show that he didn’t know.

‘Chop suey. That’s what you’ve got,’ Charles Stein pronounced sagely. ‘Not these delicate little specialities that the cooks up here on North Broadway know how to put together.’

‘Is Breslow going to make that movie?’ said Billy.

‘He’s spending money on pre-production,’ said his father.

‘I’d like to see one of the majors getting involved in it. If Paramount or Universal put their machine into action… ’

Charles Stein reached for two paper-wrapped fried shrimps and put them in his mouth in rapid succession. He crunched them in his teeth and wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘What do you do, when you are not writing your column in Variety?’ said Stein with his mouth full.

‘But I don’t write any… ’

‘It’s a joke, son,’ said his father wearily. Oh, my god, he had heard about the generation gap but this was the San Andreas fault! ‘If Breslow puts together a halfway decent little film, he’ll take the rough-cut round the world and get back his money four-fold, five-fold, maybe, and still have a piece of the equity. He couldn’t hope for anything like that if he takes this deal to the majors.’

‘Here, dad,’ said Billy. ‘I didn’t know you knew anything about movie financing.’

‘Movie financing is no different from any other kind of financing,’ said Stein. ‘Anyone who knows the difference between red ink and the black kind can understand the movie industry.’

‘You’re seeing a lot of the Breslows lately.’ A girl came into the restaurant. The dining room was large and crowded with local Chinese clients. The waitress seated her in a booth on the far side of the room. Billy Stein admired her tailored suit of cream-coloured silk, its yarn stubbed to make a texture in the weave. On the lapel there was a small gold brooch. The brightly coloured silk neckerchief completed the effect. She slid her large sunglasses up on to the crown of her head in order to scrutinize the menu and then looked at the tiny gold wristwatch on her suntanned wrist.

For a moment there was a pause in the activity. Staff and customers alike watched the beautiful young woman as she produced a packet of cigarettes from her handbag. An elderly Chinese waiter hurried forward to strike a match for her. She was out of place in this run-down restaurant on the wrong side of the freeway. She belonged down in the ‘golden triangle’ or at the Bel Air country club. But this was Los Angeles and even the sight of a radiantly beautiful woman does not halt business for more than a moment or two. The three dark-suited Chinese men in the next booth went back to discussing insurance, the two blue-shirted security men at the corner table took up again the issue of Dodger Stadium tickets, the barman finished mixing four vodka martinis and the Steins went back to the subject of Max Breslow.