London Match
London Match
Len Deighton
Long-awaited reissue of the final part of the classic spy trilogy, GAME, SET and MATCH, when the Berlin Wall divided not just a city but a world.The spy who’s in the clear doesn’t exist…Bernard Samson hoped they’d put Elvira Miller behind bars. She said she had been stupid, but it didn’t cut any ice with Bernard. She was a KGB-trained agent and stupidity was no excuse.There was one troubling thing about Mrs Miller’s confession – something about two codewords where there should have been one. The finger of suspicion pointed straight back to London.And that was where defector Erich Stinnes was locked up, refusing to say anything.Bernard had got him to London; now he had to get him to talk…
Cover designer’s note (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
On reading a synopsis for one of Len Deighton’s trilogies I was immediately taken by the sentence, ‘And we are back in the mazes of Secret Service mystery and intrigue – mazes that now lead into Samson’s own tangled past.’ There I found my concept for the London Match cover! I would place him within the maze, trapped, with pathways leading to danger, in the form of the gun, and perhaps worse, the KGB, represented here by one of the agency’s badges – this Soviet-era icon features the hammer and sickle together with Cyrillic letters for ‘KGB’ and ‘USSR’.
Some years ago I was commissioned to design a calendar for a leading British sign company. I decided to use the many door numbers that I had photographed during my travels around the world, showing a different number for each day of the year. I contacted the Prime Minister’s press secretary, who kindly gave me permission to photograph the door of Number 10 Downing Street. This photograph has once again found a good use adorning the back cover of this book of intrigue in London’s Whitehall.
At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
LEN DEIGHTON
London Match
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1985
Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1985
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008125004
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007387205
Version: 2017-05-23
Contents
Cover (#u983afc60-45d7-5dc6-9071-3b08e3ea2ead)
Cover Designer’s Note (#u8b31242f-e538-5f84-a00e-a7966b1181ce)
Title Page (#u18b3be76-f459-5ac1-9d07-c79da49159a0)
Copyright (#u734e3f95-80cb-5d61-828e-c91971091c5c)
Introduction (#uc1fc7ff0-0fca-5440-b06c-c3d9e54f1c76)
Chapter 1 (#u8bab3e98-690e-53fc-ab40-d978a935770d)
Chapter 2 (#u40b9bd72-7f27-5ef0-8482-382e6341d7b2)
Chapter 3 (#u89a30654-55af-593b-9277-60bc2369cafa)
Chapter 4 (#ua8a59788-7840-5699-964a-81f0f7ed17c0)
Chapter 5 (#ude1af3aa-519d-550f-9fb6-a0fc6e58b6bd)
Chapter 6 (#u8e6e6695-96b3-5be0-837a-0082ec42cd5f)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Len Deighton (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
Despite its title, London Match is a book largely about Berlin. The Berliners were familiar to me; their general demeanour; their humour closely resembled the cocky Londoners I grew up among. But the physical texture of Berlin is not like London, which is generously ventilated with parks and squares. Berlin is martial and monolithic and always has been. Berlin is like no other town I have ever seen. It fascinates me, and in many ways it became my home but there is no denying its grim grey ugliness. Its wide streets make the unrelenting vista of apartment blocks seem less oppressive. But only slightly so. To cope with overcrowding, the great apartment blocks were built one behind the other. Some tenements were so vast that there were three or four Hinterhöfe – or back courtyards. These were so small that sunlight was lost before it could find its way into the hintermost yard. In the early thirties it was calculated that more than ninety per cent of Berlin’s population were packed tightly into these grim five-storey buildings. Berlin, expanded by reparations of the Franco–Prussian War, was designed to absorb the impoverished agricultural workers who came flooding from the Eastern lands seeking jobs in the factories and sweatshops.
Ugly, dirty and crowded – sweaty in summer and freezing in winter – what is the secret attraction of this town? The population is a part of it. The endless upheavals of the past century have brought a weird mixture of people to a town that has never found its place in history. And like many others regularly brought to the brink of despair, Berliners have learned how to smile. Always from the east, there came to the city a steady stream of people looking for shelter. Persecution drove many, and revolution brought more. Painters and writers such as George Grosz and Alfred Döblin provided a lasting record of a town where skirts were short and pounding jazz was at its most frenetic. Emperor Wilhelm had disappeared into exile and Czarist Dukes were working as nightclub doormen. Sex, psychology and cycle racing were major obsessions, and money was singularly meaningful in a town where the currency had collapsed to zero time and time again.
After the debacle in the summer of 1945 the Red Army occupied the Eastern half of the city while fugitives of every kind sought a hazardous sanctuary in its West. But there was no sanctuary; just new kinds of danger. Only the agile survived. Some were saints and some were despicable but most of them were somewhere in between. I came to know many of Berlin’s dodgers and drifters but I had no right to judge them and didn’t attempt to do so. This was not just because I was a writer. Many years ago, I resolved never to resort to the poison of hatred. I had found that hatred wears and destroys the hater and it erects a barrier to understanding that makes objectivity impossible. This had an effect on my writing. Critics remarked upon the absence of villains and the neutrality of the storyteller. I didn’t mind this verdict. Researching my World War Two history books had already brought me into contact with a wide range of veterans of all ranks and specializations, and from both sides of the fighting. By the time I came to write London Match I was being discreetly approached by jaded warriors of the Cold War. These included people at many different levels, with many different motives; some in no way benign. I learned a new sort of discretion. The anecdotal material built up quickly and I soon had enough material for a hundred Bernard Samson books. But books are not assemblies of anecdotes, no matter how dramatically effective, disgusting, inhuman or deeply moving, the stories proved. The nine Bernard Samson stories would stand or fall on the credibility of the principal characters and ever-changing social situation to which they were exposed. Here was a boardroom drama in which the consequence of being ‘outvoted’ was not losing a job, but losing your life. It was an elderly Silesian building contractor who said that to me. He wasn’t talking about my books; he was talking about the dangerous cross-border life he had survived in his youth. He had been ‘out voted’ without losing his life, but some of the fingernails of his left hand were missing.
The times in which our story is set were times of confusion. Western Europe had been saved by the spilled blood of young Americans, and there was widespread gratitude, admiration and respect for the nation which was now the world’s most powerful and most economically successful. But Eastern Europe was ruled by Stalin; a brutal despot who had at one time befriended Hitler and his criminal regime. The Red Army which had invaded Poland and the Baltic states was now used to snuff out any glimmer of democracy in a vast area stretching from Vladivostok to the edge of West Germany. For most people in the West there was a simple distinction between good and evil, between the free societies and the totalitarian ones. But not for everyone. As the nineteen sixties became the seventies there was a slow shift in loyalties. No one openly disputed the existence of Soviet Russia’s secret police, its gulags and the number of its citizens who disappeared each year. But the communist propaganda machine persuaded many Europeans that America’s military presence, and the weapon technology that discouraged Moscow’s territorial ambitions, was as much of a threat as the armies of the USSR. Such people – many of them academics, writers, intellectuals and politicians – liked to proclaim that the USA was just as bad as the USSR. Some said it was worse. Some said that Marxist theory provided a promise of world order that was inevitable and desirable.
The advanced world was split into two distinct halves. The dividing line was drawn down through the middle of Germany. Grimly determined Marxists of the DDR built a barrier against the Federal Republic and killed any of their compatriots trying to join the exuberant capitalists on the other side of it. For added complexity, the town of Berlin had been created as an island in the middle of the DDR and this island was neatly divided between the two combatants. Berlin became the place where the fate of the world would be decided. What writer could resist such a fateful and bloody forum, or should that be amphitheatre? Not I. This was not old history. This was now. This was happening all around me and it was happening to people I knew well.
The fires of the misnamed Cold War did not burn with consistent fury. There were times when both sides toned down their activities for weeks at a time. Sometimes this was a result of orders due to a relaxing of attitudes between Moscow, London and Washington. But more often it was because the people at the sharp end of the conflict wearied, or needed rehabilitation after some particularly destructive blow. I have tried to reflect the way in which this happened. And while the nine books are not in any way an attempt to write Cold War history, I have linked the episodes to actual happenings. And, because writers of fiction are able to test the boundaries of secrecy, I was able to use material generously passed to me by those who were gagged by over-assertive officialdom. I put my thanks on record.
Len Deighton, 2010
1 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
‘Cheer up, Werner. It will soon be Christmas,’ I said.
I shook the bottle, dividing the last drips of whisky between the two white plastic cups that were balanced on the car radio. I pushed the empty bottle under the seat. The smell of the whisky was strong. I must have spilled some on the heater or on the warm leather that encased the radio. I thought Werner would decline it. He wasn’t a drinker and he’d had far too much already, but Berlin winter nights are cold and Werner swallowed his whisky in one gulp and coughed. Then he crushed the cup in his big muscular hands and sorted through the bent and broken pieces so that he could fit them all into the ashtray. Werner’s wife Zena was obsessionally tidy and this was her car.
‘People are still arriving,’ said Werner as a black Mercedes limousine drew up. Its headlights made dazzling reflections in the glass and paintwork of the parked cars and glinted on the frosty surface of the road. The chauffeur hurried to open the door and eight or nine people got out. The men wore dark cashmere coats over their evening suits, and the women a menagerie of furs. Here in Berlin Wannsee, where furs and cashmere are everyday clothes, they are called the Hautevolee and there are plenty of them.
‘What are you waiting for? Let’s barge right in and arrest him now.’ Werner’s words were just slightly slurred and he grinned to acknowledge his condition. Although I’d known Werner since we were kids at school, I’d seldom seen him drunk, or even tipsy as he was now. Tomorrow he’d have a hangover, tomorrow he’d blame me, and so would his wife, Zena. For that and other reasons, tomorrow, early, would be a good time to leave Berlin.
The house in Wannsee was big; an ugly clutter of enlargements and extensions, balconies, sun deck and penthouse almost hid the original building. It was built on a ridge that provided its rear terrace with a view across the forest to the black waters of the lake. Now the terrace was empty, the garden furniture stacked, and the awnings rolled up tight, but the house was blazing with lights and along the front garden the bare trees had been garlanded with hundreds of tiny white bulbs like electronic blossom.
‘The BfV man knows his job,’ I said. ‘He’ll come and tell us when the contact has been made.’
‘The contact won’t come here. Do you think Moscow doesn’t know we have a defector in London spilling his guts to us? They’ll have warned their network by now.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. I denied his contention for the hundredth time and didn’t doubt we’d soon be having the same exchange again. Werner was forty years old, just a few weeks older than I was, but he worried like an old woman and that put me on edge too. ‘Even his failure to come could provide a chance to identify him,’ I said. ‘We have two plainclothes cops checking everyone who arrives tonight, and the office has a copy of the invitation list.’
‘That’s if the contact is a guest,’ said Werner.
‘The staff are checked too.’
‘The contact will be an outsider,’ said Werner. ‘He wouldn’t be dumm enough to give us his contact on a plate.’
‘I know.’
‘Shall we go inside the house again?’ suggested Werner. ‘I get a cramp these days sitting in little cars.’
I opened the door and got out.
Werner closed his car door gently; it’s a habit that comes with years of surveillance work. This exclusive suburb was mostly villas amid woodland and water, and quiet enough for me to hear the sound of heavy trucks pulling into the Border Controlpoint at Drewitz to begin the long haul down the autobahn that went through the Democratic Republic to West Germany. ‘It will snow tonight,’ I predicted.
Werner gave no sign of having heard me. ‘Look at all that wealth,’ he said, waving an arm and almost losing his balance on the ice that had formed in the gutter. As far as we could see along it, the whole street was like a parking lot, or rather like a car showroom, for the cars were almost without exception glossy, new, and expensive. Five-litre V-8 Mercedes with car-phone antennas and turbo Porsches and big Ferraris and three or four Rolls-Royces. The registration plates showed how far people will travel to such a lavish party. Businessmen from Hamburg, bankers from Frankfurt, film people from Munich, and well-paid officials from Bonn. Some cars were perched high on the pavement to make room for others to be double-parked alongside them. We passed a couple of cops who were wandering between the long lines of cars, checking the registration plates and admiring the paintwork. In the driveway – stamping their feet against the cold – were two Parkwächter who would park the cars of guests unfortunate enough to be without a chauffeur. Werner went up the icy slope of the driveway with arms extended to help him balance. He wobbled like an overfed penguin.
Despite all the double-glazed windows, closed tight against the cold of a Berlin night, there came from the house the faint syrupy whirl of Johann Strauss played by a twenty-piece orchestra. It was like drowning in a thick strawberry milk shake.
A servant opened the door for us and another took our coats. One of our people was immediately inside, standing next to the butler. He gave no sign of recognition as we entered the flower-bedecked entrance hall. Werner smoothed his silk evening jacket self-consciously and tugged the ends of his bow tie as he caught a glimpse of himself in the gold-framed mirror that covered the wall. Werner’s suit was a hand-stitched custom-made silk one from Berlin’s most exclusive tailors, but on Werner’s thickset figure all suits looked rented.
Standing at the foot of the elaborate staircase there were two elderly men in stiff high collars and well-tailored evening suits that made no concessions to modern styling. They were smoking large cigars and talking with their heads close together because of the loudness of the orchestra in the ballroom beyond. One of the men stared at us but went on talking as if we weren’t visible to him. We didn’t seem right for such a gathering, but he looked away, no doubt thinking we were two heavies hired to protect the silver.
Until 1945 the house – or Villa, as such local mansions are known – had belonged to a man who began his career as a minor official with the Nazi farmers organization – and it was by chance that his department was given the task of deciding which farmers and agricultural workers were so indispensable to the economy that they would be exempt from service with the military forces. But from that time onwards – like other bureaucrats before and since – he was showered with gifts and opportunities and lived in high style, as his house bore witness.
For some years after the war the house was used as transit accommodation for US Army truck drivers. Only recently had it become a family house once more. The panelling, which so obviously dated back to the original nineteenth-century building, had been carefully repaired and reinstated, but now the oak was painted light grey. A huge painting of a soldier on a horse dominated the wall facing the stairs and on all sides there were carefully arranged displays of fresh flowers. But despite all the careful refurbishing, it was the floor of the entrance hall that attracted the eye. The floor was a complex pattern of black, white and red marble, a plain white central disc of newer marble having replaced a large gold swastika.
Werner pushed open a plain door secreted into the panelling and I followed him along a bleak corridor designed for the inconspicuous movement of servants. At the end of the passage there was a pantry. Clean linen cloths were arranged on a shelf, a dozen empty champagne bottles were inverted to drain in the sink and the waste bin was filled with the remains of sandwiches, discarded parsley, and some broken glass. A white-coated waiter arrived carrying a large silver tray of dirty glasses. He emptied them, put them into the service elevator together with the empty bottles, wiped the tray with a cloth from under the sink, and then departed without even glancing at either of us.
‘There he is, near the bar,’ said Werner, holding open the door so we could look across the crowded dance floor. There was a crush around the tables where two men in chef’s whites dispensed a dozen different sorts of sausages and foaming tankards of strong beer. Emerging from the scrum with food and drink was the man who was to be detained.
‘I hope like hell we’ve got this right,’ I said. The man was not just a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat; he was the private secretary to a senior member of the Bonn parliament.
I said, ‘If he digs his heels in and denies everything, I’m not sure we’ll be able to make it stick.’
I looked at the suspect carefully, trying to guess how he’d take it. He was a small man with crew-cut hair and a neat Vandyke beard. There was something uniquely German about that combination. Even amongst the over-dressed Berlin social set his appearance was flashy. His jacket had wide silk-faced lapels, and silk also edged his jacket, cuffs and trouser seams. The ends of his bow tie were tucked under his collar and he wore a black silk handkerchief in his top pocket.
‘He looks much younger than thirty-two, doesn’t he?’ said Werner.
‘You can’t rely on those computer printouts, especially with listed civil servants or even members of the Bundestag. They were all put onto the computer when it was installed, by copy typists working long hours of overtime to make a bit of spare cash.’
‘What do you think?’ said Werner.
‘I don’t like the look of him,’ I said.
‘He’s guilty,’ said Werner. He had no more information than I did, but he was trying to reassure me.
‘But the uncorroborated word of a defector such as Stinnes won’t cut much ice in an open court, even if London will let Stinnes go into a court. If this fellow’s boss stands by him and they both scream blue murder, he might get away with it.’
‘When do we take him, Bernie?’
‘Maybe his contact will come here,’ I said. It was an excuse for delay.
‘He’d have to be a real beginner, Bernie. Just one look at this place – lit up like a Christmas tree, cops outside, and no room to move – no one with any experience would risk coming into a place like this.’
‘Perhaps they won’t be expecting problems,’ I said optimistically.
‘Moscow know Stinnes is missing and they’ve had plenty of time to alert their networks. And anyone with experience will smell this stakeout when they park outside.’
‘He didn’t smell it,’ I said, nodding to our crew-cut man as he swigged at his beer and engaged a fellow guest in conversation.
‘Moscow can’t send a source like him away to their training school,’ said Werner. ‘But that’s why you can be quite certain that his contact will be Moscow-trained: and that means wary. You might as well arrest him now.’
‘We say nothing; we arrest no one,’ I told him once again. ‘German security are doing this one; he’s simply being detained for questioning. We stand by and see how it goes.’
‘Let me do it, Bernie.’ Werner Volkmann was a Berliner by birth. I’d come to school here as a young child, my German was just as authentic as his, but because I was English, Werner was determined to hang on to the conceit that his German was in some magic way more authentic than mine. I suppose I would feel the same way about any German who spoke perfect London-accented English, so I didn’t argue about it.
‘I don’t want him to know any non-German service is involved. If he tumbles to who we are, he’ll know Stinnes is in London.’
‘They know already, Bernie. They must know where he is by now.’
‘Stinnes has got enough troubles without a KGB hit squad searching for him.’
Werner was looking at the dancers and smiling to himself as if at some secret joke, the way people sometimes do when they’ve had too much to drink. His face was still tanned from his time in Mexico and his teeth were white and perfect. He looked almost handsome despite the lumpy fit of his suit. ‘It’s like a Hollywood movie,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The budget’s too big for television.’ The ballroom was crowded with elegant couples, all wearing the sort of clothes that would have looked all right for a ball at the turn of the century. And the guests weren’t the desiccated old fogies I was expecting to see at this fiftieth birthday party for a manufacturer of dishwashers. There were plenty of richly clad young people whirling to the music of another time in another town. Kaiserstadt – isn’t that what Vienna was called at a time when there was only one Emperor in Europe and only one capital for him?
It was the makeup and the hairdos that sounded the jarring note of modernity, that and the gun I could see bulging under Werner’s beautiful silk jacket. I suppose that’s what was making it so tight across the chest.
The white-coated waiter returned with another big tray of glasses. Some of the glasses were not empty. There was the sudden smell of alcohol as he tipped cherries, olives, and abandoned drinks into the warm water of the sink before putting the glasses into the service lift. Then he turned to Werner and said respectfully, ‘They’ve arrested the contact, sir. Went to the car just as you said.’ He wiped the empty tray with a cloth.
‘What’s all this, Werner?’ I said.
The waiter looked at me and then at Werner and, when Werner nodded assent, said, ‘The contact went to the suspect’s parked car … a woman at least forty years old, maybe older. She had a key that fitted the car door. She unlocked the glove compartment and took an envelope. We’ve taken her into custody but the envelope has not yet been opened. The captain wants to know if he should take the woman back to the office or hold her here in the panel truck for you to talk to.’
The music stopped and the dancers applauded. Somewhere on the far side of the ballroom a man was heard singing an old country song. He stopped, embarrassed, and there was laughter.
‘Has she given a Berlin address?’
‘Kreuzberg. An apartment house near the Landwehr Canal.’
‘Tell your captain to take the woman to the apartment. Search it and hold her there. Phone here to confirm that she’s given the correct address and we’ll come along later to talk to her,’ I said. ‘Don’t let her make any phone calls. Make sure the envelope remains unopened; we know what’s in it. I’ll want it as evidence, so don’t let everybody maul it about.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the waiter and departed, picking his way across the dance floor as the dancers walked off it.
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was one of our people?’ I asked Werner.
Werner giggled. ‘You should have seen your face.’
‘You’re drunk, Werner,’ I said.
‘You didn’t even recognize a plainclothes cop. What’s happening to you, Bernie?’
‘I should have guessed. They always have them clearing away the dirty dishes; a cop doesn’t know enough about food and wine to serve anything.’
‘You didn’t think it was worth watching his car, did you?’
He was beginning to irritate me. I said, ‘If I had your kind of money, I wouldn’t be dragging around with a lot of cops and security men.’
‘What would you be doing?’
‘With money? If I didn’t have the kids, I’d find some little pension in Tuscany, somewhere not too far from the beach.’
‘Admit it; you didn’t think it was worth watching his car, did you?’
‘You’re a genius.’
‘No need for sarcasm,’ said Werner. ‘You’ve got him now. Without me you would have ended up with egg on your face.’ He burped very softly, holding a hand over his mouth.
‘Yes, Werner,’ I said.
‘Let’s go and arrest the bastard … I had a feeling about that car – the way he locked the doors and then looked round like someone might be waiting there.’ There had always been a didactic side to Werner; he should have been a schoolteacher, as his mother wanted.
‘You’re a drunken fool, Werner,’ I said.
‘Shall I go and arrest him?’
‘Go and breathe all over him,’ I said.
Werner smiled. Werner had proved what a brilliant field agent he could be. Werner was very very happy.
He made a fuss of course. He wanted his lawyer and wanted to talk to his boss and to some friend of his in the government. I knew the type only too well; he was treating us as if we’d been caught stealing secrets for the Russians. He was still protesting when he departed with the arrest team. They were not impressed; they’d seen it all before. They were experienced men, brought in from the BfV’s ‘political office’ in Bonn.
They took him to the BfV office in Spandau, but I decided they’d get nothing but indignation out of him that night. Tomorrow perhaps he’d simmer down a little and get nervous enough to say something worth hearing before the time came when they’d have to charge him or release him. Luckily it was a decision I wouldn’t have to make. Meanwhile, I decided to go and see if there was anything to be got out of the woman.
Werner drove. He didn’t speak much on the journey back to Kreuzberg. I stared out of the window. Berlin is a sort of history book of twentieth-century violence, and every street corner brought a recollection of something I’d heard, seen, or read. We followed the road alongside the Landwehr Canal, which twists and turns through the heart of the city. Its oily water holds many dark secrets. Back in 1919, when the Spartakists attempted to seize the city by an armed uprising, two officers of the Horse Guards took the badly beaten Rosa Luxemburg – a Communist leader – from their headquarters at the Eden Hotel, next to the Zoo, shot her dead and threw her into the canal. The officers pretended that she’d been carried off by angry rioters, but four months later her bloated corpse floated up and got jammed into a lock gate. Now, in East Berlin, they name streets after her.
But not all the ghosts go into this canal. In February 1920 a police sergeant pulled a young woman out of the canal at the Bendler Bridge. Taken to the Elisabeth Hospital in Lützowstrasse, she was later identified as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Czar of All the Russias and only survivor of the massacre.
‘This is it,’ said Werner, pulling in to the kerb. ‘Good job there’s a cop on the door, or we’d come back to find the car stripped to the chassis.’
The address the contact had given was a shabby nineteenth-century tenement in a neighbourhood virtually taken over by Turkish immigrants. The once imposing grey stone entrance, still pitted with splinter damage from the war, was defaced by brightly coloured graffiti sprays. Inside the gloomy hallway there was a smell of spicy food and dirt and disinfectant.
These old houses have no numbered apartments, but we found the BfV men at the very top. There were two security locks on the door, but not much sign of anything inside to protect. Two men were still searching the hallway when we arrived. They were tapping the walls, prizing up floorboards, and poking screwdrivers deep into the plaster with that sort of inscrutable delight that comes to men blessed by governmental authority to be destructive.
It was typical of the overnight places the KGB provided for the faithful. Top floors: cold, cramped and cheap. Perhaps they chose these sleazy accommodations to remind all concerned about the plight of the poor in the capitalist economy. Or perhaps in this sort of district there were fewer questions asked about comings and goings by all kinds of people at all kinds of hours.
No TV, no radio, no soft seats. Iron bedstead with an old grey blanket, four wooden chairs, a small plastic-topped table and upon it black bread roughly sliced, electric ring, dented kettle, tinned milk, dried coffee, and some sugar cubes wrapped to show they were from a Hilton hotel. There were three dog-eared German paperback books – Dickens, Schiller, and a collection of crossword puzzles, mostly completed. On one of the two single beds a small case was opened and its contents displayed. It was obviously the woman’s baggage: a cheap black dress, nylon underwear, low-heeled leather shoes, an apple and orange, and an English newspaper – the Socialist Worker.
A young BfV officer was waiting for me there. We exchanged greetings and he told me the woman had been given no more than a brief preliminary questioning. She’d offered to make a statement at first and then said she wouldn’t, the officer said. He’d sent a man to get a typewriter so it could be taken down if she changed her mind again. He handed me some Westmarks, a driving licence, and a passport; the contents of her handbag. The licence and passport were British.
‘I’ve got a pocket recorder,’ I told him without lowering my voice. ‘We’ll sort out what to type and have it signed after I’ve spoken with her. I’ll want you to witness her signature.’
The woman was seated in the tiny kitchen. There were dirty cups on the table and some hairpins that I guessed had come from a search of the handbag she now held on her lap.
‘The captain tells me that you want to make a statement,’ I said in English.
‘Are you English?’ she said. She looked at me and then at Werner. She showed no great surprise that we were both in dinner suits complete with fancy cuff links and patent-leather shoes. She must have realized we’d been on duty inside the house.
‘Yes,’ I said. I signalled with my hand to tell Werner to leave the room.
‘Are you in charge?’ she asked. She had the exaggerated upper-class accent that shop girls use in Knightsbridge boutiques. ‘I want to know what I’m charged with. I warn you I know my rights. Am I under arrest?’
From the side table I picked up the bread knife and waved it at her. ‘Under Law 43 of the Allied Military Government legislation, still in force in this city, possession of this bread knife is an offence for which the death sentence can be imposed.’
‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘The war was almost forty years ago.’
I put the knife into a drawer and slammed it shut. She was startled by the sound. I moved a kitchen chair and sat on it so that I was facing her at a distance of only a yard or so. ‘You’re not in Germany,’ I told her. ‘This is Berlin. And Decree 511, ratified in 1951, includes a clause that makes information gathering an offence for which you can get ten years in prison. Not spying, not intelligence work, just collecting information is an offence.’
I put her passport on the table and turned the pages as if reading her name and occupation for the first time. ‘So don’t talk to me about knowing your rights; you’ve got no rights.’
From the passport I read aloud: ‘Carol Elvira Miller, born in London 1930, occupation: schoolteacher.’ Then I looked up at her. She returned my gaze with the calm, flat stare that the camera had recorded for her passport. Her hair was straight and short in pageboy style. She had clear blue eyes and a pointed nose, and the pert expression came naturally to her. She’d been pretty once, but now she was thin and drawn and – in dark conservative clothes and with no trace of makeup – well on the way to looking like a frail old woman. ‘Elvira. That’s a German name, isn’t it?’
She showed no sign of fear. She brightened as women so often do at personal talk. ‘It’s Spanish. Mozart used it in Don Giovanni.’
I nodded. ‘And Miller?’
She smiled nervously. She was not frightened, but it was the smile of someone who wanted to seem cooperative. My hectoring little speech had done the trick. ‘My father is German … was German. From Leipzig. He emigrated to England long before Hitler’s time. My mother is English … from Newcastle,’ she added after a long pause.
‘Married?’
‘My husband died nearly ten years ago. His name was Johnson, but I went back to using my family name.’
‘Children?’
‘A married daughter.’
‘Where do you teach?’
‘I was a supply teacher in London, but the amount of work I got grew less and less. For the last few months I’ve been virtually unemployed.’
‘You know what was in the envelope you collected from the car tonight?’
‘I won’t waste your time with excuses. I know it contained secrets of some description.’ She had the clear voice and pedantic manner of schoolteachers everywhere.
‘And you know where it was going?’
‘I want to make a statement. I told the other officer that. I want to be taken back to England and speak to someone in British security. Then I’ll make a complete statement.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why are you so anxious to go back to England? You’re a Russian agent; we both know that. What’s the difference where you are when you’re charged?’
‘I’ve been stupid,’ she said. ‘I realize that now.’
‘Did you realize it before or after you were taken into custody?’
She pressed her lips together as if suppressing a smile. ‘It was a shock.’ She put her hands on the table. They were white and wrinkled with the brown freckle marks that come with middle age. There were nicotine stains, and the ink from a leaky pen had marked finger and thumb. ‘I just can’t stop trembling. Sitting here watching the security men searching through my luggage, I’ve had enough time to consider what a fool I’ve been. I love England. My father brought me up to love everything English.’
Despite this contention she soon slipped back into speaking German. She wasn’t German; she wasn’t British. I saw the rootless feeling within her and recognized something of myself.
I said, ‘A man was it?’ She looked at me and frowned. She’d been expecting reassurance, a smile in return for the smiles she’d given me and a promise that nothing too bad would happen to her. ‘A man … the one who enticed you into this foolishness?’
She must have heard some note of scorn in my voice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was all my own doing. I joined the Party fifteen years ago. After my husband died I wanted to keep myself occupied. So I became a very active worker for the teachers union. And one day I thought, well, why not go the whole hog.’
‘What was the whole hog, Mrs Miller?’
‘My father’s name was Müller; I may as well tell you that because you will soon find out. Hugo Müller. He changed it to Miller when he was naturalized. He wanted us all to be English.’ Again she pressed her hands flat on the table and looked at them while she spoke. It was as if she was blaming her hands for doing things of which she’d never really approved.
‘I was asked to collect parcels, look after things, and so on. Later I began providing accommodation in my London flat. People were brought there late at night – Russians, Czechs, and so on – usually they spoke no English and no German either. Seamen sometimes, judging by their clothing. They always seemed to be ravenously hungry. Once there was a man dressed as a priest. He spoke Polish, but I managed to make myself understood. In the morning someone would come and collect them.’
She sighed and then looked up at me to see how I was taking her confession. ‘I have a spare bedroom,’ she added, as if the propriety of their sleeping arrangements was more important than her services to the KGB.
She stopped talking for a long time and looked at her hands.
‘They were fugitives,’ I said, to prompt her into talking again.
‘I don’t know who they were. Afterwards there was usually an envelope with a few pounds put through my letterbox, but I didn’t do it for the money.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I was a Marxist; I was serving the cause.’
‘And now?’
‘They made a fool of me,’ she said. ‘They used me to do their dirty work. What did they care what happened to me if I got caught? What do they care now? What am I supposed to do?’
It sounded more like the bitter complaint of a woman abandoned by her lover than of an agent under arrest. ‘You’re supposed to enjoy being a martyr,’ I said. ‘That’s the way the system works for them.’
‘I’ll give you the names and addresses. I’ll tell you everything I know.’ She leaned forward. ‘I don’t want to go to prison. Will it all have to be in the newspapers?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘My married daughter is living in Canada. She’s married to a Spanish boy she met on holiday. They’ve applied for Canadian citizenship but their papers haven’t come through yet. It would be terrible if this trouble I’m in ruined their lives; they’re so happy together.’
‘And this overnight accommodation you were providing for your Russian friends – when did that all stop?’
She looked up sharply, as if surprised that I could guess that it had stopped.
‘The two jobs don’t mix,’ I said. ‘The accommodation was just an interim task to see how reliable you were.’
She nodded. ‘Two years ago,’ she said softly, ‘perhaps two and a half years.’
‘Then?’
‘I came to Berlin for a week. They paid my fare. I went through to the East and spent a week in a training school. All the other students were German, but as you see I speak German well. My father always insisted that I kept up my German.’
‘A week at Potsdam?’
‘Yes, just outside Potsdam, that’s right.’
‘Don’t miss out anything important, Mrs Miller,’ I said.
‘No, I won’t,’ she promised nervously. ‘I was there for ten days learning about shortwave radios and microdots and so on. You probably know the sort of thing.’
‘Yes, I know the sort of thing. It’s a training school for spies.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘You’re not going to tell me you came back from there without realizing you were a fully trained Russian spy, Mrs Miller?’
She looked up and met my stare. ‘No, I’ve told you, I was an enthusiastic Marxist. I was perfectly ready to be a spy for them. As I saw it, I was doing it on behalf of the oppressed and hungry people of the world. I suppose I still am a Marxist-Leninist.’
‘Then you must be an incurable romantic,’ I said.
‘It was wrong of me to do what I did; I can see that, of course. England has been good to me. But half the world is starving and Marxism is the only solution.’
‘Don’t lecture me, Mrs Miller,’ I said. ‘I get enough of that from my office.’ I got up so that I could unbutton my overcoat and find my cigarettes. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ I said.
She gave no sign of having heard me.
‘I’m trying to give them up,’ I said, ‘but I carry the cigarettes with me.’
She still didn’t answer. Perhaps she was too busy thinking about what might happen to her. I went to the window and looked out. It was too dark to see very much except Berlin’s permanent false dawn: the greenish white glare that came from the floodlit ‘death strip’ along the east side of the Wall. I knew this street well enough; I’d passed this block thousands of times. Since 1961, when the Wall was first built, following the snaky route of the Landwehr Canal had become the quickest way to get around the Wall from the neon glitter of the Ku-damm to the floodlights of Checkpoint Charlie.
‘Will I go to prison?’ she said.
I didn’t turn round. I buttoned my coat, pleased that I’d resisted the temptation to smoke. From my pocket I brought the tiny Pearlcorder tape machine. It was made of a bright silver metal. I made no attempt to hide it. I wanted her to see it.
‘Will I go to prison?’ she asked again.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I hope so.’
It had taken no more than forty minutes to get her confession. Werner was waiting for me in the next room. There was no heating in that room. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, the fur collar of his coat pulled up round his ears so that it almost touched the rim of his hat.
‘A good squeal?’ he asked.
‘You look like an undertaker, Werner,’ I said. ‘A very prosperous undertaker waiting for a very prosperous corpse.’
‘I’ve got to sleep,’ he said. ‘I can’t take these late nights any more. If you’re going to hang on here, to type it all out, I’d rather go home now.’
It was the drink that had got to him, of course. The ebullience of intoxication didn’t last very long with Werner. Alcohol is a depressant and Werner’s metabolic rate had slowed enough to render him unfit to drive. ‘I’ll drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll make the transcription on your typewriter.’
‘Sure,’ said Werner. I was staying with him in his apartment at Dahlem. And now, in his melancholy mood, he was anticipating his wife’s reaction to us waking her up by arriving in the small hours of the morning. Werner’s typewriter was a very noisy machine and he knew I’d want to finish the job before going to sleep. ‘Is there much of it?’ he asked.
‘It’s short and sweet, Werner. But she’s given us a few things that might make London Central scratch their heads and wonder.’
‘Such as?’
‘Read it in the morning, Werner. We’ll talk about it over breakfast.’
It was a beautiful Berlin morning. The sky was blue despite all those East German generating plants that burn brown coal so that pale smog sits over the city for so much of the year. Today the fumes of the Braunkohle were drifting elsewhere, and outside the birds were singing to celebrate it. Inside, a big wasp, a last survivor from the summer, buzzed around angrily.
Werner’s Dahlem apartment was like a second home to me. I’d known it when it was a gathering place for an endless stream of Werner’s oddball friends. In those days the furniture was old and Werner played jazz on a piano decorated with cigarette burns, and Werner’s beautifully constructed model planes were hanging from the ceiling because that was the only place where they would not be sat upon.
Now it was all different. The old things had all been removed by Zena, his very young wife. Now the flat was done to her taste: expensive modern furniture and a big rubber plant, and a rug that hung on the wall and bore the name of the ‘artist’ who’d woven it. The only thing that remained from the old days was the lumpy sofa that converted to the lumpy bed on which I’d slept.
The three of us were sitting in the ‘breakfast room’, a counter at the end of the kitchen. It was arranged like a lunch counter with Zena playing the role of bartender. From here there was a view through the window, and we were high enough to see the sun-edged treetops of the Grunewald just a block or two away. Zena was squeezing oranges in an electric juicer, and in the automatic coffee-maker the coffee was dripping, its rich aroma floating through the room.
We were talking about marriage. I said, ‘The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change. Both are invariably disappointed.’
‘What rot,’ said Zena as she poured the juice into three glasses. ‘Men do change.’
She bent down to see better the level of the juice and ensure that we all got precisely the same amount. It was a legacy of the Prussian family background of which she was so proud, despite the fact that she’d never even seen the old family homeland. For Prussians like to think of themselves not only as the conscience of the world, but also its final judge and jury.
‘Don’t encourage him, Zena darling,’ said Werner. ‘That contrived Oscar Wilde-ish assertion is just Bernard’s way of annoying wives.’
Zena didn’t let it go; she liked to argue with me. ‘Men change. It’s men who usually leave home and break up the marriage. And it’s because they change.’
‘Good juice,’ I said, sipping some.
‘Men go out to work. Men want promotion in their jobs and they aspire to the higher social class of their superiors. Then they feel their wives are inadequate and start looking for a wife who knows the manners and vocabulary of that class they want to join.’
‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I meant that men don’t change in the way that their women want them to change.’
She smiled. She knew that I was commenting on the way she had changed poor Werner from being an easygoing and somewhat bohemian character into a devoted and obedient husband. It was Zena who had stopped him smoking and made him diet enough to reduce his waistline. And it was Zena who approved everything he bought to wear, from swimming trunks to tuxedo. In this respect Zena regarded me as her opponent. I was the bad influence who could undo all her good work, and that was something Zena was determined to prevent.
She climbed up onto the stool. She was so well proportioned that you only noticed how tiny she was when she did such things. She had long, dark hair and this morning she’d clipped it back into a ponytail that reached down to her shoulder blades. She was wearing a red cotton kimono with a wide black sash around her middle. She’d not missed any sleep that night and her eyes were bright and clear; she’d even found time enough to put on a touch of makeup. She didn’t need makeup – she was only twenty-two years old and there was no disputing her beauty – but the makeup was something from behind which she preferred to face the world.
The coffee was very dark and strong. She liked it like that, but I poured a lot of milk into mine. The buzzer on the oven sounded and Zena went to get the warm rolls. She put them into a small basket with a red-checked cloth before offering them to us. ‘Brötchen,’ she said. Zena was born and brought up in Berlin, but she didn’t call the bread rolls Schrippe the way the rest of the population of Berlin did. Zena didn’t want to be identified with Berlin; she preferred keeping her options open.
‘Any butter?’ I said, breaking open the bread roll.
‘We don’t eat it,’ said Zena. ‘It’s bad for you.’
‘Give Bernie some of that new margarine,’ said Werner.
‘You should lose some weight,’ Zena told me. ‘I wouldn’t even be eating bread if I were you.’
‘There are all kinds of other things I do that you wouldn’t do if you were me,’ I said. The wasp settled in my hair and I brushed it away.
She decided not to get into that one. She rolled up a newspaper and aimed some blows at the wasp. Then with unconcealed ill-humour she went to the refrigerator and brought me a plastic tub of margarine. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m catching the morning flight. I’ll get out of your way as soon as I’m shaved.’
‘No hurry,’ said Werner to smooth things over. He had already shaved, of course; Zena wouldn’t have let him have breakfast if he’d turned up unshaven. ‘So you got all your typing done last night,’ he said. ‘I should have stayed up and helped.’
‘It wasn’t necessary. I’ll have the translation done in London. I appreciate you and Zena giving me a place to sleep, to say nothing of the coffee last night and Zena’s great breakfast this morning.’
I overdid the appreciation I suppose. I’m prone to do this when I’m nervous, and Zena was a great expert at making me nervous.
‘I was damned tired,’ said Werner.
Zena shot me a glance, but when she spoke it was to Werner. ‘You were drunk,’ she said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be working last night.’
‘We were, darling,’ said Werner.
‘There wasn’t much drinking, Zena,’ I said.
‘Werner gets drunk on the smell of a barmaid’s apron,’ said Zena.
Werner opened his mouth to object to this put-down. Then he realized that he could only challenge it by claiming to have drunk a great deal. He sipped some coffee instead.
‘I’ve seen her before,’ said Werner.
‘The woman?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘She says it’s Müller, but she was married to a man named Johnson at one time. Here? You’ve seen her here? She said she lives in England.’
‘She went to the school in Potsdam,’ said Werner. He smiled at my look of surprise. ‘I read your report when I got up this morning. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Of course not. I wanted you to read it. There might be developments.’
‘Was this to do with Erich Stinnes?’ said Zena. She waved the wasp away from her head.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was his information.’
She nodded and poured herself more coffee. It was difficult to believe that not so long ago she’d been in love with Erich Stinnes. It was difficult to believe that she’d risked her life to protect him and that she was still having physiotherapy sessions because of injuries she’d suffered in his defence.
But Zena was young; and romantic. For both of those reasons, her passions could be of short duration. And for both those reasons, it could well be that she had never been in love with him, but merely in love with the idea of herself in love.
Werner seemed not to notice the mention of Erich Stinnes’s name. That was Werner’s way – honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil to him who evil thinks – that could well be Werner’s motto, for Werner was too generous and considerate to ever think the worst of anyone. And even when the worst was evident, Werner was ready to forgive. Zena’s flagrant love affair with Frank Harrington – the head of our Berlin Field Unit, the Berlin Resident – had made me angrier with her than Werner had been.
Some people said that Werner was the sort of masochist who got a perverse pleasure from the knowledge that his wife had gone off to live with Frank, but I knew Werner too well to go in for that sort of instant psychology. Werner was a tough guy who played the game by his own rules. Maybe some of his rules were flexible, but God help anyone who overstepped the line that Werner drew. Werner was an Old Testament man, and his wrath and vengeance could be terrible. I know, and Werner knows I know. That’s what makes us so close that nothing can come between us, not even the cunning little Zena.
‘I’ve seen that Miller woman somewhere,’ said Werner. ‘I never forget a face.’ He watched the wasp. It was sleepy, crawling slowly up the wall. Werner reached for Zena’s newspaper, but the wasp, sensing danger, flew away.
Zena was still thinking of Erich Stinnes. ‘We do all the work,’ she said bitterly. ‘Bernard gets all the credit. And Erich Stinnes gets all the money.’ She was referring to the way in which Stinnes, a KGB major, had been persuaded to come over to work for us and given a big cash payment. She reached for the jug, and some coffee dripped onto the hotplate making a loud, hissing sound. When she’d poured coffee for herself, she put the very hot jug onto the tiles of the counter. The change of temperature must have made the jug crack, for there was a sound like a pistol shot and the hot coffee flowed across the counter top so that we all jumped to our feet to avoid being scalded.
Zena grabbed some paper towels and, standing well back from the coffee flowing onto the tiled floor, dabbed them around. ‘I put it down too hard,’ she said when the mess was cleared away.
‘I think you did, Zena,’ I said.
‘It was already cracked,’ said Werner. Then he brought the rolled newspaper down on the wasp and killed it.
2 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
It was eight o’clock that evening in London when I finally delivered my report to my immediate boss, Dicky Cruyer, Controller German Stations. I’d attached a complete translation too, as I knew Dicky wasn’t exactly bilingual.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘One up to Comrade Stinnes eh?’ He shook the flimsy pages of my hastily written report as if something might fall from between them. He’d already heard my tape and had my oral account of the Berlin trip so there was little chance that he’d read the report very thoroughly, especially if it meant missing his dinner.
‘No one in Bonn will thank us,’ I warned him.
‘They have all the evidence they need,’ said Dicky with a sniff.
‘I was on the phone to Berlin an hour ago,’ I said. ‘He’s pulling all the strings that can be pulled.’
‘What does his boss say?’
‘He’s spending his Christmas vacation in Egypt. No one can find him,’ I said.
‘What a sensible man,’ said Dicky with admiration that was both sincere and undisguised. ‘Was he informed of the impending arrest of his secretary?’
‘Not by us, but that would be the regular BfV procedure.’
‘Have you phoned Bonn this evening? What do BfV reckon the chances of a statement from him?’
‘Better we stay out of it, Dicky.’
Dicky looked at me while he thought about this and then, deciding I was right, tried another aspect of the same problem. ‘Have you seen Stinnes since you handed him over to London Debriefing Centre?’
‘I gather the current policy is to keep me away from him.’
‘Come along,’ said Dicky, smiling to humour me in my state of paranoia. ‘You’re not saying you’re still suspect?’ He stood up from behind the rosewood table that he used instead of a desk and got a transparent plastic folding chair for me.
‘My wife defected.’ I sat down. Dicky had removed his visitors’ chairs on the pretext of making more space. His actual motive was to provide an excuse for him to use the conference rooms along the corridor. Dicky liked to use the conference rooms; it made him feel important and it meant that his name was exhibited in little plastic letters on the notice board opposite the top-floor lifts.
His folding chairs were the most uncomfortable seats in the building, but Dicky didn’t worry about this as he never sat in them. And anyway, I didn’t want to sit chatting with him. There was still work to clear up before I could go home.
‘That’s all past history,’ said Dick, running a thin bony hand through his curly hair so that he could take a surreptitious look at his big black wristwatch, the kind that works deep under water.
I’d always suspected that Dicky would be more comfortable with his hair cut short and brushed, and in the dark suits, white shirts and old school ties that were de rigueur for senior staff. But he persisted in being the only one of us who wore faded denim, cowboy boots, coloured neckerchiefs, and black leather because he thought it would help to identify him as an infant prodigy. But perhaps I had it the wrong way round; perhaps Dicky would have been happier to keep the trendy garb and be ‘creative’ in an advertising agency.
He zipped the front of his jacket up and down again and said, ‘You’re the local hero. You are the one who brought Stinnes to us at a time when everyone here said it couldn’t be done.’
‘Is that what they were saying? I wish I’d known. The way I heard it, a lot of people were saying I did everything to avoid bringing him in because I was frightened his debriefing would drop me into it.’
‘Well, anyone who was spreading that sort of story is now looking pretty damned stupid.’
‘I’m not in the clear yet, Dicky. You know it and I know it, so let’s stop all this bullshit.’
He held up his hand as if to ward off a blow. ‘You’re still not clear on paper,’ said Dicky. ‘On paper … and you know why?’
‘No, I don’t know why. Tell me.’
Dicky sighed. ‘For the simple but obvious reason that this Department needs an excuse to hold Stinnes in London Debriefing Centre and keep on pumping him. Without an ongoing investigation of our own staff, we’d have to hand Stinnes over to MI5 … That’s why the Department haven’t cleared you yet: it’s a department necessity, Bernard, nothing sinister about it.’
‘Who’s in charge of the Stinnes debriefing?’ I asked.
‘Don’t look at me, old friend. Stinnes is a hot potato. I don’t want any part of that one. Neither does Bret … no one up here on the top floor wants anything to do with it.’
‘Things could change,’ I said. ‘If Stinnes gives us a couple more winners like this one, then a few people will start to see that being in charge of the Stinnes debriefing could be the road to fame and fortune.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dicky. ‘The tip-off you handled in Berlin was just for openers … a few quick forays before Moscow tumble what’s happening to their networks. Once the dust settles, the interrogators will take Stinnes through the files … right?’
‘Files? You mean they’ll be poking into all our past operations?’
‘Not all of them. I don’t suppose they’ll go back to discover how Christopher Marlowe discovered that the Spanish Armada had sailed.’ Dicky permitted himself a smile at this joke. ‘It’s obvious that the Department will want to discover how good our guesses were. They’ll play all the games again, but this time they’ll know which ones have a happy ending.’
‘And you’ll go along with that?’
‘They won’t consult me, old son. I’m just German Stations Controller; I’m not the D-G. I’m not even on the Policy Committee.’
‘Giving Stinnes access to department archives would be showing a lot of trust in him.’
‘You know what the old man’s like. Deputy D-G came in yesterday on one of his rare visits to the building. He’s enraptured about the progress of the Stinnes debriefing.’
‘If Stinnes is a plant …’
‘Ah, if Stinnes is a plant …’ Dicky sank down in his Charles Eames chair and put his feet on the matching footstool. The night was dark outside and the windowpanes were like ebony reflecting a perfect image of the room. Only the antique desk light was on; it made a pool of light on the table where the report and transcript were placed side by side. Dicky almost disappeared into the gloom except when the light reflected from the brass buckle of his belt or shone on the gold medallion he wore suspended inside his open-neck shirt. ‘But the idea that Stinnes is a plant is hard to sustain when he’s just given us three well-placed KGB agents in a row.’
He looked at his watch before shouting ‘Coffee’ loudly enough for his secretary to hear in the adjoining room. When Dicky worked late, his secretary worked late too. He didn’t trust the duty roster staff with making his coffee.
‘Will he talk, this one you arrested in Berlin? He had a year with the Bonn Defence Ministry, I notice from the file.’
‘I didn’t arrest him; we left it to the Germans. Yes, he’ll talk if they push him hard enough. They have the evidence and – thanks to Volkmann – they’re holding the woman who came to collect it from the car.’
‘And I’m sure you put all that in your report. Are you now the official secretary of the Werner Volkmann fan club? Or is this something you do for all your old school chums?’
‘He’s very good at what he does.’
‘And so we all agree, but don’t tell me that but for Volkmann, we wouldn’t have picked up the woman. Staking out the car is standard procedure. Ye gods, Bernard, any probationary cop would do that as a matter of course.’
‘A commendation would work wonders for him.’
‘Well, he’s not getting any bloody commendation from me. Just because he’s your close friend, you think you can inveigle any kind of praise and privilege out of me for him.’
‘It wouldn’t cost anything, Dicky,’ I said mildly.
‘No, it wouldn’t cost anything,’ said Dicky sarcastically. ‘Not until the next time he makes some monumental cock-up. Then someone asks me how come I commended him; then it would cost something. It would cost me a chewing out and maybe a promotion.’
‘Yes, Dicky,’ I said.
Promotion? Dicky was two years younger than me and he’d already been promoted several rungs beyond his competence. What promotion did he have his eye on now? He’d only just fought off Bret Rensselaer’s attempt to take over the German desk. I’d thought he’d be satisfied to consolidate his good fortune.
‘And what do you make of this Englishwoman?’ He tapped the roughly typed transcript of her statement. ‘Looks as if you got her talking.’
‘I couldn’t stop her,’ I said.
‘Like that, was it? I don’t want to go all through it again tonight. Anything important?’
‘Some inconsistencies that should be followed up.’
‘For instance?’
‘She was working in London, handling selected items for immediate shortwave radio transmission to Moscow.’
‘Must have been bloody urgent,’ said Dicky. So he’d noticed that already. Had he waited to see if I brought it up? ‘And that means damned good. Right? I mean, not even handled through the Embassy radio, so it was a source they wanted to keep very very secret.’
‘Fiona’s material probably,’ I said.
‘I wondered if you’d twig that,’ said Dicky. ‘It was obviously the stuff your wife was betraying out of our day-to-day operational files.’
He liked to twist the knife in the wound. He held me personally responsible for what Fiona had done; he’d virtually said so on more than one occasion.
‘But the material kept coming.’
Dicky frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘It kept coming. First-grade material even after Fiona ran for it.’
‘This woman’s transmitted material wasn’t all from the same source,’ said Dicky. ‘I remember what she said when you played your tape to me.’
He picked up the transcript and tried to find what he wanted in the muddle of humms and hahhs and ‘indistinct passage’ marks that are always a part of transcripts from such tape recordings. He put the sheets down again.
‘Well anyway, I remember there were two assignment codes: Jake and Ironfoot. Is that what’s worrying you?’
‘We should follow it up!’ I said. ‘I don’t like loose ends like that. The dates suggest that Fiona was Ironfoot. Who the hell was Jake?’
‘The Fiona material is our worry. Whatever else Moscow got – and are still getting – is a matter for Five. You know that, Bernard. It’s not our job to search high and low to find Russian spies.’
‘I still think we should check this woman’s statement against what Stinnes knows.’
‘Stinnes is nothing to do with me, Bernard. I’ve just told you that.’
‘Well, I think he should be. It’s madness that we don’t have access to him without going to Debriefing Centre for permission.’
‘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. ‘When London Debriefing Centre get through with Stinnes, heads will roll up here on the top floor. You know the monumental cock-ups that have dogged the work of this Department for the last few years. Now we’ll have chapter and verse on every decision made up here while Stinnes was running things in Berlin. Every decision made by senior staff will be scrutinized with twenty-twenty hindsight. 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.
‘And you think that whoever’s in charge of the Stinnes debriefing will be unpopular?’
‘Running a witch-hunt is not likely to be a social asset,’ said Dicky.
I thought ‘witch-hunt’ was an inaccurate description of the weeding out of incompetents, but there would be plenty who would favour Dicky’s terminology.
‘And that’s not only my opinion,’ he added. ‘No one wants to take Stinnes. And I don’t want you saying we should have responsibility for him.’
Dicky’s secretary brought coffee.
‘I was just coming, Mr Cruyer,’ she said apologetically. She was a mousy little widow whose every sheet of typing was a patchwork of white correcting paint. At one time Dicky had had a shapely twenty-five-year-old divorcee as secretary, but his wife, Daphne, had made him get rid of her. At the time, Dicky had pretended that firing the secretary was his idea; he said it was because she didn’t boil the water properly for his coffee. ‘Your wife phoned. She wanted to know what time to expect you for dinner.’
‘And what did you say?’ Dicky asked her.
The poor woman hesitated, worrying if she’d done the right thing. ‘I said you were at a meeting and I would call her back.’
‘Tell my wife not to wait dinner for me. I’ll get a bite to eat somewhere or other.’
‘If you want to get away, Dicky,’ I said, rising to my feet.
‘Sit down, Bernard. We can’t waste a decent cup of coffee. I’ll be home soon enough. Daphne knows what this job is like; eighteen hours a day lately.’ It was not a soft, melancholy reflection but a loud proclamation to the world, or at least to me and his secretary who departed to pass the news on to Daphne.
I nodded but I couldn’t help wondering if Dicky was scheduling a visit to some other lady. Lately I’d noticed a gleam in his eye and a spring in his step and a most unusual willingness to stay late at the office.
Dicky got up from his easy chair and fussed over the antique butler’s tray which his secretary had placed so carefully on his side table. He emptied the Spode cups of the hot water and half filled each warmed cup with black coffee. Dicky was extremely particular about his coffee. Twice a week he sent one of the drivers to collect a packet of freshly roasted beans from Mr Higgins in South Molton Street – chagga, no blends – and it had to be ground just before brewing.
‘That’s good,’ he said, sipping it with all the studied attention of the connoisseur he claimed to be. Having approved the coffee, he poured some for me.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to stay away from Stinnes, Bernard? He doesn’t belong to us any longer, does he?’ He smiled. It was a direct order; I knew Dicky’s style.
‘Can I have milk or cream or something in mine?’ I said. ‘That strong black brew you make keeps me awake at night.’
He always had a jug of cream and a bowl of sugar brought in with his coffee although he never used either. He once told me that in his regimental officers’ mess, the cream was always on the table but it was considered bad form to take any. I wondered if there were a lot of people like Dicky in the Army; it was a dreadful thought. He brought the cream to me.
‘You’re getting old, Bernard. Did you ever think of jogging? I run three miles every morning – summer, winter, Christmas, every morning without fail.’
‘Is it doing you any good?’ I asked as he poured cream for me from the cow-shaped silver jug.
‘Ye gods, Bernard. I’m fitter now than I was at twenty-five. I swear I am.’
‘What kind of shape were you in at twenty-five?’ I said.
‘Damned good.’ He put the jug down so that he could run his fingers round the brass-buckled leather belt that held up his jeans. He sucked in his stomach to exaggerate his slim figure and then slammed himself in the gut with a flattened hand. Even without the intake of breath, his lack of fat was impressive. Especially when you took into account the countless long lunches he charged against his expense account.
‘But not as good as now?’ I persisted.
‘I wasn’t fat and flabby the way you are, Bernard. I didn’t huff and puff every time I went up a flight of stairs.’
‘I thought Bret Rensselaer would take over the Stinnes debriefing.’
‘Debriefing,’ said Dicky suddenly. ‘How I hate that word. You get briefed and maybe briefed again, but there is no way anyone can be debriefed.’
‘I thought Bret would jump at it. He’s been out of a job since Stinnes was enrolled.’
Dicky gave the tiniest chuckle and rubbed his hands together. ‘Out of a job since he tried to take over my desk and failed. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’
‘Was he after your desk?’ I said innocently, although Dicky had been providing me with a blow-by-blow account of Bret’s tactics and his own counterploys.
‘Jesus Christ, Bernard, you know he was. I told you all that.’
‘So what’s he got lined up now?’
‘He’d like to take over in Berlin when Frank goes.’
Frank Harrington’s job as head of the Berlin Field Unit was one I coveted, but it meant close liaison with Dicky, maybe even taking orders from him sometimes (although such orders were always wrapped up in polite double-talk and signed by Deputy Controller Europe or a member of the London Central Policy Committee). It wasn’t exactly a role that the autocratic Bret Rensselaer would cherish.
‘Berlin? Bret? Would he like that job?’
‘The rumour is that Frank will get his K. and then retire.’
‘And so Bret plans to sit in Berlin until his retirement comes round and hope that he’ll get a K. too?’ It seemed unlikely. Bret’s social life centred on the swanky jet setters of London South West One. I couldn’t see him sweating it out in Berlin.
‘Why not?’ said Dicky, who seemed to get a flushed face whenever the subject of knighthoods came up.
‘Why not?’ I repeated. ‘Bret can’t speak the language, for one thing.’
‘Come along, Bernard!’ said Dicky, whose command of German was about on a par with Bret’s. ‘He’ll be running the show; he won’t be required to pass himself off as a bricklayer from Prenzlauer Berg.’
A palpable hit for Dicky. Bernard Samson had spent his youth masquerading as just such lowly coarse-accented East German citizens.
‘It’s not just a matter of throwing gracious dinner parties in that big house in the Grunewald,’ I said. ‘Whoever takes over in Berlin has to know the streets and alleys. He’ll also need to know the crooks and hustlers who come in to sell bits and pieces of intelligence.’
‘That’s what you say,’ said Dicky, pouring himself more coffee. He held up the jug. ‘More for you?’ And when I shook my head he continued: ‘That’s because you fancy yourself doing Frank’s job … don’t deny it, you know it’s true. You’ve always wanted Berlin. But times have changed, Bernard. The days of rough-and-tumble stuff are over and done with. That was okay in your father’s time, when we were a de facto occupying power. But now – whatever the lawyers say – the Germans have to be treated as equal partners. What the Berlin job needs is a smoothie like Bret, someone who can charm the natives and get things done by gentle persuasion.’
‘Can I change my mind about coffee?’ I said. I suspected that Dicky’s views were those prevailing among the top-floor mandarins. There was no way I’d be on a short list of smoothies who got things done by means of gentle persuasion, so this was goodbye to my chances of Berlin.
‘Don’t be so damned gloomy about it,’ said Dicky as he poured coffee. ‘It’s mostly dregs, I’m afraid. You didn’t really think you were in line for Frank’s job, did you?’ He smiled at the idea.
‘There isn’t enough money in Central Funding to entice me back to Berlin on any permanent basis. I spent half my life there. I deserve my London posting and I’m hanging on to it.’
‘London is the only place to be,’ said Dicky. But I wasn’t fooling him. My indignation was too strong and my explanation too long. A public school man like Dicky would have done a better job of concealing his bitterness. He would have smiled coldly and said that a Berlin posting would be ‘super’ in such a way that it seemed he didn’t care.
I’d only been in my office for about ten minutes when I heard Dicky coming down the corridor. Dicky and I must have been the only ones still working, apart from the night-duty people, and his footsteps sounded unnaturally sharp, as sounds do at night. And I could always recognize the sound of Dicky’s high-heeled cowboy boots.
‘Do you know what those stupid sods have done?’ he asked, standing in the doorway, arms akimbo and feet apart, like Wyatt Earp coming into the saloon at Tombstone. I knew he would get on the phone to Berlin as soon as I left the office; it was always easier to meddle in other people’s work than to get on with his own.
‘Released him?’
‘Right,’ he said. My accurate guess angered him even more, as if he thought I might have been party to this development. ‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t know. But with you standing there blowing your top it wasn’t difficult to guess.’
‘They released him an hour ago. Direct instructions from Bonn. The government can’t survive another scandal, is the line they’re taking. How can they let politics interfere with our work?’
I noted the nice turn of phrase: ‘our work’.
‘It’s all politics,’ I said calmly. ‘Espionage is about politics. Remove the politics and you don’t need espionage or any of the paraphernalia of it.’
‘By paraphernalia you mean us. I suppose. Well, I knew you’d have some bloody smart answer.’
‘We don’t run the world, Dicky. We can pick it over and then report on it. After that it’s up to the politicians.’
‘I suppose so.’ The anger was draining out of him now. He was often given to these violent explosions, but they didn’t last long providing he had someone to shout at.
‘Your secretary gone?’ I asked.
He nodded. That explained everything – usually it was his poor secretary who got the brunt of Dicky’s fury when the world didn’t run to his complete satisfaction. ‘I’m going too,’ he said, looking at his watch.
‘I’ve got a lot more work to do,’ I told him. I got up from my desk and put papers into the secure filing cabinet and turned the combination lock. Dicky still stood there. I looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
‘And that bloody Miller woman,’ said Dicky. ‘She tried to knock herself off.’
‘They didn’t release her too?’
‘No, of course not. But they let her keep her sleeping tablets. Can you imagine that sort of stupidity? She said they were aspirins and that she needed them for period pains. They believed her, and as soon as they left her alone for five minutes she swallowed the whole bottle of them.’
‘And?’
‘She’s in the Steglitz Clinic. They pumped her stomach; it sounds as if she’ll be okay. But I ask you … God knows when she’ll be fit enough for more interrogation.’
‘I’d let it go, Dicky.’
But he stood there, obviously unwilling to depart without some further word of consolation. ‘And it would all happen tonight,’ he added petulantly, ‘just when I’m going out to dinner.’
I looked at him and nodded. So I was right about an assignation. He bit his lip, angry at having let slip his secret. ‘That’s strictly between you and me of course.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ I said.
And the Controller of German Stations marched off to his dinner date. It was sobering to realize that the man in the front line of the western world’s intelligence system couldn’t even keep his own infidelities secret.
When Dicky Cruyer had gone I went downstairs to the film department and took a reel of film from the rack that was waiting for the filing clerk. It was still in the wrapping paper with the courier’s marks on it. I placed the film in position on the editing bench and laced it up. Then I dimmed the lights and watched the screen.
The titles were in Hungarian and so was the commentary. It was film of a security conference that had just taken place in Budapest. There was nothing very secret; the film had been made by the Hungarian Film Service for distribution to news agencies. This copy was to be used for identification purposes, so that we had up-to-date pictures of their officials.
The conference building was a fine old mansion in a well-kept park. The film crew had done exactly what was expected of them: they’d filmed the big black shiny cars arriving, they’d got pictures of Army officers and civilians walking up the marble steps and the inevitable shot of delegates round a huge table, smiling amicably at each other.
I kept the film running until the camera panned around the table. It came to a nameplate Fiona Samson and there was my wife – more beautiful than ever, perfectly groomed, and smiling for the cameraman. I stopped the film. The commentary growled to a halt and she froze, her hand awkwardly splayed, her face strained, and her smile false. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at her. But suddenly the door of the editing room banged open and flooded everything with bright yellow light from the corridor.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Samson. I thought everyone had finished work.’
‘It’s not work,’ I said. ‘Just something I remembered.’
3 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
So Dicky, having scoffed at the notion that I was being kept away from Stinnes, had virtually ordered me not to go near him. Well, that was all right. For the first time in months I was able to get my desk more or less clear. I worked from nine to five and even found myself able to join in some of those earnest conversations about what had been on TV the previous evening.
And at last I was able to spend more time with my children. For the past six months I had been almost a stranger to them. They never asked about Fiona, but now, when we’d finished putting up the paper decorations for Christmas, I sat them down and told them that their mother was safe and well but that she’d had to go abroad to work.
‘I know,’ said Billy. ‘She’s in Germany with the Russians.’
‘Who told you that?’ I said.
I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told anyone. Just after Fiona’s defection, the Director-General had addressed all the staff in the downstairs dining room – the D-G was an Army man with undisguised admiration for the late Field Marshal Montgomery’s techniques with the lower ranks – and told us that no mention of Fiona’s defection was to be included in any written reports, and it was on no account to be discussed outside the building. The Prime Minister had been told, and anyone who mattered at the Foreign Office knew by means of the daily report. Otherwise the whole business was to be ‘kept to ourselves’.
‘Grandpa told us,’ said Billy.
Well, that was someone the D-G hadn’t reckoned with: my irrepressible father-in-law, David Kimber-Hutchinson, by his own admission a self-made man.
‘What else did he tell you?’ I asked.
‘I can’t remember,’ said Billy. He was a bright child, academic, calculating and naturally inquisitive. His memory was formidable. I wondered if it was his way of saying that he didn’t much want to talk about it.
‘He said that Mummy may not be back for a long time,’ said Sally. She was younger than Billy, generous but introverted in that mysterious way that so many second children are, and closer to her mother. Sally was never moody in the way Billy could be, but she was more sensitive. She had taken her mother’s absence much better than I’d feared, but I was still concerned about her.
‘That’s what I was going to tell you,’ I said. I was relieved that the children were taking this discussion about their mother’s disappearance so calmly. Fiona had always arranged their outings and gone to immense trouble to organize every last detail of their parties. My efforts were a poor substitute, and we all knew it.
‘Mummy is really there to spy for us isn’t she, Daddy?’ said Billy.
‘Ummm,’ I said. It was a difficult one to respond to. I was afraid that Fiona or her KGB colleagues would grab the children and take them to her in East Berlin or Moscow or somewhere, as she once tried to. If she tried again, I didn’t want to make it easier for her to succeed, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to warn them against their own mother. ‘No one knows,’ I said vaguely.
‘Sure, it’s a secret,’ said Billy with that confident shrug of the shoulders used by Dicky Cruyer to help emphasize the obvious. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell.’
‘It’s better just to say she’s gone away,’ I said.
‘Grandpa said we’re to say Mummy’s in hospital in Switzerland.’
It was typical of David to invent his own loony deception story and involve my children in it.
‘The fact is that Mummy and I have separated,’ I said in a rush. ‘And I’ve asked a lady from my office to come round and see us this afternoon.’
There was a long silence. Billy looked at Sally and Sally looked at her new shoes.
‘Aren’t you going to ask her name?’ I said desperately.
Sally looked at me with her big blue eyes. ‘Will she be staying?’ she said.
‘We don’t need anyone else to live here. You have Nanny to look after you,’ I said, avoiding the question.
‘Will she use our bathroom?’ said Sally.
‘No. I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Nanny hates visitors using our bathroom.’
This was a new insight into Nanny, a quiet plump girl from a Devon village who spoke in whispers, was transfixed by all TV programmes, ate chocolates by the truckload, and never complained. ‘Well, I’ll make sure she uses my bathroom,’ I promised.
‘Must she come today?’ said Billy.
‘I invited her for tea so that we could all be together,’ I said. ‘Then, when you go to bed, I’m taking her to dinner in a restaurant.’
‘I wish we could all go out to dinner in a restaurant,’ said Billy, who had recently acquired a blue blazer and long trousers and wanted to wear them to good effect.
‘Which restaurant?’ said Sally.
‘The Greek restaurant where Billy had his birthday.’
‘The waiters sang “Happy Birthday” for him.’
‘So I heard.’
‘You were away.’
‘I was in Berlin.’
‘Why don’t you tell them it’s your girlfriend’s birthday,’ said Sally. ‘They’ll be awfully nice to her, and they’d never find out.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She’s just a friend.’
‘She’s his boyfriend,’ said Billy. Sally laughed.
‘She’s just a friend,’ I said soberly.
‘All my lovers and I are just good friends,’ said Sally, putting on her ‘Hollywood’ voice.
‘She heard that in a film,’ Billy explained.
‘Her name is Gloria,’ I said.
‘We’ve nothing for tea,’ said Sally. ‘Not even biscuits.’
‘Nanny will make toast,’ said Billy to reassure me. ‘She always makes toast when there’s nothing for tea. Toast with butter and jam. It’s quite nice really.’
‘I believe she will be bringing a cake.’
‘Auntie Tessa brings the best cakes,’ said Sally. ‘She gets them from a shop near Harrods.’
‘That’s because Auntie Tessa is very rich,’ said Billy. ‘She has a Rolls-Royce.’
‘She comes here in a Volkswagen,’ said Sally.
‘That’s because she doesn’t want to be flash,’ said Billy. ‘I heard her say that on the phone once.’
‘I think she’s very flash,’ said Sally in a voice heavy with admiration. ‘Couldn’t Auntie Tessa be your girlfriend, Daddy?’
‘Auntie Tessa is married to Uncle George,’ I said before things got out of hand.
‘But Auntie Tessa isn’t faithful to him,’ Sally told Billy. Before I could contradict this uncontradictable fact, Sally after a glance at me added, ‘I heard Daddy tell Mummy that one day when I shouldn’t have been listening.’
‘What kind of cake will she bring?’ said Billy.
‘Will she bring chocolate layer cake?’ said Sally.
‘I like rum babas best,’ said Billy. ‘Especially when they have lots of rum on them.’
They were still discussing their favourite cakes – a discussion that can go on for a very long time – when the doorbell rang.
Gloria Zsuzsa Kent was a tall and very beautiful blonde, whose twentieth birthday was soon approaching. She was what the service called an ‘Executive Officer’ which meant in theory that she could be promoted to Director-General. Armed with good marks from school and fluent Hungarian learned from her parents, she joined the Department on the vague promise of being given paid leave to go to university. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Dicky Cruyer had got his Army service – and Bret his studies at Oxford – credited towards promotion. Now financial cutbacks made it look as if she was stuck with nothing beyond a second-rate office job.
She took off her expensive fur-lined suede coat and the children gave whoops of joy on discovering that she’d brought the rum babas and chocolate layer cake that were their favourites.
‘You’re a mind reader,’ I said. I kissed her. Under the children’s gaze I made sure it was no more than the sort of peck you get along with the Legion of Honour.
She smiled as the children gave her a kiss of thanks before they went off to set the table for tea. ‘I adore your children, Bernard.’
‘You chose their favourite cakes,’ I said.
‘I have two young sisters. I know what children like.’
She sat down near the fire and warmed her hands. Already the afternoon light was fading and the room was dark. There was just a rim of daylight on her straw-coloured hair and the red glow of the fire’s light on her hands and face.
Nanny came in and exchanged amiably noisy greetings with Gloria. They had spoken on the phone several times and the similarity in their ages gave them enough in common to allay my fears about Nanny’s reaction to the news that I had a ‘girlfriend’.
To me Nanny said, ‘The children want to make toast by the fire in here, but I can easily do it in the toaster.’
‘Let’s all sit by the fire and have tea,’ I said.
Nanny looked at me and said nothing.
‘What’s wrong, Nanny?’
‘It would be better if we eat in the kitchen. The children will make a lot of crumbs and mess on the carpets and Mrs Dias won’t come in again to clean until Tuesday.’
‘You’re a fusspot, Nanny,’ I said.
‘I’ll tidy up, Doris,’ Gloria told Nanny. Doris! Good grief, those two were getting along too nicely!
‘And Mr Samson,’ said Nanny tentatively. ‘The children were invited to spend the evening with one of Billy’s school friends. The Dubois family. They live near Swiss Cottage. I promised to phone them before five.’
‘Sure, that’s okay. If the children want to go. Are you going too?’
‘Yes, I’d like to. They have Singin’ in the Rain on video, and they’ll serve soup and a snack meal afterwards. Other children will be there. We’d be back rather late, but the children could sleep late tomorrow.’
‘Well, drive carefully, Nanny. The town’s full of drunk drivers on a Saturday night.’
I heard cheers from the kitchen when Nanny went back and announced my decision. And tea was a delight. The children recited ‘If’ for Gloria, and Billy did three new magic tricks he’d been practising for the school Christmas concert.
‘As I remember it,’ I said, ‘I’d promised to take you to the Greek restaurant for dinner, have a drink or two at Les Ambassadeurs, and then drive you home to your parents.’
‘This is better,’ she said. We were in bed. I said nothing. ‘It is better, isn’t it?’ she asked anxiously.
I kissed her. ‘It’s madness and you know it.’
‘Nanny and the children won’t be back for hours.’
‘I mean you and me. When will you realize that I’m twenty years older than you are?’
‘I love you and you love me.’
‘I didn’t say I loved you,’ I said.
She pulled a face. She resented the fact that I wouldn’t say I loved her, but I was adamant; she was so young that I felt I was taking advantage of her. It was absurd, but refusing to tell her that I loved her enabled me to hang onto a last shred of self-respect.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She pulled the bedclothes over our heads to make a tent. ‘I know you love me, but you don’t want to admit it.’
‘Do your parents suspect that we’re having an affair?’
‘Are you still frightened that my father will come after you?’
‘You’re damned right I am.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said. The more I tried to explain my feelings to her, the more amused she always got. She laughed and snuggled down in the bed, pressing against me.
‘You’re only ten years older than little Sally.’
She grew tired of the tent game and threw the bedclothes back. ‘Your daughter is eight. Apart from the inaccurate mathematics of that allegation, you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that when your lovely daughter is ten years older she will be a grown woman too. Much sooner than that, in fact. You’re an old fogy, Bernard.’
‘I have Dicky telling me that I’m fat and flabby and you telling me that I’m an old fogy. It’s enough to crush a man’s ego.’
‘Not an ego like yours, darling.’
‘Come here,’ I said. I hugged her tight and kissed her.
The truth was that I was falling in love with her. I thought of her too much; soon everyone at the office would guess what was between us. Worse, I was becoming frightened at the prospect of this impossible affair coming to an end. And that, I suppose, is love.
‘I’ve been filing for Dicky all week.’
‘I know, and I’m jealous.’
‘Dicky is such an idiot,’ she said for no apparent reason. ‘I used to think he was so clever, but he’s such a fool.’ She was amused and scornful, but I didn’t miss the element of affection in her voice. Dicky seemed to bring out the maternal instinct in all women, even in his wife.
‘You’re telling me. I work for him.’
‘Did you ever think of getting out of the Department, Bernard?’
‘Over and over again. But what would I do?’
‘You could do almost anything,’ she said with the adoring intensity and the sincere belief that are the marks of those who are very young.
‘I’m forty,’ I said. ‘Companies don’t want promising “young” men of forty. They don’t fit into the pension scheme and they’re too old to be infant prodigies.’
‘I shall get out soon,’ she said. ‘Those bastards will never give me paid leave to go to Cambridge, and if I don’t go up next year I’m not sure when I’ll get another place.’
‘Have they told you they won’t give you paid leave?’
‘They asked me if unpaid leave would suit me just as well. Morgan, actually; that little Welsh shit who does all the dirty work for the D-G’s office.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him to get stuffed.’
‘In those very words?’
‘No point in beating about the bush, is there?’
‘None at all, darling,’ I said.
‘I can’t stand Morgan,’ she said. ‘And he’s no friend of yours either.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I heard him talking to Bret Rensselaer last week. They were talking about you. I heard Morgan say he felt sorry for you really because there was no real future for you in the Department now that your wife’s gone over to the Russians.’
‘What did Bret say?’
‘He’s always very just, very dispassionate, very honourable and sincere; he’s the beautiful American, Bret Rensselaer. He said that the German Section would go to pieces without you. Morgan said the German Section isn’t the only Section in the Department and Bret said, “No, just the most important one”.’
‘How did Morgan take that?’
‘He said that when the Stinnes debriefing is completed Bret might think again.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What’s that bastard talking about?’
‘Don’t get upset, Bernie. It’s just Morgan putting the poison in. You know what he’s like.’
‘Frank Harrington said Morgan is the Martin Bormann of London South West One.’ I laughed.
‘Explain the joke to me.’
‘Martin Bormann was Hitler’s secretary, but by controlling the paperwork of Hitler’s office and by deciding who was permitted to have an audience with Hitler, Bormann became the power behind the throne. He decided everything that happened. People who upset Bormann never got to see Hitler and their influence and importance waned and waned.’
‘And Morgan controls the D-G like that?’
‘The D-G is not well,’ I said.
‘He’s as nutty as a fruitcake,’ said Gloria.
‘He has good days and bad days,’ I said. I was sorry for the D-G; he’d been good in his day – tough when it was necessary, but always scrupulously honest. ‘But by taking on the job of being the D-G’s hatchet man – a job no one else wanted – Morgan has become a formidable power in that building. And he’s done it in a very short time.’
‘How long has he been in the Department?’
‘I don’t know exactly – two years, three at the most. Now he’s talking to old-timers like Bret Rensselaer and Frank Harrington as man to man.’
‘That’s right. I heard him ask Bret about taking charge of the Stinnes debriefing. Bret said he had no time. Morgan said it wouldn’t be time-consuming; it was just a matter of holding the reins so that the Department knew what was happening, from day to day, over at London Debriefing Centre. You’d have thought Morgan was the D-G the way he was saying it.’
‘And how did Bret react to that?’
‘He asked for time to think it over, and it was decided that he’d let Morgan know next week. And then Bret asked if anyone knew when Frank Harrington was retiring, and Morgan said nothing was fixed. Bret said, “Nothing?” in a funny voice and they laughed. I don’t know what that was about.’
‘The D-G has a knighthood to dispose of. Rumour says it will go to Frank Harrington when he retires from the Berlin office. Everyone knows that Bret would give his right arm for a knighthood.’
‘I see. Is that how people get knighthoods?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘There was something else,’ said Gloria. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, but Morgan said the D-G had decided it would be just as well for the Department if you didn’t work in Operations as from the end of this year.’
‘Are you serious,’ I said in alarm.
‘Bret said that Internal Security had given you a clean bill of health – that’s what he said, “a clean bill of health”. And then Morgan said it was nothing to do with Internal Security; it was a matter of the Department’s reputation.’
‘That doesn’t sound like the D-G,’ I said. ‘That sounds like Morgan.’
‘Morgan the ventriloquist,’ said Gloria.
I kissed her again and changed the subject. It was all getting too damned depressing for me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, responding to my change of mood. ‘I was determined not to tell you.’
I hugged her. ‘How did you know the children’s favourite cakes, you witch?’
‘I phoned Doris and asked her.’
‘You and Nanny are very thick,’ I said suspiciously.
‘Why don’t you call her Doris?’
‘I always call her Nanny. It’s better that way when we’re living in the same house.’
‘You’re such a prude. She adores you, you know.’
‘Don’t avoid my question. Have you been plotting with Nanny?’
‘With Nanny? About what?’
‘You know about what.’
‘Don’t do that. Oh, stop tickling me. Oh oh oh. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh stop it.’
‘Did you connive with Nanny so that she and the children were out for the evening? So that we could go to bed?’
‘Of course not.’
‘What did you give her?’
‘Stop it. Please. You beast.’
‘What did you give her?’
‘A box of chocolates.’
‘I knew it. You schemer.’
‘I hate Greek food.’
4 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
Taking the children to see Billy’s godfather was an excuse for a day in the country, a Sunday lunch second to none, and a chance to talk to ‘Uncle Silas’, one of the legends of the Department’s golden days. Also it gave me a chance to tie up some loose ends in the arrested woman’s evidence. If Dicky didn’t want it done for the Department, then I would do it just to satisfy my own curiosity.
The property had always fascinated me; Whitelands was as surprising as Silas Gaunt himself. From the long drive, with its well-tended garden, the ancient stone farmhouse was as pretty as a calendar picture. But over the years it had been adapted to the tastes of many different owners. Adapted, modified, extended and defaced. Across the cobbled yard at the back there was a curious castellated Gothic tower, its spiral staircase leading up to a large, ornately decorated chamber which once had been a mirrored bedroom. Even more incongruous in this cottage with its stone floors and oak beams was the richly panelled billiards room, with game trophies crowding its walls. Both architectural additions dated from the same time, both installed by a nineteenth-century beer baron to indulge his favourite pastimes.
Silas Gaunt had inherited Whitelands from his father, but Silas had never been a farmer. Even when he left the Department and came to live here in retirement, he still let his farm manager make all the decisions. Little wonder that Silas got lonely amid his six hundred acres on the edge of the Cotswolds. Now all the soft greenery of summer had gone. So had the crisp browns of autumn. Only the framework of landscape remained: bare tangles of hedgerow and leafless trees. The first snow had whitened rock-hard ridges of the empty brown fields: crosshatched pieces of landscape where magpies, rooks and starlings scavenged for worms and insects.
Silas had had few guests. It had been a hermit’s life, for the conversation of Mrs Porter, his housekeeper, was limited to recipes, needlework, and the steadily rising prices of groceries in the village shop. Silas Gaunt’s life had revolved round his library, his records and his wine cellar. But there is more to life than Schiller, Mahler and Margaux, which trio Silas claimed as his ‘fellow pensioners’. And so he’d come to encourage these occasional weekend house parties at which departmental staff, both past and present, were usually represented along with a sprinkling of the artists, tycoons, eccentrics and weirdos whom Silas had encountered during his very long and amazing career.
Silas was unkempt; the wispy white hair that made a halo on his almost bald head did not respond to combs or to the clawing gesture of his fingers that he made whenever a strand of hair fell forward across his eyes. He was tall and broad, a Falstaffian figure who liked to laugh and shout, could curse fluently in half a dozen languages, and who’d make reckless bets on anything and everything and claimed – with some justification – to be able to drink any man under the table.
Billy and Sally were in awe of him. They were always ready to go to Whitelands and see Uncle Silas, but they regarded him as a benevolent old ruffian of whose sudden moods they should constantly be wary. And that was the way I saw him myself. But he’d had a fully decorated Christmas tree erected in the entrance hall. Under it there was a little pile of presents for both children, all of them wrapped in bright paper and tied neatly with big bows. Mrs Porter’s doing no doubt.
Like all old people, Silas Gaunt felt a need for unchanging ritual. These guest weekends followed a firmly established pattern: a long country walk on Saturday morning (which I did my best to avoid), roast beef lunch to follow, billiards in the afternoon, and a dress-up dinner on Saturday evening. On Sunday morning his guests were shepherded to church and then to the village pub before coming back to lunch which was locally obtained game or, failing that, poultry. I was relieved to find that duckling was on the menu this week. I did not care for Silas’s selection of curious little wild birds, every mouthful with its portion of lead shot.
‘Surprised to see Walter here?’ Uncle Silas asked me again as he sharpened his long carving knife with the careless abandon of a butcher.
I had registered my surprise on first arriving, but apparently I’d inadequately performed my allotted role. ‘Amazed!’ I said, putting all my energies into it. ‘I had no idea …’ I winked at von Munte. I knew him even better than I knew Uncle Silas; once long ago he’d saved my life by risking his own. Dr Walter von Munte smiled, and even the staid old Frau Doktor gave the ghost of a smile. Living with extroverted, outspoken Silas must have come as something of a shock after their austere and tight-lipped life in the German Democratic Republic, where even the von in their name had been taken from them.
I knew that the von Muntes were staying there – it was my job to know such things. I’d played a part in bringing them out of the East. Their presence was, to some extent, the reason for my visit, but their whereabouts was considered a departmental secret and I was expected to register appropriate surprise.
Until a few short weeks ago this lugubrious old man had been one of our most reliable agents. Known only as Brahms Four he’d supplied regular and carefully selected facts and figures from the Deutsche Notenbank, through which came banking clearances for the whole of East Germany. From time to time he’d also obtained for us the decisions and plans of Comecon – the East Bloc Common Market – and memos from the Moscow Narodny bank too. At the receiving end, Bret Rensselaer had built an empire upon the dangerous work of von Munte, but now von Munte had been debriefed and left in the custodial care of his old friend Uncle Silas, and Bret was desperately seeking new dominions.
Silas stood at the end of the long table and dismembered the duck, apportioning suitable pieces to each guest. He liked to do it himself. It was a game he played: discussing and arguing what each and every guest should have. Mrs Porter watched the cameo with an expressionless face. She arranged the pile of warmed plates, positioned the vegetables and gravy, and, at exactly the right psychological moment, brought in the second roasted duckling. ‘Another one!’ said Silas as if he hadn’t ordered the meal himself and as if he didn’t have a third duckling in the oven for extra portions.
Before pouring the wine, Silas lectured us about it. Château Palmer 1961, he said, was the finest claret he’d ever tasted, the finest perhaps of this century. He still hovered, looking at the wine in the antique decanter as if now wondering whether it would be wasted on the present company.
Perhaps von Munte sensed the hesitation for he said, ‘It’s generous of you to share it with us.’
‘I was looking through my cellar the other day.’ He stood up straight, looking out across the snow-whitened lawn as if oblivious of his guests. ‘I found a dozen bottles of 1878 port down there. My grandfather bought them for me, to mark my tenth birthday, and I’d completely forgotten them. I’ve never tasted it. Yes, I’ve got a lot of treasures there. I stocked up when I had the money to afford it. It would break my heart to leave too much magnificent claret behind when I go.’
He poured the wine carefully and evoked from us the sort of compliments he needed. He was like an actor in that and many other respects – he desperately needed regular and earnest declarations of love. ‘Label uppermost, always label uppermost; when you store and when you pour.’ He demonstrated it. ‘Otherwise you’ll disturb it.’
I knew it would be a predominantly masculine lunch, a departmental get-together, Silas had warned me beforehand, but I still came. Bret Rensselaer and Frank Harrington were both there. Rensselaer was in his middle fifties; American-born, he was trim almost to the point of emaciation. Although his hair was turning white, there was still enough of the blond colouring left to prevent him looking old. And he smiled a lot and had good teeth and a face that was bony so that there weren’t many wrinkles.
Over lunch there was the usual seasonal discussion about how quickly Christmas was approaching and the likelihood of more snow. Bret Rensselaer was deciding upon a place to ski. Frank Harrington, our senior man in Berlin, told him it was too early for good snow, but Silas advised Switzerland.
Frank argued about the snow. He liked to think he was an authority on such matters. He liked skiing, golfing and sailing, and generally having a good time. Frank Harrington was waiting for retirement, something for which he’d been strenuously practising all his life. He was a soldierly-looking figure with a weather-beaten face and a blunt-ended stubble moustache. Unlike Bret, who was wearing the same sort of Savile Row suit he wore to the office, Frank had come correctly attired for the upper-class English weekend: old Bedford cord trousers and a khaki sweater with a silk scarf in the open neck of his faded shirt. ‘February,’ said Frank. ‘That’s the only time for any decent skiing anywhere worth going.’
I observed the way Bret was eying von Munte, whose stream of high-grade information had taken Bret into the very top ranks of the Department. Bret’s desk was now closed down and his seniority had been in peril ever since the old man had been forced to flee. No wonder the two men watched each other like boxers in a ring.
Talk became more serious when it touched upon that inevitable subject in such company, the unification of Germany. ‘How deeply ingrained in East Germans is the philosophy of Communism?’ Bret asked von Munte.
‘Philosophy,’ said Silas, interrupting sharply. ‘I’ll accept that Communism is a perverted sort of religion – infallible Kremlin, infallible Vatican – but philosophy, no.’ He was happier with the von Muntes here, I could tell from the tone of his voice.
Von Munte didn’t take up Silas’s semantic contention. Gravely he said, ‘The way in which Stalin took from Germany Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia made it impossible for many of us Germans to accept the USSR as a friend, neighbour, or example.’
‘That’s going back a long while,’ said Bret. ‘Which Germans are we talking about? Are young Germans interested in the tears and cries of pain we hear about the lost territories?’ He smiled. This was Bret being deliberately provocative. His charming manner was frequently used like this – the local anaesthetic that accompanied the lancet of his rude remarks.
Von Munte remained very calm; was it a legacy of years of banking or years of Communism? Either way, I’d hate to play poker against him. ‘You English equate our eastern lands with Imperial India. The French think we who talk about reasserting Germany’s border to the frontiers of East Prussia are like the pieds-noirs, who hope once again to have Algeria governed from Paris.’
‘Exactly,’ said Bret. He smiled to himself and ate some duckling.
Von Munte nodded. ‘But our eastern provinces have always been German and a vital part of Europe’s relationship with the East. Culturally, psychologically and commercially, Germany’s eastern lands, not Poland, provided the buffer and the link with Russia. Frederick the Great, Yorck and Bismarck – and indeed all those Germans who instituted important alliances with the East – were ostelbisch, Germans from the eastern side of the River Elbe.’ He paused and looked round the table before going on with what was obviously something he’d said time and time again. ‘Czar Alexander I and Nicolas who succeeded him were more German than Russian, and they both married German princesses. And what about Bismarck who was continually defending Russian interests even at the expense of Germany’s relations with the Austrians?’
‘Yes,’ said Bret sardonically. ‘And you have yet to mention the German-born Karl Marx.’
For a moment I thought von Munte was going to reply seriously to the joke and make a fool of himself, but he’d lived amid signals, innuendos, and half-truths long enough to recognize the joke for what it was. He smiled.
‘Can there ever be lasting peace in Europe?’ said Bret wearily. ‘Now, if I’m to believe my ears, you say Germany still has territorial aspirations.’ For Bret it was all a game, but poor old von Munte could not play it.
‘For our own provinces,’ said von Munte stolidly.
‘For Poland and pieces of Russia,’ said Bret. ‘You’d better be clear on that.’
Silas poured more of his precious Château Palmer in a gesture of placation for all concerned. ‘You’re from Pomerania, aren’t you, Walter?’ It was an invitation to talk rather than a real question, for by now Silas knew every last detail of von Munte’s family history.
‘I was born in Falkenburg. My father had a big estate there.’
‘That’s near the Baltic,’ said Bret, feigning interest to make what he considered a measure of reconciliation.
‘Pomerania,’ said von Munte. ‘Do you know it, Bernard?’ he asked me, because I was the closest person there to being a fellow-countryman.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Many lakes and hills. They call it Pomeranian Switzerland, don’t they?’
‘Not any longer.’
‘A beautiful place,’ I said. ‘But as I remember it, damned cold, Walter.’
‘You must go in the summer,’ said von Munte. ‘It’s one of the most enchanting places in the world.’ I looked at Frau Doktor von Munte. I had the feeling that the move to the West was a disappointment for her. Her English was poor and she keenly felt the social disadvantage she suffered as a refugee. With the talk of Pomerania she brightened and tried to follow the conversation.
‘You’ve been back?’ Silas asked.
‘Yes, my wife and I went there about ten years ago. It was foolish. One should never go back.’
‘Tell us about it,’ said Silas.
At first it seemed as if the memories were too painful for von Munte to recount, but after a pause he told us about his trip. ‘There is something nightmarish about going back to your homeland and finding that it’s occupied exclusively by foreigners. It was the most curious experience I’ve ever had – to write “birthplace Falkenburg” and then “destination Zlocieniec”.’
‘The same place, now given a Polish name,’ said Frank Harrington. ‘But you must have been prepared for that.’
‘I was prepared in my mind but not in my heart,’ said von Munte. He turned to his wife and repeated this in rapid German. She nodded dolefully.
‘The train connection from Berlin was never good,’ von Munte went on. ‘Even before the war we had to change twice. This time we went by bus. I tried to borrow a car, but it was not possible. The bus was convenient. We went to Neustettin, my wife’s home town. We had difficulty finding the house in which she’d lived as a child.’
‘Couldn’t you ask for directions?’ said Frank.
‘Neither of us speaks much Polish,’ said von Munte. ‘Also, my wife had lived in Hermann-Göring-Strasse and I did not care to ask the way there.’ He smiled. ‘But we found it eventually. In the street where she lived as a girl we even found an old German woman who remembered my wife’s family. It was a remarkable stroke of luck, for there are only a handful of Germans still living there.’
‘And in Falkenburg?’ said Silas.
‘Ah, in my beloved Zlocieniec, Stalin was more thorough. We could find no one there who spoke German. I was born in a house in the country, right on the lake. We went to the nearest village and the priest tried to help us, but there were no records. He even lent me a bicycle so that I could go out to the house, but it had completely disappeared. The buildings have all been destroyed and the area has been made into a forest. The only remains I could recognize were a couple of farm buildings a long way distant from the site of the house where I was born. The priest promised to write if he found out any more, but he never did.’
‘And you never went back again?’ asked Silas.
‘We planned to return, but things happened in Poland. The big demonstrations for free trade unions and the creation of Solidarity was reported in our East German newspapers as being the work of reactionary elements supported by western fascists. Very few people were prepared to even comment on the Polish crisis. And most of the people who did talk about it said that such “troubles”, by upsetting the Russians, made conditions worse for us East Germans and other peoples in the Eastern Bloc. Poles became unpopular and no one went there. It was as if Poland ceased to exist as a next-door neighbour and became some land far away on the other side of the world.’
‘Eat up,’ said Silas. ‘We’re keeping you from your lunch, Walter.’
But soon von Munte took up the same subject again. It was as if he had to convert us to his point of view. He had to remove our misunderstandings. ‘It was the occupation zones that created the archetype German for you,’ he said. ‘Now the French think all Germans are chattering Rhinelanders, the Americans think we are all beer-swilling Bavarians, the British think we are all icy Westphalians, and the Russians think we are all cloddish Saxons.’
‘The Russians,’ I said, having downed two generous glasses of Silas’s magnificent wine as well as a few aperitifs, ‘think you are all brutal Prussians.’
He nodded sadly. ‘Yes, Saupreiss,’ he said, using the Bavarian dialect word for Prussian swine. ‘Perhaps you are right.’
After lunch the other guests divided into those who played billiards and those who preferred to sit huddled round the blazing log fire in the drawing room. My children were watching TV with Mrs Porter.
Silas, giving me a chance to speak privately with von Munte, took us to the conservatory to which, at this time of year, he had moved his house plants. It was a huge glass palace, resting against the side of the house, its framework gracefully curved, its floor formed of beautiful old decorative tiles. In these cold months the whole place was crammed full of prehensile-looking greenery of every shape and size. It seemed too cold in there for such plants to flourish, but Silas said they didn’t need heat so much as light. ‘With me,’ I told him, ‘it’s exactly the opposite.’
He smiled as if he’d heard the joke before, which he had because I told it to him every time he trapped me into one of these chats amid his turnip tops. But Silas liked the conservatory, and if he liked it, everyone else had to like it too. He seemed not to feel the cold. He was jacketless, with bright red braces visible under his unbuttoned waistcoat. Walter von Munte was wearing a black suit of the kind that was uniform for a German government official in the service of the Kaiser. His face was grey and lined and his whitening hair cropped short. He took off his gold-rimmed glasses and polished them on a silk handkerchief. Seated on the big wicker seat under the large and leafy plants the old man looked like some ancient studio portrait.
‘Young Bernard has a question for you, Walter,’ said Silas. He had a bottle of Madeira with him and three glasses. He put them on the table and poured a measure of the amber-coloured wine for each of us, then lowered his weight onto a cast-iron garden chair. He sat between us, positioned like a referee.
‘It is not good for me,’ said von Munte, but he took the glass and looked at the colour of it and sniffed it appreciatively.
‘It’s not good for anyone,’ said Silas cheerfully, sipping his carefully measured portion. ‘It’s not supposed to be good for you. The doctor cut me down to one bottle per month last year.’ He drank. ‘This year he told me to cut it out altogether.’
‘Then you are disobeying orders,’ said von Munte.
‘I got myself another doctor,’ said Silas. ‘We live in a capitalist society over here, Walter. I can afford to get myself a doctor who says it’s okay to smoke and drink.’ He laughed and sipped a little more of his Madeira. ‘Cossart 1926, bottled fifty years later. Not the finest Madeira I’ve ever encountered, but not at all bad, eh?’ He didn’t wait for our response, but selected a cigar from the box he’d brought under his arm. ‘Try that,’ he said, offering the cigar to me. ‘That’s an Upmann grand corona, one of the best cigars you can smoke and just right for this time of day. Walter, what about one of those petits that you enjoyed last night?’
‘Alas,’ said von Munte, holding up his hand to decline. ‘I cannot afford your doctor. I must keep to one a week.’
I lit the cigar Silas had given me. It was typical of him that he had to select what he thought suitable for us. He had well-defined ideas about what everyone should have and what they shouldn’t have. For anyone who called him a ‘fascist’ – and there were plenty who did – he had the perfect response: scars from Gestapo bullets.
‘What do you want to ask me, Bernard?’ said von Munte.
I got the cigar going and then I said, ‘Ever hear of Martello, Harry, Jake, See-saw or Ironfoot?’ I’d put in a few extra names as a means of control.
‘What kind of names are these?’ said von Munte. ‘People?’
‘Agents. Code names. Russian agents operating out of the United Kingdom.’
‘Recently?’
‘It looks as if one of them was used by my wife.’
‘Yes, recently. I see.’ Von Munte sipped his port. He was old-fashioned enough to be embarrassed at the mention of my wife and her spying. He shifted his weight on the wicker seat and the movement produced a loud creaking sound.
‘Did you ever come across those names?’ I asked.
‘It was not the policy to let my people have access to such secrets as the code names of agents.’
‘Not even source names?’ I persisted. ‘These are probably not agent names; they’re the code names used in messages and for distribution. No real risk there, and the material from any one source keeps its name until identified and measured and pronounced upon. That’s the KGB system and our system too.’
I glanced round at Silas. He was examining one of his plants, his head turned away as if he weren’t listening. But he was listening all right; listening and remembering every last syllable of what was being said. I knew him of old.
‘Source names. Yes, Martello sounds familiar,’ said von Munte. ‘Perhaps the others too, I can’t remember.’
‘Two names used by one agent at the same time,’ I said.
‘That would be unprecedented,’ said von Munte. He was loosening up now. ‘Two names, no. How would we ever keep track of our material?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said.
‘This was from the woman arrested in Berlin?’ said Silas suddenly. He dropped the pretence of looking at his plants. ‘I heard about that.’ Silas always knew what was happening. In earlier days, while the D-G had been settling in, he’d even asked Silas to monitor some of the operations. Nowadays Silas and the D-G kept in touch. It would be foolish of me to imagine that this conversation would not get back to the Department.
‘Yes, the woman in Berlin,’ I said.
Walter von Munte touched his stiff white collar. ‘I was never allowed to know any secrets. They gave me only what they thought I should have.’
I said, ‘Like Silas distributing his food and cigars, you mean?’ I kept wishing that Silas would depart and leave me and von Munte to have the conversation I wanted. But that was not Silas’s way. Information was his stock in trade, it always had been, and he knew how to use it to his own advantage. That’s why he’d survived so long in the Department.
‘Not as generously as Silas,’ said von Munte. He smiled and drank some of the Madeira and then shifted about, deciding how to explain it all. ‘The bank’s intelligence staff went over to the Warschauer Strasse office once a week. They would have all the new material in trays waiting for us. Old Mr Heine was in charge there. He’d produce for us each item according to subject.’
‘Raw?’ I said.
‘Raw?’ said von Munte. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Did they tell you what the agent said or did they merely tell you the content of his message?’
‘Oh, the messages were edited, but otherwise as received. They had to be; the staff handling the material didn’t know enough about economics to understand what it was about.’
‘But you identified different sourees?’ I asked yet again.
‘Sometimes we could, sometimes that was easy. Some of it was total rubbish.’
‘From different agents?’ I persisted. My God, but it was agony to deal with old people. Would I be like this one day?
‘Some of their agents sent only rumours. There was one who never provided a word of good sense. They called him “Grock”. That wasn’t his code name or his source name; it was our joke. We called him “Grock”, after the famous clown, of course.’
‘Yes,’ I said. But I’m glad von Munte had told me it was a joke; that gave me the cue to laugh. ‘What about the good sources?’ I said.
‘You could recognize them from the quality of their intelligence and from the style in which it was presented.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Perhaps I should explain what it was like in the Warschauer Strasse office. It wasn’t our office. It is supposed to be an office belonging to Aeroflot, but there are always police and security guards on the door, and our passes were carefully scrutinized no matter how often we visited there. I don’t know who else uses the building, but the economic intelligence staff met there regularly, as I said.’
‘And you were included in “economic intelligence staff”?’
‘Certainly not. They were all KGB and security people. My superior was only invited to attend when there was something directly affecting our department. Other bank officials and Ministry people came according to what was to be discussed.’
‘Why didn’t the briefing take place at the KGB offices?’ I asked. Silas was sitting upright on his metal chair, his eyes closed as if he were dozing off to sleep.
‘The Warschauer Strasse office was – perhaps I should say is – used at arm’s length by the KGB. When some Party official or some exalted visitor has enough influence to be permitted to visit the KGB installation in Berlin, they are invariably taken to Warschauer Strasse rather than to Karlshorst.’
‘It’s used as a front?’ said Silas opening his eyes and blinking as if suddenly coming awake from a deep slumber.
‘They wouldn’t want visitors tramping through the offices where the real work was being done. And Warschauer Strasse has a kitchen and dining room where such dignitaries can be entertained. Also there is a small lecture hall where they can see slide shows and demonstration films and so on. We liked going over there. Even the coffee and sandwiches served were far better than anything available elsewhere.’
‘You said you could tell the source from the quality and the style. Could you enlarge on that?’ I asked.
‘Some communications would begin an item with a phrase such as “I hear that the Bank of England” or whatever. Others would say, “Last week the Treasury issued a confidential statement.” Others might put it, “Fears of an imminent drop in American interest rates are likely to bring …”. These different styles are virtually sufficient for identification, but correlated with the proved quality of certain sources, we were soon able to recognize the agents. We spoke of them as people and joked about the nonsense that certain of them sometimes passed on to us.’
‘So you must have recognized the first-class material that my wife was providing.’
Von Munte looked at me and then at Silas. Silas said, ‘Is this official, Bernard?’ There was a note of warning in his voice.
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘We’re sailing a bit close to the wind for chitchat,’ Silas said. The choice of casual words, and the softness of his voice, did nothing to hide the authority behind what he said; on the contrary, it was the manner in which certain classes of Englishmen give orders to their subordinates. I said nothing and von Munte watched Silas carefully. Then Silas drew on his cigar reflectively and, having taken his time, said, ‘Tell him whatever you know, Walter.’
‘As I told you, I only saw the economic material. I can’t guess what proportion of any one agent’s submissions that might be.’ He looked at me. ‘Take the material from the man we called “Grock”. It was rubbish, as I said. But for all I know, Grock might have been sending wonderful stuff about underwater weaponry or secret NATO conferences.’
‘Looking back at it, can you now guess what my wife was sending?’
‘It’s only a guess,’ said von Munte, ‘but there was one tray of material that was always well written and organized in a manner one might call academic.’
‘Good stuff?’
‘Very reliable but inclined towards caution. Nothing very alarming or exciting; mostly confirmations of trends that we could guess at. Useful, of course, but from our point of view not wonderful.’ He looked up at the sky through the glass roof of the conservatory. ‘Eisenguss,’ he said suddenly and laughed. ‘Nicht Eisenfuss; Eisenguss. Not iron foot but cast iron or pig iron; Gusseisen. Yes, that was the name of the source. I remember at the time I thought he must be some sort of government official.’
‘It means poured iron,’ said Silas, who spoke a perfect and pedantic German and couldn’t tolerate my Berlin accent.
‘I know the word,’ I said irritably. ‘The audiotypist was careless, that’s all. None of them are really fluent.’ It was a feeble excuse and quite untrue. I’d done it myself. I should have listened more carefully when I was with the Miller woman or picked up my mistranslation when typing from the tape recording.
‘So now we have a name to connect Fiona with the material she gave them,’ said Silas. ‘Is that what you wanted?’
I looked at von Munte. ‘Just the one code word for Fiona’s tray?’
‘It all came under the one identification,’ said von Munte. ‘Why would they split it up? It wouldn’t make sense, would it?’
‘No,’ I said. I finished my drink and stood up. ‘It wouldn’t make sense.’
Upstairs I could hear the children growing noisy. There was a limit to the amount of time that TV kept them entertained. ‘I’ll go and take charge of my children,’ I said. ‘I know they tire Mrs Porter.’
‘Are you staying for supper?’ said Silas.
‘Thanks, but it’s a long journey, Silas. And the children will be late to bed as it is.’
‘There’s plenty of room for you all.’
‘You’re very kind, but it would mean leaving at crack of dawn to get the children to school and me to the office.’
He nodded and turned back to von Munte. But I knew there was more to it than simple hospitality. Silas was determined to have a word with me in private. And on my way downstairs, after I’d told the children that we’d be leaving soon after tea, he emerged from his study and, with one hand on my shoulder, drew me inside.
He closed the study door with great care. Then, in a sudden change of mood that was typical of him, he said, ‘Do you mind telling me what the bloody hell this is all about?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t what me, Bernard. You understand English. What the hell are you cross-questioning von Munte about?’
‘The arrested woman …’
‘Mrs Miller,’ he interrupted me, to show how well informed he was.
‘Yes, Mrs Carol Elvira Johnson, née Miller, father’s name Müller, born London 1930, occupation schoolteacher. That’s the one.’
‘That was quite uncalled for,’ said Silas, offended at my reply. ‘Well, what about her?’
‘Her testimony doesn’t fit what I know of KGB procedures and I wanted to hear about von Munte’s experience.’
‘About using multiple code names? Did the Miller woman say they used multiple code names?’
‘She handled two lots of exceptionally high-grade intelligence material. There were two code names, but the Department is happy to believe that it all came from Fiona.’
‘But you incline to the view that it was two lots of material from two different agents?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I’m still trying to find out. It can’t hurt to improve upon our knowledge, can it?’
‘Have you spoken to anyone at the office about this?’
‘Dicky Cruyer knows.’
‘Well, he’s a bright lad,’ said Silas. ‘What did he say?’
‘He’s not interested.’
‘What would you do in Dicky Cruyer’s place?’
‘Someone should check it with Stinnes,’ I said. ‘What is the point of debriefing a KGB defector if we don’t use him to improve upon what we already know?’
Silas turned to the window; his lips were pressed tight together and his face was angry. From this first-floor room there was a view across the paddock all the way to the stream that Silas called his ‘river’. For a long time he watched the flecks of snow spinning in the air. ‘Drive slowly. It will freeze hard tonight,’ he said without looking round at me. He’d suppressed his anger and his body relaxed as the rage drained out of him.
‘No other way to drive in that old banger of mine.’
When he turned to me he had his smile in place. ‘Didn’t I hear you telling Frank that you’re buying something good from your brother-in-law?’ He never missed anything. He must have had superhuman hearing and, in defiance of the laws of nature, it improved with every year he aged. I had been telling Frank Harrington about it, and, in keeping with our curious father-son sort of relationship, Frank had told me to be very careful when I was driving it.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A Rover 3500 saloon that a couple of tear-aways souped up to do one hundred and fifty miles an hour.’
‘With a V-8 engine that shouldn’t be too difficult.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You’ll surprise a few Sunday drivers with that one, Bernard.’
‘Yes, that’s what Tessa’s husband said. But until it’s ready I have to manage with the Ford. And in that I can’t surprise anyone.’
Silas leaned close and his manner was avuncular. ‘You’ve come out of the Kimber-Hutchinson business with a smile on your face, Bernard. I’m pleased.’ I couldn’t help noticing that his distant relative Fiona was now referred to by her maiden name, thus distancing both of us from her.
‘I don’t know about the smile,’ I said.
He ignored my retort. ‘Don’t start digging into that all over again. Let it go.’
‘You think that’s best?’ I said, to avoid giving him the reassurance he was asking for.
‘Leave all that to the people at Five. It’s not our job to chase spies,’ said Silas and opened the door of his study to let me out on to the landing.
‘Come along, children,’ I called. ‘Tea and cake and then we must leave.’
‘The Germans have a word for the results of such over-enthusiasm, don’t they,’ said Silas, who never knew when to stop. ‘Schlimmbesserung, an improvement that makes things worse.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. There was no sign of anger now. Silas had become Uncle Silas again.
5 (#ulink_b649b0ca-1295-57de-8d7d-bf62cfb3eed4)
‘Why does anyone have to go to Berlin,’ I asked Dicky resentfully. I was at home: warm and comfortable and looking forward to Christmas Day.
‘Be sensible,’ said Dicky. ‘They’re getting this Miller woman’s body out of the Hohenzollern Canal. We can’t leave it to the Berlin cops, and a lot of questions will have to be answered. Why was she being moved? Who authorized the ambulance? And where the hell was she being moved to?’
‘It’s Christmas, Dicky,’ I said.
‘Oh, is it?’ said Dicky feigning surprise. ‘That accounts for the difficulty I seem to be having getting anything done.’
‘Don’t Operations know that we have something called the Berlin Field Unit?’ I said sarcastically. ‘Why isn’t Frank Harrington handling it?’
‘Don’t be peevish, old boy,’ said Dicky, who I think was enjoying the idea of ruining my Christmas. ‘We showed Frank how important this was by sending you over to supervise the arrest. And you interrogated her. We can’t suddenly decide that BFU must take over. They’ll say we’re unloading this one onto them because it’s the Christmas holiday. And they’d be right.’
‘What does Frank say?’
‘Frank isn’t in Berlin. He’s gone away for Christmas.’
‘He must have left a contact number,’ I said desperately.
‘He’s gone to some relatives in the Scottish Highlands. There have been gales and the phone lines are down. And don’t say send the local constabulary to find him because when I track him down, Frank will point out that he has a deputy on duty in Berlin. No, you’ll have to go, Bernard. I’m sorry, but there it is. And after all, you’re not married.’
‘Hell, Dicky. I’ve got the children with me and the nanny has gone home for Christmas with her parents. I’m not even on stand-by duty. I’ve planned all sorts of things over the holiday.’
‘With gorgeous Gloria, no doubt. I can imagine what sort of things you planned, Bernard. Bad luck, but this is an emergency.’
‘Who I spend my Christmas with is my personal business,’ I said huffily.
‘Of course, old chap. But let me point out that you introduced the personal note into this conversation. I didn’t.’
‘I’ll phone Werner,’ I said.
‘By all means. But you’ll have to go, Bernard. You are the person the BfV knows. I can’t get all the paperwork done to authorize someone else to work with them.’
‘I see,’ I said. That was the real reason, of course. Dicky was determined that he would not go back into the office for a couple of hours of paperwork and phoning.
‘And who else could I send? Tell me who could go and see to it.’
‘From what you say, it’s only going to be a matter of identifying a corpse.’
‘And who else can do that?’
‘Any of the BfV men who were in the arrest team.’
‘That would look very good on the documentation, wouldn’t it,’ said Dicky with heavy irony. ‘We have to rely on a foreign police service for our certified identification. Even Coordination would query that one.’
‘If it’s a corpse, Dicky, let it stay in the icebox until after the holiday.’
There was a deep sigh from the other end. ‘You can wriggle and wriggle, Bernard, but you’re on this hook and you know it. I’m sorry to wreck your cosy little Christmas, but it’s nothing of my doing. You have to go and that’s that. The ticket is arranged, and cash and so on will be sent round by security messenger tomorrow morning.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Daphne and I will be pleased to entertain the children round here, you know. Gloria can come round too, if she’d like that.’
‘Thanks, Dicky,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘She’ll be safe with me, Bernard,’ said Dicky, and did nothing to disguise the smirk with which he said it. He’d always lusted after Gloria. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I think Daphne, his wife, knew it too. I hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
And so it was that, on Christmas Eve, when Gloria was with my children, preparing them for early bed so that Santa Claus could operate undisturbed, I was standing watching the Berlin police trying to winch a wrecked car out of the water. It wasn’t exactly the Hohenzollern Canal. Dicky had got that wrong; it was Hakenfelde, that industrialized section of the bank of the Havel River not far from where the Hohenzollern joins it.
Here the Havel widens to become a lake. It was so cold that the police doctor insisted the frogmen must have a couple of hours’ rest to thaw out. The police inspector had argued about it, but in the end the doctor’s opinion prevailed. Now the boat containing the frogmen had disappeared into the gloom and I was left with only the police inspector for company. The two policemen left to guard the scene had gone behind the generator truck, the noise of which never ceased. The police electricians had put flood lamps along the wharf to make light for the winch crew, so that the whole place was lit with the bright artificiality of a film set.
I stepped through the broken railing at the place where the car had gone into the water. Looking down over the edge of the jetty I could just make out the wobbling outline of the car under the dark oily surface. The winch, and two steadying cables, held it suspended there. For the time being, the car had won the battle. One steel cable had broken, and the first attempts to lift the car had ripped its rear off. That was the trouble with cars, said the inspector – they filled with water, and water weighs a ton per cubic metre. And this was a big car, a Citroën ambulance. To make it worse, its frame was bent enough to prevent the frogmen from getting its doors open.
The inspector was in his mid-fifties, a tall man with a large white moustache, its ends curling in the style of the Kaiser’s soldiers. It was the sort of moustache a man grew to make himself look older. ‘To think,’ said the inspector, ‘that I transferred out of the Traffic Department because I thought standing on point duty was too cold.’ He stamped his feet. His heavy jackboots made a crunching sound where ice was forming in the cracks between the cobblestones.
‘You should have kept to traffic,’ I said, ‘but transferred to the Nice or Cannes Police Department.’
‘Rio,’ said the inspector, ‘I was offered a job in Rio. There was an agency here recruiting ex-policemen. My wife was all in favour, but I like Berlin. There’s no town like it. And I’ve always been a cop; never wanted to be anything else. I know you from somewhere, don’t I? I remember your face. Were you ever a cop?’
‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about what I did for a living.
‘Right from the time I was a child,’ he continued. ‘I’m going back a long time now to the war and even before that. There was a traffic cop, famous all over Berlin. Siegfried they called him; I don’t know if that was his real name but everyone knew Siegfried. He was always on duty at the Wilhelmplatz, the beautiful little white palace where Dr Goebbels ran his Propaganda Ministry. There were always crowds of tourists there, watching the well-known faces that went in and out, and if there was any kind of crisis, big crowds would form there to try and guess what was going on. My father always pointed out Siegfried, a tall policeman in a long white coat. And I wanted a big white coat like the traffic police wear. And I wanted to have the ministers and the generals, the journalists and the film stars, say hello to me in that friendly way they always greeted him. There was a kiosk there on the Wilhelmplatz which sold souvenirs and they had postcard photos of all the Nazi bigwigs and I asked my father why there wasn’t a photo card of Siegfried on sale there. I wanted to buy one. My father said that maybe next week there would be one of Siegfried, and every week I looked but there wasn’t one. I decided that when I grew up I’d be the policeman in the Wilhelmplatz and I’d make sure they had my photo on sale in the kiosk. It’s silly, isn’t it, how such unimportant things change a man’s life?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I know you from somewhere,’ he said, looking at my face and frowning. I passed the police inspector my hip flask of brandy. He hesitated and took a look round the desolate yard. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ I joked. He smiled, took a gulp, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
‘My God, it’s cold,’ he said as if to explain his lapse from grace.
‘It’s cold and it’s Christmas Eve,’ I said.
‘Now I remember,’ he said suddenly. ‘You were in that football team that played on the rubble behind the Stadium. I used to take my kid brother along. He was ten or eleven; you must have been about the same age.’ He chuckled at the recollection and with the satisfaction of remembering where he’d seen me before. ‘The football team; yes. It was run by that crazy English colonel – the tall one with glasses. He had no idea about how to play football; he couldn’t even kick the ball straight, but he ran round the pitch waving a walking stick and yelling his head off. Remember?’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘Those were the days. I can see him now, waving that stick in the air and yelling. What a crazy old man he was. After the match he’d give each boy a bar of chocolate and an apple. Most of the kids only went to get the chocolate and apple.’
‘You’re right,’ I said.
‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’ He stood looking across the water for a long time and then said, ‘Who was in the ambulance? One of your people?’ He knew I was from London and guessed the rest of it. In Berlin you didn’t have to be psychic to guess the rest of it.
‘A prisoner,’ I said.
It was already getting dark. Daylight doesn’t last long on clouded Berlin days like this in December. The warehouse lights made little puff balls in the mist. Around here there were only cranes, sheds, storage tanks, crates stacked as high as tenements, and rusty railway tracks. Facing us far across the water were more of the same. There was no movement except the sluggish current. The great city around us was almost silent and only the generator disturbed the peace. Looking south along the river I could see the island of Eiswerder. Beyond that, swallowed by the mist, was Spandau – world-famous now, not only for its machine guns but for the fortress prison inside which the soldiers of four nations guarded one aged and infirm prisoner: Hitler’s deputy.
The police inspector followed my gaze. ‘Not Hess,’ he joked. ‘Don’t say the poor old fellow finally escaped?’
I smiled dutifully. ‘Bad luck getting Christmas duty,’ I said. ‘Are you married?’
‘I’m married. I live just round the corner from here. My parents lived in the same house. Do you know I’ve never been out of Berlin in all my life?’
‘All through the war too?’
‘Yes, all through the war I was living here. I was thinking of that just now when you gave me the drink.’ He turned up the collar of his uniform greatcoat. ‘You get old and suddenly you find yourself remembering things that you haven’t recalled in about forty years. Tonight for instance, suddenly I’m remembering a time just before Christmas in 1944 when I was on duty very near here: the gasworks.’
‘You were in the Army?’ He didn’t look old enough.
‘No. Hitler Youth. I was fourteen and I’d only just got my uniform. They said I wasn’t strong enough to join a gun crew, so they made me a messenger for the air defence post. I was the youngest kid there. They only let me do that job because Berlin hadn’t had an air raid for months and it seemed so safe. There were rumours that Stalin had told the Western powers that Berlin mustn’t be bombed so that the Red Army could capture it intact.’ He gave a sardonic little smile. ‘But the rumours were proved wrong, and on December fifth the Americans came over in daylight. People said they were trying to hit the Siemens factory, but I don’t know. Siemensstadt was badly bombed, but bombs hit Spandau, and Pankow and Oranienburg and Weissensee. Our fighters attacked the Amis as they came in to bomb – it was a thick overcast but I could hear the machine guns – and I think they just dropped everything as soon as they could and headed home.’
‘Why do you remember that particular air raid?’
‘I was outside and I was blown off my bicycle by the bomb that dropped in Streitstrasse just along the back of here. The officer at the air-raid post found another bike for me and gave me a swig of schnapps from his flask, like you did just now. I felt very grown up. I’d never tasted schnapps before. Then he sent me off on my bike with a message for our headquarters at Spandau station. Our phones had been knocked out. Be careful, he said, and if another lot of bombers come, you take shelter. When I got back from delivering the message there was nothing left of them. The air defence post was just rubble. They were all dead. It was a delayed action bomb. It must have been right alongside us when he gave me the schnapps, but no one felt the shock of it because of all the racket.’
Suddenly his manner changed, as if he was embarrassed at having told me his war experiences. Perhaps he’d been chafed about his yarns by men who’d come back from the Eastern Front with stories that made his air-raid experiences seem no more than minor troubles.
He tugged at his greatcoat like a man about to go on parade. And then, looking down into the water at the submerged car again, he said, ‘If the next go doesn’t move it, we’ll have to get a big crane. And that will mean waiting until after the holiday; the union man will make sure of that.’
‘I’ll hang on,’ I said. I knew he was trying to provide me with an excuse to leave.
‘The frogmen say the car is empty.’
‘They wanted to go home,’ I said flippantly.
The inspector was offended. ‘Oh, no. They are good boys. They wouldn’t tell me wrong just to avoid another dive.’ He was right, of course. In Germany there was still a work ethic.
I said, ‘They can’t see much, with the car covered in all that oil and muck. I know what it’s like in this sort of water; the underwater lamps just reflect in the car’s window glass.’
‘Here’s your friend,’ said the inspector. He strolled off towards the other end of the wharf to give us a chance to talk in private.
It was Werner Volkmann. He had his hat dumped on top of his head and was wearing his long heavy coat with the astrakhan collar. I called it his impresario’s coat, but today the laugh was on me, freezing to death in my damp trench coat. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Don’t bite my head off,’ said Werner. ‘I’m not even getting paid.’
‘I’m sorry, Werner, but I told you not to bother to drag out here.’
‘The roads are empty, and to tell you the truth, being a Jew I feel a bit of a hypocrite celebrating Christmas.’
‘You haven’t left Zena alone?’
‘Her sister’s family are with us – four children and a husband who works in the VAT office.’
‘I can see why you came.’
‘I like it all up to a point,’ said Werner. ‘Zena likes to do the whole thing right. You know how it is in Germany. She spent all the afternoon decorating the tree and putting the presents out, and she has real candles on it.’
‘You should be with them,’ I said. In Germany the evening before Christmas Day – heiliger Abend – is the most important time of the holiday. ‘Make sure she doesn’t burn the house down.’
‘I’ll be back with them in time for the dinner. I told them you’d join us.’
‘I wish I could, Werner. But I’ll have to be here when it comes out of the water. Dicky put that in writing and you know what he’s like.’
‘Are you going to try again soon?’
‘In about an hour. What did you find out at the hospital this morning?’
‘Nothing very helpful. The people who took her away were dressed up to be a doctor and hospital staff. They had the Citroën waiting outside. From what the people in the reception office say, the ambulance was supposed to be taking her to a private clinic in Dahlem.’
‘What about the cop guarding her?’
‘For him they had a different story. They told him they were clinic staff. They said they were just taking her downstairs for another X-ray and would be back in about thirty minutes. She was very weak and complained bitterly about being moved. She probably didn’t realize what was going to happen.’
‘That she was going into the Havel, you mean?’
‘No. That they were a KGB team, there to get her away from police custody.’
I said, ‘Why didn’t the clinic reception phone the police before releasing her?’
‘I don’t know, Bernie. One of them said that she was taken out using the papers of a patient who was due to be moved that day. Another one said there was a policeman outside with the ambulance, so it seemed to be all in order. We’ll probably never find out exactly what happened. It’s a hospital, not a prison; the staff don’t worry too much about who’s going in and out.’
‘What do you make of it, Werner?’
‘They knew she was talking, I suppose. Somehow what she was telling us got back to Moscow and they decided there was only one way of handling it.’
‘Why not take her straight back into East Berlin?’ I said.
‘In an ambulance? Very conspicuous. Even the Russians are not too keen on that sort of publicity. Snatching a prisoner from police custody and taking her across the wire would not look good at a time when the East Germans are trying to show the world what good neighbours they can be.’ He looked at me. I pulled a face. ‘It’s easier this way,’ added Werner. ‘They got rid of her. They were taking no chances. If she had talked to us already, they’d be making sure she couldn’t give evidence.’
‘But it’s a drastic remedy, Werner. What made them get so excited?’
‘They knew she was handling the radio traffic your wife provided.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And Fiona is over there. So why would they be worried about what she might tell us?’
‘Fiona is behind it? Is that what you mean?’
‘It’s difficult not to suspect her hand is in it.’
‘But Fiona is safe and sound. What has she got to worry about?’
‘Nothing, Werner, she’s got nothing to worry about.’
He looked at me as if puzzled. Then he said, ‘The radio traffic then. What did Dicky think about the multiple codes?’
‘Dicky didn’t seem to be listening. He was hoping the Miller woman would just fade away, and he’s forbidden me to speak with Stinnes.’
‘Dicky was never one to go looking for extra work,’ said Werner.
‘No one is interested,’ I said. ‘I went down to talk to Silas Gaunt and von Munte and neither of them were very interested. Silas waggled his finger at me when I brought the matter up with von Munte. And he told me not to rock the boat. Don’t start digging into all that again, he said.’
‘I don’t know old Mr Gaunt the way you do. I just remember him in the Berlin office at the time when your dad was Resident. We were about eighteen years old. Mr Gaunt bet me that the Wall would never go up. I won fifty marks from him when they built the Wall. And fifty marks was a lot of money in those days. You could have an evening out with all the trimmings for fifty marks.’
‘I wish I had one mark for every time you’ve told me that story, Werner.’
‘You’re in a filthy mood, Bernie. I’m sorry you got this rotten job, but it’s not my fault.’
‘I’d really looked forward to a couple of days with the kids. They’re growing up without me, Werner. And Gloria is there too.’
‘I’m glad that’s going well … you and Gloria.’
‘It’s bloody ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I’m old enough to be her father. Do you know how old she is?’
‘No, and I don’t care. There’s an age difference between me and Zena, isn’t there? But that doesn’t stop us being happy.’
I turned to Werner so that I could look at him. It was dark. His face was visible only because it was edged with light reflected from the array of floodlights. His heavy-lidded eyes were serious. Poor Werner. Was he really happy? His marriage was my idea of hell. ‘Zena is older than Gloria,’ I said.
‘Be happy while you can, Bernie. It’s nothing to do with Gloria’s age. You still feel bad about losing Fiona. You haven’t got over her running away yet. I know you, and I can tell. She was a sort of anchor for you, a base. Without her you are restless and unsure of yourself. But that’s only temporary. You’ll get over it. And Gloria is just what you need.’
‘Maybe.’ I didn’t argue with him; he was usually very perceptive about people and their relationships. That was why he’d been such a good field agent back in the days when we were young and carefree, and enjoyed taking risks.
‘What’s really on your mind? Code names are just for the analysts and Coordination staff. Why do you care how many code names Fiona used?’
‘She used one,’ I snapped. ‘They all use one. Our people have one name per source and so do their agents. That’s what von Munte confirmed. Fiona was Eisenguss – no other names.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I’m not one hundred per cent sure,’ I told him. ‘Special circumstances come up in this business; we all know that. But I’m ninety-nine per cent sure.’
‘What are you saying, Bernie?’
‘Surely it’s obvious, Werner.’
‘It’s Christmas, Bernie. I had a few drinks just to be sociable. What is it you’re saying?’
‘There are two major sources of material that the Miller woman handled. Both top-grade intelligence. Only one of them was Fiona.’
Werner pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger and closed his eyes. Werner did that when he was thinking hard. ‘You mean there’s someone else still there? You mean the KGB still have someone in London Central?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Don’t just shrug it off,’ said Werner. ‘Don’t hit me in the face with that kind of custard pie and then say you don’t know.’
‘Everything points to it,’ I said. ‘But I’ve told them at London Central. I’ve done everything short of drawing a diagram and no one gives a damn.’
‘It might just be a stunt, a KGB stunt.’
‘I’m not organizing a lynching party, Werner. I’m just suggesting that it should be checked out.’
‘The Miller woman might have got it wrong,’ said Werner.
‘She might have got it wrong, but even if she got it wrong, that still leaves a question to be answered. And what if someone reads the Miller transcript and starts wondering if I might be the other source?’
‘Ahh! You’re just covering your arse,’ said Werner. ‘You don’t really think there’s another KGB source in London Central, but you realized that you’d have to interpret it that way in case anyone thought it was you and you were trying to protect yourself.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m not stupid, Bernard. I know London Central and I know you. You’re just running round shouting fire in case someone accuses you of arson.’
I shook my head to say no, but I was wondering if perhaps he was right. He knew me better than anyone, better even than Fiona knew me.
‘Are you really going to hang on until they get that motor car out of the water?’
‘That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘Come back for a bite of dinner. Ask the police inspector to phone us when they start work again.’
‘I mustn’t, Werner. I promised Lisl I’d have dinner with her at the hotel in the unlikely event of my getting away from here in time.’
‘Shall I phone her to say you won’t make it?’
I looked at my watch. ‘Yes, please, Werner. She’s having some cronies in to eat there – old Mr Koch and those people she buys wine from – and they’ll get fidgety if she delays dinner for me.’
‘I’ll phone her. I took her a present yesterday, but I’ll phone to say Happy Christmas.’ He pulled the collar of his coat up and tucked his white silk scarf into it. ‘Damned cold out here on the river.’
‘Get back to Zena,’ I told him.
‘If you’re sure you’re not coming … Shall I bring you something to eat?’
‘Stop being a Jewish mother, Werner. There are plenty of places where I can get something. In fact, I’ll walk back to your car with you. There’s a bar open on the corner. I’ll get myself sausage and beer.’
It was nearly ten o’clock at night when they dragged the ambulance out of the Havel. It was a sorry sight, its side caked with oily mud where it had rested on the bottom of the river. One tyre was torn off and some of the bodywork ripped open where it had collided with the railings that were there to prevent such accidents.
There was a muffled cheer as the car came to rest. But there was no delay in finishing the job. Even while the frogmen were still packing their gear away, the car’s doors had been levered open and a search was being made of its interior.
There was no body inside – that was obvious within the first two or three minutes – but we continued to search through the car in search of other evidence.
By eleven-fifteen the police inspector declared the preliminary forensic examination complete. Although they’d put a number of oddments into clear-plastic evidence bags, nothing had been discovered that was likely to throw any light on the disappearance of Carol Elvira Miller, self-confessed Russian agent.
We were all very dirty. I went with the policemen into the toilet facilities at the wharfside. There was no hot water from the tap, and only one bar of soap. One of the policemen came back with a large pail of boiling water. The rest of them stood aside so that the inspector could wash first. He indicated that I should use the other sink.
‘What do you make of it?’ said the inspector as he rationed out a measure of the hot water into each of the sinks.
‘Where would a body turn up?’ I asked.
‘Spandau locks, that’s where we fish them out,’ he said without hesitation. ‘But there was no one in that car when it went into the water.’ He took off his jacket and shirt so that he could wash his arms where mud had dribbled up his sleeve.
‘You think not?’ I stood alongside him and took the soap he offered.
‘The front doors were locked, and the back door of the ambulance was locked too. Not many people getting out of a car underwater remember to lock the doors before swimming away.’ He passed me some paper towels.
‘It went into the water empty?’
‘So you don’t want to talk about it. Very well.’
‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s probably just a stunt. How did you get the information about where to find it?’
‘I looked at the docket. An anonymous phone call from a passer-by. You think it was a phony?’
‘Probably.’
‘While the prisoner was taken away somewhere else.’
‘It would be a way of getting our attention.’
‘And spoiling my Christmas Eve,’ he said. ‘I’ll kill the bastards if I ever get hold of them.’
‘Them?’
‘At least two people. It wasn’t in gear, you notice, it was in neutral. So they must have pushed it in. That needs two people; one to push and one to steer.’
‘Three of them, according to what we heard.’
He nodded. ‘There’s too much crime on television,’ said the police inspector. He signalled to the policeman to get another bucket of water for the rest of them to wash with. ‘That old English colonel with the kids’ football team … he was your father, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I realized that afterwards. I could have bitten my tongue off. No offence. Everyone liked the old man.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said.
‘He didn’t even enjoy the football. He just did it for the German kids; there wasn’t much for them in those days. He probably hated every minute of those games. At the time we didn’t see that; we wondered why he took so much trouble about the football when he couldn’t even kick the ball straight. He organized lots of things for the kids, didn’t he. And he sent you to the neighbourhood school instead of to that fancy school where the other British children went. He must have been an unusual man, your father.’
Washing my hands and arms and face had only got rid of the most obvious dirt. My trench coat was soaked and my shoes squelched. The mud along the banks of the Havel at that point is polluted with a century of industrial waste and effluents. Even my newly washed hands still bore the stench of the riverbed.
The hotel was dark when I let myself in by means of the key that certain privileged guests were permitted to borrow. Lisl Hennig’s hotel had once been her grand home, and her parents’ home before that. It was just off Kantstrasse, a heavy grey stone building of the sort that abounds in Berlin. The ground floor was an optician’s shop and its bright façade partly hid the pockmarked stone that was the result of Red Army artillery fire in 1945. My very earliest memories were of Lisl’s house – it was not easy to think of it as a hotel – for I came here as a baby when my father was with the British Army. I’d known the patched brown carpet that led up the grand staircase when it had been bright red.
At the top of the stairs there was the large salon and the bar. It was gloomy. The only illumination came from a tiny Christmas tree positioned on the bar counter. Tiny green and red bulbs flashed on and off in a melancholy attempt to be festive. Intermittent light fell upon the framed photos that covered every wall. Here were some of Berlin’s most illustrious residents, from Einstein to Nabokov, Garbo to Dietrich, Max Schmeling to Grand Admiral Dönitz, celebrities of a Berlin now gone for ever.
I looked into the breakfast room; it was empty. The bentwood chairs had been put up on the tables so that the floor could be swept. The cruets and cutlery and a tall stack of white plates were ready on the table near the serving hatch. There was no sign of life anywhere. There wasn’t even the smell of cooking that usually crept up through the house at night-time.
I tiptoed across the salon to the back stairs. My room was at the top – I always liked to occupy the little garret room that had been my bedroom as a child. But before reaching the stairs I passed the door of Lisl’s room. A strip of light along the door confirmed that she was there.
‘Who is it?’ she called anxiously. ‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s Bernd,’ I said.
‘Come in, you wretched boy.’ Her shout was loud enough to wake everyone in the building.
She was propped up in bed; there must have been a dozen lace-edged pillows behind her. She had a scarf tied round her head, and on the side table there was a bottle of sherry and a glass. All over the bed there were newspapers; some of them had come to pieces so that pages had drifted across the room as far as the fireplace.
She’d snatched her glasses off so quickly that her dyed brown hair was disarranged. ‘Give me a kiss,’ she demanded. I did so and noticed the expensive perfume and the makeup and false eyelashes that she applied only for very special occasions. The heiliger Abend with her friends had meant a lot to her. I guessed she’d waited for me to come home before she’d remove the makeup. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ she asked. There was repressed anger in her voice.
‘I’ve been working,’ I said. I didn’t want to get into a conversation. I wanted to go to bed and sleep for a long time.
‘Who were you with?’
‘I told you, I was working.’ I tried to assuage her annoyance. ‘Did you have dinner with Mr Koch and your friends? What did you serve them – carp?’ She liked carp at Christmas; she’d often told me it was the only thing to serve. Even during the war they’d always somehow managed to get carp.
‘Lothar Koch couldn’t come. He had influenza and the wine people had to go to a trade party.’
‘So you were all alone,’ I said. I bent over and kissed her again. ‘I’m so sorry, Lisl.’ She’d been so pretty. I remember as a child feeling guilty for thinking she was more beautiful than my mother. ‘I really am sorry.’
‘And so you should be.’
‘There was no way of avoiding it. I had to be there.’
‘Had to be where – Kempinski or the Steigenberger? Don’t lie to me, Liebchen. When Werner phoned me I could hear the voices and the music in the background. So you don’t have to pretend you were working.’ She gave a little hoot of laughter, but there was no joy in it.
So she’d been in bed here working herself up into a rage about that. ‘I was working,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll explain tomorrow.’
‘There’s nothing you have to explain, Liebchen. You are a free man. You don’t have to spend your heiliger Abend with an ugly old woman. Go and have fun while you are young. I don’t mind.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, Lisl,’ I said. ‘Werner was phoning from his apartment because I was working.’
By this time she’d noticed the smell of the mud on my clothes, and now she pushed her glasses into place so that she could see me more clearly. ‘You’re filthy, Bernd. Whatever have you been doing? Where have you been?’ From her study there came the loud chimes of the ornate ormolu clock striking two-thirty.
‘I keep telling you over and over again, Lisl. I’ve been with the police on the Havel getting a car from the water.’
‘The times I’ve told you that you drive too fast.’
‘It wasn’t anything to do with me,’ I said.
‘So what were you doing there?’
‘Working. Can I have a drink?’
‘There’s a glass on the sideboard. I’ve only got sherry. The whisky and brandy are locked in the cellar.’
‘Sherry will be just right.’
‘My God, Bernd, what are you doing? You don’t drink sherry by the tumblerful.’
‘It’s Christmas,’ I said.
‘Yes. It’s Christmas,’ she said, and poured herself another small measure. ‘There was a phone message, a woman. She said her name was Gloria Kent. She said that everyone sent you their love. She wouldn’t leave a phone number. She said you’d understand.’ Lisl sniffed.
‘Yes, I understand,’ I said. ‘It’s a message from the children.’
‘Ah, Bernd. Give me a kiss, Liebchen. Why are you so cruel to your Tante Lisl? I bounced you on my knee in this very room, and that was before you could walk.’
‘Yes, I know, but I couldn’t get away, Lisl. It was work.’
She fluttered her eyelashes like a young actress. ‘One day you’ll be old, darling. Then you’ll know what it’s like.’
6 (#ulink_3964bb9c-4a1c-5e96-9854-5d9776985d64)
Christmas morning. West Berlin was like a ghost town; as I stepped into the street the silence was uncanny. The Kudamm was empty of traffic and, although some of the neon signs and shop lights were still shining, there was no one strolling on its wide pavements. I had the town virtually to myself all the way to Potsdamer Strasse.
Potsdamer Strasse is Schöneberg’s main street, a wide thoroughfare that is called Hauptstrasse at one end and continues north to the Tiergarten. You can find everything you want there and a lot of things you’ve been trying to avoid. There are smart shops and slums, kabob counters and superb nineteenth-century houses now listed as national monuments. Here is a neobaroque palace – the Volksgerichtshof – where Hitler’s judges passed death sentences at the rate of two thousand a year, so that citizens found guilty of telling even the most feeble anti-Nazi jokes were executed.
Behind the Volksgerichtshof – its rooms now echoing and empty except for those used by the Allied Travel Office and the Allied Air Security Office (where the four powers control the air lanes across East Germany to Berlin) – was the street where Lange lived. His top-floor apartment overlooked one of the seedier side streets. Lange was not his family name, it was not his name at all. ‘Lange’ – or ‘Lofty’ – was the descriptive nickname the Germans had given to this very tall American. His real name was John Koby. Of Lithuanian extraction, his grandfather had decided that ‘Kubilunas’ was not American enough to go over a storefront in Boston.
The street door led to a grim stone staircase. The windows on every landing had been boarded up. It was dark, the stairs illuminated by dim lamps protected against vandals by wire mesh. The walls were bare of any decoration but graffiti. At the top of the house the apartment door was newly painted dark grey and a new plastic bell push was labelled John Koby – Journalist. The door was opened by Mrs Koby and she led me into a brightly lit, well-furnished apartment. ‘Lange was so glad you phoned,’ she whispered. ‘It was wonderful that you could come right away. He gets miserable sometimes. You’ll cheer him up.’ She was a small thin woman, her face pale like the faces of most Berliners when winter comes. She had clear eyes, a round face, and a fringe that came almost down to her eyebrows.
‘I’ll try,’ I promised.
It was the sort of untidy room in which you’d expect to find a writer or even a ‘journalist’. There were crowded bookshelves, a desk with an old manual typewriter, and more books and papers piled on the floor. But Lange had not been a professional writer for many years, and even in his newspaper days he’d never been a man who referred to books except as a last resort. Lange had never been a journalist, Lange had always been a streetwise reporter who got his facts at firsthand and guessed the bits in between. Just as I did.
The furniture was old but not valuable – the random mixture of shapes and styles that’s to be found in a saleroom or attic. Obviously a big stove had once stood in the corner, and the wall where it had been was covered in old blue-and-white tiles. Antique tiles like those were valuable now, but these must have been firmly affixed to the wall, for I had the feeling that any valuable thing not firmly attached had already been sold.
He was wearing an old red-and-gold silk dressing gown. Under it there were grey flannel slacks and a heavy cotton button-down shirt of the sort that Brooks Brothers made famous. His tie bore the ice-cream colours of the Garrick Club, a London meeting place for actors, advertising men, and lawyers. He was over seventy, but he was thin and tall and somehow that helped to give him a more youthful appearance. His face was drawn and clean-shaven, with a high forehead and grey hair neatly parted. He had a prominent bony nose and teeth that were too yellow and irregular to be anything but his own natural ones.
I remembered in time the sort of greeting that Lange gave to old friends – the Handschlag, the hands slapped together in that noisy handshake with which German farmers conclude a sale of pigs.
‘A Merry Christmas, Lange,’ I said.
‘It’s good to see you, Bernie,’ he said as he released my hand. ‘We were in the other house the last time we saw you. The apartment over the baker’s shop.’ His American accent was strong, as if he’d arrived only yesterday. And yet Lange had lived in Berlin longer than most of his neighbours. He’d come here as a newspaperman even before Hitler took power in 1933, and he’d stayed here right up to the time America got into World War II.
‘Coffee, Bernard? It’s already made. Or would you prefer a glass of wine?’ said Gerda Koby, taking my coat. She was a shy withdrawn woman, and although I’d known her since I was a child, she’d never called me ‘Bernie’. I think she would have rather called me ‘Herr Samson’, but she followed her husband in this matter as in all others. She was still pretty. Rather younger than Lange, she had once been an opera singer famous throughout Germany. They’d met in Berlin when he returned here as a newspaperman with the US Army in 1945.
‘I missed breakfast,’ I said. ‘A cup of coffee would be great.’
‘Lange?’ she said. He looked at her blankly and didn’t answer. She shrugged. ‘He’ll have wine,’ she told me. ‘He won’t cut down on it.’ She looked too small for an opera singer, but the ancient posters on the wall gave her billing above title: Wagner in Bayreuth, Fidelio at the Berlin State Opera, and in Munich a performance of Mongol Fury which was the Nazis’ ‘Aryanized’ version of Handel’s Israel in Egypt.
‘It’s Christmas, woman,’ said Lange. ‘Give us both wine.’ He didn’t smile and neither did she. It was the brusque way he always addressed her.
‘I’ll stick to coffee,’ I said. ‘I have a lot of driving to do. And I have to go to Police HQ and sign some forms later today.’
‘Sit down, Bernie, and tell me what you’re doing here. The last time we saw you you were settled in London, married, and with kids.’ His voice was hoarse and slurred slightly in the Bogart manner.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m just here for a couple of days on business.’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Lange. ‘Stuffing presents down the chimneys: then you’ve got to get your reindeer together and head back to the workshops.’
‘The children must be big,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘You should be with them at home. They make you work at Christmas? That’s terrible.’
‘My boss has a mean streak,’ I said.
‘And you haven’t got a union by the sound of it,’ said Lange. He had little love for the Department and he made his dislike evident in almost everything he said about the men in London Central.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
We sat there exchanging small talk for fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour. I needed a little time to get used to Lange’s harsh, abrasive style.
‘Still working for the Department, eh?’
‘Not any longer,’ I said.
He ignored my denial; he knew it counted for nothing. ‘Well, I’m glad I got out of it when I did.’
‘You were the first man my dad recruited in Berlin, at least that’s what people say.’
‘Then they’ve got it right,’ said Lange. ‘And I was grateful to him. In 1945 I couldn’t wait to kiss the newspaper business goodbye.’
‘What was wrong with it?’
‘You’re too young to remember. They dressed reporters up in fancy uniforms and stuck “War Correspondent” badges on us. That was so all those dumb jerks in the Army press departments could order us about and tell us what to write.’
‘Not you, Lange. No one told you what to do.’
‘We couldn’t argue. I was living in an apartment that the Army had commandeered. I was eating US rations, driving an Army car on Army gas, and spending Army occupation money. Sure, they had us by the balls.’
‘They tried to stop Lange seeing me,’ said Mrs Koby indignantly.
‘They forbade all Allied soldiers to talk to any Germans. Those dummies were trying to sell the soldiers their crackpot non-fraternization doctrine. Can you imagine me trying to write stories here while forbidden to talk to Germans? The Army fumed and threw kids into the stockade, but when you’ve got young German girls walking past the GIs patting their asses and shouting “Verboten”, even the Army brass began to see what a dumb idea it was.’
‘It was terrible in 1945 when I met Lange,’ said Gerda Koby. ‘My beautiful Berlin was unrecognizable. You’re too young to remember, Bernard. There were heaps of rubble as tall as the tenement blocks. There wasn’t one tree or bush left in the entire city; the Tiergarten was like a desert – everything that would burn had long since been cut down. The canals and waterways were all completely filled with rubble and ironwork, pushed there to clear a lane through the streets. The whole city stank with the dead; the stench from the canals was even worse.’
It was uncharacteristic of her to speak so passionately. She came to a sudden stop as if embarrassed. Then she got up and poured coffee for me from a vacuum flask and poured a glass of wine for her husband. I think he’d had a few before I arrived.
The coffee was in a delicate demitasse that contained no more than a mouthful. I swallowed it gratefully. I can’t get started in the morning until I’ve had some coffee.
‘Die Stunde Null,’ said Lange. ‘Germany’s hour zero – I didn’t need anyone to explain what that meant when I got here in 1945. Berlin looked like the end of the world had arrived.’ Lange scratched his head without disarranging his neatly combed hair. ‘And that’s the kind of chaos I had to work in. None of these Army guys, or the clowns who worked for the so-called Military Government, knew the city. Half of them couldn’t even speak the language. I’d been in Berlin right up until 1941 and I was able to renew all those old contacts. I set up the whole agent network that your dad ran into the East. He was smart, your dad, he knew I could deliver what I promised. He assigned me to work as his assistant and I told the Army where to stick their “War Correspondent” badge, pin and all.’ He laughed. ‘Jesus, but they were mad. They were mad at me and mad at your dad. The US Army complained to Eisenhower’s intelligence. But your dad had a direct line to Whitehall and that trumped their ace.’
‘Why did you go to Hamburg?’ I said.
‘I’d been here too long.’ He drank some of the bright red wine.
‘How long after that did Bret Rensselaer do his “fact-finding mission”?’ I asked.
‘Don’t mention that bastard to me. Bret was just a kid when he came out here trying to “rationalize the administration”.’ Lange put heavy sarcastic emphasis on the last three words. ‘He was the best pal the Kremlin ever had, and I’ll give you that in writing any time.’
‘Was he?’ I said.
‘Go to the archives and look … or better still, go to the “yellow submarine”.’ He smiled and studied my face to see if I was surprised at the extent of his knowledge. ‘The yellow submarine – that’s what I hear they call the big London Central computer.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Lange. ‘I know, you’re not in the Department any more; you’re over here to conduct a concert of Christmas carols for the British garrison.’
‘What did Bret Rensselaer do?’
‘Do? He dismantled three networks that I was running into the Russian Zone. Everything was going smoothly until he arrived. He put a spanner into the works and eventually got London to pack me off to Hamburg.’
‘What was his explanation?’ I persisted.
‘Bret didn’t provide any explanations. You know him better than that. No one could stop him. Bret was only on temporary attachment to us at that time, but he’d been given some piece of paper in London Central that said he could do anything.’
‘And what did my father do?’
‘Your father wasn’t here. They got him out of the way before Bret arrived. I had no one to appeal to; that was part of the setup.’
‘Setup? Were you set up?’ I said.
‘Sure I was set up. Bret was going out to get me. Mine was the only desk in Berlin that was getting good material from the Russians. Jesus. I had a guy in Karlshorst who was bringing me day-to-day material from the Russian commandant’s office. You can’t do better than that.’
‘And he was stopped?’
‘He was one of the first we lost. I went across to the US Army to offer them what I had left, but Bret had already been there. I got the cold shoulder. I had no friends there because of the showdown I’d had with them during the early days. So I went to Hamburg just as London Central wanted.’
‘But you didn’t stay.’
‘In Hamburg? No, I didn’t stay in Hamburg. Berlin is my town, mister. I just went to Hamburg long enough to work my way through my resignation and then I got out. Bret Rensselaer had got what he wanted.’
‘What was that?’
‘He’d showed us what a big shot he was. He’d denazified the Berlin office and wrecked our best networks. “Denazified”, that’s what he called it. Who the hell did he think we could find who would risk their necks prying secrets from the Russkies – Socialists, Communists, left-wing liberals? We had to use ex-Nazis; they were the only pros we had. By the time your dad came back and tried to pick up the pieces, Bret was reading philosophy at some fancy college. Your dad wanted me to work with him again. But I said, “No dice.” I didn’t want to work for London Central, not if I was going to be looking over my shoulder in case Bret came back to breathe fire all over me again. No, sir.’
‘It was my fault, Bernard,’ said Mrs Koby. Again she spoke my name as if it was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps she always felt self-conscious as a German amongst Lange’s American and British friends.
‘No, no, no,’ said Lange.
‘It was my brother,’ she persisted. ‘He came back from the war so sick. He was injured in Hungary just before the end. He had nowhere to go. Lange let him stay with us.’
‘Nah!’ said Lange angrily. ‘It was nothing to do with Stefan.’
‘Stefan was a wonderful boy.’ She said it with heartfelt earnestness as if she was pleading for him.
‘Stefan was a bastard,’ said Lange.
‘You didn’t know him until afterwards … It was the pain, the constant pain that made him so ill-natured. But before he went off to the war he was a kind and gentle boy. Hitler destroyed him.’
‘Oh, sure, blame Hitler,’ said Lange. ‘That’s the style nowadays. Everything was Hitler’s fault. How would Germans manage without the Nazis to blame everything on?’
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Len Deighton
Long-awaited reissue of the final part of the classic spy trilogy, GAME, SET and MATCH, when the Berlin Wall divided not just a city but a world.The spy who’s in the clear doesn’t exist…Bernard Samson hoped they’d put Elvira Miller behind bars. She said she had been stupid, but it didn’t cut any ice with Bernard. She was a KGB-trained agent and stupidity was no excuse.There was one troubling thing about Mrs Miller’s confession – something about two codewords where there should have been one. The finger of suspicion pointed straight back to London.And that was where defector Erich Stinnes was locked up, refusing to say anything.Bernard had got him to London; now he had to get him to talk…
Cover designer’s note (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
On reading a synopsis for one of Len Deighton’s trilogies I was immediately taken by the sentence, ‘And we are back in the mazes of Secret Service mystery and intrigue – mazes that now lead into Samson’s own tangled past.’ There I found my concept for the London Match cover! I would place him within the maze, trapped, with pathways leading to danger, in the form of the gun, and perhaps worse, the KGB, represented here by one of the agency’s badges – this Soviet-era icon features the hammer and sickle together with Cyrillic letters for ‘KGB’ and ‘USSR’.
Some years ago I was commissioned to design a calendar for a leading British sign company. I decided to use the many door numbers that I had photographed during my travels around the world, showing a different number for each day of the year. I contacted the Prime Minister’s press secretary, who kindly gave me permission to photograph the door of Number 10 Downing Street. This photograph has once again found a good use adorning the back cover of this book of intrigue in London’s Whitehall.
At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.
Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI
LEN DEIGHTON
London Match
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1985
Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1985
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008125004
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007387205
Version: 2017-05-23
Contents
Cover (#u983afc60-45d7-5dc6-9071-3b08e3ea2ead)
Cover Designer’s Note (#u8b31242f-e538-5f84-a00e-a7966b1181ce)
Title Page (#u18b3be76-f459-5ac1-9d07-c79da49159a0)
Copyright (#u734e3f95-80cb-5d61-828e-c91971091c5c)
Introduction (#uc1fc7ff0-0fca-5440-b06c-c3d9e54f1c76)
Chapter 1 (#u8bab3e98-690e-53fc-ab40-d978a935770d)
Chapter 2 (#u40b9bd72-7f27-5ef0-8482-382e6341d7b2)
Chapter 3 (#u89a30654-55af-593b-9277-60bc2369cafa)
Chapter 4 (#ua8a59788-7840-5699-964a-81f0f7ed17c0)
Chapter 5 (#ude1af3aa-519d-550f-9fb6-a0fc6e58b6bd)
Chapter 6 (#u8e6e6695-96b3-5be0-837a-0082ec42cd5f)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Len Deighton (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
Despite its title, London Match is a book largely about Berlin. The Berliners were familiar to me; their general demeanour; their humour closely resembled the cocky Londoners I grew up among. But the physical texture of Berlin is not like London, which is generously ventilated with parks and squares. Berlin is martial and monolithic and always has been. Berlin is like no other town I have ever seen. It fascinates me, and in many ways it became my home but there is no denying its grim grey ugliness. Its wide streets make the unrelenting vista of apartment blocks seem less oppressive. But only slightly so. To cope with overcrowding, the great apartment blocks were built one behind the other. Some tenements were so vast that there were three or four Hinterhöfe – or back courtyards. These were so small that sunlight was lost before it could find its way into the hintermost yard. In the early thirties it was calculated that more than ninety per cent of Berlin’s population were packed tightly into these grim five-storey buildings. Berlin, expanded by reparations of the Franco–Prussian War, was designed to absorb the impoverished agricultural workers who came flooding from the Eastern lands seeking jobs in the factories and sweatshops.
Ugly, dirty and crowded – sweaty in summer and freezing in winter – what is the secret attraction of this town? The population is a part of it. The endless upheavals of the past century have brought a weird mixture of people to a town that has never found its place in history. And like many others regularly brought to the brink of despair, Berliners have learned how to smile. Always from the east, there came to the city a steady stream of people looking for shelter. Persecution drove many, and revolution brought more. Painters and writers such as George Grosz and Alfred Döblin provided a lasting record of a town where skirts were short and pounding jazz was at its most frenetic. Emperor Wilhelm had disappeared into exile and Czarist Dukes were working as nightclub doormen. Sex, psychology and cycle racing were major obsessions, and money was singularly meaningful in a town where the currency had collapsed to zero time and time again.
After the debacle in the summer of 1945 the Red Army occupied the Eastern half of the city while fugitives of every kind sought a hazardous sanctuary in its West. But there was no sanctuary; just new kinds of danger. Only the agile survived. Some were saints and some were despicable but most of them were somewhere in between. I came to know many of Berlin’s dodgers and drifters but I had no right to judge them and didn’t attempt to do so. This was not just because I was a writer. Many years ago, I resolved never to resort to the poison of hatred. I had found that hatred wears and destroys the hater and it erects a barrier to understanding that makes objectivity impossible. This had an effect on my writing. Critics remarked upon the absence of villains and the neutrality of the storyteller. I didn’t mind this verdict. Researching my World War Two history books had already brought me into contact with a wide range of veterans of all ranks and specializations, and from both sides of the fighting. By the time I came to write London Match I was being discreetly approached by jaded warriors of the Cold War. These included people at many different levels, with many different motives; some in no way benign. I learned a new sort of discretion. The anecdotal material built up quickly and I soon had enough material for a hundred Bernard Samson books. But books are not assemblies of anecdotes, no matter how dramatically effective, disgusting, inhuman or deeply moving, the stories proved. The nine Bernard Samson stories would stand or fall on the credibility of the principal characters and ever-changing social situation to which they were exposed. Here was a boardroom drama in which the consequence of being ‘outvoted’ was not losing a job, but losing your life. It was an elderly Silesian building contractor who said that to me. He wasn’t talking about my books; he was talking about the dangerous cross-border life he had survived in his youth. He had been ‘out voted’ without losing his life, but some of the fingernails of his left hand were missing.
The times in which our story is set were times of confusion. Western Europe had been saved by the spilled blood of young Americans, and there was widespread gratitude, admiration and respect for the nation which was now the world’s most powerful and most economically successful. But Eastern Europe was ruled by Stalin; a brutal despot who had at one time befriended Hitler and his criminal regime. The Red Army which had invaded Poland and the Baltic states was now used to snuff out any glimmer of democracy in a vast area stretching from Vladivostok to the edge of West Germany. For most people in the West there was a simple distinction between good and evil, between the free societies and the totalitarian ones. But not for everyone. As the nineteen sixties became the seventies there was a slow shift in loyalties. No one openly disputed the existence of Soviet Russia’s secret police, its gulags and the number of its citizens who disappeared each year. But the communist propaganda machine persuaded many Europeans that America’s military presence, and the weapon technology that discouraged Moscow’s territorial ambitions, was as much of a threat as the armies of the USSR. Such people – many of them academics, writers, intellectuals and politicians – liked to proclaim that the USA was just as bad as the USSR. Some said it was worse. Some said that Marxist theory provided a promise of world order that was inevitable and desirable.
The advanced world was split into two distinct halves. The dividing line was drawn down through the middle of Germany. Grimly determined Marxists of the DDR built a barrier against the Federal Republic and killed any of their compatriots trying to join the exuberant capitalists on the other side of it. For added complexity, the town of Berlin had been created as an island in the middle of the DDR and this island was neatly divided between the two combatants. Berlin became the place where the fate of the world would be decided. What writer could resist such a fateful and bloody forum, or should that be amphitheatre? Not I. This was not old history. This was now. This was happening all around me and it was happening to people I knew well.
The fires of the misnamed Cold War did not burn with consistent fury. There were times when both sides toned down their activities for weeks at a time. Sometimes this was a result of orders due to a relaxing of attitudes between Moscow, London and Washington. But more often it was because the people at the sharp end of the conflict wearied, or needed rehabilitation after some particularly destructive blow. I have tried to reflect the way in which this happened. And while the nine books are not in any way an attempt to write Cold War history, I have linked the episodes to actual happenings. And, because writers of fiction are able to test the boundaries of secrecy, I was able to use material generously passed to me by those who were gagged by over-assertive officialdom. I put my thanks on record.
Len Deighton, 2010
1 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
‘Cheer up, Werner. It will soon be Christmas,’ I said.
I shook the bottle, dividing the last drips of whisky between the two white plastic cups that were balanced on the car radio. I pushed the empty bottle under the seat. The smell of the whisky was strong. I must have spilled some on the heater or on the warm leather that encased the radio. I thought Werner would decline it. He wasn’t a drinker and he’d had far too much already, but Berlin winter nights are cold and Werner swallowed his whisky in one gulp and coughed. Then he crushed the cup in his big muscular hands and sorted through the bent and broken pieces so that he could fit them all into the ashtray. Werner’s wife Zena was obsessionally tidy and this was her car.
‘People are still arriving,’ said Werner as a black Mercedes limousine drew up. Its headlights made dazzling reflections in the glass and paintwork of the parked cars and glinted on the frosty surface of the road. The chauffeur hurried to open the door and eight or nine people got out. The men wore dark cashmere coats over their evening suits, and the women a menagerie of furs. Here in Berlin Wannsee, where furs and cashmere are everyday clothes, they are called the Hautevolee and there are plenty of them.
‘What are you waiting for? Let’s barge right in and arrest him now.’ Werner’s words were just slightly slurred and he grinned to acknowledge his condition. Although I’d known Werner since we were kids at school, I’d seldom seen him drunk, or even tipsy as he was now. Tomorrow he’d have a hangover, tomorrow he’d blame me, and so would his wife, Zena. For that and other reasons, tomorrow, early, would be a good time to leave Berlin.
The house in Wannsee was big; an ugly clutter of enlargements and extensions, balconies, sun deck and penthouse almost hid the original building. It was built on a ridge that provided its rear terrace with a view across the forest to the black waters of the lake. Now the terrace was empty, the garden furniture stacked, and the awnings rolled up tight, but the house was blazing with lights and along the front garden the bare trees had been garlanded with hundreds of tiny white bulbs like electronic blossom.
‘The BfV man knows his job,’ I said. ‘He’ll come and tell us when the contact has been made.’
‘The contact won’t come here. Do you think Moscow doesn’t know we have a defector in London spilling his guts to us? They’ll have warned their network by now.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. I denied his contention for the hundredth time and didn’t doubt we’d soon be having the same exchange again. Werner was forty years old, just a few weeks older than I was, but he worried like an old woman and that put me on edge too. ‘Even his failure to come could provide a chance to identify him,’ I said. ‘We have two plainclothes cops checking everyone who arrives tonight, and the office has a copy of the invitation list.’
‘That’s if the contact is a guest,’ said Werner.
‘The staff are checked too.’
‘The contact will be an outsider,’ said Werner. ‘He wouldn’t be dumm enough to give us his contact on a plate.’
‘I know.’
‘Shall we go inside the house again?’ suggested Werner. ‘I get a cramp these days sitting in little cars.’
I opened the door and got out.
Werner closed his car door gently; it’s a habit that comes with years of surveillance work. This exclusive suburb was mostly villas amid woodland and water, and quiet enough for me to hear the sound of heavy trucks pulling into the Border Controlpoint at Drewitz to begin the long haul down the autobahn that went through the Democratic Republic to West Germany. ‘It will snow tonight,’ I predicted.
Werner gave no sign of having heard me. ‘Look at all that wealth,’ he said, waving an arm and almost losing his balance on the ice that had formed in the gutter. As far as we could see along it, the whole street was like a parking lot, or rather like a car showroom, for the cars were almost without exception glossy, new, and expensive. Five-litre V-8 Mercedes with car-phone antennas and turbo Porsches and big Ferraris and three or four Rolls-Royces. The registration plates showed how far people will travel to such a lavish party. Businessmen from Hamburg, bankers from Frankfurt, film people from Munich, and well-paid officials from Bonn. Some cars were perched high on the pavement to make room for others to be double-parked alongside them. We passed a couple of cops who were wandering between the long lines of cars, checking the registration plates and admiring the paintwork. In the driveway – stamping their feet against the cold – were two Parkwächter who would park the cars of guests unfortunate enough to be without a chauffeur. Werner went up the icy slope of the driveway with arms extended to help him balance. He wobbled like an overfed penguin.
Despite all the double-glazed windows, closed tight against the cold of a Berlin night, there came from the house the faint syrupy whirl of Johann Strauss played by a twenty-piece orchestra. It was like drowning in a thick strawberry milk shake.
A servant opened the door for us and another took our coats. One of our people was immediately inside, standing next to the butler. He gave no sign of recognition as we entered the flower-bedecked entrance hall. Werner smoothed his silk evening jacket self-consciously and tugged the ends of his bow tie as he caught a glimpse of himself in the gold-framed mirror that covered the wall. Werner’s suit was a hand-stitched custom-made silk one from Berlin’s most exclusive tailors, but on Werner’s thickset figure all suits looked rented.
Standing at the foot of the elaborate staircase there were two elderly men in stiff high collars and well-tailored evening suits that made no concessions to modern styling. They were smoking large cigars and talking with their heads close together because of the loudness of the orchestra in the ballroom beyond. One of the men stared at us but went on talking as if we weren’t visible to him. We didn’t seem right for such a gathering, but he looked away, no doubt thinking we were two heavies hired to protect the silver.
Until 1945 the house – or Villa, as such local mansions are known – had belonged to a man who began his career as a minor official with the Nazi farmers organization – and it was by chance that his department was given the task of deciding which farmers and agricultural workers were so indispensable to the economy that they would be exempt from service with the military forces. But from that time onwards – like other bureaucrats before and since – he was showered with gifts and opportunities and lived in high style, as his house bore witness.
For some years after the war the house was used as transit accommodation for US Army truck drivers. Only recently had it become a family house once more. The panelling, which so obviously dated back to the original nineteenth-century building, had been carefully repaired and reinstated, but now the oak was painted light grey. A huge painting of a soldier on a horse dominated the wall facing the stairs and on all sides there were carefully arranged displays of fresh flowers. But despite all the careful refurbishing, it was the floor of the entrance hall that attracted the eye. The floor was a complex pattern of black, white and red marble, a plain white central disc of newer marble having replaced a large gold swastika.
Werner pushed open a plain door secreted into the panelling and I followed him along a bleak corridor designed for the inconspicuous movement of servants. At the end of the passage there was a pantry. Clean linen cloths were arranged on a shelf, a dozen empty champagne bottles were inverted to drain in the sink and the waste bin was filled with the remains of sandwiches, discarded parsley, and some broken glass. A white-coated waiter arrived carrying a large silver tray of dirty glasses. He emptied them, put them into the service elevator together with the empty bottles, wiped the tray with a cloth from under the sink, and then departed without even glancing at either of us.
‘There he is, near the bar,’ said Werner, holding open the door so we could look across the crowded dance floor. There was a crush around the tables where two men in chef’s whites dispensed a dozen different sorts of sausages and foaming tankards of strong beer. Emerging from the scrum with food and drink was the man who was to be detained.
‘I hope like hell we’ve got this right,’ I said. The man was not just a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat; he was the private secretary to a senior member of the Bonn parliament.
I said, ‘If he digs his heels in and denies everything, I’m not sure we’ll be able to make it stick.’
I looked at the suspect carefully, trying to guess how he’d take it. He was a small man with crew-cut hair and a neat Vandyke beard. There was something uniquely German about that combination. Even amongst the over-dressed Berlin social set his appearance was flashy. His jacket had wide silk-faced lapels, and silk also edged his jacket, cuffs and trouser seams. The ends of his bow tie were tucked under his collar and he wore a black silk handkerchief in his top pocket.
‘He looks much younger than thirty-two, doesn’t he?’ said Werner.
‘You can’t rely on those computer printouts, especially with listed civil servants or even members of the Bundestag. They were all put onto the computer when it was installed, by copy typists working long hours of overtime to make a bit of spare cash.’
‘What do you think?’ said Werner.
‘I don’t like the look of him,’ I said.
‘He’s guilty,’ said Werner. He had no more information than I did, but he was trying to reassure me.
‘But the uncorroborated word of a defector such as Stinnes won’t cut much ice in an open court, even if London will let Stinnes go into a court. If this fellow’s boss stands by him and they both scream blue murder, he might get away with it.’
‘When do we take him, Bernie?’
‘Maybe his contact will come here,’ I said. It was an excuse for delay.
‘He’d have to be a real beginner, Bernie. Just one look at this place – lit up like a Christmas tree, cops outside, and no room to move – no one with any experience would risk coming into a place like this.’
‘Perhaps they won’t be expecting problems,’ I said optimistically.
‘Moscow know Stinnes is missing and they’ve had plenty of time to alert their networks. And anyone with experience will smell this stakeout when they park outside.’
‘He didn’t smell it,’ I said, nodding to our crew-cut man as he swigged at his beer and engaged a fellow guest in conversation.
‘Moscow can’t send a source like him away to their training school,’ said Werner. ‘But that’s why you can be quite certain that his contact will be Moscow-trained: and that means wary. You might as well arrest him now.’
‘We say nothing; we arrest no one,’ I told him once again. ‘German security are doing this one; he’s simply being detained for questioning. We stand by and see how it goes.’
‘Let me do it, Bernie.’ Werner Volkmann was a Berliner by birth. I’d come to school here as a young child, my German was just as authentic as his, but because I was English, Werner was determined to hang on to the conceit that his German was in some magic way more authentic than mine. I suppose I would feel the same way about any German who spoke perfect London-accented English, so I didn’t argue about it.
‘I don’t want him to know any non-German service is involved. If he tumbles to who we are, he’ll know Stinnes is in London.’
‘They know already, Bernie. They must know where he is by now.’
‘Stinnes has got enough troubles without a KGB hit squad searching for him.’
Werner was looking at the dancers and smiling to himself as if at some secret joke, the way people sometimes do when they’ve had too much to drink. His face was still tanned from his time in Mexico and his teeth were white and perfect. He looked almost handsome despite the lumpy fit of his suit. ‘It’s like a Hollywood movie,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The budget’s too big for television.’ The ballroom was crowded with elegant couples, all wearing the sort of clothes that would have looked all right for a ball at the turn of the century. And the guests weren’t the desiccated old fogies I was expecting to see at this fiftieth birthday party for a manufacturer of dishwashers. There were plenty of richly clad young people whirling to the music of another time in another town. Kaiserstadt – isn’t that what Vienna was called at a time when there was only one Emperor in Europe and only one capital for him?
It was the makeup and the hairdos that sounded the jarring note of modernity, that and the gun I could see bulging under Werner’s beautiful silk jacket. I suppose that’s what was making it so tight across the chest.
The white-coated waiter returned with another big tray of glasses. Some of the glasses were not empty. There was the sudden smell of alcohol as he tipped cherries, olives, and abandoned drinks into the warm water of the sink before putting the glasses into the service lift. Then he turned to Werner and said respectfully, ‘They’ve arrested the contact, sir. Went to the car just as you said.’ He wiped the empty tray with a cloth.
‘What’s all this, Werner?’ I said.
The waiter looked at me and then at Werner and, when Werner nodded assent, said, ‘The contact went to the suspect’s parked car … a woman at least forty years old, maybe older. She had a key that fitted the car door. She unlocked the glove compartment and took an envelope. We’ve taken her into custody but the envelope has not yet been opened. The captain wants to know if he should take the woman back to the office or hold her here in the panel truck for you to talk to.’
The music stopped and the dancers applauded. Somewhere on the far side of the ballroom a man was heard singing an old country song. He stopped, embarrassed, and there was laughter.
‘Has she given a Berlin address?’
‘Kreuzberg. An apartment house near the Landwehr Canal.’
‘Tell your captain to take the woman to the apartment. Search it and hold her there. Phone here to confirm that she’s given the correct address and we’ll come along later to talk to her,’ I said. ‘Don’t let her make any phone calls. Make sure the envelope remains unopened; we know what’s in it. I’ll want it as evidence, so don’t let everybody maul it about.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the waiter and departed, picking his way across the dance floor as the dancers walked off it.
‘Why didn’t you tell me he was one of our people?’ I asked Werner.
Werner giggled. ‘You should have seen your face.’
‘You’re drunk, Werner,’ I said.
‘You didn’t even recognize a plainclothes cop. What’s happening to you, Bernie?’
‘I should have guessed. They always have them clearing away the dirty dishes; a cop doesn’t know enough about food and wine to serve anything.’
‘You didn’t think it was worth watching his car, did you?’
He was beginning to irritate me. I said, ‘If I had your kind of money, I wouldn’t be dragging around with a lot of cops and security men.’
‘What would you be doing?’
‘With money? If I didn’t have the kids, I’d find some little pension in Tuscany, somewhere not too far from the beach.’
‘Admit it; you didn’t think it was worth watching his car, did you?’
‘You’re a genius.’
‘No need for sarcasm,’ said Werner. ‘You’ve got him now. Without me you would have ended up with egg on your face.’ He burped very softly, holding a hand over his mouth.
‘Yes, Werner,’ I said.
‘Let’s go and arrest the bastard … I had a feeling about that car – the way he locked the doors and then looked round like someone might be waiting there.’ There had always been a didactic side to Werner; he should have been a schoolteacher, as his mother wanted.
‘You’re a drunken fool, Werner,’ I said.
‘Shall I go and arrest him?’
‘Go and breathe all over him,’ I said.
Werner smiled. Werner had proved what a brilliant field agent he could be. Werner was very very happy.
He made a fuss of course. He wanted his lawyer and wanted to talk to his boss and to some friend of his in the government. I knew the type only too well; he was treating us as if we’d been caught stealing secrets for the Russians. He was still protesting when he departed with the arrest team. They were not impressed; they’d seen it all before. They were experienced men, brought in from the BfV’s ‘political office’ in Bonn.
They took him to the BfV office in Spandau, but I decided they’d get nothing but indignation out of him that night. Tomorrow perhaps he’d simmer down a little and get nervous enough to say something worth hearing before the time came when they’d have to charge him or release him. Luckily it was a decision I wouldn’t have to make. Meanwhile, I decided to go and see if there was anything to be got out of the woman.
Werner drove. He didn’t speak much on the journey back to Kreuzberg. I stared out of the window. Berlin is a sort of history book of twentieth-century violence, and every street corner brought a recollection of something I’d heard, seen, or read. We followed the road alongside the Landwehr Canal, which twists and turns through the heart of the city. Its oily water holds many dark secrets. Back in 1919, when the Spartakists attempted to seize the city by an armed uprising, two officers of the Horse Guards took the badly beaten Rosa Luxemburg – a Communist leader – from their headquarters at the Eden Hotel, next to the Zoo, shot her dead and threw her into the canal. The officers pretended that she’d been carried off by angry rioters, but four months later her bloated corpse floated up and got jammed into a lock gate. Now, in East Berlin, they name streets after her.
But not all the ghosts go into this canal. In February 1920 a police sergeant pulled a young woman out of the canal at the Bendler Bridge. Taken to the Elisabeth Hospital in Lützowstrasse, she was later identified as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Czar of All the Russias and only survivor of the massacre.
‘This is it,’ said Werner, pulling in to the kerb. ‘Good job there’s a cop on the door, or we’d come back to find the car stripped to the chassis.’
The address the contact had given was a shabby nineteenth-century tenement in a neighbourhood virtually taken over by Turkish immigrants. The once imposing grey stone entrance, still pitted with splinter damage from the war, was defaced by brightly coloured graffiti sprays. Inside the gloomy hallway there was a smell of spicy food and dirt and disinfectant.
These old houses have no numbered apartments, but we found the BfV men at the very top. There were two security locks on the door, but not much sign of anything inside to protect. Two men were still searching the hallway when we arrived. They were tapping the walls, prizing up floorboards, and poking screwdrivers deep into the plaster with that sort of inscrutable delight that comes to men blessed by governmental authority to be destructive.
It was typical of the overnight places the KGB provided for the faithful. Top floors: cold, cramped and cheap. Perhaps they chose these sleazy accommodations to remind all concerned about the plight of the poor in the capitalist economy. Or perhaps in this sort of district there were fewer questions asked about comings and goings by all kinds of people at all kinds of hours.
No TV, no radio, no soft seats. Iron bedstead with an old grey blanket, four wooden chairs, a small plastic-topped table and upon it black bread roughly sliced, electric ring, dented kettle, tinned milk, dried coffee, and some sugar cubes wrapped to show they were from a Hilton hotel. There were three dog-eared German paperback books – Dickens, Schiller, and a collection of crossword puzzles, mostly completed. On one of the two single beds a small case was opened and its contents displayed. It was obviously the woman’s baggage: a cheap black dress, nylon underwear, low-heeled leather shoes, an apple and orange, and an English newspaper – the Socialist Worker.
A young BfV officer was waiting for me there. We exchanged greetings and he told me the woman had been given no more than a brief preliminary questioning. She’d offered to make a statement at first and then said she wouldn’t, the officer said. He’d sent a man to get a typewriter so it could be taken down if she changed her mind again. He handed me some Westmarks, a driving licence, and a passport; the contents of her handbag. The licence and passport were British.
‘I’ve got a pocket recorder,’ I told him without lowering my voice. ‘We’ll sort out what to type and have it signed after I’ve spoken with her. I’ll want you to witness her signature.’
The woman was seated in the tiny kitchen. There were dirty cups on the table and some hairpins that I guessed had come from a search of the handbag she now held on her lap.
‘The captain tells me that you want to make a statement,’ I said in English.
‘Are you English?’ she said. She looked at me and then at Werner. She showed no great surprise that we were both in dinner suits complete with fancy cuff links and patent-leather shoes. She must have realized we’d been on duty inside the house.
‘Yes,’ I said. I signalled with my hand to tell Werner to leave the room.
‘Are you in charge?’ she asked. She had the exaggerated upper-class accent that shop girls use in Knightsbridge boutiques. ‘I want to know what I’m charged with. I warn you I know my rights. Am I under arrest?’
From the side table I picked up the bread knife and waved it at her. ‘Under Law 43 of the Allied Military Government legislation, still in force in this city, possession of this bread knife is an offence for which the death sentence can be imposed.’
‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘The war was almost forty years ago.’
I put the knife into a drawer and slammed it shut. She was startled by the sound. I moved a kitchen chair and sat on it so that I was facing her at a distance of only a yard or so. ‘You’re not in Germany,’ I told her. ‘This is Berlin. And Decree 511, ratified in 1951, includes a clause that makes information gathering an offence for which you can get ten years in prison. Not spying, not intelligence work, just collecting information is an offence.’
I put her passport on the table and turned the pages as if reading her name and occupation for the first time. ‘So don’t talk to me about knowing your rights; you’ve got no rights.’
From the passport I read aloud: ‘Carol Elvira Miller, born in London 1930, occupation: schoolteacher.’ Then I looked up at her. She returned my gaze with the calm, flat stare that the camera had recorded for her passport. Her hair was straight and short in pageboy style. She had clear blue eyes and a pointed nose, and the pert expression came naturally to her. She’d been pretty once, but now she was thin and drawn and – in dark conservative clothes and with no trace of makeup – well on the way to looking like a frail old woman. ‘Elvira. That’s a German name, isn’t it?’
She showed no sign of fear. She brightened as women so often do at personal talk. ‘It’s Spanish. Mozart used it in Don Giovanni.’
I nodded. ‘And Miller?’
She smiled nervously. She was not frightened, but it was the smile of someone who wanted to seem cooperative. My hectoring little speech had done the trick. ‘My father is German … was German. From Leipzig. He emigrated to England long before Hitler’s time. My mother is English … from Newcastle,’ she added after a long pause.
‘Married?’
‘My husband died nearly ten years ago. His name was Johnson, but I went back to using my family name.’
‘Children?’
‘A married daughter.’
‘Where do you teach?’
‘I was a supply teacher in London, but the amount of work I got grew less and less. For the last few months I’ve been virtually unemployed.’
‘You know what was in the envelope you collected from the car tonight?’
‘I won’t waste your time with excuses. I know it contained secrets of some description.’ She had the clear voice and pedantic manner of schoolteachers everywhere.
‘And you know where it was going?’
‘I want to make a statement. I told the other officer that. I want to be taken back to England and speak to someone in British security. Then I’ll make a complete statement.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why are you so anxious to go back to England? You’re a Russian agent; we both know that. What’s the difference where you are when you’re charged?’
‘I’ve been stupid,’ she said. ‘I realize that now.’
‘Did you realize it before or after you were taken into custody?’
She pressed her lips together as if suppressing a smile. ‘It was a shock.’ She put her hands on the table. They were white and wrinkled with the brown freckle marks that come with middle age. There were nicotine stains, and the ink from a leaky pen had marked finger and thumb. ‘I just can’t stop trembling. Sitting here watching the security men searching through my luggage, I’ve had enough time to consider what a fool I’ve been. I love England. My father brought me up to love everything English.’
Despite this contention she soon slipped back into speaking German. She wasn’t German; she wasn’t British. I saw the rootless feeling within her and recognized something of myself.
I said, ‘A man was it?’ She looked at me and frowned. She’d been expecting reassurance, a smile in return for the smiles she’d given me and a promise that nothing too bad would happen to her. ‘A man … the one who enticed you into this foolishness?’
She must have heard some note of scorn in my voice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was all my own doing. I joined the Party fifteen years ago. After my husband died I wanted to keep myself occupied. So I became a very active worker for the teachers union. And one day I thought, well, why not go the whole hog.’
‘What was the whole hog, Mrs Miller?’
‘My father’s name was Müller; I may as well tell you that because you will soon find out. Hugo Müller. He changed it to Miller when he was naturalized. He wanted us all to be English.’ Again she pressed her hands flat on the table and looked at them while she spoke. It was as if she was blaming her hands for doing things of which she’d never really approved.
‘I was asked to collect parcels, look after things, and so on. Later I began providing accommodation in my London flat. People were brought there late at night – Russians, Czechs, and so on – usually they spoke no English and no German either. Seamen sometimes, judging by their clothing. They always seemed to be ravenously hungry. Once there was a man dressed as a priest. He spoke Polish, but I managed to make myself understood. In the morning someone would come and collect them.’
She sighed and then looked up at me to see how I was taking her confession. ‘I have a spare bedroom,’ she added, as if the propriety of their sleeping arrangements was more important than her services to the KGB.
She stopped talking for a long time and looked at her hands.
‘They were fugitives,’ I said, to prompt her into talking again.
‘I don’t know who they were. Afterwards there was usually an envelope with a few pounds put through my letterbox, but I didn’t do it for the money.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I was a Marxist; I was serving the cause.’
‘And now?’
‘They made a fool of me,’ she said. ‘They used me to do their dirty work. What did they care what happened to me if I got caught? What do they care now? What am I supposed to do?’
It sounded more like the bitter complaint of a woman abandoned by her lover than of an agent under arrest. ‘You’re supposed to enjoy being a martyr,’ I said. ‘That’s the way the system works for them.’
‘I’ll give you the names and addresses. I’ll tell you everything I know.’ She leaned forward. ‘I don’t want to go to prison. Will it all have to be in the newspapers?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘My married daughter is living in Canada. She’s married to a Spanish boy she met on holiday. They’ve applied for Canadian citizenship but their papers haven’t come through yet. It would be terrible if this trouble I’m in ruined their lives; they’re so happy together.’
‘And this overnight accommodation you were providing for your Russian friends – when did that all stop?’
She looked up sharply, as if surprised that I could guess that it had stopped.
‘The two jobs don’t mix,’ I said. ‘The accommodation was just an interim task to see how reliable you were.’
She nodded. ‘Two years ago,’ she said softly, ‘perhaps two and a half years.’
‘Then?’
‘I came to Berlin for a week. They paid my fare. I went through to the East and spent a week in a training school. All the other students were German, but as you see I speak German well. My father always insisted that I kept up my German.’
‘A week at Potsdam?’
‘Yes, just outside Potsdam, that’s right.’
‘Don’t miss out anything important, Mrs Miller,’ I said.
‘No, I won’t,’ she promised nervously. ‘I was there for ten days learning about shortwave radios and microdots and so on. You probably know the sort of thing.’
‘Yes, I know the sort of thing. It’s a training school for spies.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘You’re not going to tell me you came back from there without realizing you were a fully trained Russian spy, Mrs Miller?’
She looked up and met my stare. ‘No, I’ve told you, I was an enthusiastic Marxist. I was perfectly ready to be a spy for them. As I saw it, I was doing it on behalf of the oppressed and hungry people of the world. I suppose I still am a Marxist-Leninist.’
‘Then you must be an incurable romantic,’ I said.
‘It was wrong of me to do what I did; I can see that, of course. England has been good to me. But half the world is starving and Marxism is the only solution.’
‘Don’t lecture me, Mrs Miller,’ I said. ‘I get enough of that from my office.’ I got up so that I could unbutton my overcoat and find my cigarettes. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ I said.
She gave no sign of having heard me.
‘I’m trying to give them up,’ I said, ‘but I carry the cigarettes with me.’
She still didn’t answer. Perhaps she was too busy thinking about what might happen to her. I went to the window and looked out. It was too dark to see very much except Berlin’s permanent false dawn: the greenish white glare that came from the floodlit ‘death strip’ along the east side of the Wall. I knew this street well enough; I’d passed this block thousands of times. Since 1961, when the Wall was first built, following the snaky route of the Landwehr Canal had become the quickest way to get around the Wall from the neon glitter of the Ku-damm to the floodlights of Checkpoint Charlie.
‘Will I go to prison?’ she said.
I didn’t turn round. I buttoned my coat, pleased that I’d resisted the temptation to smoke. From my pocket I brought the tiny Pearlcorder tape machine. It was made of a bright silver metal. I made no attempt to hide it. I wanted her to see it.
‘Will I go to prison?’ she asked again.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I hope so.’
It had taken no more than forty minutes to get her confession. Werner was waiting for me in the next room. There was no heating in that room. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, the fur collar of his coat pulled up round his ears so that it almost touched the rim of his hat.
‘A good squeal?’ he asked.
‘You look like an undertaker, Werner,’ I said. ‘A very prosperous undertaker waiting for a very prosperous corpse.’
‘I’ve got to sleep,’ he said. ‘I can’t take these late nights any more. If you’re going to hang on here, to type it all out, I’d rather go home now.’
It was the drink that had got to him, of course. The ebullience of intoxication didn’t last very long with Werner. Alcohol is a depressant and Werner’s metabolic rate had slowed enough to render him unfit to drive. ‘I’ll drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll make the transcription on your typewriter.’
‘Sure,’ said Werner. I was staying with him in his apartment at Dahlem. And now, in his melancholy mood, he was anticipating his wife’s reaction to us waking her up by arriving in the small hours of the morning. Werner’s typewriter was a very noisy machine and he knew I’d want to finish the job before going to sleep. ‘Is there much of it?’ he asked.
‘It’s short and sweet, Werner. But she’s given us a few things that might make London Central scratch their heads and wonder.’
‘Such as?’
‘Read it in the morning, Werner. We’ll talk about it over breakfast.’
It was a beautiful Berlin morning. The sky was blue despite all those East German generating plants that burn brown coal so that pale smog sits over the city for so much of the year. Today the fumes of the Braunkohle were drifting elsewhere, and outside the birds were singing to celebrate it. Inside, a big wasp, a last survivor from the summer, buzzed around angrily.
Werner’s Dahlem apartment was like a second home to me. I’d known it when it was a gathering place for an endless stream of Werner’s oddball friends. In those days the furniture was old and Werner played jazz on a piano decorated with cigarette burns, and Werner’s beautifully constructed model planes were hanging from the ceiling because that was the only place where they would not be sat upon.
Now it was all different. The old things had all been removed by Zena, his very young wife. Now the flat was done to her taste: expensive modern furniture and a big rubber plant, and a rug that hung on the wall and bore the name of the ‘artist’ who’d woven it. The only thing that remained from the old days was the lumpy sofa that converted to the lumpy bed on which I’d slept.
The three of us were sitting in the ‘breakfast room’, a counter at the end of the kitchen. It was arranged like a lunch counter with Zena playing the role of bartender. From here there was a view through the window, and we were high enough to see the sun-edged treetops of the Grunewald just a block or two away. Zena was squeezing oranges in an electric juicer, and in the automatic coffee-maker the coffee was dripping, its rich aroma floating through the room.
We were talking about marriage. I said, ‘The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change. Both are invariably disappointed.’
‘What rot,’ said Zena as she poured the juice into three glasses. ‘Men do change.’
She bent down to see better the level of the juice and ensure that we all got precisely the same amount. It was a legacy of the Prussian family background of which she was so proud, despite the fact that she’d never even seen the old family homeland. For Prussians like to think of themselves not only as the conscience of the world, but also its final judge and jury.
‘Don’t encourage him, Zena darling,’ said Werner. ‘That contrived Oscar Wilde-ish assertion is just Bernard’s way of annoying wives.’
Zena didn’t let it go; she liked to argue with me. ‘Men change. It’s men who usually leave home and break up the marriage. And it’s because they change.’
‘Good juice,’ I said, sipping some.
‘Men go out to work. Men want promotion in their jobs and they aspire to the higher social class of their superiors. Then they feel their wives are inadequate and start looking for a wife who knows the manners and vocabulary of that class they want to join.’
‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I meant that men don’t change in the way that their women want them to change.’
She smiled. She knew that I was commenting on the way she had changed poor Werner from being an easygoing and somewhat bohemian character into a devoted and obedient husband. It was Zena who had stopped him smoking and made him diet enough to reduce his waistline. And it was Zena who approved everything he bought to wear, from swimming trunks to tuxedo. In this respect Zena regarded me as her opponent. I was the bad influence who could undo all her good work, and that was something Zena was determined to prevent.
She climbed up onto the stool. She was so well proportioned that you only noticed how tiny she was when she did such things. She had long, dark hair and this morning she’d clipped it back into a ponytail that reached down to her shoulder blades. She was wearing a red cotton kimono with a wide black sash around her middle. She’d not missed any sleep that night and her eyes were bright and clear; she’d even found time enough to put on a touch of makeup. She didn’t need makeup – she was only twenty-two years old and there was no disputing her beauty – but the makeup was something from behind which she preferred to face the world.
The coffee was very dark and strong. She liked it like that, but I poured a lot of milk into mine. The buzzer on the oven sounded and Zena went to get the warm rolls. She put them into a small basket with a red-checked cloth before offering them to us. ‘Brötchen,’ she said. Zena was born and brought up in Berlin, but she didn’t call the bread rolls Schrippe the way the rest of the population of Berlin did. Zena didn’t want to be identified with Berlin; she preferred keeping her options open.
‘Any butter?’ I said, breaking open the bread roll.
‘We don’t eat it,’ said Zena. ‘It’s bad for you.’
‘Give Bernie some of that new margarine,’ said Werner.
‘You should lose some weight,’ Zena told me. ‘I wouldn’t even be eating bread if I were you.’
‘There are all kinds of other things I do that you wouldn’t do if you were me,’ I said. The wasp settled in my hair and I brushed it away.
She decided not to get into that one. She rolled up a newspaper and aimed some blows at the wasp. Then with unconcealed ill-humour she went to the refrigerator and brought me a plastic tub of margarine. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m catching the morning flight. I’ll get out of your way as soon as I’m shaved.’
‘No hurry,’ said Werner to smooth things over. He had already shaved, of course; Zena wouldn’t have let him have breakfast if he’d turned up unshaven. ‘So you got all your typing done last night,’ he said. ‘I should have stayed up and helped.’
‘It wasn’t necessary. I’ll have the translation done in London. I appreciate you and Zena giving me a place to sleep, to say nothing of the coffee last night and Zena’s great breakfast this morning.’
I overdid the appreciation I suppose. I’m prone to do this when I’m nervous, and Zena was a great expert at making me nervous.
‘I was damned tired,’ said Werner.
Zena shot me a glance, but when she spoke it was to Werner. ‘You were drunk,’ she said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be working last night.’
‘We were, darling,’ said Werner.
‘There wasn’t much drinking, Zena,’ I said.
‘Werner gets drunk on the smell of a barmaid’s apron,’ said Zena.
Werner opened his mouth to object to this put-down. Then he realized that he could only challenge it by claiming to have drunk a great deal. He sipped some coffee instead.
‘I’ve seen her before,’ said Werner.
‘The woman?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘She says it’s Müller, but she was married to a man named Johnson at one time. Here? You’ve seen her here? She said she lives in England.’
‘She went to the school in Potsdam,’ said Werner. He smiled at my look of surprise. ‘I read your report when I got up this morning. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Of course not. I wanted you to read it. There might be developments.’
‘Was this to do with Erich Stinnes?’ said Zena. She waved the wasp away from her head.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was his information.’
She nodded and poured herself more coffee. It was difficult to believe that not so long ago she’d been in love with Erich Stinnes. It was difficult to believe that she’d risked her life to protect him and that she was still having physiotherapy sessions because of injuries she’d suffered in his defence.
But Zena was young; and romantic. For both of those reasons, her passions could be of short duration. And for both those reasons, it could well be that she had never been in love with him, but merely in love with the idea of herself in love.
Werner seemed not to notice the mention of Erich Stinnes’s name. That was Werner’s way – honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil to him who evil thinks – that could well be Werner’s motto, for Werner was too generous and considerate to ever think the worst of anyone. And even when the worst was evident, Werner was ready to forgive. Zena’s flagrant love affair with Frank Harrington – the head of our Berlin Field Unit, the Berlin Resident – had made me angrier with her than Werner had been.
Some people said that Werner was the sort of masochist who got a perverse pleasure from the knowledge that his wife had gone off to live with Frank, but I knew Werner too well to go in for that sort of instant psychology. Werner was a tough guy who played the game by his own rules. Maybe some of his rules were flexible, but God help anyone who overstepped the line that Werner drew. Werner was an Old Testament man, and his wrath and vengeance could be terrible. I know, and Werner knows I know. That’s what makes us so close that nothing can come between us, not even the cunning little Zena.
‘I’ve seen that Miller woman somewhere,’ said Werner. ‘I never forget a face.’ He watched the wasp. It was sleepy, crawling slowly up the wall. Werner reached for Zena’s newspaper, but the wasp, sensing danger, flew away.
Zena was still thinking of Erich Stinnes. ‘We do all the work,’ she said bitterly. ‘Bernard gets all the credit. And Erich Stinnes gets all the money.’ She was referring to the way in which Stinnes, a KGB major, had been persuaded to come over to work for us and given a big cash payment. She reached for the jug, and some coffee dripped onto the hotplate making a loud, hissing sound. When she’d poured coffee for herself, she put the very hot jug onto the tiles of the counter. The change of temperature must have made the jug crack, for there was a sound like a pistol shot and the hot coffee flowed across the counter top so that we all jumped to our feet to avoid being scalded.
Zena grabbed some paper towels and, standing well back from the coffee flowing onto the tiled floor, dabbed them around. ‘I put it down too hard,’ she said when the mess was cleared away.
‘I think you did, Zena,’ I said.
‘It was already cracked,’ said Werner. Then he brought the rolled newspaper down on the wasp and killed it.
2 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
It was eight o’clock that evening in London when I finally delivered my report to my immediate boss, Dicky Cruyer, Controller German Stations. I’d attached a complete translation too, as I knew Dicky wasn’t exactly bilingual.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘One up to Comrade Stinnes eh?’ He shook the flimsy pages of my hastily written report as if something might fall from between them. He’d already heard my tape and had my oral account of the Berlin trip so there was little chance that he’d read the report very thoroughly, especially if it meant missing his dinner.
‘No one in Bonn will thank us,’ I warned him.
‘They have all the evidence they need,’ said Dicky with a sniff.
‘I was on the phone to Berlin an hour ago,’ I said. ‘He’s pulling all the strings that can be pulled.’
‘What does his boss say?’
‘He’s spending his Christmas vacation in Egypt. No one can find him,’ I said.
‘What a sensible man,’ said Dicky with admiration that was both sincere and undisguised. ‘Was he informed of the impending arrest of his secretary?’
‘Not by us, but that would be the regular BfV procedure.’
‘Have you phoned Bonn this evening? What do BfV reckon the chances of a statement from him?’
‘Better we stay out of it, Dicky.’
Dicky looked at me while he thought about this and then, deciding I was right, tried another aspect of the same problem. ‘Have you seen Stinnes since you handed him over to London Debriefing Centre?’
‘I gather the current policy is to keep me away from him.’
‘Come along,’ said Dicky, smiling to humour me in my state of paranoia. ‘You’re not saying you’re still suspect?’ He stood up from behind the rosewood table that he used instead of a desk and got a transparent plastic folding chair for me.
‘My wife defected.’ I sat down. Dicky had removed his visitors’ chairs on the pretext of making more space. His actual motive was to provide an excuse for him to use the conference rooms along the corridor. Dicky liked to use the conference rooms; it made him feel important and it meant that his name was exhibited in little plastic letters on the notice board opposite the top-floor lifts.
His folding chairs were the most uncomfortable seats in the building, but Dicky didn’t worry about this as he never sat in them. And anyway, I didn’t want to sit chatting with him. There was still work to clear up before I could go home.
‘That’s all past history,’ said Dick, running a thin bony hand through his curly hair so that he could take a surreptitious look at his big black wristwatch, the kind that works deep under water.
I’d always suspected that Dicky would be more comfortable with his hair cut short and brushed, and in the dark suits, white shirts and old school ties that were de rigueur for senior staff. But he persisted in being the only one of us who wore faded denim, cowboy boots, coloured neckerchiefs, and black leather because he thought it would help to identify him as an infant prodigy. But perhaps I had it the wrong way round; perhaps Dicky would have been happier to keep the trendy garb and be ‘creative’ in an advertising agency.
He zipped the front of his jacket up and down again and said, ‘You’re the local hero. You are the one who brought Stinnes to us at a time when everyone here said it couldn’t be done.’
‘Is that what they were saying? I wish I’d known. The way I heard it, a lot of people were saying I did everything to avoid bringing him in because I was frightened his debriefing would drop me into it.’
‘Well, anyone who was spreading that sort of story is now looking pretty damned stupid.’
‘I’m not in the clear yet, Dicky. You know it and I know it, so let’s stop all this bullshit.’
He held up his hand as if to ward off a blow. ‘You’re still not clear on paper,’ said Dicky. ‘On paper … and you know why?’
‘No, I don’t know why. Tell me.’
Dicky sighed. ‘For the simple but obvious reason that this Department needs an excuse to hold Stinnes in London Debriefing Centre and keep on pumping him. Without an ongoing investigation of our own staff, we’d have to hand Stinnes over to MI5 … That’s why the Department haven’t cleared you yet: it’s a department necessity, Bernard, nothing sinister about it.’
‘Who’s in charge of the Stinnes debriefing?’ I asked.
‘Don’t look at me, old friend. Stinnes is a hot potato. I don’t want any part of that one. Neither does Bret … no one up here on the top floor wants anything to do with it.’
‘Things could change,’ I said. ‘If Stinnes gives us a couple more winners like this one, then a few people will start to see that being in charge of the Stinnes debriefing could be the road to fame and fortune.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dicky. ‘The tip-off you handled in Berlin was just for openers … a few quick forays before Moscow tumble what’s happening to their networks. Once the dust settles, the interrogators will take Stinnes through the files … right?’
‘Files? You mean they’ll be poking into all our past operations?’
‘Not all of them. I don’t suppose they’ll go back to discover how Christopher Marlowe discovered that the Spanish Armada had sailed.’ Dicky permitted himself a smile at this joke. ‘It’s obvious that the Department will want to discover how good our guesses were. They’ll play all the games again, but this time they’ll know which ones have a happy ending.’
‘And you’ll go along with that?’
‘They won’t consult me, old son. I’m just German Stations Controller; I’m not the D-G. I’m not even on the Policy Committee.’
‘Giving Stinnes access to department archives would be showing a lot of trust in him.’
‘You know what the old man’s like. Deputy D-G came in yesterday on one of his rare visits to the building. He’s enraptured about the progress of the Stinnes debriefing.’
‘If Stinnes is a plant …’
‘Ah, if Stinnes is a plant …’ Dicky sank down in his Charles Eames chair and put his feet on the matching footstool. The night was dark outside and the windowpanes were like ebony reflecting a perfect image of the room. Only the antique desk light was on; it made a pool of light on the table where the report and transcript were placed side by side. Dicky almost disappeared into the gloom except when the light reflected from the brass buckle of his belt or shone on the gold medallion he wore suspended inside his open-neck shirt. ‘But the idea that Stinnes is a plant is hard to sustain when he’s just given us three well-placed KGB agents in a row.’
He looked at his watch before shouting ‘Coffee’ loudly enough for his secretary to hear in the adjoining room. When Dicky worked late, his secretary worked late too. He didn’t trust the duty roster staff with making his coffee.
‘Will he talk, this one you arrested in Berlin? He had a year with the Bonn Defence Ministry, I notice from the file.’
‘I didn’t arrest him; we left it to the Germans. Yes, he’ll talk if they push him hard enough. They have the evidence and – thanks to Volkmann – they’re holding the woman who came to collect it from the car.’
‘And I’m sure you put all that in your report. Are you now the official secretary of the Werner Volkmann fan club? Or is this something you do for all your old school chums?’
‘He’s very good at what he does.’
‘And so we all agree, but don’t tell me that but for Volkmann, we wouldn’t have picked up the woman. Staking out the car is standard procedure. Ye gods, Bernard, any probationary cop would do that as a matter of course.’
‘A commendation would work wonders for him.’
‘Well, he’s not getting any bloody commendation from me. Just because he’s your close friend, you think you can inveigle any kind of praise and privilege out of me for him.’
‘It wouldn’t cost anything, Dicky,’ I said mildly.
‘No, it wouldn’t cost anything,’ said Dicky sarcastically. ‘Not until the next time he makes some monumental cock-up. Then someone asks me how come I commended him; then it would cost something. It would cost me a chewing out and maybe a promotion.’
‘Yes, Dicky,’ I said.
Promotion? Dicky was two years younger than me and he’d already been promoted several rungs beyond his competence. What promotion did he have his eye on now? He’d only just fought off Bret Rensselaer’s attempt to take over the German desk. I’d thought he’d be satisfied to consolidate his good fortune.
‘And what do you make of this Englishwoman?’ He tapped the roughly typed transcript of her statement. ‘Looks as if you got her talking.’
‘I couldn’t stop her,’ I said.
‘Like that, was it? I don’t want to go all through it again tonight. Anything important?’
‘Some inconsistencies that should be followed up.’
‘For instance?’
‘She was working in London, handling selected items for immediate shortwave radio transmission to Moscow.’
‘Must have been bloody urgent,’ said Dicky. So he’d noticed that already. Had he waited to see if I brought it up? ‘And that means damned good. Right? I mean, not even handled through the Embassy radio, so it was a source they wanted to keep very very secret.’
‘Fiona’s material probably,’ I said.
‘I wondered if you’d twig that,’ said Dicky. ‘It was obviously the stuff your wife was betraying out of our day-to-day operational files.’
He liked to twist the knife in the wound. He held me personally responsible for what Fiona had done; he’d virtually said so on more than one occasion.
‘But the material kept coming.’
Dicky frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’
‘It kept coming. First-grade material even after Fiona ran for it.’
‘This woman’s transmitted material wasn’t all from the same source,’ said Dicky. ‘I remember what she said when you played your tape to me.’
He picked up the transcript and tried to find what he wanted in the muddle of humms and hahhs and ‘indistinct passage’ marks that are always a part of transcripts from such tape recordings. He put the sheets down again.
‘Well anyway, I remember there were two assignment codes: Jake and Ironfoot. Is that what’s worrying you?’
‘We should follow it up!’ I said. ‘I don’t like loose ends like that. The dates suggest that Fiona was Ironfoot. Who the hell was Jake?’
‘The Fiona material is our worry. Whatever else Moscow got – and are still getting – is a matter for Five. You know that, Bernard. It’s not our job to search high and low to find Russian spies.’
‘I still think we should check this woman’s statement against what Stinnes knows.’
‘Stinnes is nothing to do with me, Bernard. I’ve just told you that.’
‘Well, I think he should be. It’s madness that we don’t have access to him without going to Debriefing Centre for permission.’
‘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. ‘When London Debriefing Centre get through with Stinnes, heads will roll up here on the top floor. You know the monumental cock-ups that have dogged the work of this Department for the last few years. Now we’ll have chapter and verse on every decision made up here while Stinnes was running things in Berlin. Every decision made by senior staff will be scrutinized with twenty-twenty hindsight. 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.
‘And you think that whoever’s in charge of the Stinnes debriefing will be unpopular?’
‘Running a witch-hunt is not likely to be a social asset,’ said Dicky.
I thought ‘witch-hunt’ was an inaccurate description of the weeding out of incompetents, but there would be plenty who would favour Dicky’s terminology.
‘And that’s not only my opinion,’ he added. ‘No one wants to take Stinnes. And I don’t want you saying we should have responsibility for him.’
Dicky’s secretary brought coffee.
‘I was just coming, Mr Cruyer,’ she said apologetically. She was a mousy little widow whose every sheet of typing was a patchwork of white correcting paint. At one time Dicky had had a shapely twenty-five-year-old divorcee as secretary, but his wife, Daphne, had made him get rid of her. At the time, Dicky had pretended that firing the secretary was his idea; he said it was because she didn’t boil the water properly for his coffee. ‘Your wife phoned. She wanted to know what time to expect you for dinner.’
‘And what did you say?’ Dicky asked her.
The poor woman hesitated, worrying if she’d done the right thing. ‘I said you were at a meeting and I would call her back.’
‘Tell my wife not to wait dinner for me. I’ll get a bite to eat somewhere or other.’
‘If you want to get away, Dicky,’ I said, rising to my feet.
‘Sit down, Bernard. We can’t waste a decent cup of coffee. I’ll be home soon enough. Daphne knows what this job is like; eighteen hours a day lately.’ It was not a soft, melancholy reflection but a loud proclamation to the world, or at least to me and his secretary who departed to pass the news on to Daphne.
I nodded but I couldn’t help wondering if Dicky was scheduling a visit to some other lady. Lately I’d noticed a gleam in his eye and a spring in his step and a most unusual willingness to stay late at the office.
Dicky got up from his easy chair and fussed over the antique butler’s tray which his secretary had placed so carefully on his side table. He emptied the Spode cups of the hot water and half filled each warmed cup with black coffee. Dicky was extremely particular about his coffee. Twice a week he sent one of the drivers to collect a packet of freshly roasted beans from Mr Higgins in South Molton Street – chagga, no blends – and it had to be ground just before brewing.
‘That’s good,’ he said, sipping it with all the studied attention of the connoisseur he claimed to be. Having approved the coffee, he poured some for me.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to stay away from Stinnes, Bernard? He doesn’t belong to us any longer, does he?’ He smiled. It was a direct order; I knew Dicky’s style.
‘Can I have milk or cream or something in mine?’ I said. ‘That strong black brew you make keeps me awake at night.’
He always had a jug of cream and a bowl of sugar brought in with his coffee although he never used either. He once told me that in his regimental officers’ mess, the cream was always on the table but it was considered bad form to take any. I wondered if there were a lot of people like Dicky in the Army; it was a dreadful thought. He brought the cream to me.
‘You’re getting old, Bernard. Did you ever think of jogging? I run three miles every morning – summer, winter, Christmas, every morning without fail.’
‘Is it doing you any good?’ I asked as he poured cream for me from the cow-shaped silver jug.
‘Ye gods, Bernard. I’m fitter now than I was at twenty-five. I swear I am.’
‘What kind of shape were you in at twenty-five?’ I said.
‘Damned good.’ He put the jug down so that he could run his fingers round the brass-buckled leather belt that held up his jeans. He sucked in his stomach to exaggerate his slim figure and then slammed himself in the gut with a flattened hand. Even without the intake of breath, his lack of fat was impressive. Especially when you took into account the countless long lunches he charged against his expense account.
‘But not as good as now?’ I persisted.
‘I wasn’t fat and flabby the way you are, Bernard. I didn’t huff and puff every time I went up a flight of stairs.’
‘I thought Bret Rensselaer would take over the Stinnes debriefing.’
‘Debriefing,’ said Dicky suddenly. ‘How I hate that word. You get briefed and maybe briefed again, but there is no way anyone can be debriefed.’
‘I thought Bret would jump at it. He’s been out of a job since Stinnes was enrolled.’
Dicky gave the tiniest chuckle and rubbed his hands together. ‘Out of a job since he tried to take over my desk and failed. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’
‘Was he after your desk?’ I said innocently, although Dicky had been providing me with a blow-by-blow account of Bret’s tactics and his own counterploys.
‘Jesus Christ, Bernard, you know he was. I told you all that.’
‘So what’s he got lined up now?’
‘He’d like to take over in Berlin when Frank goes.’
Frank Harrington’s job as head of the Berlin Field Unit was one I coveted, but it meant close liaison with Dicky, maybe even taking orders from him sometimes (although such orders were always wrapped up in polite double-talk and signed by Deputy Controller Europe or a member of the London Central Policy Committee). It wasn’t exactly a role that the autocratic Bret Rensselaer would cherish.
‘Berlin? Bret? Would he like that job?’
‘The rumour is that Frank will get his K. and then retire.’
‘And so Bret plans to sit in Berlin until his retirement comes round and hope that he’ll get a K. too?’ It seemed unlikely. Bret’s social life centred on the swanky jet setters of London South West One. I couldn’t see him sweating it out in Berlin.
‘Why not?’ said Dicky, who seemed to get a flushed face whenever the subject of knighthoods came up.
‘Why not?’ I repeated. ‘Bret can’t speak the language, for one thing.’
‘Come along, Bernard!’ said Dicky, whose command of German was about on a par with Bret’s. ‘He’ll be running the show; he won’t be required to pass himself off as a bricklayer from Prenzlauer Berg.’
A palpable hit for Dicky. Bernard Samson had spent his youth masquerading as just such lowly coarse-accented East German citizens.
‘It’s not just a matter of throwing gracious dinner parties in that big house in the Grunewald,’ I said. ‘Whoever takes over in Berlin has to know the streets and alleys. He’ll also need to know the crooks and hustlers who come in to sell bits and pieces of intelligence.’
‘That’s what you say,’ said Dicky, pouring himself more coffee. He held up the jug. ‘More for you?’ And when I shook my head he continued: ‘That’s because you fancy yourself doing Frank’s job … don’t deny it, you know it’s true. You’ve always wanted Berlin. But times have changed, Bernard. The days of rough-and-tumble stuff are over and done with. That was okay in your father’s time, when we were a de facto occupying power. But now – whatever the lawyers say – the Germans have to be treated as equal partners. What the Berlin job needs is a smoothie like Bret, someone who can charm the natives and get things done by gentle persuasion.’
‘Can I change my mind about coffee?’ I said. I suspected that Dicky’s views were those prevailing among the top-floor mandarins. There was no way I’d be on a short list of smoothies who got things done by means of gentle persuasion, so this was goodbye to my chances of Berlin.
‘Don’t be so damned gloomy about it,’ said Dicky as he poured coffee. ‘It’s mostly dregs, I’m afraid. You didn’t really think you were in line for Frank’s job, did you?’ He smiled at the idea.
‘There isn’t enough money in Central Funding to entice me back to Berlin on any permanent basis. I spent half my life there. I deserve my London posting and I’m hanging on to it.’
‘London is the only place to be,’ said Dicky. But I wasn’t fooling him. My indignation was too strong and my explanation too long. A public school man like Dicky would have done a better job of concealing his bitterness. He would have smiled coldly and said that a Berlin posting would be ‘super’ in such a way that it seemed he didn’t care.
I’d only been in my office for about ten minutes when I heard Dicky coming down the corridor. Dicky and I must have been the only ones still working, apart from the night-duty people, and his footsteps sounded unnaturally sharp, as sounds do at night. And I could always recognize the sound of Dicky’s high-heeled cowboy boots.
‘Do you know what those stupid sods have done?’ he asked, standing in the doorway, arms akimbo and feet apart, like Wyatt Earp coming into the saloon at Tombstone. I knew he would get on the phone to Berlin as soon as I left the office; it was always easier to meddle in other people’s work than to get on with his own.
‘Released him?’
‘Right,’ he said. My accurate guess angered him even more, as if he thought I might have been party to this development. ‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t know. But with you standing there blowing your top it wasn’t difficult to guess.’
‘They released him an hour ago. Direct instructions from Bonn. The government can’t survive another scandal, is the line they’re taking. How can they let politics interfere with our work?’
I noted the nice turn of phrase: ‘our work’.
‘It’s all politics,’ I said calmly. ‘Espionage is about politics. Remove the politics and you don’t need espionage or any of the paraphernalia of it.’
‘By paraphernalia you mean us. I suppose. Well, I knew you’d have some bloody smart answer.’
‘We don’t run the world, Dicky. We can pick it over and then report on it. After that it’s up to the politicians.’
‘I suppose so.’ The anger was draining out of him now. He was often given to these violent explosions, but they didn’t last long providing he had someone to shout at.
‘Your secretary gone?’ I asked.
He nodded. That explained everything – usually it was his poor secretary who got the brunt of Dicky’s fury when the world didn’t run to his complete satisfaction. ‘I’m going too,’ he said, looking at his watch.
‘I’ve got a lot more work to do,’ I told him. I got up from my desk and put papers into the secure filing cabinet and turned the combination lock. Dicky still stood there. I looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
‘And that bloody Miller woman,’ said Dicky. ‘She tried to knock herself off.’
‘They didn’t release her too?’
‘No, of course not. But they let her keep her sleeping tablets. Can you imagine that sort of stupidity? She said they were aspirins and that she needed them for period pains. They believed her, and as soon as they left her alone for five minutes she swallowed the whole bottle of them.’
‘And?’
‘She’s in the Steglitz Clinic. They pumped her stomach; it sounds as if she’ll be okay. But I ask you … God knows when she’ll be fit enough for more interrogation.’
‘I’d let it go, Dicky.’
But he stood there, obviously unwilling to depart without some further word of consolation. ‘And it would all happen tonight,’ he added petulantly, ‘just when I’m going out to dinner.’
I looked at him and nodded. So I was right about an assignation. He bit his lip, angry at having let slip his secret. ‘That’s strictly between you and me of course.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ I said.
And the Controller of German Stations marched off to his dinner date. It was sobering to realize that the man in the front line of the western world’s intelligence system couldn’t even keep his own infidelities secret.
When Dicky Cruyer had gone I went downstairs to the film department and took a reel of film from the rack that was waiting for the filing clerk. It was still in the wrapping paper with the courier’s marks on it. I placed the film in position on the editing bench and laced it up. Then I dimmed the lights and watched the screen.
The titles were in Hungarian and so was the commentary. It was film of a security conference that had just taken place in Budapest. There was nothing very secret; the film had been made by the Hungarian Film Service for distribution to news agencies. This copy was to be used for identification purposes, so that we had up-to-date pictures of their officials.
The conference building was a fine old mansion in a well-kept park. The film crew had done exactly what was expected of them: they’d filmed the big black shiny cars arriving, they’d got pictures of Army officers and civilians walking up the marble steps and the inevitable shot of delegates round a huge table, smiling amicably at each other.
I kept the film running until the camera panned around the table. It came to a nameplate Fiona Samson and there was my wife – more beautiful than ever, perfectly groomed, and smiling for the cameraman. I stopped the film. The commentary growled to a halt and she froze, her hand awkwardly splayed, her face strained, and her smile false. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at her. But suddenly the door of the editing room banged open and flooded everything with bright yellow light from the corridor.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Samson. I thought everyone had finished work.’
‘It’s not work,’ I said. ‘Just something I remembered.’
3 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
So Dicky, having scoffed at the notion that I was being kept away from Stinnes, had virtually ordered me not to go near him. Well, that was all right. For the first time in months I was able to get my desk more or less clear. I worked from nine to five and even found myself able to join in some of those earnest conversations about what had been on TV the previous evening.
And at last I was able to spend more time with my children. For the past six months I had been almost a stranger to them. They never asked about Fiona, but now, when we’d finished putting up the paper decorations for Christmas, I sat them down and told them that their mother was safe and well but that she’d had to go abroad to work.
‘I know,’ said Billy. ‘She’s in Germany with the Russians.’
‘Who told you that?’ I said.
I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told anyone. Just after Fiona’s defection, the Director-General had addressed all the staff in the downstairs dining room – the D-G was an Army man with undisguised admiration for the late Field Marshal Montgomery’s techniques with the lower ranks – and told us that no mention of Fiona’s defection was to be included in any written reports, and it was on no account to be discussed outside the building. The Prime Minister had been told, and anyone who mattered at the Foreign Office knew by means of the daily report. Otherwise the whole business was to be ‘kept to ourselves’.
‘Grandpa told us,’ said Billy.
Well, that was someone the D-G hadn’t reckoned with: my irrepressible father-in-law, David Kimber-Hutchinson, by his own admission a self-made man.
‘What else did he tell you?’ I asked.
‘I can’t remember,’ said Billy. He was a bright child, academic, calculating and naturally inquisitive. His memory was formidable. I wondered if it was his way of saying that he didn’t much want to talk about it.
‘He said that Mummy may not be back for a long time,’ said Sally. She was younger than Billy, generous but introverted in that mysterious way that so many second children are, and closer to her mother. Sally was never moody in the way Billy could be, but she was more sensitive. She had taken her mother’s absence much better than I’d feared, but I was still concerned about her.
‘That’s what I was going to tell you,’ I said. I was relieved that the children were taking this discussion about their mother’s disappearance so calmly. Fiona had always arranged their outings and gone to immense trouble to organize every last detail of their parties. My efforts were a poor substitute, and we all knew it.
‘Mummy is really there to spy for us isn’t she, Daddy?’ said Billy.
‘Ummm,’ I said. It was a difficult one to respond to. I was afraid that Fiona or her KGB colleagues would grab the children and take them to her in East Berlin or Moscow or somewhere, as she once tried to. If she tried again, I didn’t want to make it easier for her to succeed, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to warn them against their own mother. ‘No one knows,’ I said vaguely.
‘Sure, it’s a secret,’ said Billy with that confident shrug of the shoulders used by Dicky Cruyer to help emphasize the obvious. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell.’
‘It’s better just to say she’s gone away,’ I said.
‘Grandpa said we’re to say Mummy’s in hospital in Switzerland.’
It was typical of David to invent his own loony deception story and involve my children in it.
‘The fact is that Mummy and I have separated,’ I said in a rush. ‘And I’ve asked a lady from my office to come round and see us this afternoon.’
There was a long silence. Billy looked at Sally and Sally looked at her new shoes.
‘Aren’t you going to ask her name?’ I said desperately.
Sally looked at me with her big blue eyes. ‘Will she be staying?’ she said.
‘We don’t need anyone else to live here. You have Nanny to look after you,’ I said, avoiding the question.
‘Will she use our bathroom?’ said Sally.
‘No. I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Nanny hates visitors using our bathroom.’
This was a new insight into Nanny, a quiet plump girl from a Devon village who spoke in whispers, was transfixed by all TV programmes, ate chocolates by the truckload, and never complained. ‘Well, I’ll make sure she uses my bathroom,’ I promised.
‘Must she come today?’ said Billy.
‘I invited her for tea so that we could all be together,’ I said. ‘Then, when you go to bed, I’m taking her to dinner in a restaurant.’
‘I wish we could all go out to dinner in a restaurant,’ said Billy, who had recently acquired a blue blazer and long trousers and wanted to wear them to good effect.
‘Which restaurant?’ said Sally.
‘The Greek restaurant where Billy had his birthday.’
‘The waiters sang “Happy Birthday” for him.’
‘So I heard.’
‘You were away.’
‘I was in Berlin.’
‘Why don’t you tell them it’s your girlfriend’s birthday,’ said Sally. ‘They’ll be awfully nice to her, and they’d never find out.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She’s just a friend.’
‘She’s his boyfriend,’ said Billy. Sally laughed.
‘She’s just a friend,’ I said soberly.
‘All my lovers and I are just good friends,’ said Sally, putting on her ‘Hollywood’ voice.
‘She heard that in a film,’ Billy explained.
‘Her name is Gloria,’ I said.
‘We’ve nothing for tea,’ said Sally. ‘Not even biscuits.’
‘Nanny will make toast,’ said Billy to reassure me. ‘She always makes toast when there’s nothing for tea. Toast with butter and jam. It’s quite nice really.’
‘I believe she will be bringing a cake.’
‘Auntie Tessa brings the best cakes,’ said Sally. ‘She gets them from a shop near Harrods.’
‘That’s because Auntie Tessa is very rich,’ said Billy. ‘She has a Rolls-Royce.’
‘She comes here in a Volkswagen,’ said Sally.
‘That’s because she doesn’t want to be flash,’ said Billy. ‘I heard her say that on the phone once.’
‘I think she’s very flash,’ said Sally in a voice heavy with admiration. ‘Couldn’t Auntie Tessa be your girlfriend, Daddy?’
‘Auntie Tessa is married to Uncle George,’ I said before things got out of hand.
‘But Auntie Tessa isn’t faithful to him,’ Sally told Billy. Before I could contradict this uncontradictable fact, Sally after a glance at me added, ‘I heard Daddy tell Mummy that one day when I shouldn’t have been listening.’
‘What kind of cake will she bring?’ said Billy.
‘Will she bring chocolate layer cake?’ said Sally.
‘I like rum babas best,’ said Billy. ‘Especially when they have lots of rum on them.’
They were still discussing their favourite cakes – a discussion that can go on for a very long time – when the doorbell rang.
Gloria Zsuzsa Kent was a tall and very beautiful blonde, whose twentieth birthday was soon approaching. She was what the service called an ‘Executive Officer’ which meant in theory that she could be promoted to Director-General. Armed with good marks from school and fluent Hungarian learned from her parents, she joined the Department on the vague promise of being given paid leave to go to university. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Dicky Cruyer had got his Army service – and Bret his studies at Oxford – credited towards promotion. Now financial cutbacks made it look as if she was stuck with nothing beyond a second-rate office job.
She took off her expensive fur-lined suede coat and the children gave whoops of joy on discovering that she’d brought the rum babas and chocolate layer cake that were their favourites.
‘You’re a mind reader,’ I said. I kissed her. Under the children’s gaze I made sure it was no more than the sort of peck you get along with the Legion of Honour.
She smiled as the children gave her a kiss of thanks before they went off to set the table for tea. ‘I adore your children, Bernard.’
‘You chose their favourite cakes,’ I said.
‘I have two young sisters. I know what children like.’
She sat down near the fire and warmed her hands. Already the afternoon light was fading and the room was dark. There was just a rim of daylight on her straw-coloured hair and the red glow of the fire’s light on her hands and face.
Nanny came in and exchanged amiably noisy greetings with Gloria. They had spoken on the phone several times and the similarity in their ages gave them enough in common to allay my fears about Nanny’s reaction to the news that I had a ‘girlfriend’.
To me Nanny said, ‘The children want to make toast by the fire in here, but I can easily do it in the toaster.’
‘Let’s all sit by the fire and have tea,’ I said.
Nanny looked at me and said nothing.
‘What’s wrong, Nanny?’
‘It would be better if we eat in the kitchen. The children will make a lot of crumbs and mess on the carpets and Mrs Dias won’t come in again to clean until Tuesday.’
‘You’re a fusspot, Nanny,’ I said.
‘I’ll tidy up, Doris,’ Gloria told Nanny. Doris! Good grief, those two were getting along too nicely!
‘And Mr Samson,’ said Nanny tentatively. ‘The children were invited to spend the evening with one of Billy’s school friends. The Dubois family. They live near Swiss Cottage. I promised to phone them before five.’
‘Sure, that’s okay. If the children want to go. Are you going too?’
‘Yes, I’d like to. They have Singin’ in the Rain on video, and they’ll serve soup and a snack meal afterwards. Other children will be there. We’d be back rather late, but the children could sleep late tomorrow.’
‘Well, drive carefully, Nanny. The town’s full of drunk drivers on a Saturday night.’
I heard cheers from the kitchen when Nanny went back and announced my decision. And tea was a delight. The children recited ‘If’ for Gloria, and Billy did three new magic tricks he’d been practising for the school Christmas concert.
‘As I remember it,’ I said, ‘I’d promised to take you to the Greek restaurant for dinner, have a drink or two at Les Ambassadeurs, and then drive you home to your parents.’
‘This is better,’ she said. We were in bed. I said nothing. ‘It is better, isn’t it?’ she asked anxiously.
I kissed her. ‘It’s madness and you know it.’
‘Nanny and the children won’t be back for hours.’
‘I mean you and me. When will you realize that I’m twenty years older than you are?’
‘I love you and you love me.’
‘I didn’t say I loved you,’ I said.
She pulled a face. She resented the fact that I wouldn’t say I loved her, but I was adamant; she was so young that I felt I was taking advantage of her. It was absurd, but refusing to tell her that I loved her enabled me to hang onto a last shred of self-respect.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She pulled the bedclothes over our heads to make a tent. ‘I know you love me, but you don’t want to admit it.’
‘Do your parents suspect that we’re having an affair?’
‘Are you still frightened that my father will come after you?’
‘You’re damned right I am.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said. The more I tried to explain my feelings to her, the more amused she always got. She laughed and snuggled down in the bed, pressing against me.
‘You’re only ten years older than little Sally.’
She grew tired of the tent game and threw the bedclothes back. ‘Your daughter is eight. Apart from the inaccurate mathematics of that allegation, you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that when your lovely daughter is ten years older she will be a grown woman too. Much sooner than that, in fact. You’re an old fogy, Bernard.’
‘I have Dicky telling me that I’m fat and flabby and you telling me that I’m an old fogy. It’s enough to crush a man’s ego.’
‘Not an ego like yours, darling.’
‘Come here,’ I said. I hugged her tight and kissed her.
The truth was that I was falling in love with her. I thought of her too much; soon everyone at the office would guess what was between us. Worse, I was becoming frightened at the prospect of this impossible affair coming to an end. And that, I suppose, is love.
‘I’ve been filing for Dicky all week.’
‘I know, and I’m jealous.’
‘Dicky is such an idiot,’ she said for no apparent reason. ‘I used to think he was so clever, but he’s such a fool.’ She was amused and scornful, but I didn’t miss the element of affection in her voice. Dicky seemed to bring out the maternal instinct in all women, even in his wife.
‘You’re telling me. I work for him.’
‘Did you ever think of getting out of the Department, Bernard?’
‘Over and over again. But what would I do?’
‘You could do almost anything,’ she said with the adoring intensity and the sincere belief that are the marks of those who are very young.
‘I’m forty,’ I said. ‘Companies don’t want promising “young” men of forty. They don’t fit into the pension scheme and they’re too old to be infant prodigies.’
‘I shall get out soon,’ she said. ‘Those bastards will never give me paid leave to go to Cambridge, and if I don’t go up next year I’m not sure when I’ll get another place.’
‘Have they told you they won’t give you paid leave?’
‘They asked me if unpaid leave would suit me just as well. Morgan, actually; that little Welsh shit who does all the dirty work for the D-G’s office.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him to get stuffed.’
‘In those very words?’
‘No point in beating about the bush, is there?’
‘None at all, darling,’ I said.
‘I can’t stand Morgan,’ she said. ‘And he’s no friend of yours either.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I heard him talking to Bret Rensselaer last week. They were talking about you. I heard Morgan say he felt sorry for you really because there was no real future for you in the Department now that your wife’s gone over to the Russians.’
‘What did Bret say?’
‘He’s always very just, very dispassionate, very honourable and sincere; he’s the beautiful American, Bret Rensselaer. He said that the German Section would go to pieces without you. Morgan said the German Section isn’t the only Section in the Department and Bret said, “No, just the most important one”.’
‘How did Morgan take that?’
‘He said that when the Stinnes debriefing is completed Bret might think again.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What’s that bastard talking about?’
‘Don’t get upset, Bernie. It’s just Morgan putting the poison in. You know what he’s like.’
‘Frank Harrington said Morgan is the Martin Bormann of London South West One.’ I laughed.
‘Explain the joke to me.’
‘Martin Bormann was Hitler’s secretary, but by controlling the paperwork of Hitler’s office and by deciding who was permitted to have an audience with Hitler, Bormann became the power behind the throne. He decided everything that happened. People who upset Bormann never got to see Hitler and their influence and importance waned and waned.’
‘And Morgan controls the D-G like that?’
‘The D-G is not well,’ I said.
‘He’s as nutty as a fruitcake,’ said Gloria.
‘He has good days and bad days,’ I said. I was sorry for the D-G; he’d been good in his day – tough when it was necessary, but always scrupulously honest. ‘But by taking on the job of being the D-G’s hatchet man – a job no one else wanted – Morgan has become a formidable power in that building. And he’s done it in a very short time.’
‘How long has he been in the Department?’
‘I don’t know exactly – two years, three at the most. Now he’s talking to old-timers like Bret Rensselaer and Frank Harrington as man to man.’
‘That’s right. I heard him ask Bret about taking charge of the Stinnes debriefing. Bret said he had no time. Morgan said it wouldn’t be time-consuming; it was just a matter of holding the reins so that the Department knew what was happening, from day to day, over at London Debriefing Centre. You’d have thought Morgan was the D-G the way he was saying it.’
‘And how did Bret react to that?’
‘He asked for time to think it over, and it was decided that he’d let Morgan know next week. And then Bret asked if anyone knew when Frank Harrington was retiring, and Morgan said nothing was fixed. Bret said, “Nothing?” in a funny voice and they laughed. I don’t know what that was about.’
‘The D-G has a knighthood to dispose of. Rumour says it will go to Frank Harrington when he retires from the Berlin office. Everyone knows that Bret would give his right arm for a knighthood.’
‘I see. Is that how people get knighthoods?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘There was something else,’ said Gloria. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, but Morgan said the D-G had decided it would be just as well for the Department if you didn’t work in Operations as from the end of this year.’
‘Are you serious,’ I said in alarm.
‘Bret said that Internal Security had given you a clean bill of health – that’s what he said, “a clean bill of health”. And then Morgan said it was nothing to do with Internal Security; it was a matter of the Department’s reputation.’
‘That doesn’t sound like the D-G,’ I said. ‘That sounds like Morgan.’
‘Morgan the ventriloquist,’ said Gloria.
I kissed her again and changed the subject. It was all getting too damned depressing for me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, responding to my change of mood. ‘I was determined not to tell you.’
I hugged her. ‘How did you know the children’s favourite cakes, you witch?’
‘I phoned Doris and asked her.’
‘You and Nanny are very thick,’ I said suspiciously.
‘Why don’t you call her Doris?’
‘I always call her Nanny. It’s better that way when we’re living in the same house.’
‘You’re such a prude. She adores you, you know.’
‘Don’t avoid my question. Have you been plotting with Nanny?’
‘With Nanny? About what?’
‘You know about what.’
‘Don’t do that. Oh, stop tickling me. Oh oh oh. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh stop it.’
‘Did you connive with Nanny so that she and the children were out for the evening? So that we could go to bed?’
‘Of course not.’
‘What did you give her?’
‘Stop it. Please. You beast.’
‘What did you give her?’
‘A box of chocolates.’
‘I knew it. You schemer.’
‘I hate Greek food.’
4 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)
Taking the children to see Billy’s godfather was an excuse for a day in the country, a Sunday lunch second to none, and a chance to talk to ‘Uncle Silas’, one of the legends of the Department’s golden days. Also it gave me a chance to tie up some loose ends in the arrested woman’s evidence. If Dicky didn’t want it done for the Department, then I would do it just to satisfy my own curiosity.
The property had always fascinated me; Whitelands was as surprising as Silas Gaunt himself. From the long drive, with its well-tended garden, the ancient stone farmhouse was as pretty as a calendar picture. But over the years it had been adapted to the tastes of many different owners. Adapted, modified, extended and defaced. Across the cobbled yard at the back there was a curious castellated Gothic tower, its spiral staircase leading up to a large, ornately decorated chamber which once had been a mirrored bedroom. Even more incongruous in this cottage with its stone floors and oak beams was the richly panelled billiards room, with game trophies crowding its walls. Both architectural additions dated from the same time, both installed by a nineteenth-century beer baron to indulge his favourite pastimes.
Silas Gaunt had inherited Whitelands from his father, but Silas had never been a farmer. Even when he left the Department and came to live here in retirement, he still let his farm manager make all the decisions. Little wonder that Silas got lonely amid his six hundred acres on the edge of the Cotswolds. Now all the soft greenery of summer had gone. So had the crisp browns of autumn. Only the framework of landscape remained: bare tangles of hedgerow and leafless trees. The first snow had whitened rock-hard ridges of the empty brown fields: crosshatched pieces of landscape where magpies, rooks and starlings scavenged for worms and insects.
Silas had had few guests. It had been a hermit’s life, for the conversation of Mrs Porter, his housekeeper, was limited to recipes, needlework, and the steadily rising prices of groceries in the village shop. Silas Gaunt’s life had revolved round his library, his records and his wine cellar. But there is more to life than Schiller, Mahler and Margaux, which trio Silas claimed as his ‘fellow pensioners’. And so he’d come to encourage these occasional weekend house parties at which departmental staff, both past and present, were usually represented along with a sprinkling of the artists, tycoons, eccentrics and weirdos whom Silas had encountered during his very long and amazing career.
Silas was unkempt; the wispy white hair that made a halo on his almost bald head did not respond to combs or to the clawing gesture of his fingers that he made whenever a strand of hair fell forward across his eyes. He was tall and broad, a Falstaffian figure who liked to laugh and shout, could curse fluently in half a dozen languages, and who’d make reckless bets on anything and everything and claimed – with some justification – to be able to drink any man under the table.
Billy and Sally were in awe of him. They were always ready to go to Whitelands and see Uncle Silas, but they regarded him as a benevolent old ruffian of whose sudden moods they should constantly be wary. And that was the way I saw him myself. But he’d had a fully decorated Christmas tree erected in the entrance hall. Under it there was a little pile of presents for both children, all of them wrapped in bright paper and tied neatly with big bows. Mrs Porter’s doing no doubt.
Like all old people, Silas Gaunt felt a need for unchanging ritual. These guest weekends followed a firmly established pattern: a long country walk on Saturday morning (which I did my best to avoid), roast beef lunch to follow, billiards in the afternoon, and a dress-up dinner on Saturday evening. On Sunday morning his guests were shepherded to church and then to the village pub before coming back to lunch which was locally obtained game or, failing that, poultry. I was relieved to find that duckling was on the menu this week. I did not care for Silas’s selection of curious little wild birds, every mouthful with its portion of lead shot.
‘Surprised to see Walter here?’ Uncle Silas asked me again as he sharpened his long carving knife with the careless abandon of a butcher.
I had registered my surprise on first arriving, but apparently I’d inadequately performed my allotted role. ‘Amazed!’ I said, putting all my energies into it. ‘I had no idea …’ I winked at von Munte. I knew him even better than I knew Uncle Silas; once long ago he’d saved my life by risking his own. Dr Walter von Munte smiled, and even the staid old Frau Doktor gave the ghost of a smile. Living with extroverted, outspoken Silas must have come as something of a shock after their austere and tight-lipped life in the German Democratic Republic, where even the von in their name had been taken from them.
I knew that the von Muntes were staying there – it was my job to know such things. I’d played a part in bringing them out of the East. Their presence was, to some extent, the reason for my visit, but their whereabouts was considered a departmental secret and I was expected to register appropriate surprise.
Until a few short weeks ago this lugubrious old man had been one of our most reliable agents. Known only as Brahms Four he’d supplied regular and carefully selected facts and figures from the Deutsche Notenbank, through which came banking clearances for the whole of East Germany. From time to time he’d also obtained for us the decisions and plans of Comecon – the East Bloc Common Market – and memos from the Moscow Narodny bank too. At the receiving end, Bret Rensselaer had built an empire upon the dangerous work of von Munte, but now von Munte had been debriefed and left in the custodial care of his old friend Uncle Silas, and Bret was desperately seeking new dominions.
Silas stood at the end of the long table and dismembered the duck, apportioning suitable pieces to each guest. He liked to do it himself. It was a game he played: discussing and arguing what each and every guest should have. Mrs Porter watched the cameo with an expressionless face. She arranged the pile of warmed plates, positioned the vegetables and gravy, and, at exactly the right psychological moment, brought in the second roasted duckling. ‘Another one!’ said Silas as if he hadn’t ordered the meal himself and as if he didn’t have a third duckling in the oven for extra portions.
Before pouring the wine, Silas lectured us about it. Château Palmer 1961, he said, was the finest claret he’d ever tasted, the finest perhaps of this century. He still hovered, looking at the wine in the antique decanter as if now wondering whether it would be wasted on the present company.
Perhaps von Munte sensed the hesitation for he said, ‘It’s generous of you to share it with us.’
‘I was looking through my cellar the other day.’ He stood up straight, looking out across the snow-whitened lawn as if oblivious of his guests. ‘I found a dozen bottles of 1878 port down there. My grandfather bought them for me, to mark my tenth birthday, and I’d completely forgotten them. I’ve never tasted it. Yes, I’ve got a lot of treasures there. I stocked up when I had the money to afford it. It would break my heart to leave too much magnificent claret behind when I go.’
He poured the wine carefully and evoked from us the sort of compliments he needed. He was like an actor in that and many other respects – he desperately needed regular and earnest declarations of love. ‘Label uppermost, always label uppermost; when you store and when you pour.’ He demonstrated it. ‘Otherwise you’ll disturb it.’
I knew it would be a predominantly masculine lunch, a departmental get-together, Silas had warned me beforehand, but I still came. Bret Rensselaer and Frank Harrington were both there. Rensselaer was in his middle fifties; American-born, he was trim almost to the point of emaciation. Although his hair was turning white, there was still enough of the blond colouring left to prevent him looking old. And he smiled a lot and had good teeth and a face that was bony so that there weren’t many wrinkles.
Over lunch there was the usual seasonal discussion about how quickly Christmas was approaching and the likelihood of more snow. Bret Rensselaer was deciding upon a place to ski. Frank Harrington, our senior man in Berlin, told him it was too early for good snow, but Silas advised Switzerland.
Frank argued about the snow. He liked to think he was an authority on such matters. He liked skiing, golfing and sailing, and generally having a good time. Frank Harrington was waiting for retirement, something for which he’d been strenuously practising all his life. He was a soldierly-looking figure with a weather-beaten face and a blunt-ended stubble moustache. Unlike Bret, who was wearing the same sort of Savile Row suit he wore to the office, Frank had come correctly attired for the upper-class English weekend: old Bedford cord trousers and a khaki sweater with a silk scarf in the open neck of his faded shirt. ‘February,’ said Frank. ‘That’s the only time for any decent skiing anywhere worth going.’
I observed the way Bret was eying von Munte, whose stream of high-grade information had taken Bret into the very top ranks of the Department. Bret’s desk was now closed down and his seniority had been in peril ever since the old man had been forced to flee. No wonder the two men watched each other like boxers in a ring.
Talk became more serious when it touched upon that inevitable subject in such company, the unification of Germany. ‘How deeply ingrained in East Germans is the philosophy of Communism?’ Bret asked von Munte.
‘Philosophy,’ said Silas, interrupting sharply. ‘I’ll accept that Communism is a perverted sort of religion – infallible Kremlin, infallible Vatican – but philosophy, no.’ He was happier with the von Muntes here, I could tell from the tone of his voice.
Von Munte didn’t take up Silas’s semantic contention. Gravely he said, ‘The way in which Stalin took from Germany Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia made it impossible for many of us Germans to accept the USSR as a friend, neighbour, or example.’
‘That’s going back a long while,’ said Bret. ‘Which Germans are we talking about? Are young Germans interested in the tears and cries of pain we hear about the lost territories?’ He smiled. This was Bret being deliberately provocative. His charming manner was frequently used like this – the local anaesthetic that accompanied the lancet of his rude remarks.
Von Munte remained very calm; was it a legacy of years of banking or years of Communism? Either way, I’d hate to play poker against him. ‘You English equate our eastern lands with Imperial India. The French think we who talk about reasserting Germany’s border to the frontiers of East Prussia are like the pieds-noirs, who hope once again to have Algeria governed from Paris.’
‘Exactly,’ said Bret. He smiled to himself and ate some duckling.
Von Munte nodded. ‘But our eastern provinces have always been German and a vital part of Europe’s relationship with the East. Culturally, psychologically and commercially, Germany’s eastern lands, not Poland, provided the buffer and the link with Russia. Frederick the Great, Yorck and Bismarck – and indeed all those Germans who instituted important alliances with the East – were ostelbisch, Germans from the eastern side of the River Elbe.’ He paused and looked round the table before going on with what was obviously something he’d said time and time again. ‘Czar Alexander I and Nicolas who succeeded him were more German than Russian, and they both married German princesses. And what about Bismarck who was continually defending Russian interests even at the expense of Germany’s relations with the Austrians?’
‘Yes,’ said Bret sardonically. ‘And you have yet to mention the German-born Karl Marx.’
For a moment I thought von Munte was going to reply seriously to the joke and make a fool of himself, but he’d lived amid signals, innuendos, and half-truths long enough to recognize the joke for what it was. He smiled.
‘Can there ever be lasting peace in Europe?’ said Bret wearily. ‘Now, if I’m to believe my ears, you say Germany still has territorial aspirations.’ For Bret it was all a game, but poor old von Munte could not play it.
‘For our own provinces,’ said von Munte stolidly.
‘For Poland and pieces of Russia,’ said Bret. ‘You’d better be clear on that.’
Silas poured more of his precious Château Palmer in a gesture of placation for all concerned. ‘You’re from Pomerania, aren’t you, Walter?’ It was an invitation to talk rather than a real question, for by now Silas knew every last detail of von Munte’s family history.
‘I was born in Falkenburg. My father had a big estate there.’
‘That’s near the Baltic,’ said Bret, feigning interest to make what he considered a measure of reconciliation.
‘Pomerania,’ said von Munte. ‘Do you know it, Bernard?’ he asked me, because I was the closest person there to being a fellow-countryman.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Many lakes and hills. They call it Pomeranian Switzerland, don’t they?’
‘Not any longer.’
‘A beautiful place,’ I said. ‘But as I remember it, damned cold, Walter.’
‘You must go in the summer,’ said von Munte. ‘It’s one of the most enchanting places in the world.’ I looked at Frau Doktor von Munte. I had the feeling that the move to the West was a disappointment for her. Her English was poor and she keenly felt the social disadvantage she suffered as a refugee. With the talk of Pomerania she brightened and tried to follow the conversation.
‘You’ve been back?’ Silas asked.
‘Yes, my wife and I went there about ten years ago. It was foolish. One should never go back.’
‘Tell us about it,’ said Silas.
At first it seemed as if the memories were too painful for von Munte to recount, but after a pause he told us about his trip. ‘There is something nightmarish about going back to your homeland and finding that it’s occupied exclusively by foreigners. It was the most curious experience I’ve ever had – to write “birthplace Falkenburg” and then “destination Zlocieniec”.’
‘The same place, now given a Polish name,’ said Frank Harrington. ‘But you must have been prepared for that.’
‘I was prepared in my mind but not in my heart,’ said von Munte. He turned to his wife and repeated this in rapid German. She nodded dolefully.
‘The train connection from Berlin was never good,’ von Munte went on. ‘Even before the war we had to change twice. This time we went by bus. I tried to borrow a car, but it was not possible. The bus was convenient. We went to Neustettin, my wife’s home town. We had difficulty finding the house in which she’d lived as a child.’
‘Couldn’t you ask for directions?’ said Frank.
‘Neither of us speaks much Polish,’ said von Munte. ‘Also, my wife had lived in Hermann-Göring-Strasse and I did not care to ask the way there.’ He smiled. ‘But we found it eventually. In the street where she lived as a girl we even found an old German woman who remembered my wife’s family. It was a remarkable stroke of luck, for there are only a handful of Germans still living there.’
‘And in Falkenburg?’ said Silas.
‘Ah, in my beloved Zlocieniec, Stalin was more thorough. We could find no one there who spoke German. I was born in a house in the country, right on the lake. We went to the nearest village and the priest tried to help us, but there were no records. He even lent me a bicycle so that I could go out to the house, but it had completely disappeared. The buildings have all been destroyed and the area has been made into a forest. The only remains I could recognize were a couple of farm buildings a long way distant from the site of the house where I was born. The priest promised to write if he found out any more, but he never did.’
‘And you never went back again?’ asked Silas.
‘We planned to return, but things happened in Poland. The big demonstrations for free trade unions and the creation of Solidarity was reported in our East German newspapers as being the work of reactionary elements supported by western fascists. Very few people were prepared to even comment on the Polish crisis. And most of the people who did talk about it said that such “troubles”, by upsetting the Russians, made conditions worse for us East Germans and other peoples in the Eastern Bloc. Poles became unpopular and no one went there. It was as if Poland ceased to exist as a next-door neighbour and became some land far away on the other side of the world.’
‘Eat up,’ said Silas. ‘We’re keeping you from your lunch, Walter.’
But soon von Munte took up the same subject again. It was as if he had to convert us to his point of view. He had to remove our misunderstandings. ‘It was the occupation zones that created the archetype German for you,’ he said. ‘Now the French think all Germans are chattering Rhinelanders, the Americans think we are all beer-swilling Bavarians, the British think we are all icy Westphalians, and the Russians think we are all cloddish Saxons.’
‘The Russians,’ I said, having downed two generous glasses of Silas’s magnificent wine as well as a few aperitifs, ‘think you are all brutal Prussians.’
He nodded sadly. ‘Yes, Saupreiss,’ he said, using the Bavarian dialect word for Prussian swine. ‘Perhaps you are right.’
After lunch the other guests divided into those who played billiards and those who preferred to sit huddled round the blazing log fire in the drawing room. My children were watching TV with Mrs Porter.
Silas, giving me a chance to speak privately with von Munte, took us to the conservatory to which, at this time of year, he had moved his house plants. It was a huge glass palace, resting against the side of the house, its framework gracefully curved, its floor formed of beautiful old decorative tiles. In these cold months the whole place was crammed full of prehensile-looking greenery of every shape and size. It seemed too cold in there for such plants to flourish, but Silas said they didn’t need heat so much as light. ‘With me,’ I told him, ‘it’s exactly the opposite.’
He smiled as if he’d heard the joke before, which he had because I told it to him every time he trapped me into one of these chats amid his turnip tops. But Silas liked the conservatory, and if he liked it, everyone else had to like it too. He seemed not to feel the cold. He was jacketless, with bright red braces visible under his unbuttoned waistcoat. Walter von Munte was wearing a black suit of the kind that was uniform for a German government official in the service of the Kaiser. His face was grey and lined and his whitening hair cropped short. He took off his gold-rimmed glasses and polished them on a silk handkerchief. Seated on the big wicker seat under the large and leafy plants the old man looked like some ancient studio portrait.
‘Young Bernard has a question for you, Walter,’ said Silas. He had a bottle of Madeira with him and three glasses. He put them on the table and poured a measure of the amber-coloured wine for each of us, then lowered his weight onto a cast-iron garden chair. He sat between us, positioned like a referee.
‘It is not good for me,’ said von Munte, but he took the glass and looked at the colour of it and sniffed it appreciatively.
‘It’s not good for anyone,’ said Silas cheerfully, sipping his carefully measured portion. ‘It’s not supposed to be good for you. The doctor cut me down to one bottle per month last year.’ He drank. ‘This year he told me to cut it out altogether.’
‘Then you are disobeying orders,’ said von Munte.
‘I got myself another doctor,’ said Silas. ‘We live in a capitalist society over here, Walter. I can afford to get myself a doctor who says it’s okay to smoke and drink.’ He laughed and sipped a little more of his Madeira. ‘Cossart 1926, bottled fifty years later. Not the finest Madeira I’ve ever encountered, but not at all bad, eh?’ He didn’t wait for our response, but selected a cigar from the box he’d brought under his arm. ‘Try that,’ he said, offering the cigar to me. ‘That’s an Upmann grand corona, one of the best cigars you can smoke and just right for this time of day. Walter, what about one of those petits that you enjoyed last night?’
‘Alas,’ said von Munte, holding up his hand to decline. ‘I cannot afford your doctor. I must keep to one a week.’
I lit the cigar Silas had given me. It was typical of him that he had to select what he thought suitable for us. He had well-defined ideas about what everyone should have and what they shouldn’t have. For anyone who called him a ‘fascist’ – and there were plenty who did – he had the perfect response: scars from Gestapo bullets.
‘What do you want to ask me, Bernard?’ said von Munte.
I got the cigar going and then I said, ‘Ever hear of Martello, Harry, Jake, See-saw or Ironfoot?’ I’d put in a few extra names as a means of control.
‘What kind of names are these?’ said von Munte. ‘People?’
‘Agents. Code names. Russian agents operating out of the United Kingdom.’
‘Recently?’
‘It looks as if one of them was used by my wife.’
‘Yes, recently. I see.’ Von Munte sipped his port. He was old-fashioned enough to be embarrassed at the mention of my wife and her spying. He shifted his weight on the wicker seat and the movement produced a loud creaking sound.
‘Did you ever come across those names?’ I asked.
‘It was not the policy to let my people have access to such secrets as the code names of agents.’
‘Not even source names?’ I persisted. ‘These are probably not agent names; they’re the code names used in messages and for distribution. No real risk there, and the material from any one source keeps its name until identified and measured and pronounced upon. That’s the KGB system and our system too.’
I glanced round at Silas. He was examining one of his plants, his head turned away as if he weren’t listening. But he was listening all right; listening and remembering every last syllable of what was being said. I knew him of old.
‘Source names. Yes, Martello sounds familiar,’ said von Munte. ‘Perhaps the others too, I can’t remember.’
‘Two names used by one agent at the same time,’ I said.
‘That would be unprecedented,’ said von Munte. He was loosening up now. ‘Two names, no. How would we ever keep track of our material?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said.
‘This was from the woman arrested in Berlin?’ said Silas suddenly. He dropped the pretence of looking at his plants. ‘I heard about that.’ Silas always knew what was happening. In earlier days, while the D-G had been settling in, he’d even asked Silas to monitor some of the operations. Nowadays Silas and the D-G kept in touch. It would be foolish of me to imagine that this conversation would not get back to the Department.
‘Yes, the woman in Berlin,’ I said.
Walter von Munte touched his stiff white collar. ‘I was never allowed to know any secrets. They gave me only what they thought I should have.’
I said, ‘Like Silas distributing his food and cigars, you mean?’ I kept wishing that Silas would depart and leave me and von Munte to have the conversation I wanted. But that was not Silas’s way. Information was his stock in trade, it always had been, and he knew how to use it to his own advantage. That’s why he’d survived so long in the Department.
‘Not as generously as Silas,’ said von Munte. He smiled and drank some of the Madeira and then shifted about, deciding how to explain it all. ‘The bank’s intelligence staff went over to the Warschauer Strasse office once a week. They would have all the new material in trays waiting for us. Old Mr Heine was in charge there. He’d produce for us each item according to subject.’
‘Raw?’ I said.
‘Raw?’ said von Munte. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Did they tell you what the agent said or did they merely tell you the content of his message?’
‘Oh, the messages were edited, but otherwise as received. They had to be; the staff handling the material didn’t know enough about economics to understand what it was about.’
‘But you identified different sourees?’ I asked yet again.
‘Sometimes we could, sometimes that was easy. Some of it was total rubbish.’
‘From different agents?’ I persisted. My God, but it was agony to deal with old people. Would I be like this one day?
‘Some of their agents sent only rumours. There was one who never provided a word of good sense. They called him “Grock”. That wasn’t his code name or his source name; it was our joke. We called him “Grock”, after the famous clown, of course.’
‘Yes,’ I said. But I’m glad von Munte had told me it was a joke; that gave me the cue to laugh. ‘What about the good sources?’ I said.
‘You could recognize them from the quality of their intelligence and from the style in which it was presented.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Perhaps I should explain what it was like in the Warschauer Strasse office. It wasn’t our office. It is supposed to be an office belonging to Aeroflot, but there are always police and security guards on the door, and our passes were carefully scrutinized no matter how often we visited there. I don’t know who else uses the building, but the economic intelligence staff met there regularly, as I said.’
‘And you were included in “economic intelligence staff”?’
‘Certainly not. They were all KGB and security people. My superior was only invited to attend when there was something directly affecting our department. Other bank officials and Ministry people came according to what was to be discussed.’
‘Why didn’t the briefing take place at the KGB offices?’ I asked. Silas was sitting upright on his metal chair, his eyes closed as if he were dozing off to sleep.
‘The Warschauer Strasse office was – perhaps I should say is – used at arm’s length by the KGB. When some Party official or some exalted visitor has enough influence to be permitted to visit the KGB installation in Berlin, they are invariably taken to Warschauer Strasse rather than to Karlshorst.’
‘It’s used as a front?’ said Silas opening his eyes and blinking as if suddenly coming awake from a deep slumber.
‘They wouldn’t want visitors tramping through the offices where the real work was being done. And Warschauer Strasse has a kitchen and dining room where such dignitaries can be entertained. Also there is a small lecture hall where they can see slide shows and demonstration films and so on. We liked going over there. Even the coffee and sandwiches served were far better than anything available elsewhere.’
‘You said you could tell the source from the quality and the style. Could you enlarge on that?’ I asked.
‘Some communications would begin an item with a phrase such as “I hear that the Bank of England” or whatever. Others would say, “Last week the Treasury issued a confidential statement.” Others might put it, “Fears of an imminent drop in American interest rates are likely to bring …”. These different styles are virtually sufficient for identification, but correlated with the proved quality of certain sources, we were soon able to recognize the agents. We spoke of them as people and joked about the nonsense that certain of them sometimes passed on to us.’
‘So you must have recognized the first-class material that my wife was providing.’
Von Munte looked at me and then at Silas. Silas said, ‘Is this official, Bernard?’ There was a note of warning in his voice.
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘We’re sailing a bit close to the wind for chitchat,’ Silas said. The choice of casual words, and the softness of his voice, did nothing to hide the authority behind what he said; on the contrary, it was the manner in which certain classes of Englishmen give orders to their subordinates. I said nothing and von Munte watched Silas carefully. Then Silas drew on his cigar reflectively and, having taken his time, said, ‘Tell him whatever you know, Walter.’
‘As I told you, I only saw the economic material. I can’t guess what proportion of any one agent’s submissions that might be.’ He looked at me. ‘Take the material from the man we called “Grock”. It was rubbish, as I said. But for all I know, Grock might have been sending wonderful stuff about underwater weaponry or secret NATO conferences.’
‘Looking back at it, can you now guess what my wife was sending?’
‘It’s only a guess,’ said von Munte, ‘but there was one tray of material that was always well written and organized in a manner one might call academic.’
‘Good stuff?’
‘Very reliable but inclined towards caution. Nothing very alarming or exciting; mostly confirmations of trends that we could guess at. Useful, of course, but from our point of view not wonderful.’ He looked up at the sky through the glass roof of the conservatory. ‘Eisenguss,’ he said suddenly and laughed. ‘Nicht Eisenfuss; Eisenguss. Not iron foot but cast iron or pig iron; Gusseisen. Yes, that was the name of the source. I remember at the time I thought he must be some sort of government official.’
‘It means poured iron,’ said Silas, who spoke a perfect and pedantic German and couldn’t tolerate my Berlin accent.
‘I know the word,’ I said irritably. ‘The audiotypist was careless, that’s all. None of them are really fluent.’ It was a feeble excuse and quite untrue. I’d done it myself. I should have listened more carefully when I was with the Miller woman or picked up my mistranslation when typing from the tape recording.
‘So now we have a name to connect Fiona with the material she gave them,’ said Silas. ‘Is that what you wanted?’
I looked at von Munte. ‘Just the one code word for Fiona’s tray?’
‘It all came under the one identification,’ said von Munte. ‘Why would they split it up? It wouldn’t make sense, would it?’
‘No,’ I said. I finished my drink and stood up. ‘It wouldn’t make sense.’
Upstairs I could hear the children growing noisy. There was a limit to the amount of time that TV kept them entertained. ‘I’ll go and take charge of my children,’ I said. ‘I know they tire Mrs Porter.’
‘Are you staying for supper?’ said Silas.
‘Thanks, but it’s a long journey, Silas. And the children will be late to bed as it is.’
‘There’s plenty of room for you all.’
‘You’re very kind, but it would mean leaving at crack of dawn to get the children to school and me to the office.’
He nodded and turned back to von Munte. But I knew there was more to it than simple hospitality. Silas was determined to have a word with me in private. And on my way downstairs, after I’d told the children that we’d be leaving soon after tea, he emerged from his study and, with one hand on my shoulder, drew me inside.
He closed the study door with great care. Then, in a sudden change of mood that was typical of him, he said, ‘Do you mind telling me what the bloody hell this is all about?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t what me, Bernard. You understand English. What the hell are you cross-questioning von Munte about?’
‘The arrested woman …’
‘Mrs Miller,’ he interrupted me, to show how well informed he was.
‘Yes, Mrs Carol Elvira Johnson, née Miller, father’s name Müller, born London 1930, occupation schoolteacher. That’s the one.’
‘That was quite uncalled for,’ said Silas, offended at my reply. ‘Well, what about her?’
‘Her testimony doesn’t fit what I know of KGB procedures and I wanted to hear about von Munte’s experience.’
‘About using multiple code names? Did the Miller woman say they used multiple code names?’
‘She handled two lots of exceptionally high-grade intelligence material. There were two code names, but the Department is happy to believe that it all came from Fiona.’
‘But you incline to the view that it was two lots of material from two different agents?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I’m still trying to find out. It can’t hurt to improve upon our knowledge, can it?’
‘Have you spoken to anyone at the office about this?’
‘Dicky Cruyer knows.’
‘Well, he’s a bright lad,’ said Silas. ‘What did he say?’
‘He’s not interested.’
‘What would you do in Dicky Cruyer’s place?’
‘Someone should check it with Stinnes,’ I said. ‘What is the point of debriefing a KGB defector if we don’t use him to improve upon what we already know?’
Silas turned to the window; his lips were pressed tight together and his face was angry. From this first-floor room there was a view across the paddock all the way to the stream that Silas called his ‘river’. For a long time he watched the flecks of snow spinning in the air. ‘Drive slowly. It will freeze hard tonight,’ he said without looking round at me. He’d suppressed his anger and his body relaxed as the rage drained out of him.
‘No other way to drive in that old banger of mine.’
When he turned to me he had his smile in place. ‘Didn’t I hear you telling Frank that you’re buying something good from your brother-in-law?’ He never missed anything. He must have had superhuman hearing and, in defiance of the laws of nature, it improved with every year he aged. I had been telling Frank Harrington about it, and, in keeping with our curious father-son sort of relationship, Frank had told me to be very careful when I was driving it.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A Rover 3500 saloon that a couple of tear-aways souped up to do one hundred and fifty miles an hour.’
‘With a V-8 engine that shouldn’t be too difficult.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You’ll surprise a few Sunday drivers with that one, Bernard.’
‘Yes, that’s what Tessa’s husband said. But until it’s ready I have to manage with the Ford. And in that I can’t surprise anyone.’
Silas leaned close and his manner was avuncular. ‘You’ve come out of the Kimber-Hutchinson business with a smile on your face, Bernard. I’m pleased.’ I couldn’t help noticing that his distant relative Fiona was now referred to by her maiden name, thus distancing both of us from her.
‘I don’t know about the smile,’ I said.
He ignored my retort. ‘Don’t start digging into that all over again. Let it go.’
‘You think that’s best?’ I said, to avoid giving him the reassurance he was asking for.
‘Leave all that to the people at Five. It’s not our job to chase spies,’ said Silas and opened the door of his study to let me out on to the landing.
‘Come along, children,’ I called. ‘Tea and cake and then we must leave.’
‘The Germans have a word for the results of such over-enthusiasm, don’t they,’ said Silas, who never knew when to stop. ‘Schlimmbesserung, an improvement that makes things worse.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. There was no sign of anger now. Silas had become Uncle Silas again.
5 (#ulink_b649b0ca-1295-57de-8d7d-bf62cfb3eed4)
‘Why does anyone have to go to Berlin,’ I asked Dicky resentfully. I was at home: warm and comfortable and looking forward to Christmas Day.
‘Be sensible,’ said Dicky. ‘They’re getting this Miller woman’s body out of the Hohenzollern Canal. We can’t leave it to the Berlin cops, and a lot of questions will have to be answered. Why was she being moved? Who authorized the ambulance? And where the hell was she being moved to?’
‘It’s Christmas, Dicky,’ I said.
‘Oh, is it?’ said Dicky feigning surprise. ‘That accounts for the difficulty I seem to be having getting anything done.’
‘Don’t Operations know that we have something called the Berlin Field Unit?’ I said sarcastically. ‘Why isn’t Frank Harrington handling it?’
‘Don’t be peevish, old boy,’ said Dicky, who I think was enjoying the idea of ruining my Christmas. ‘We showed Frank how important this was by sending you over to supervise the arrest. And you interrogated her. We can’t suddenly decide that BFU must take over. They’ll say we’re unloading this one onto them because it’s the Christmas holiday. And they’d be right.’
‘What does Frank say?’
‘Frank isn’t in Berlin. He’s gone away for Christmas.’
‘He must have left a contact number,’ I said desperately.
‘He’s gone to some relatives in the Scottish Highlands. There have been gales and the phone lines are down. And don’t say send the local constabulary to find him because when I track him down, Frank will point out that he has a deputy on duty in Berlin. No, you’ll have to go, Bernard. I’m sorry, but there it is. And after all, you’re not married.’
‘Hell, Dicky. I’ve got the children with me and the nanny has gone home for Christmas with her parents. I’m not even on stand-by duty. I’ve planned all sorts of things over the holiday.’
‘With gorgeous Gloria, no doubt. I can imagine what sort of things you planned, Bernard. Bad luck, but this is an emergency.’
‘Who I spend my Christmas with is my personal business,’ I said huffily.
‘Of course, old chap. But let me point out that you introduced the personal note into this conversation. I didn’t.’
‘I’ll phone Werner,’ I said.
‘By all means. But you’ll have to go, Bernard. You are the person the BfV knows. I can’t get all the paperwork done to authorize someone else to work with them.’
‘I see,’ I said. That was the real reason, of course. Dicky was determined that he would not go back into the office for a couple of hours of paperwork and phoning.
‘And who else could I send? Tell me who could go and see to it.’
‘From what you say, it’s only going to be a matter of identifying a corpse.’
‘And who else can do that?’
‘Any of the BfV men who were in the arrest team.’
‘That would look very good on the documentation, wouldn’t it,’ said Dicky with heavy irony. ‘We have to rely on a foreign police service for our certified identification. Even Coordination would query that one.’
‘If it’s a corpse, Dicky, let it stay in the icebox until after the holiday.’
There was a deep sigh from the other end. ‘You can wriggle and wriggle, Bernard, but you’re on this hook and you know it. I’m sorry to wreck your cosy little Christmas, but it’s nothing of my doing. You have to go and that’s that. The ticket is arranged, and cash and so on will be sent round by security messenger tomorrow morning.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Daphne and I will be pleased to entertain the children round here, you know. Gloria can come round too, if she’d like that.’
‘Thanks, Dicky,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘She’ll be safe with me, Bernard,’ said Dicky, and did nothing to disguise the smirk with which he said it. He’d always lusted after Gloria. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I think Daphne, his wife, knew it too. I hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
And so it was that, on Christmas Eve, when Gloria was with my children, preparing them for early bed so that Santa Claus could operate undisturbed, I was standing watching the Berlin police trying to winch a wrecked car out of the water. It wasn’t exactly the Hohenzollern Canal. Dicky had got that wrong; it was Hakenfelde, that industrialized section of the bank of the Havel River not far from where the Hohenzollern joins it.
Here the Havel widens to become a lake. It was so cold that the police doctor insisted the frogmen must have a couple of hours’ rest to thaw out. The police inspector had argued about it, but in the end the doctor’s opinion prevailed. Now the boat containing the frogmen had disappeared into the gloom and I was left with only the police inspector for company. The two policemen left to guard the scene had gone behind the generator truck, the noise of which never ceased. The police electricians had put flood lamps along the wharf to make light for the winch crew, so that the whole place was lit with the bright artificiality of a film set.
I stepped through the broken railing at the place where the car had gone into the water. Looking down over the edge of the jetty I could just make out the wobbling outline of the car under the dark oily surface. The winch, and two steadying cables, held it suspended there. For the time being, the car had won the battle. One steel cable had broken, and the first attempts to lift the car had ripped its rear off. That was the trouble with cars, said the inspector – they filled with water, and water weighs a ton per cubic metre. And this was a big car, a Citroën ambulance. To make it worse, its frame was bent enough to prevent the frogmen from getting its doors open.
The inspector was in his mid-fifties, a tall man with a large white moustache, its ends curling in the style of the Kaiser’s soldiers. It was the sort of moustache a man grew to make himself look older. ‘To think,’ said the inspector, ‘that I transferred out of the Traffic Department because I thought standing on point duty was too cold.’ He stamped his feet. His heavy jackboots made a crunching sound where ice was forming in the cracks between the cobblestones.
‘You should have kept to traffic,’ I said, ‘but transferred to the Nice or Cannes Police Department.’
‘Rio,’ said the inspector, ‘I was offered a job in Rio. There was an agency here recruiting ex-policemen. My wife was all in favour, but I like Berlin. There’s no town like it. And I’ve always been a cop; never wanted to be anything else. I know you from somewhere, don’t I? I remember your face. Were you ever a cop?’
‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about what I did for a living.
‘Right from the time I was a child,’ he continued. ‘I’m going back a long time now to the war and even before that. There was a traffic cop, famous all over Berlin. Siegfried they called him; I don’t know if that was his real name but everyone knew Siegfried. He was always on duty at the Wilhelmplatz, the beautiful little white palace where Dr Goebbels ran his Propaganda Ministry. There were always crowds of tourists there, watching the well-known faces that went in and out, and if there was any kind of crisis, big crowds would form there to try and guess what was going on. My father always pointed out Siegfried, a tall policeman in a long white coat. And I wanted a big white coat like the traffic police wear. And I wanted to have the ministers and the generals, the journalists and the film stars, say hello to me in that friendly way they always greeted him. There was a kiosk there on the Wilhelmplatz which sold souvenirs and they had postcard photos of all the Nazi bigwigs and I asked my father why there wasn’t a photo card of Siegfried on sale there. I wanted to buy one. My father said that maybe next week there would be one of Siegfried, and every week I looked but there wasn’t one. I decided that when I grew up I’d be the policeman in the Wilhelmplatz and I’d make sure they had my photo on sale in the kiosk. It’s silly, isn’t it, how such unimportant things change a man’s life?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I know you from somewhere,’ he said, looking at my face and frowning. I passed the police inspector my hip flask of brandy. He hesitated and took a look round the desolate yard. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ I joked. He smiled, took a gulp, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
‘My God, it’s cold,’ he said as if to explain his lapse from grace.
‘It’s cold and it’s Christmas Eve,’ I said.
‘Now I remember,’ he said suddenly. ‘You were in that football team that played on the rubble behind the Stadium. I used to take my kid brother along. He was ten or eleven; you must have been about the same age.’ He chuckled at the recollection and with the satisfaction of remembering where he’d seen me before. ‘The football team; yes. It was run by that crazy English colonel – the tall one with glasses. He had no idea about how to play football; he couldn’t even kick the ball straight, but he ran round the pitch waving a walking stick and yelling his head off. Remember?’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘Those were the days. I can see him now, waving that stick in the air and yelling. What a crazy old man he was. After the match he’d give each boy a bar of chocolate and an apple. Most of the kids only went to get the chocolate and apple.’
‘You’re right,’ I said.
‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’ He stood looking across the water for a long time and then said, ‘Who was in the ambulance? One of your people?’ He knew I was from London and guessed the rest of it. In Berlin you didn’t have to be psychic to guess the rest of it.
‘A prisoner,’ I said.
It was already getting dark. Daylight doesn’t last long on clouded Berlin days like this in December. The warehouse lights made little puff balls in the mist. Around here there were only cranes, sheds, storage tanks, crates stacked as high as tenements, and rusty railway tracks. Facing us far across the water were more of the same. There was no movement except the sluggish current. The great city around us was almost silent and only the generator disturbed the peace. Looking south along the river I could see the island of Eiswerder. Beyond that, swallowed by the mist, was Spandau – world-famous now, not only for its machine guns but for the fortress prison inside which the soldiers of four nations guarded one aged and infirm prisoner: Hitler’s deputy.
The police inspector followed my gaze. ‘Not Hess,’ he joked. ‘Don’t say the poor old fellow finally escaped?’
I smiled dutifully. ‘Bad luck getting Christmas duty,’ I said. ‘Are you married?’
‘I’m married. I live just round the corner from here. My parents lived in the same house. Do you know I’ve never been out of Berlin in all my life?’
‘All through the war too?’
‘Yes, all through the war I was living here. I was thinking of that just now when you gave me the drink.’ He turned up the collar of his uniform greatcoat. ‘You get old and suddenly you find yourself remembering things that you haven’t recalled in about forty years. Tonight for instance, suddenly I’m remembering a time just before Christmas in 1944 when I was on duty very near here: the gasworks.’
‘You were in the Army?’ He didn’t look old enough.
‘No. Hitler Youth. I was fourteen and I’d only just got my uniform. They said I wasn’t strong enough to join a gun crew, so they made me a messenger for the air defence post. I was the youngest kid there. They only let me do that job because Berlin hadn’t had an air raid for months and it seemed so safe. There were rumours that Stalin had told the Western powers that Berlin mustn’t be bombed so that the Red Army could capture it intact.’ He gave a sardonic little smile. ‘But the rumours were proved wrong, and on December fifth the Americans came over in daylight. People said they were trying to hit the Siemens factory, but I don’t know. Siemensstadt was badly bombed, but bombs hit Spandau, and Pankow and Oranienburg and Weissensee. Our fighters attacked the Amis as they came in to bomb – it was a thick overcast but I could hear the machine guns – and I think they just dropped everything as soon as they could and headed home.’
‘Why do you remember that particular air raid?’
‘I was outside and I was blown off my bicycle by the bomb that dropped in Streitstrasse just along the back of here. The officer at the air-raid post found another bike for me and gave me a swig of schnapps from his flask, like you did just now. I felt very grown up. I’d never tasted schnapps before. Then he sent me off on my bike with a message for our headquarters at Spandau station. Our phones had been knocked out. Be careful, he said, and if another lot of bombers come, you take shelter. When I got back from delivering the message there was nothing left of them. The air defence post was just rubble. They were all dead. It was a delayed action bomb. It must have been right alongside us when he gave me the schnapps, but no one felt the shock of it because of all the racket.’
Suddenly his manner changed, as if he was embarrassed at having told me his war experiences. Perhaps he’d been chafed about his yarns by men who’d come back from the Eastern Front with stories that made his air-raid experiences seem no more than minor troubles.
He tugged at his greatcoat like a man about to go on parade. And then, looking down into the water at the submerged car again, he said, ‘If the next go doesn’t move it, we’ll have to get a big crane. And that will mean waiting until after the holiday; the union man will make sure of that.’
‘I’ll hang on,’ I said. I knew he was trying to provide me with an excuse to leave.
‘The frogmen say the car is empty.’
‘They wanted to go home,’ I said flippantly.
The inspector was offended. ‘Oh, no. They are good boys. They wouldn’t tell me wrong just to avoid another dive.’ He was right, of course. In Germany there was still a work ethic.
I said, ‘They can’t see much, with the car covered in all that oil and muck. I know what it’s like in this sort of water; the underwater lamps just reflect in the car’s window glass.’
‘Here’s your friend,’ said the inspector. He strolled off towards the other end of the wharf to give us a chance to talk in private.
It was Werner Volkmann. He had his hat dumped on top of his head and was wearing his long heavy coat with the astrakhan collar. I called it his impresario’s coat, but today the laugh was on me, freezing to death in my damp trench coat. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Don’t bite my head off,’ said Werner. ‘I’m not even getting paid.’
‘I’m sorry, Werner, but I told you not to bother to drag out here.’
‘The roads are empty, and to tell you the truth, being a Jew I feel a bit of a hypocrite celebrating Christmas.’
‘You haven’t left Zena alone?’
‘Her sister’s family are with us – four children and a husband who works in the VAT office.’
‘I can see why you came.’
‘I like it all up to a point,’ said Werner. ‘Zena likes to do the whole thing right. You know how it is in Germany. She spent all the afternoon decorating the tree and putting the presents out, and she has real candles on it.’
‘You should be with them,’ I said. In Germany the evening before Christmas Day – heiliger Abend – is the most important time of the holiday. ‘Make sure she doesn’t burn the house down.’
‘I’ll be back with them in time for the dinner. I told them you’d join us.’
‘I wish I could, Werner. But I’ll have to be here when it comes out of the water. Dicky put that in writing and you know what he’s like.’
‘Are you going to try again soon?’
‘In about an hour. What did you find out at the hospital this morning?’
‘Nothing very helpful. The people who took her away were dressed up to be a doctor and hospital staff. They had the Citroën waiting outside. From what the people in the reception office say, the ambulance was supposed to be taking her to a private clinic in Dahlem.’
‘What about the cop guarding her?’
‘For him they had a different story. They told him they were clinic staff. They said they were just taking her downstairs for another X-ray and would be back in about thirty minutes. She was very weak and complained bitterly about being moved. She probably didn’t realize what was going to happen.’
‘That she was going into the Havel, you mean?’
‘No. That they were a KGB team, there to get her away from police custody.’
I said, ‘Why didn’t the clinic reception phone the police before releasing her?’
‘I don’t know, Bernie. One of them said that she was taken out using the papers of a patient who was due to be moved that day. Another one said there was a policeman outside with the ambulance, so it seemed to be all in order. We’ll probably never find out exactly what happened. It’s a hospital, not a prison; the staff don’t worry too much about who’s going in and out.’
‘What do you make of it, Werner?’
‘They knew she was talking, I suppose. Somehow what she was telling us got back to Moscow and they decided there was only one way of handling it.’
‘Why not take her straight back into East Berlin?’ I said.
‘In an ambulance? Very conspicuous. Even the Russians are not too keen on that sort of publicity. Snatching a prisoner from police custody and taking her across the wire would not look good at a time when the East Germans are trying to show the world what good neighbours they can be.’ He looked at me. I pulled a face. ‘It’s easier this way,’ added Werner. ‘They got rid of her. They were taking no chances. If she had talked to us already, they’d be making sure she couldn’t give evidence.’
‘But it’s a drastic remedy, Werner. What made them get so excited?’
‘They knew she was handling the radio traffic your wife provided.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And Fiona is over there. So why would they be worried about what she might tell us?’
‘Fiona is behind it? Is that what you mean?’
‘It’s difficult not to suspect her hand is in it.’
‘But Fiona is safe and sound. What has she got to worry about?’
‘Nothing, Werner, she’s got nothing to worry about.’
He looked at me as if puzzled. Then he said, ‘The radio traffic then. What did Dicky think about the multiple codes?’
‘Dicky didn’t seem to be listening. He was hoping the Miller woman would just fade away, and he’s forbidden me to speak with Stinnes.’
‘Dicky was never one to go looking for extra work,’ said Werner.
‘No one is interested,’ I said. ‘I went down to talk to Silas Gaunt and von Munte and neither of them were very interested. Silas waggled his finger at me when I brought the matter up with von Munte. And he told me not to rock the boat. Don’t start digging into all that again, he said.’
‘I don’t know old Mr Gaunt the way you do. I just remember him in the Berlin office at the time when your dad was Resident. We were about eighteen years old. Mr Gaunt bet me that the Wall would never go up. I won fifty marks from him when they built the Wall. And fifty marks was a lot of money in those days. You could have an evening out with all the trimmings for fifty marks.’
‘I wish I had one mark for every time you’ve told me that story, Werner.’
‘You’re in a filthy mood, Bernie. I’m sorry you got this rotten job, but it’s not my fault.’
‘I’d really looked forward to a couple of days with the kids. They’re growing up without me, Werner. And Gloria is there too.’
‘I’m glad that’s going well … you and Gloria.’
‘It’s bloody ridiculous,’ I said. ‘I’m old enough to be her father. Do you know how old she is?’
‘No, and I don’t care. There’s an age difference between me and Zena, isn’t there? But that doesn’t stop us being happy.’
I turned to Werner so that I could look at him. It was dark. His face was visible only because it was edged with light reflected from the array of floodlights. His heavy-lidded eyes were serious. Poor Werner. Was he really happy? His marriage was my idea of hell. ‘Zena is older than Gloria,’ I said.
‘Be happy while you can, Bernie. It’s nothing to do with Gloria’s age. You still feel bad about losing Fiona. You haven’t got over her running away yet. I know you, and I can tell. She was a sort of anchor for you, a base. Without her you are restless and unsure of yourself. But that’s only temporary. You’ll get over it. And Gloria is just what you need.’
‘Maybe.’ I didn’t argue with him; he was usually very perceptive about people and their relationships. That was why he’d been such a good field agent back in the days when we were young and carefree, and enjoyed taking risks.
‘What’s really on your mind? Code names are just for the analysts and Coordination staff. Why do you care how many code names Fiona used?’
‘She used one,’ I snapped. ‘They all use one. Our people have one name per source and so do their agents. That’s what von Munte confirmed. Fiona was Eisenguss – no other names.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I’m not one hundred per cent sure,’ I told him. ‘Special circumstances come up in this business; we all know that. But I’m ninety-nine per cent sure.’
‘What are you saying, Bernie?’
‘Surely it’s obvious, Werner.’
‘It’s Christmas, Bernie. I had a few drinks just to be sociable. What is it you’re saying?’
‘There are two major sources of material that the Miller woman handled. Both top-grade intelligence. Only one of them was Fiona.’
Werner pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger and closed his eyes. Werner did that when he was thinking hard. ‘You mean there’s someone else still there? You mean the KGB still have someone in London Central?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Don’t just shrug it off,’ said Werner. ‘Don’t hit me in the face with that kind of custard pie and then say you don’t know.’
‘Everything points to it,’ I said. ‘But I’ve told them at London Central. I’ve done everything short of drawing a diagram and no one gives a damn.’
‘It might just be a stunt, a KGB stunt.’
‘I’m not organizing a lynching party, Werner. I’m just suggesting that it should be checked out.’
‘The Miller woman might have got it wrong,’ said Werner.
‘She might have got it wrong, but even if she got it wrong, that still leaves a question to be answered. And what if someone reads the Miller transcript and starts wondering if I might be the other source?’
‘Ahh! You’re just covering your arse,’ said Werner. ‘You don’t really think there’s another KGB source in London Central, but you realized that you’d have to interpret it that way in case anyone thought it was you and you were trying to protect yourself.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m not stupid, Bernard. I know London Central and I know you. You’re just running round shouting fire in case someone accuses you of arson.’
I shook my head to say no, but I was wondering if perhaps he was right. He knew me better than anyone, better even than Fiona knew me.
‘Are you really going to hang on until they get that motor car out of the water?’
‘That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘Come back for a bite of dinner. Ask the police inspector to phone us when they start work again.’
‘I mustn’t, Werner. I promised Lisl I’d have dinner with her at the hotel in the unlikely event of my getting away from here in time.’
‘Shall I phone her to say you won’t make it?’
I looked at my watch. ‘Yes, please, Werner. She’s having some cronies in to eat there – old Mr Koch and those people she buys wine from – and they’ll get fidgety if she delays dinner for me.’
‘I’ll phone her. I took her a present yesterday, but I’ll phone to say Happy Christmas.’ He pulled the collar of his coat up and tucked his white silk scarf into it. ‘Damned cold out here on the river.’
‘Get back to Zena,’ I told him.
‘If you’re sure you’re not coming … Shall I bring you something to eat?’
‘Stop being a Jewish mother, Werner. There are plenty of places where I can get something. In fact, I’ll walk back to your car with you. There’s a bar open on the corner. I’ll get myself sausage and beer.’
It was nearly ten o’clock at night when they dragged the ambulance out of the Havel. It was a sorry sight, its side caked with oily mud where it had rested on the bottom of the river. One tyre was torn off and some of the bodywork ripped open where it had collided with the railings that were there to prevent such accidents.
There was a muffled cheer as the car came to rest. But there was no delay in finishing the job. Even while the frogmen were still packing their gear away, the car’s doors had been levered open and a search was being made of its interior.
There was no body inside – that was obvious within the first two or three minutes – but we continued to search through the car in search of other evidence.
By eleven-fifteen the police inspector declared the preliminary forensic examination complete. Although they’d put a number of oddments into clear-plastic evidence bags, nothing had been discovered that was likely to throw any light on the disappearance of Carol Elvira Miller, self-confessed Russian agent.
We were all very dirty. I went with the policemen into the toilet facilities at the wharfside. There was no hot water from the tap, and only one bar of soap. One of the policemen came back with a large pail of boiling water. The rest of them stood aside so that the inspector could wash first. He indicated that I should use the other sink.
‘What do you make of it?’ said the inspector as he rationed out a measure of the hot water into each of the sinks.
‘Where would a body turn up?’ I asked.
‘Spandau locks, that’s where we fish them out,’ he said without hesitation. ‘But there was no one in that car when it went into the water.’ He took off his jacket and shirt so that he could wash his arms where mud had dribbled up his sleeve.
‘You think not?’ I stood alongside him and took the soap he offered.
‘The front doors were locked, and the back door of the ambulance was locked too. Not many people getting out of a car underwater remember to lock the doors before swimming away.’ He passed me some paper towels.
‘It went into the water empty?’
‘So you don’t want to talk about it. Very well.’
‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s probably just a stunt. How did you get the information about where to find it?’
‘I looked at the docket. An anonymous phone call from a passer-by. You think it was a phony?’
‘Probably.’
‘While the prisoner was taken away somewhere else.’
‘It would be a way of getting our attention.’
‘And spoiling my Christmas Eve,’ he said. ‘I’ll kill the bastards if I ever get hold of them.’
‘Them?’
‘At least two people. It wasn’t in gear, you notice, it was in neutral. So they must have pushed it in. That needs two people; one to push and one to steer.’
‘Three of them, according to what we heard.’
He nodded. ‘There’s too much crime on television,’ said the police inspector. He signalled to the policeman to get another bucket of water for the rest of them to wash with. ‘That old English colonel with the kids’ football team … he was your father, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I realized that afterwards. I could have bitten my tongue off. No offence. Everyone liked the old man.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said.
‘He didn’t even enjoy the football. He just did it for the German kids; there wasn’t much for them in those days. He probably hated every minute of those games. At the time we didn’t see that; we wondered why he took so much trouble about the football when he couldn’t even kick the ball straight. He organized lots of things for the kids, didn’t he. And he sent you to the neighbourhood school instead of to that fancy school where the other British children went. He must have been an unusual man, your father.’
Washing my hands and arms and face had only got rid of the most obvious dirt. My trench coat was soaked and my shoes squelched. The mud along the banks of the Havel at that point is polluted with a century of industrial waste and effluents. Even my newly washed hands still bore the stench of the riverbed.
The hotel was dark when I let myself in by means of the key that certain privileged guests were permitted to borrow. Lisl Hennig’s hotel had once been her grand home, and her parents’ home before that. It was just off Kantstrasse, a heavy grey stone building of the sort that abounds in Berlin. The ground floor was an optician’s shop and its bright façade partly hid the pockmarked stone that was the result of Red Army artillery fire in 1945. My very earliest memories were of Lisl’s house – it was not easy to think of it as a hotel – for I came here as a baby when my father was with the British Army. I’d known the patched brown carpet that led up the grand staircase when it had been bright red.
At the top of the stairs there was the large salon and the bar. It was gloomy. The only illumination came from a tiny Christmas tree positioned on the bar counter. Tiny green and red bulbs flashed on and off in a melancholy attempt to be festive. Intermittent light fell upon the framed photos that covered every wall. Here were some of Berlin’s most illustrious residents, from Einstein to Nabokov, Garbo to Dietrich, Max Schmeling to Grand Admiral Dönitz, celebrities of a Berlin now gone for ever.
I looked into the breakfast room; it was empty. The bentwood chairs had been put up on the tables so that the floor could be swept. The cruets and cutlery and a tall stack of white plates were ready on the table near the serving hatch. There was no sign of life anywhere. There wasn’t even the smell of cooking that usually crept up through the house at night-time.
I tiptoed across the salon to the back stairs. My room was at the top – I always liked to occupy the little garret room that had been my bedroom as a child. But before reaching the stairs I passed the door of Lisl’s room. A strip of light along the door confirmed that she was there.
‘Who is it?’ she called anxiously. ‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s Bernd,’ I said.
‘Come in, you wretched boy.’ Her shout was loud enough to wake everyone in the building.
She was propped up in bed; there must have been a dozen lace-edged pillows behind her. She had a scarf tied round her head, and on the side table there was a bottle of sherry and a glass. All over the bed there were newspapers; some of them had come to pieces so that pages had drifted across the room as far as the fireplace.
She’d snatched her glasses off so quickly that her dyed brown hair was disarranged. ‘Give me a kiss,’ she demanded. I did so and noticed the expensive perfume and the makeup and false eyelashes that she applied only for very special occasions. The heiliger Abend with her friends had meant a lot to her. I guessed she’d waited for me to come home before she’d remove the makeup. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ she asked. There was repressed anger in her voice.
‘I’ve been working,’ I said. I didn’t want to get into a conversation. I wanted to go to bed and sleep for a long time.
‘Who were you with?’
‘I told you, I was working.’ I tried to assuage her annoyance. ‘Did you have dinner with Mr Koch and your friends? What did you serve them – carp?’ She liked carp at Christmas; she’d often told me it was the only thing to serve. Even during the war they’d always somehow managed to get carp.
‘Lothar Koch couldn’t come. He had influenza and the wine people had to go to a trade party.’
‘So you were all alone,’ I said. I bent over and kissed her again. ‘I’m so sorry, Lisl.’ She’d been so pretty. I remember as a child feeling guilty for thinking she was more beautiful than my mother. ‘I really am sorry.’
‘And so you should be.’
‘There was no way of avoiding it. I had to be there.’
‘Had to be where – Kempinski or the Steigenberger? Don’t lie to me, Liebchen. When Werner phoned me I could hear the voices and the music in the background. So you don’t have to pretend you were working.’ She gave a little hoot of laughter, but there was no joy in it.
So she’d been in bed here working herself up into a rage about that. ‘I was working,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll explain tomorrow.’
‘There’s nothing you have to explain, Liebchen. You are a free man. You don’t have to spend your heiliger Abend with an ugly old woman. Go and have fun while you are young. I don’t mind.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, Lisl,’ I said. ‘Werner was phoning from his apartment because I was working.’
By this time she’d noticed the smell of the mud on my clothes, and now she pushed her glasses into place so that she could see me more clearly. ‘You’re filthy, Bernd. Whatever have you been doing? Where have you been?’ From her study there came the loud chimes of the ornate ormolu clock striking two-thirty.
‘I keep telling you over and over again, Lisl. I’ve been with the police on the Havel getting a car from the water.’
‘The times I’ve told you that you drive too fast.’
‘It wasn’t anything to do with me,’ I said.
‘So what were you doing there?’
‘Working. Can I have a drink?’
‘There’s a glass on the sideboard. I’ve only got sherry. The whisky and brandy are locked in the cellar.’
‘Sherry will be just right.’
‘My God, Bernd, what are you doing? You don’t drink sherry by the tumblerful.’
‘It’s Christmas,’ I said.
‘Yes. It’s Christmas,’ she said, and poured herself another small measure. ‘There was a phone message, a woman. She said her name was Gloria Kent. She said that everyone sent you their love. She wouldn’t leave a phone number. She said you’d understand.’ Lisl sniffed.
‘Yes, I understand,’ I said. ‘It’s a message from the children.’
‘Ah, Bernd. Give me a kiss, Liebchen. Why are you so cruel to your Tante Lisl? I bounced you on my knee in this very room, and that was before you could walk.’
‘Yes, I know, but I couldn’t get away, Lisl. It was work.’
She fluttered her eyelashes like a young actress. ‘One day you’ll be old, darling. Then you’ll know what it’s like.’
6 (#ulink_3964bb9c-4a1c-5e96-9854-5d9776985d64)
Christmas morning. West Berlin was like a ghost town; as I stepped into the street the silence was uncanny. The Kudamm was empty of traffic and, although some of the neon signs and shop lights were still shining, there was no one strolling on its wide pavements. I had the town virtually to myself all the way to Potsdamer Strasse.
Potsdamer Strasse is Schöneberg’s main street, a wide thoroughfare that is called Hauptstrasse at one end and continues north to the Tiergarten. You can find everything you want there and a lot of things you’ve been trying to avoid. There are smart shops and slums, kabob counters and superb nineteenth-century houses now listed as national monuments. Here is a neobaroque palace – the Volksgerichtshof – where Hitler’s judges passed death sentences at the rate of two thousand a year, so that citizens found guilty of telling even the most feeble anti-Nazi jokes were executed.
Behind the Volksgerichtshof – its rooms now echoing and empty except for those used by the Allied Travel Office and the Allied Air Security Office (where the four powers control the air lanes across East Germany to Berlin) – was the street where Lange lived. His top-floor apartment overlooked one of the seedier side streets. Lange was not his family name, it was not his name at all. ‘Lange’ – or ‘Lofty’ – was the descriptive nickname the Germans had given to this very tall American. His real name was John Koby. Of Lithuanian extraction, his grandfather had decided that ‘Kubilunas’ was not American enough to go over a storefront in Boston.
The street door led to a grim stone staircase. The windows on every landing had been boarded up. It was dark, the stairs illuminated by dim lamps protected against vandals by wire mesh. The walls were bare of any decoration but graffiti. At the top of the house the apartment door was newly painted dark grey and a new plastic bell push was labelled John Koby – Journalist. The door was opened by Mrs Koby and she led me into a brightly lit, well-furnished apartment. ‘Lange was so glad you phoned,’ she whispered. ‘It was wonderful that you could come right away. He gets miserable sometimes. You’ll cheer him up.’ She was a small thin woman, her face pale like the faces of most Berliners when winter comes. She had clear eyes, a round face, and a fringe that came almost down to her eyebrows.
‘I’ll try,’ I promised.
It was the sort of untidy room in which you’d expect to find a writer or even a ‘journalist’. There were crowded bookshelves, a desk with an old manual typewriter, and more books and papers piled on the floor. But Lange had not been a professional writer for many years, and even in his newspaper days he’d never been a man who referred to books except as a last resort. Lange had never been a journalist, Lange had always been a streetwise reporter who got his facts at firsthand and guessed the bits in between. Just as I did.
The furniture was old but not valuable – the random mixture of shapes and styles that’s to be found in a saleroom or attic. Obviously a big stove had once stood in the corner, and the wall where it had been was covered in old blue-and-white tiles. Antique tiles like those were valuable now, but these must have been firmly affixed to the wall, for I had the feeling that any valuable thing not firmly attached had already been sold.
He was wearing an old red-and-gold silk dressing gown. Under it there were grey flannel slacks and a heavy cotton button-down shirt of the sort that Brooks Brothers made famous. His tie bore the ice-cream colours of the Garrick Club, a London meeting place for actors, advertising men, and lawyers. He was over seventy, but he was thin and tall and somehow that helped to give him a more youthful appearance. His face was drawn and clean-shaven, with a high forehead and grey hair neatly parted. He had a prominent bony nose and teeth that were too yellow and irregular to be anything but his own natural ones.
I remembered in time the sort of greeting that Lange gave to old friends – the Handschlag, the hands slapped together in that noisy handshake with which German farmers conclude a sale of pigs.
‘A Merry Christmas, Lange,’ I said.
‘It’s good to see you, Bernie,’ he said as he released my hand. ‘We were in the other house the last time we saw you. The apartment over the baker’s shop.’ His American accent was strong, as if he’d arrived only yesterday. And yet Lange had lived in Berlin longer than most of his neighbours. He’d come here as a newspaperman even before Hitler took power in 1933, and he’d stayed here right up to the time America got into World War II.
‘Coffee, Bernard? It’s already made. Or would you prefer a glass of wine?’ said Gerda Koby, taking my coat. She was a shy withdrawn woman, and although I’d known her since I was a child, she’d never called me ‘Bernie’. I think she would have rather called me ‘Herr Samson’, but she followed her husband in this matter as in all others. She was still pretty. Rather younger than Lange, she had once been an opera singer famous throughout Germany. They’d met in Berlin when he returned here as a newspaperman with the US Army in 1945.
‘I missed breakfast,’ I said. ‘A cup of coffee would be great.’
‘Lange?’ she said. He looked at her blankly and didn’t answer. She shrugged. ‘He’ll have wine,’ she told me. ‘He won’t cut down on it.’ She looked too small for an opera singer, but the ancient posters on the wall gave her billing above title: Wagner in Bayreuth, Fidelio at the Berlin State Opera, and in Munich a performance of Mongol Fury which was the Nazis’ ‘Aryanized’ version of Handel’s Israel in Egypt.
‘It’s Christmas, woman,’ said Lange. ‘Give us both wine.’ He didn’t smile and neither did she. It was the brusque way he always addressed her.
‘I’ll stick to coffee,’ I said. ‘I have a lot of driving to do. And I have to go to Police HQ and sign some forms later today.’
‘Sit down, Bernie, and tell me what you’re doing here. The last time we saw you you were settled in London, married, and with kids.’ His voice was hoarse and slurred slightly in the Bogart manner.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m just here for a couple of days on business.’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Lange. ‘Stuffing presents down the chimneys: then you’ve got to get your reindeer together and head back to the workshops.’
‘The children must be big,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘You should be with them at home. They make you work at Christmas? That’s terrible.’
‘My boss has a mean streak,’ I said.
‘And you haven’t got a union by the sound of it,’ said Lange. He had little love for the Department and he made his dislike evident in almost everything he said about the men in London Central.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
We sat there exchanging small talk for fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour. I needed a little time to get used to Lange’s harsh, abrasive style.
‘Still working for the Department, eh?’
‘Not any longer,’ I said.
He ignored my denial; he knew it counted for nothing. ‘Well, I’m glad I got out of it when I did.’
‘You were the first man my dad recruited in Berlin, at least that’s what people say.’
‘Then they’ve got it right,’ said Lange. ‘And I was grateful to him. In 1945 I couldn’t wait to kiss the newspaper business goodbye.’
‘What was wrong with it?’
‘You’re too young to remember. They dressed reporters up in fancy uniforms and stuck “War Correspondent” badges on us. That was so all those dumb jerks in the Army press departments could order us about and tell us what to write.’
‘Not you, Lange. No one told you what to do.’
‘We couldn’t argue. I was living in an apartment that the Army had commandeered. I was eating US rations, driving an Army car on Army gas, and spending Army occupation money. Sure, they had us by the balls.’
‘They tried to stop Lange seeing me,’ said Mrs Koby indignantly.
‘They forbade all Allied soldiers to talk to any Germans. Those dummies were trying to sell the soldiers their crackpot non-fraternization doctrine. Can you imagine me trying to write stories here while forbidden to talk to Germans? The Army fumed and threw kids into the stockade, but when you’ve got young German girls walking past the GIs patting their asses and shouting “Verboten”, even the Army brass began to see what a dumb idea it was.’
‘It was terrible in 1945 when I met Lange,’ said Gerda Koby. ‘My beautiful Berlin was unrecognizable. You’re too young to remember, Bernard. There were heaps of rubble as tall as the tenement blocks. There wasn’t one tree or bush left in the entire city; the Tiergarten was like a desert – everything that would burn had long since been cut down. The canals and waterways were all completely filled with rubble and ironwork, pushed there to clear a lane through the streets. The whole city stank with the dead; the stench from the canals was even worse.’
It was uncharacteristic of her to speak so passionately. She came to a sudden stop as if embarrassed. Then she got up and poured coffee for me from a vacuum flask and poured a glass of wine for her husband. I think he’d had a few before I arrived.
The coffee was in a delicate demitasse that contained no more than a mouthful. I swallowed it gratefully. I can’t get started in the morning until I’ve had some coffee.
‘Die Stunde Null,’ said Lange. ‘Germany’s hour zero – I didn’t need anyone to explain what that meant when I got here in 1945. Berlin looked like the end of the world had arrived.’ Lange scratched his head without disarranging his neatly combed hair. ‘And that’s the kind of chaos I had to work in. None of these Army guys, or the clowns who worked for the so-called Military Government, knew the city. Half of them couldn’t even speak the language. I’d been in Berlin right up until 1941 and I was able to renew all those old contacts. I set up the whole agent network that your dad ran into the East. He was smart, your dad, he knew I could deliver what I promised. He assigned me to work as his assistant and I told the Army where to stick their “War Correspondent” badge, pin and all.’ He laughed. ‘Jesus, but they were mad. They were mad at me and mad at your dad. The US Army complained to Eisenhower’s intelligence. But your dad had a direct line to Whitehall and that trumped their ace.’
‘Why did you go to Hamburg?’ I said.
‘I’d been here too long.’ He drank some of the bright red wine.
‘How long after that did Bret Rensselaer do his “fact-finding mission”?’ I asked.
‘Don’t mention that bastard to me. Bret was just a kid when he came out here trying to “rationalize the administration”.’ Lange put heavy sarcastic emphasis on the last three words. ‘He was the best pal the Kremlin ever had, and I’ll give you that in writing any time.’
‘Was he?’ I said.
‘Go to the archives and look … or better still, go to the “yellow submarine”.’ He smiled and studied my face to see if I was surprised at the extent of his knowledge. ‘The yellow submarine – that’s what I hear they call the big London Central computer.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Lange. ‘I know, you’re not in the Department any more; you’re over here to conduct a concert of Christmas carols for the British garrison.’
‘What did Bret Rensselaer do?’
‘Do? He dismantled three networks that I was running into the Russian Zone. Everything was going smoothly until he arrived. He put a spanner into the works and eventually got London to pack me off to Hamburg.’
‘What was his explanation?’ I persisted.
‘Bret didn’t provide any explanations. You know him better than that. No one could stop him. Bret was only on temporary attachment to us at that time, but he’d been given some piece of paper in London Central that said he could do anything.’
‘And what did my father do?’
‘Your father wasn’t here. They got him out of the way before Bret arrived. I had no one to appeal to; that was part of the setup.’
‘Setup? Were you set up?’ I said.
‘Sure I was set up. Bret was going out to get me. Mine was the only desk in Berlin that was getting good material from the Russians. Jesus. I had a guy in Karlshorst who was bringing me day-to-day material from the Russian commandant’s office. You can’t do better than that.’
‘And he was stopped?’
‘He was one of the first we lost. I went across to the US Army to offer them what I had left, but Bret had already been there. I got the cold shoulder. I had no friends there because of the showdown I’d had with them during the early days. So I went to Hamburg just as London Central wanted.’
‘But you didn’t stay.’
‘In Hamburg? No, I didn’t stay in Hamburg. Berlin is my town, mister. I just went to Hamburg long enough to work my way through my resignation and then I got out. Bret Rensselaer had got what he wanted.’
‘What was that?’
‘He’d showed us what a big shot he was. He’d denazified the Berlin office and wrecked our best networks. “Denazified”, that’s what he called it. Who the hell did he think we could find who would risk their necks prying secrets from the Russkies – Socialists, Communists, left-wing liberals? We had to use ex-Nazis; they were the only pros we had. By the time your dad came back and tried to pick up the pieces, Bret was reading philosophy at some fancy college. Your dad wanted me to work with him again. But I said, “No dice.” I didn’t want to work for London Central, not if I was going to be looking over my shoulder in case Bret came back to breathe fire all over me again. No, sir.’
‘It was my fault, Bernard,’ said Mrs Koby. Again she spoke my name as if it was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps she always felt self-conscious as a German amongst Lange’s American and British friends.
‘No, no, no,’ said Lange.
‘It was my brother,’ she persisted. ‘He came back from the war so sick. He was injured in Hungary just before the end. He had nowhere to go. Lange let him stay with us.’
‘Nah!’ said Lange angrily. ‘It was nothing to do with Stefan.’
‘Stefan was a wonderful boy.’ She said it with heartfelt earnestness as if she was pleading for him.
‘Stefan was a bastard,’ said Lange.
‘You didn’t know him until afterwards … It was the pain, the constant pain that made him so ill-natured. But before he went off to the war he was a kind and gentle boy. Hitler destroyed him.’
‘Oh, sure, blame Hitler,’ said Lange. ‘That’s the style nowadays. Everything was Hitler’s fault. How would Germans manage without the Nazis to blame everything on?’
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Len Deighton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: Long-awaited reissue of the final part of the classic spy trilogy, GAME, SET and MATCH, when the Berlin Wall divided not just a city but a world.The spy who’s in the clear doesn’t exist…Bernard Samson hoped they’d put Elvira Miller behind bars. She said she had been stupid, but it didn’t cut any ice with Bernard. She was a KGB-trained agent and stupidity was no excuse.There was one troubling thing about Mrs Miller’s confession – something about two codewords where there should have been one. The finger of suspicion pointed straight back to London.And that was where defector Erich Stinnes was locked up, refusing to say anything.Bernard had got him to London; now he had to get him to talk…