by John Lawton
“You have to admit it was funny.”
“No I don’t. It wasn’t.”
“Did you not find The Fireman’s Ball funny?”
“No. It’s another film about dirty old men in uniforms … they just happen to be firemen today not station masters twenty-five years ago.”
“Yet it was subversive.”
“In what way?”
“Lust. Lust is subversive. Pulling that girl’s knickers down is subversive. In a country where our soldiers are always courageous and our citizens models of morality, immorality is itself a rebellion. And incompetence a victory. Both films are full of weak, lazy people who barely scrape the edge of heroism. As such they are mirrors held up to life, not something plucked from a socialist realism poster. And they are jokes—and censorship so rarely gets a joke. Think how ordinary and petty those firemen are, how unlike the Stakhanovite ideal. Think of those firemen as our Keystone Cops.”
He was grinning as he said it. Highly amused at his own words.
“Keystone Cops? Really?”
“Oh Nell, I may come to love your po-face.”
They had reached the end of the bridge, the corner of Malostranské nábřeži and Vítězná.
Another continental double kiss, which she took less rigidly than the first.
Then he was gone, walking quickly to the end of the street. She felt sure he’d wanted more. He hadn’t asked. She’d no idea what she might have said or done if he had.
He was a hugely attractive man. A bit of a dandy with his coloured shirts and his silk scarves. She was plain Nell. Frau Burkhardt’s po-faced daughter. His parting quip was no doubt casual, almost thoughtless, but it was precise enough to be surgical.
Her mother had frequently referred to her as “my po-faced girl”—the child who took everything seriously, whose eyes had scrutinised and doubted everything from the second they had opened on this world to focus on it like a camera.
That had been Joe Wilderness’s strength and her weakness—he had made her laugh.
Before Wilderness she had often wondered if she had a sense of humour at all. Now she wondered if she was the right person to do the job Brandt had assigned her.
The next time they spoke she told him so, but he would not hear of her quitting Prague.
“Nell, you must stay until your po-face cracks with laughter.”
It was as though he’d met her mother.
§117
Čzernázemě Agricultural Collective
As a city kid Wilderness was both ignorant and blinkered. Ignorant in that rural England and certainly rural Czechoslovakia were foreign turf to him; he could tell a dandelion from a nettle; without a handy pocket crib he could not tell oats from barley. Blinkered in that, plonked down on the vast plain of central Bohemia, he might not see what there was to be seen. It came to him as fragments, or, more precisely, detritus.
He stood, backside propped against the wing of his BMW, looking at a field, putting off the moment when he had to follow the baked-dirt trail down to the farm and buttonhole the Collective’s apparatchik.
It was vast … a square mile or more without so much as a twiglet of hedge to break it up. He was almost certain the crop was maize, not yet ripe, almost head-height, spear-like until the corn cob popped out—his bluffer’s vade mecum assured him it was grown as cattle fodder. After weeds—everywhere weeds—maize might be the most prolific crop in Czechoslovakia.
He drove a snaky route avoiding potholes. Along the way he passed spuds—who could fail to spot a spud?—and hops; he knew hops, he’d been on laborious hop-picking holidays in Kent in the 1930s. But—most striking were the sporadic crops of junk and rubbish. He passed two stagnant, stinking ponds each with a rusting piece of farm machinery sitting in the middle … he passed a brass bed, complete with mattress, standing in a field, covered in bird shit, as though a tornado had whisked away the house that once enclosed it … and every few yards a pile of garbage … a small mountain of sinks (who in their right mind collected sinks?), a bigger mountain of broken brick and gypsum plaster, and as he swung into the farmyard a roadside crucifix tilted at forty-five degrees, its broken Christ hanging by one arm, the wooden headboard that once proclaimed INRI split in two and caked in mud. It was less like the Čzernázemě Agricultural Collective (no.1483) than the Somme after the battle. All it needed was dead tanks, and if he drove on he was sure he’d find them too.
The barn was new. Ribbed, pressed steel in plain grey. Perhaps the only evidence of socialist planning to be seen. From it emerged half a dozen grumpy-looking men. The cleanest of them, the one in leather gaiters rather than wellies, approached him, watery-blue eyes, a white walrus moustache, a nose to delight Edward Lear … all conveying nothing but suspicion.
“You’re late.”
“Ah … sorry about that. New to the country.”
“Kraut?”
“For my sins, yes.”
“Well, don’t try to atone for them here. You have too many and I don’t have the time. Let’s see it.”
“See what.”
“You’ll have brought a brochure.”
“Of course.”
Wilderness had it tucked under his arm, a glowing guide to the Erdbahn T64.
“Hmm … tractor, eh? I don’t need tractors, I need harrows.”
Oh bugger—Hahn had not briefed him on harrows.
“I can come back to that if you like.”
“I don’t like. And I don’t like this brochure.”
The old bastard rubbed it between finger and thumb.
“You haven’t read it yet.”
“I don’t need to. It feels useless. Far too shiny.”
“Too shiny for what?”
“Too shiny for wiping my arse on. Bring me paper that mops up a bit of shit and maybe we can talk about harrows.”
§118
The British Embassy, Palác Thun
The embassy resembled a fortress more than a palace. Forbidding wooden gates designed to resist the battering ram that now merely opened and closed on government Humbers.
The occasion—half of Prague seemed to be queuing up—necessitated uniformed coppers, although Wilderness spotted the StB secret service dogsbody at once. He sat in a cupboard set in the stone wall opposite the gates. The oddity was that he bothered with concealment at all.
The coppers checked no documents, simply ensured that the turnaround of cars in the cul-de-sac was smooth. Inside, no one asked him for identification. He and Kruger produced their invitations and were nodded through to the reception with a smile.
It wasn’t “black-tie”—just as well, Wilderness hated the black-tie events to which his father-in-law would occasionally drag him like the whining schoolboy. He’d scrubbed up, put on his best togs—Kruger had swapped his hideous paisley bow tie for one in a discreet cobalt blue.
He was impressed that Janis Bell had got all this together so soon. It was a shrewd move to bury control and agent in the biggest crowd she could muster.
He shook hands with the ambassador—he had the vaguest memory of this bloke, Lord Brynmawr … hadn’t he been some sort of trades union leader back in the early sixties? … the Amalgamated Wellyboot Makers? … the Guild of Backseat Drivers?—and with a plump, red-faced head of chancery whose name he immediately forgot.
He hoped Janis would find him soon. There was surely a limit to the number of sausages on sticks he could eat and to how long he could make small talk in English whilst faking a Berlin accent. He sounded to his own ears like an SS guard in a 1950s POW film—“Ve haff ways of makink you eat sausage.” And, as his first attempt at conversation proved, tractors were amongst the biggest chat-stoppers known to man.
Over to his left he spotted a woman in a stunning backless black dress that might have been sprayed onto her buttocks. Judy would have named the designer for him in a split second … Chanel? Schiaparelli? Or if it turned out to be frontless as well as backless, Rudi Gernreich.
Only one way to find out—but as he approached
the woman he felt a hand settle gently upon his arm.
“Herr Hensel?” Janis Bell said. “How good of you to join us this evening. I’m Janis Bell, First Secretary to the ambassador.”
Bugger. The woman in black did not turn around.
Had she done so, Wilderness would have found himself face to face with Nell Burkhardt.
“Have you seen the embassy garden? It’s at its best at this time of the year.”
Wilderness took the hint, muttered the right pleasantries and followed.
They went nowhere near the garden.
Janis Bell closeted them in an office on the floor above and said, “It’s secure. We can talk.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve done what Colonel Burne-Jones asked. I’ve worked out a simple way for the Czechs to pass information—so long as your man really has mastered his plum duff.”
She pushed a small hardback book across the desk.
Franz Kafka: Ausgewählte Kurzgeschichten
(Franz Kafka: Selected Short Stories)
“Turn to the third one in.”
Wilderness flipped past Forschungen eines Hundes and In der Strafkolonie to Die Verwandlung—Metamorphosis.
“Third paragraph, first sentence.”
Gregors Blick richtete sich dann zum Fenster, und das trübe Wetter—man hörte Regentropfen auf das Fensterblech aufschlagen—machte ihn ganz melancholisch.
“Tenth word has an umlaut, so does the thirteenth. The last word doesn’t. Put an umlaut over the ‘o’ of melancholisch and you have your conduit. A microdot, two if necessary. A good German speaker would spot it. Most would dismiss it as a typographic error.”
Wilderness ran the tip of his index finger along the sentence.
“Would I be able to feel something? Like Braille.”
“I doubt it. But I’m as new to this as you are. Nine months ago, you will recall, the most secret thing I did was type Old Ma Burton’s letters. You can buy this book anywhere in the German-speaking world. Prague alone will have five thousand identical copies in its bookshops. Buy them as you need them, but not all at the same shop. Obviously. You give a copy of the book to your Czech. When there’s information to receive, you just swap the doctored copy for a clean one. He is never without a Kafka and neither are you. Simple.”
“Yes. It is and it’ll work. Can you set up a meeting?”
“I need a few more days. I want at least six people between me and him … as I believe you put it to the colonel … a chain so long the KGB can’t follow it.”
“I was really hoping they’d just get bored and give up.”
Janis Bell smiled, laughed.
“And when the meeting’s set up,” Wilderness said, “suspend the chain.”
The laugh cut short, the smiled dropped.
“What?”
“Stand everyone down. Indefinitely. I’ll do everything face-to-face with Tibor. From now on nothing comes through the embassy.”
“Nothing?”
“Safer that way.”
“So what do I do, Sgt. Holderness? Go back to typing fucking letters!”
§119
Wilderness did his best to convince her.
“Janis, you’ll be the decoy. If you’re looking for risk, if you’re looking for danger there’ll be more than enough for both of us.”
“I’m not as naïve as you think. I’m not looking for risk, I’m not looking for danger. I am looking to be significant. I am looking … I am looking … to make a difference!”
“Believe me, you will.”
“Fuck you, Joe.”
“Not helpful, Janis.”
“Me being a soddin’ decoy is hardly much of a step up from typing. Did you get me here just for that? Or are we going back to showing Carry On films as a cover for a dodgy booze racket?”
“Cheap shot, Janis.”
“At least your rackets made a profit!”
“Cheaper still.”
With her last insult some of the steam seemed to go out of her. She smoothed down her dress and shook the hair out of her eyes. Looked to Wilderness to be very disappointed in him.
“I have to go. Lord Brynmawr isn’t exactly the life and soul of the party. In fact, in less than a month I’ve concluded he’s a total twat who shouldn’t be allowed out on his own. And he’ll get his knickers in a twist if I’m not out there schmoozing.”
“Fine. Just let me know when the chain’s in place.”
A sigh of deep exasperation, an upward tilt of the head. In heels she and Wilderness were unflinchingly eye to eye.
“I’ll get a message to Kruger at Erdbahn … some sort of follow-up to tonight’s farce, a thank you, a suggestion to discuss things further … whatever … he’ll pass it to his bloke at Mělník.”
“A time and place?”
“Of course.”
“Good.”
“Oh, good? Happy now? Right, I’ll get back to me typewriter.”
§120
About a week after Janis Bell’s bit-of-a-do at the embassy Rudolf Hahn handed him an envelope. Inside was a picture postcard of the Old New Synagogue in Prague.
On the back was a map reference.
“What?”
“I heard that this is how it’s done. Postcards. You send each other anonymous postcards.”
“It has been known, I agree, agent to agent, city to city perhaps, but we’re in the same room. Rudolf, why not just show me on the map?”
Hahn looked both ways, even though there was no one else in the office, before reaching down a map from the shelf above his desk.
He stabbed at it with his finger.
It was, judging by the contours, a hill. There weren’t many of those around.
“I believe it’s a monument. Of some sort. Quite easy to find of course.”
§121
Somewhere in the České Středohoří
Wilderness wondered if he would have chosen this hilltop for a meeting. It had advantages—you could see everything for miles around—and disadvantages—you had nowhere to hide. Anyone in a light plane or a helicopter could hardly miss you, but the Czechs seemed grounded. Czechoslovakia had more canal barges than planes. The skies did not buzz, no Cessnas, no Bobcats, no Bell Whirlybirds. Only a couple of unflapping vultures gliding.
It was a strange place. Hahn had termed it a memorial or a monument or some such, but to what Wilderness could not quite grasp. A pile of stones carefully placed in the centre of a stone circle—it all somehow seemed gladiatorial, a setting for sport or combat. No dates, no inscriptions, no roll call of the Czech dead, in a country that had dead and memorials aplenty.
Up the opposite track a maroon, dirty Škoda Octavia approached, throwing up a cloud of white dust. Tibor skidded to a halt outside the stone circle. He stood a moment half-hidden by the open door. He looked, as Crosland had said, to be in his late twenties—slightly built, about five foot nine and wearing what Wilderness thought of as the ubiquitous Czech cap.
His right hand appeared over the door, clutching a handgun.
Wilderness had expected this.
He’d left his in the footwell of the BMW.
Nobody spoke.
He slipped off his jacket, lifted his shirt, held his arms high and turned through 360 degrees.
“Happy now?”
“No. I am not happy.”
“All the same, put the gun away, because you’ve seen all there is to see. I’m not dropping my trousers.”
“You take too many risks.”
“I do?”
“We have no … no password. We should have had a password. You have no gun. You should have a gun.”
“Why? Do you want me to shoot you?”
Wilderness put his jacket back on.
“Put the gun way, Tibor.”
“You know my name. What do I call you?”
“Put the damn thing away and I’ll tell you.”
Tibor looked at the gun as though wondering how it came to be in his right hand,
then he stuck it back inside his jacket.
“I have a codename,” Wilderness proffered. “Diesel.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t get to pick. If you like, you can call me Joe.”
“Ano ano … the world is full of Joes.”
“Isn’t it just.”
“Why are we here … face-to-face, Joe?”
“Dead drops and a chain of connection damn near got you caught.”
“No—it didn’t. The last drop Mrs. Crosland picked up was cold. I’d made it the night before. By the time the KGB pounced I was miles from Prague.”
“As we are now.”
“Indeed.”
“If we meet face-to-face, without a chain, then you and I are the only people in the know. The embassy people go through the motions—but really they’re just a decoy. Each time we meet, we agree on a time for the next meeting. If one of us fails to show, we know the other’s busted.”
“And then?”
“Then I drive hell-for-leather for the German border.”
“And if you don’t show … where do I run to?”
It was a good question. One Wilderness could not answer.
“And,” Tibor went on. “If I have nothing to give you?”
“Then I suggest you bring a book, a ham sandwich, a bottle of beer and have a picnic.”
Tibor cracked, a grin that became laughter.
“Joe—you are absurd enough, silly enough to be a Czech.”
“So happens, I have a book with me.”
He took the Kafka out of his jacket pocket.
“Metamorphosis. Third paragraph, last word. Stick your dots on melancholisch … pretend it’s an umlaut.”
Tibor flicked through the pages, looked at Metamorphosis.
“I have read the story many times. I could even say it haunts me. Some mornings I wake up and I’m surprised to find I am not a beetle. Tell me … do you know what the name Kafka means?”
“I thought Kafka meant Kafka.”
“I suppose it does, but it sounds exactly like kavka. Jackdaw. The bird that collects shiny objects—gold and silver and jewels. What jewels will I bring you, Joe?”
