by Len Deighton
Frank said: ‘You met the pastor.’
‘Yes,’ I said. He’d sheltered me and the kid when we were leaving Magdeburg in a hurry.
‘The funny old man,’ said the kid. ‘The turbulent priest.’
Frank said: ‘Allenstein is critical. If it was BARTOK or one of the networks in the Dresden area, or those troublemakers in Rostock, I might say thank goodness, and let them stew in their own juice. But we pass too many people through Magdeburg. It’s our most reliable line for people coming and going. We need an active setup in Allenstein to nurse them and pass them back if they get into trouble.’
‘Isn’t this a problem London Central should deal with, Frank?’ I said. ‘Any failure in Operations should have the Coordination people watching it to see if it’s part of some bigger pattern.’
‘London won’t wear that, Bernard. I tried that on Monday morning. I went through it all with Operations. But we’re not dealing with Harry Strang any more. Operations are more cautious since Bret Rensselaer has been Deputy D-G. London Ops don’t want to hear: they spend their time trying to dump their problems on us. I tried hard.’
‘I’m sure you did, Frank,’ I said, although I wondered to what extent Frank wanted to let London take control, or whether he only wanted London to know how hard he worked. Berlin’s power and influence had been eroded over the last year or more. I suspected that he needed to ring all the bells about an occasional crisis out there in the DDR sticks if he was to make a convincing case for Berlin Field Unit’s finances next year.
After I’d taken rather too long in offering any comment, Frank said: ‘You know how things work over there at ground level. What’s the prognosis, Bernard?’
‘I went right back through the three years of DELIUS files.’
‘Did you? When?’
‘This morning.’
‘Oh,’ said Frank, as if I’d taken unfair advantage of him. Frank never checked back through old files. The file clerks in the Berlin Registry wouldn’t have recognized Frank had he ever knocked on their door.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘DELIUS has had a lot of arguments and splits and reassembling. I don’t like that. Every time a network regroups, more and more people get to see each other. It’s the sort of risk the Stasi are good at provoking and exploiting.’
‘They are amateurs,’ said the kid. ‘We can’t treat them as if they were trained and experienced professionals.’
‘Well that’s how the Stasi treat them,’ I said.
‘Someone will have to go and sort it out,’ said the kid, obviously seeing himself as the right one to do it.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Frank hurriedly. Then added: ‘Unless that’s what Bernard thinks.’
‘Let’s leave it for a few more days,’ I said.
‘I thought you would want to get in there immediately, Mr Samson,’ said the kid.
‘Why?’
He looked at Frank before saying to me: ‘The Romeo Effect.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’ Trust the kid to pluck that old joker out of the deck.
‘What is the Romeo Effect?’ Frank asked.
The kid said: ‘Mr Samson once said that when a network is penetrated, there is a danger that it will simply destroy itself without outside action. Romeo effect. Kill itself in despair, the way that Juliet did when she awoke from drugged sleep to find that Romeo was dead.’
‘Too poetic for me,’ said Frank.
‘Destroy the network in a panic,’ explained the kid, giving me a self-conscious glance. ‘Eliminate the codes and all traces. Split and destroy the network so that not a trace of any evidence remains.’
‘Oh,’ said Frank, touching the end of his nose with a pencil. ‘I thought it was Juliet who killed herself first.’
‘It wasn’t my theory,’ I said. ‘It’s a KGB theory and they named it. The Soviets lost two important networks in Washington in the Fifties. The Moscow inquiry afterwards lasted six months, and finally produced a report that said that neither network had been truly penetrated.’
‘And had they?’ Frank asked.
‘Sort of. One net had been under observation for a long time. A new man arrived in town. The FBI banged on his door and found a list of contacts. He claimed diplomatic immunity and they gave him his list back and apologized. But the other one might have gone on for ever. Husband and wife, both working in the Pentagon, feeding torn but not shredded photocopies out through a clerk who had the job of disposing of top-secret waste paper. The wife had her handbag stolen; the thief found papers marked secret inside and told the cops. Nothing much more than that would have happened, but once inside the police station the husband panicked and confessed the whole works.’
‘The Romeo Effect,’ said Frank reflectively. ‘What a name to give it. I’ll never fathom the Russians.’
‘I mentioned it in a lecture at the training school,’ I explained. ‘Years ago. The real lecturer hadn’t turned up. I filled in at short notice.’
‘Six more working days before we act,’ said Frank, closing the cardboard folder and pressing upon it with his flattened hand like a man testifying on oath.
‘All days are working days in the field,’ I said.
Frank gave me the sort of smug and distant smile used by VIPs inspecting guards of honour. ‘We’ll probably hear from them tomorrow,’ he announced in a cheerful clubby voice. ‘I remember this time two years back. Christmas. Those people in Zwickau went off the air for ten days, and then blandly explained that they had had trouble with their batteries.’ He gave an avuncular chuckle to show that he bore them no ill will.
‘But they were wiped out the following year,’ I reminded him. ‘Six months later the Stasi went in and picked them off one by one, like ripe cherries. I’ve always wondered if that six-month period was the Stasi waiting a decent interval while their own inside man got clear.’
‘No,’ said Frank, who preferred not to give the enemy the benefit of the doubt. ‘We looked into it. A review board spent six weeks on it. There was no penetration of that network. The batteries fiasco wasn’t a cause, but it should have been a warning to us at this end. It should have reminded us that ill-disciplined networks are vulnerable. It’s always been that way. Look at France in nineteen forty-four.’
Keen to avoid Frank’s account of what intricacies of ill-discipline afflicted the French networks in 1944, I said: ‘Don’t let’s say six days; or specify any period of time, Frank. Let me keep my ear to the ground and report back to you.’
‘I’m away for a few days in London,’ said Frank. ‘I’m catching the seven o’clock flight. Another of those Estimates Committees. I have to be there, or the others will gang up to persuade the old man to give Hong Kong, or some other godforsaken outpost, the money Berlin needs.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you want a record of this meeting?’
‘We’d better have something on the file,’ said Frank. ‘Something that will make it clear that we earn our pay,’ he added, in case his reference to the Estimates Committee hadn’t alerted us to the fact that all our jobs were in constant jeopardy unless we not only did our work but recorded it in triplicate.
I stood up, but the kid remained sitting in his chair and flipping through thick files of paperwork he’d brought with him. It was not until Frank said ‘Look at the time’ to politely indicate that his presence was no longer required that he suddenly slammed his papers together and remembered unfinished work downstairs and departed.
‘Robin is a good lad,’ said Frank.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You heard that Dicky Cruyer is giving a dinner at Claridge’s? To celebrate the official commendation he got for the shooting… the severed hand and all that.’ Frank looked at me quizzically. ‘The old man is attending, so is Bret. I’m surprised that you’re not going too, Bernard.’
‘I thought it was better to get here and report to you,’ I said. In fact, joining the fawning admirers at Dicky’s celebration had not appealed to me greatly
.
Perhaps Frank read my thoughts. ‘Give Dicky credit for fast thinking, Bernard. He recognized the Stasi man, retrieved the severed hand and shot the fellow carrying it. Mind you, he admits to feeling nervous until he’d phoned Berne and confirmed his identification.’
‘Dicky has always been very fast-thinking,’ I said. ‘I’ve never denied it.’
‘A commendation will do wonders for Dicky,’ said Frank. ‘It will probably be enough to get him confirmed as Europe supremo. And the word is that this Stasi fellow Dicky shot is the sniper they used to kill that defector in the safe house.’
‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ I said.
‘VERDI, the ruffian you and Werner Volkmann took to the Notting Hill safe house.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Special Branch appointed an investigation team for it. They’re now saying it was the same man; but no solid evidence as yet. I can’t think why you and Werner took that VERDI chap to Notting Hill. Isn’t that safe house known to every Stasi and KGB man in Europe?’
‘It is now,’ I said.
‘And the Fletcher House annexe job was very nearly successful for them wasn’t it? Nothing to suggest to you that that was a Stasi operation? You’re the one who wrote the book.’
‘They used a black getaway car,’ I said blandly.
Frank laughed. ‘They used a black car, did they?’ There was a long-standing belief in the Berlin office that the hoodlums we faced would always choose a black car. The official cars used by the Eastern Bloc Party officials, the top cops and the security generals were invariably black. The lesser lights – the heavies and the hit men – let loose in the West could seldom resist adopting this status symbol. ‘And you are feeling well?’ he asked.
‘Do I look ill?’
‘I would have thought you’d have been raring to go and sort out the DELIUS problem. In the old days you never passed up a chance to chase around over there.’
‘I was younger then. And even more foolish.’
Frank looked at me and nodded. ‘You’ll be in charge here for the next few days, but I’m not far away. Don’t do anything without we discuss it.’
‘On the matter of the DELIUS net?’
‘In the matter of anything.’ He got to his feet and looked at his appointment book. The page was blank, as the pages of Frank’s appointment book so often were.
‘No, sure.’
He fixed me with his clear and piercing grey eyes and said: ‘The last thing I need is a débâcle here now. I’m too old for it.’ I knew what he meant. Berlin was to the Department what Las Vegas was to the glittering stars of show-biz: a perfect show-case for a brilliant youngster, but a burial ground for has-beens. But where did that leave me? I was too old to be a promising youngster but still too young to be a has-been. Too old to seek employment elsewhere, and that was the bitter truth of it. I could see that verdict in Frank’s eyes too as he looked at me and added: ‘But we both have to make the best of things, Bernard.’
‘Yes, Frank.’
He took my arm: ‘“’Tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.” Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene Two. We did it at my prep school for half-term; I played the apothecary.’
‘The apothecary,’ I said. ‘What perfect casting, Frank.’
As soon as Frank had departed for his plane, I exercised my new-found authority as Deputy Director of the Berlin Field Unit. I took a set of false identity papers from the safe and went across to the car pool and signed out a big BMW motor cycle. Once through the checkpoint – as a West German national – I left the motor cycle in the East, in a lock-up garage in Prenzlauerberg. From there I took instead a noisy little Trabant motor car that was kept fuelled and ready for such purposes. From a hiding place in the garage I picked up a suitcase containing a new lot of identity papers and I changed into a baggy suit of the cut that made citizens of the DDR instantly recognizable.
Skirting the city I drove westwards, the Trabant’s two-stroke engine running smoothly, as such engines did in the cold weather. There was very little traffic on the road. At one time the East German army and the Soviet garrison forces had always made their military redeployments after dark, but nowadays there were far fewer tactical military movements. Soviet troops, and East German units too, were being kept out of sight. There were few signs of individual soldiers either. Their pay constantly in arrears, they found it cheaper to get drunk in their camps and barracks. The only military vehicles I passed were three eight-wheel armoured personnel carriers, their hatches closed down, and bearing the markings of some northern factory militia. They were rattling along at high speed, manned by workers ordered away from their benches for their regular two weeks of winter exercises.
The streets of Allenstein bei Magdeburg were dark and silent. I left the Trabbie out of sight in the alley behind the primary school rather than park it where it would be noticed by passers-by. As I got out of the car I saw all round me a landscape etched with frost, and heard the crackle of ice under my feet. My nose and ears were stung painfully by the chilly wind that moaned through the overhead wires. Perhaps some member of the Forster family had heard the clatter of my Trabbie’s two-stroke engine, for a woman came down and opened the main door of the apartment block before I rang the bell.
Once inside, the biting cold with its ever-present odour of brown coal was exchanged for warm stale air upon which rested the faint smells of recently cooked food. I took off my trilby hat and unbuttoned my coat. One of the few compensations of living in the DDR was having a warm home. It was a part of the tacit compact that the self-serving communist masters had struck with the inhabitants of this sad and deprived police-state; warm rooms and crime-free streets were offered as compensation for everything inflicted upon them.
‘Hello, Bernd,’ said the woman. ‘I knew you’d come.’
‘Good,’ I said. She hadn’t known I was coming of course; it was a way of saying that she only saw me when trouble was in the offing. At first I thought it was Theo’s mother-in-law who had answered the door, but she’d died two years before. It was Theo’s wife; poor little Bettina, she’d aged so much and was wearing her mother-in-law’s red spotted dress. I hadn’t recognized her. Now I leaned forward and kissed her on both cheeks.
‘I thought they’d send you, Bernd,’ she said without enthusiasm.
‘Yes,’ I said, and followed her into the gloomy living-room where two children were sprawled on a threadbare oriental carpet, constructing angel’s wings from coloured paper. It was the sort of gesture to religion that the regime discouraged, but Theo Forster had never been an ardent believer; his churchgoing was only done to please his wife. There were many such lukewarm worshippers in the networks that London had formed and coordinated, but streetwise cynics like Theo were needed in the mix.
‘Theo,’ she announced. ‘It’s Bernd come to see you.’
Theo was propped up in a bed in the corner in the living-room. It was not a good sign, for he had never been strong. The walls of the apartment were thin and from the next room there came the sounds of conversation and Bing Crosby singing. There must have been a dozen people in that tiny apartment; talking without being overheard was difficult.
‘I knew you’d come, Bernd. I told Betti you would. This is Uncle Bernd,’ Theo called out to the children, who looked up, nodded at me politely and went back to their wings.
Theo Forster, number four of the DELIUS group, had been at school with me. He’d been a boisterous young teenager in those days, the classroom clown with a pointed nose, a gnomish face and remarkable facility for advanced mathematics. Theo’s father had been good at mathematics too. He’d been an artillery sergeant who’d served under an artful old war hero named Rolf Mauser, and was with him at Vinnitsa on the Bug that fateful day in 1944 when Mauser earned his Knight’s Cross. In postwar Berlin, Rolf Mauser did secret tasks for my father. Inevitably young Theo came to know what I did for a living. We’d kept in touch from time to time. Now so many y
ears later, when the DELIUS network went on the blink, he was the most obvious person for me to contact. I loved him dearly, but Theo would never make a good field agent; he was too principled, too honest, too sensitive.
‘How are you feeling, Theo?’
‘I’ll be all right by Christmas, Bernd.’
It was disconcerting to deal with any of these Church groups. They’d been organized, and encouraged, during my wife’s pretended defection to the DDR. Such people weren’t at all like field agents or trained spies. Such well-meaning amateurs were armed and equipped to fight the good fight against sin and the devil, rather than against a pitiless communist regime. Many of them were brave beyond measure, but it was difficult to make them see the dangers they faced. They were in every respect a Volkssturm – a ‘Dad’s Army’ – and had to be treated like those well-meaning civilian soldiers.
‘Take off your coat, Bernd.’ The room was dimly lit, but as my eyes became accustomed to it I could see Theo’s waxy face beaming at me. His pale complexion and sparse eyebrows gave emphasis to those dark staring sorrowful eyes. Looking around I recognized the heavy Biedermeier wardrobe and armchair that had come from his parents’ Berlin apartment. They looked out of place here amid the cheap unpainted wooden chairs and table that were the standard products of DDR factories.
‘The doctor says I’ll be out of bed in time for Christmas Eve,’ he said as briskly as he could manage. ‘I get these attacks from time to time. I might look like death but I will soon be back at the factory.’ He grinned, his face impish, looking very like the teenager I remembered.
‘That’s great, Theo,’ I said. I’d often passed the Stern bicycle factory where Theo worked as an electrician. The blackened brick buildings on the railway siding dated back to the Kaiser’s days. But the newer prefabricated sheds where Theo worked were cold and draughty, so that in winter the workers wrapped up in coats and sweaters. There was a constant haze of dirt in the air for miles around, while into the nearby river the factory poured a filthy torrent of brown pollution. It was no place for a sick man.
