A Few Words for the Dead

by Guy Adams

  ‘You’ve read my file, yes?’ he said.

  She looked at it and snorted.

  He did his best to remain calm. ‘A common reaction,’ he admitted, ‘though, forgive me, a stupid one. Do you really think someone like me gets to exist if everything he files is fantasy? Does that sound possible to you? That our masters would continue to fund – however poorly – my department, provide me with staff, a level of authority… Do you really think they would do that if I was just wasting everyone’s time?’

  Her derision possessed a little less conviction. ‘It’s absurd.’

  ‘Of course it is. Deeply absurd. That anyone with half a mind could look at the evidence, and there’s plenty of it, and still scoff. Whatever your logic tells you, whatever your preconceptions, once presented with contrary information you have no choice but to alter your world view. Nobody likes doing that. We like to cling to our beliefs, they’re our security. But once someone categorically proves you wrong you simply have to. To do otherwise would be idiotic. And, as I seem to need to remind you regularly, I don’t believe you’re an idiot. Please prove as much and think for a moment before you take the stupid way out again.’

  Ryska stared at him. ‘But if all this was real, people would know, we’d all be discussing it.’

  ‘Remind yourself what it is we do for a living and then think again, you’re nearly there.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me…’

  ‘After a career of banging my head against a brick wall it’s either that or screaming. And considering the situation I currently find myself in, you will forgive me if I’m a little less easy-going on the subject than normal. Question my story all you like, that’s your job, I have faith that we’ll get to the end of it and we’ll all walk away satisfied. But don’t question my job – it’s no doubt saved your life in the past and probably will do again. Be clever, or this situation isn’t going to just be annoying, it’s going to be completely intolerable.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll suspend judgement.’

  ‘You’re too kind. So, where we? Grauber – or, more precisely, what was controlling him – had flung himself off the balcony of his apartment block. Young Engel wasn’t badly hurt, luckily, but we were left with a mess to clean up. Luckily, cleaning up messes is something the British secret service is used to. It causes enough of them after all. We finally called it a night and I returned to the questionable comforts of Frau Schwarz’s guesthouse…’

  FOURTEEN

  I woke up to a cricked neck from Frau Schwarz’s pillows. I’d discussed matters with them during the night, explaining the basic principles of softness balanced with support, but they’d remained dogged in their refusal to concur. I’d tried punching them but, like all forms of violent coercion, this had resulted in little but battered pillows and increased resentment.

  I put on my dressing gown and made my way down the corridor to the bathroom, rolling my head all the way. If that didn’t help loosen my neck muscles then a hot shower surely would. I had no desire to stare at my second day in Berlin from a pained angle of forty-five degrees.

  The bathroom had the sort of functional, aggressive air one expects from military establishments or expensive English boarding schools. It quite took me back.

  The shower had the same personality as my pillows but was weaker-willed – within a few minutes it had agreed to pump out hot water and I took up a precarious position behind the glass partition and set to the soap with gusto.

  I was, naturally, a blind mess of soap suds when I heard the door rattle.

  ‘Occupied!’ I shouted in the way of the Englishman abroad stating the obvious.

  The door rattled again, a low scratching working its way beneath the rush of water as I worked faster to rinse my hair.

  I alternated between swearing and washing away soap, straddling that middle line between someone who wants the situation to end and yet refuses to be altogether hurried in his simple business of washing.

  There was silence and I relaxed, thankful to be able to go about my scrubbing in peace.

  I was just considering another handful of shampoo (for fun rather than necessity) when an arm reached around my neck and pulled. My feet slipped immediately and my bodyweight collaborated with my attacker’s attempt to choke the life out of me. I kicked out, trying to get purchase enough to wrest myself free. Wet feet pounded against the wall and the glass partition, neither achieving anything. I shot my head back, trying to catch the attacker’s face but I’d slid down his body and all I was doing his banging my head against his chest. I decided to use my position better, throwing all my weight in the direction it had been going anyway: down.

  He stooped slightly, struggling to keep his grip on my wet body. I planted my feet against the surface of the bath and kicked upwards. This time my head connected with his chin and I heard a satisfying, spluttered cry pre-empting the tip of his tongue falling into my wet hair. His grip loosened slightly, no doubt down to an involuntary desire to put his hands to his profusely bleeding mouth. This was the only opportunity I was likely to get, so I put all my strength into it, driving my elbows back into his belly and kicking back against the bath again to force myself free.

  We both toppled over, hitting the floor with the sort of resounding crash you would really hope other people would hear (and take as their cue to come and help). I got to my feet but my attacker grabbed at my leg. That and the water spilled onto the tiled floor saw me fall backwards into the glass partition which finally decided enough was enough, cracking behind me.

  Now that I could finally get a good look at him, I wasn’t all that impressed: he was middle-aged, slightly overweight and wearing a heavy postman’s anorak. Still, it seemed churlish to be overly critical. He was, after all, doing a reasonable job of trying to kill me.

  He ran at me, and our combined weight shattered the glass partition behind me. I grabbed on to its metal frame, desperate to avoid falling back on the exposed edge of the glass. I head-butted him a couple of times, partially sickened and partially relieved to feel his nose pop beneath my forehead. It didn’t slow him down much. He lifted me up, turned me and slammed me against the wall. Definitely an amateur move and one that saved my life – if he’d had any sense he would have shoved me down onto the broken glass. I would have fallen into the bath and bled out. The cuts on my back were fairly severe as it was, making it hard to tell what was blood and what was water as I slid against the wall.

  Reaching out for a shard of glass, I wrenched a piece from the frame and stabbed it into the side of his neck. It was an awful thing to do. Killing is something that disgusts me every time I’m forced to do it, just as it should, but my feelings on the subject don’t extend to dying myself in order to avoid committing the act.

  He staggered back, blood spurting from the hole I’d opened in his neck. Then, all of a sudden a look of absolute confusion settled on his face. You remember that trick mimes used to perform? Where they would pass their hand in front of their face, showing a seemingly instant switch from happiness to sadness with each pass. It was like that but without the hand. One minute he was snarling with a furious determination to kill me, the next he was a confused postman wondering why his blood supply was fast relocating onto the wall of a hotel bathroom.

  ‘Who are you?’ he croaked before dropping forward and landing face first on the bathroom floor. I slowly sank down to a sitting position, utterly drained.

  ‘What is going on?’ shouted Frau Schwarz having finally had the good grace to investigate the sound of her guest’s more than usually vigorous cleaning regime.

  ‘Call Engel,’ I told her. ‘We need a clean-up team.’ I tried to get to my feet but the pain from the cuts in my back knocked me back. ‘And someone who can give me a onceover and some stitches.’

  She stared at me.

  ‘You have no clothes.’

  ‘I’m fully aware of that Frau Schwarz. I do apologise. Could you please be quick? I have no wish to embarrass you further by bleeding to death in you
r lovely bathroom.’

  FIFTEEN

  It took about twenty minutes for Engel to arrive, a small team in tow. By which point I had managed to drag myself out of the bathroom and tug on a pair of trousers. The wounds in my back needed a few stitches but were far from life-threatening.

  While the team of officers worked quickly to clear the body out of the bathroom and tidy up after our little tussle, I lay face down on my bed and let a medic sort out my back.

  ‘How lovely it is to have you with us,’ said Engel. ‘Two bodies to bury within the space of a few hours.’

  ‘At least one of them isn’t mine.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Engel, ‘that is some small comfort. You do realise we don’t have the staff for this sort of thing? The Berlin desk is now shouting at Battle and asking him angry questions.’

  ‘All of which start with “Now, this chap Shining…” I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh they’ll settle down soon enough. Last night was written off as an accident.’

  ‘Quite an accident.’

  ‘Kreuzberg man clumsy with a bottle of lighter fluid runs outside for help and keeps going.’

  ‘And people will buy that?’

  ‘Sad to say, Grauber wasn’t a man much loved. He was a petty smuggler, got by trading in soft drugs mainly. No friends or family. Simply: nobody cares enough about him to question it.’

  ‘Well,’ I told Engel, ‘I care. We need to find out what interest he had in Robie, and who scared him enough that he would rather set fire to himself than talk to us.’

  ‘“It”,’ said Engel. ‘He said “it” wouldn’t let him talk to us, not “who”.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘he did. Strange, wasn’t it? A Russian soldier with a successful career ahead of him turns psychotic and gets mown down by his own men. A down-at-heel smuggler sets fire to himself and jumps to his death.’

  ‘They’re connected.’ Engel was bright enough not to phrase it as a question.

  ‘Too much of a coincidence not to be, I’d have thought, and Robie links them both.’

  ‘And now we have a postman who decides that, rather than continue on his round, he’ll try and murder someone in the shower.’

  ‘What do we have on him?’

  Engel shrugged. ‘Nothing immediately obvious, though we’ll dig into it. At the moment, from what we can tell he’s exactly what he appears. Heinz Schumann, forty-five, father of two, no political associations – well, none that raise any red flags. There’s no reason whatsoever to explain his behaviour. We’re preparing a cover story.’

  ‘What about the other guests?’ I asked Engel, breaking off between words to offer a few English curses in response to the alcohol swabs being rooted around in the wounds on my back.

  ‘There aren’t any,’ Engel replied. ‘We pay Frau Schwarz for exclusive use of the place and, at the moment, you’re the only one sleeping here.’

  Aside from leaving me to wonder if this was the best room she had, this was a relief. The Intelligence service is not a police force, our response to acts of random violence is to make them vanish not offer them increased attention. ‘No witnesses’ sounds chilling but, often, they’re words we live by.

  ‘So, working on the assumption that you don’t turn up something terribly suspect in Herr Schumann’s background, it’s safe to say we’ve now had three people break out of their normal behaviour, becoming violent and out of control.’ Out of control. That was the operative phrase and, as would soon prove to be the case, the heart of the matter.

  ‘So where next?’ Engel asked.

  A local anaesthetic was now making my back feel dreamy, despite the fact that someone was repeatedly passing a needle through its flappy bits. ‘Where else?’ I said. ‘I need to walk in Robie’s footsteps. I need to pay a visit to our Eastern neighbours.’

  SIXTEEN

  According to the papers in my pocket, I was exactly what I had claimed to be in the American bar: a drinks importer. Not that the excuse would wash if I had to show them for a while; legitimate businessmen are not found conducting their business in the tunnels of the U-Bahn. Rats are not, I believe, great consumers of wine. They have little interest in the differences between a Riesling or a Chardonnay. Any East Berlin official I met down here would likely meet my cover story with disdain before proceeding to get very cross indeed.

  Not that Engel had been exactly happy either.

  ‘I told you we don’t make a habit of using the tunnels,’ he had said. ‘It’s a massive risk.’

  ‘Given that we know I’ve been under observation since my arrival,’ I had explained, ‘do you really think I can pass through one of the checkpoints without bringing the whole weight of KGB scrutiny to bear? They’ll let me through, of that we can be quite sure, they’ll then follow my every move before picking me up for a chat so lengthy we may as well be honest and just call it a prison sentence. I’m too visible. The only way I can get to the East without bringing the whole operation down around our ears is to do so without anyone knowing I’m there.’

  Engel had agreed, of course. Irritated he may have been but it didn’t make him stupid. He’d tried to come up with some alternative plans, all of which would have taken time to arrange and brought their own share of risks. Finally, he’d relented and accepted my solution: a map, a torch and someone who might, at a glance, pass for me being driven to various, unimportant locations. Later, Engel was to drop my double off at the guesthouse and I could seem to be safely tucked away within the ignoble walls of my room. Spiegel may not fall for such theatrics of course – I probably wouldn’t if I were in his place – but I could only hope that I wasn’t deemed sufficiently interesting to worry about it in any great detail. All I needed was a short period of cover to allow me to enter East Berlin unnoticed.

  The journey through the tunnels was longwinded but uneventful. The route on the map worked me around the various ghost stations, security blockades and bricked-up tunnels, leading me to a small chink in the network. Eventually, I came to an inspection entrance that opened out into the foreign world not a mile away from the relative security of West Berlin. In my pocket I had some East German marks, my ID papers and a crumpled sheet of paper that appeared like an innocuous till receipt but was actually my key to accessing Battle’s network.

  It had been a tiring few hours, cramming information on the identities of Battle’s agents. It was worrying how readily such information had been given. Despite the network’s fading reputation, I wouldn’t have wanted to be an agent on Battle’s books, having my name handed over to an interloper like me. I knew I was trustworthy, but still… However difficult it may be for Intelligence officers, the people taking the real risks were often the little people, the embassy drivers, the clerks, the domestic staff, those vital people who sold secrets to the other side. Sometimes they did it for ideological reasons, sometimes just for the money (though they were the least reliable – never trust anyone who’ll tell you anything if there’s cash at the end of it, they’ll soon realise lies can pay just as well as the truth). There was also something unnerving about containing the information, I felt like a stuffed wallet as I climbed out into the cold street, moving quickly so as not to embarrass myself by being caught halfway through a manhole opening.

  We had timed things so as to see me arrive late at night, under the cover of darkness. I still confess to a feeling of abject terror as I walked down the street. I’d been intimidated by my position on arrival in Berlin, only too aware of being a fish out of water. That feeling was doubled now that I was strolling through the part of that city that could quite legitimately have me shot simply for being there. East Germany didn’t look favourably on spies. Especially, I reflected, on those that might appear to have no great value. I had considered myself a prize for a few moments, a man who knew Battle’s network, but if we considered that network of limited worth then certainly the GDR would as well. If caught, I was more likely to be thought of as the disposable spy, the head of a department that even my own
country held in low esteem. Hadn’t I said I was disposable when Battle first asked me to act on his behalf? With every step I took into truly enemy territory the reality of that position grew heavier.

  My first port of call had to be Robie’s apartment. Engel had panicked, pointing out that it was probably being watched. I explained, with more confidence than I felt, that this was only the case if Robie had been caught.

  Of course, this wasn’t unlikely, so, as I approached the small block he called his Eastern home, I was especially conscious of the street around me. The road was all but empty but brightly lit thanks to the increasing snow and I felt hopelessly exposed as I made my way up to the front door. I tried to reassure myself that, as far as anyone watching was concerned, I could be visiting any number of residents here. It was only me that seemed to think I was wearing a neon sign that flashed the word ‘spy’ at regular intervals.

  It was standard practice for officers to deposit spare keys for their accommodation with the central office. This wasn’t so we could feed the cat while they were away on business — though I had known a charming chap in Section 14 that frequently offered to do just that — rather it was a simple safety measure. As was the case with Robie, we needed the wherewithal to immediately access an officer’s home should they go missing. After all, they might be dead in the bath tub.

  Inside, I realised that now I was at my most vulnerable. If East German forces were monitoring the flat, they would likely be doing so from inside. I opened Robie’s door quickly, stepping inside and closing the door behind me. I didn’t turn on the light but I did immediately move to the far window, a sliding Arcadia door that led out onto a tiny balcony overlooking the East German wall and the death strip beyond. Keeping back behind the curtain, I checked the set of keys and unlocked the sliding door. If someone did burst in, this was likely to my only escape route. Not that I fancied jumping down onto the death strip from three floors up – if I didn’t break my legs, I’d certainly get shot at by the border guards.