by Len Deighton
‘And don’t go chasing after Werner Volkmann.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Don’t give me that glib no-of-course-not routine. I mean it. Whatever Werner did to them, London Central hate him with a passion beyond compare.’
‘Yes, you told me that.’
‘You can’t afford to step out of line, Bernard. If someone spots you having a cup of coffee with your old buddy Werner, everyone in London will be saying you are part of a conspiracy or something. God knows what he did to them but they hate him.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to find him,’ I said.
‘That’s never stopped you before.’ Bret paused and looked at his watch. ‘Be a model employee. Put your faith in the Department, Bernard. Swallow your pride and tug your fore-lock. Now that London Central’s funds are being so severely cut, they are looking for an excuse to fire people instead of retire them. No one’s job is safe.’
‘I’ve got it all, Bret,’ I said, and tried to prise my bag away from him.
He smiled and moistened his lips, as if trying to resist giving me any more advice and reminders. ‘I hear Tante Lisl has had a check-up. If she’s going to have a hip replacement, or whatever it is, trying to save a few bucks on it is dumb.’
That was his way of saying that he’d pay old Frau Hennig’s doctor’s bills. I knew Bret well. We’d had our ups and downs, especially when I thought he was chasing Fiona, but I’d got to know him better during my long stay in California. As far as I could tell, Bret wasn’t a double-crosser. He didn’t lie or cheat or steal except when ordered to do so, and that put him into a very tiny minority of the people I worked with. He handed over my bag and we shook hands. We were out of earshot of Fiona and anyone else.
‘This Russkie who’s asking for you, Bernard,’ he whispered. ‘He says he owes you a favour, a big favour.’
‘So you said.’
‘VERDI: that’s his codename of course.’ I nodded solemnly. I’m glad Bret told me that or I might have arrived expecting an aria from La Traviata. ‘A colonel,’ he coaxed me. ‘His father was a junior lieutenant with one of the first Red Army units to enter Berlin in April ’45 and stayed there to become a staff officer at Red Army headquarters, on long-term political assignment at Berlin-Karlshorst. Dad married a pretty German fräulein, and VERDI grew up more German than Russian … so the KGB grabbed him. Now he’s a colonel and wants a deal.’ Having gabbled his way through this description he paused. ‘And you still can’t guess who he might be?’ Bret looked at me. Surely he knew I wasn’t going to start that kind of game; it would open a can of worms that I wanted to keep tightly shut.
‘Do you have any idea how many hustlers out there answer that kind of description?’ I said. ‘They all have stories like that. Seems like those first few Ivans into town fathered half the population of the city.’
‘That’s right. Play it close to the chest,’ said Bret. ‘That’s always been your way, hasn’t it?’ He so wanted to be in London, and be a part of it again, that he actually envied me. It was almost laughable. Poor old Bret was past it; even his friends said that.
‘And your girlfriend,’ whispered Bret. ‘Gloria. Make sure that’s all over and done with.’ His voice was edged with the indignant anger that we all feel for other men’s philandering. ‘Try to hang on to both of them and you’ll lose Fiona and the children. And maybe your job too.’
I smiled mirthlessly. The airline girl ripped my boarding pass in half and before I went down the jetty I turned back to wave to them. Who would have guessed that my wife was a revered heroine of the Secret Intelligence Service? And with every chance of becoming its Director-General, if Bret’s opinion was anything to go by. At this moment Fiona looked like a photo from some English society magazine. Her old Burberry coat, its collar turned up to frame her head, and a colourful Hermès scarf knotted at the point of her chin, made her look like an English upper-class mum watching her children at a gymkhana. She held a handkerchief to her face as if about to cry, but it was probably the head cold she’d had for a week and couldn’t shake off. Bret was standing there in his short black raincoat; as still and expressionless as a stone statue. His fair hair was now mostly white and his face grey. And he was looking at me as if imprinting this moment on his memory; as if he was never going to see me again.
As I walked down the enclosed jetty towards the plane a series of scratched plastic windows, rippling with water, provided a glimpse of rain-lashed palm trees, lustrous engine cowling, sleek tailplane and a slice of fuselage. Rain was glazing the jumbo, making its paintwork shiny like a huge new toy; it was a hell of a way to say goodbye to California.
‘First Class?’
Airlines arrange things as if they didn’t want you to discover that you were boarding a plane, so they wind up with something like a cramped roadside diner that smells of cold coffee and stale perspiration and has exits on both sides of the ocean.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Business.’ She let me find my own assigned place. I put my carry-on bag into the overhead locker, selected a German newspaper from the display and settled into my seat. I looked out of the tiny window to see if Bret was pressing his nose against the window of the departure lounge but there was no sign of him. So I settled back and opened the red bag that contained his going-away present. It was a Holy Bible. Its pages had gold edges and its binding was of soft tooled leather. It looked very old. I wondered if it was some sort of Rensselaer family heirloom.
‘Hi there, Bernard.’ A man named ‘Tiny’ Timmermann called to me from his seat across the aisle. A linguist of indeterminate national origins – Danish maybe – he was a baby-faced 250-pound wrestler, with piggy eyes, close-cropped skull and heavy gold jewellery. I knew him from Berlin in the old days when he was some kind of well-paid consultant to the US State Department. There was a persistent rumour that he’d strangled a Russian ship’s captain in Riga and brought back to Washington a boxful of manifests and documents that gave details of the nuclear dumping the Russian Navy was doing into the sea off Archangel. Whatever he’d done for them, the Americans always seemed to treat him generously, but now, the rumours said, even Tiny’s services were for hire.
‘Good to see you, Tiny,’ I said.
‘Hals und Beinbruch!’ he said, wishing me good fortune as if dispatching me down a particularly hazardous ski-run. It shook me. Did he guess I was on an assignment? And if news of it had reached Tiny who else knew?
I gave him a bemused smile and then we were strapping in and the flight attendant was pretending to blow into a life-vest, and after that Tiny produced a lap-top computer from his case and started playing tunes on it as if to indicate that he wasn’t in the mood for conversation.
The plane had thundered into the sky, banked briefly over the Pacific Ocean and set course northeast. I stretched out my legs to their full Business Class extent and opened my newspaper. At the bottom of the front page a discreet headline, ‘Erich Honecker proclaims Wall will still exist in 100 years,’ was accompanied by a smudgy photo of him. This optimistic expressed view of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, the party governing East Germany, seemed like the sincere words of a dedicated tyrant. I believed him.
I didn’t read on. The newsprint was small and the grey daylight was not much helped by my dim overhead reading light. Also my hand trembled as it held the paper. I told myself that it was a natural condition arising from the rush to the airport and carrying a ton of baggage from the car while Bret fought off the traffic cops. Putting the newspaper down I opened the Bible instead. There was a yellow sticker in a page marking a passage from St Luke:
For I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.
Yes, very droll, Bret. The only inscription on the flyleaf was a pencilled scrawl that said in German, ‘A promise is a promise!’ It was not Bret’s handwriting. I opened the Bible at random and read passa
ges but I kept recalling Bret’s face. Was it his imminent demise I saw written there? Or his anticipation of mine? Then I found the letter from Bret. One sheet of thin onion-skin paper, folded and creased so tightly that it made no bulge in the pages.
‘Forget what happened. You are off on a new adventure,’ Bret had written in that loopy coiled style that characterizes American script. ‘Like Kim about to leave his father for the Grand Trunk Road, or Huck Finn starting his journey down the Mississippi, or Jim Hawkins being invited to sail to the Spanish Caribbean, you are starting all over again, Bernard. Put the past behind you. This time it will all be different, providing you tackle it that way.’
I read it twice, looking for a code or a hidden message, but I shouldn’t have bothered. It was pure Bret right down to the literary clichés and flowery good wishes and encouragement. But it didn’t reassure me. Kim was an orphan and these were all fictional characters he was comparing me with. I had the feeling that these promised beginnings in distant lands were Bret’s way of making his goodbye really final. It didn’t say: come back soon.
Or was Bret’s message about me and Fiona, about our starting our marriage anew? Fiona’s pretended defection to the East was being measured by the valuable encouragement she’d given to the Church in its opposition to the communists. Only I could see the price she had paid. In the last couple of weeks she’d been confident and more vivacious than I could remember her being for a very long time. Of course she was never again going to be like the Fiona I’d first met, that eager young Oxford-educated adventurer who had crewed an oceangoing yacht and could argue dialectical materialism in almost perfect French while cooking a souffle. But if she was not the same person she’d once been, then neither was I. No one could be blamed for that. We’d chosen to deal in secrets. And if her secret task had been so secret that it had been kept concealed even from me then I would have to learn not to resent that exclusion.
When the flight attendant brought champagne and a liver compound spread on tiny circles of toast I gobbled everything down as I always do, because my mind was elsewhere. I still couldn’t help thinking about Honecker and Bret and the Wall. It’s true that things were slowly changing over there; financial loans and political pressure had persuaded them to make the Stasi dig up and discard a few of the land-mines and automatic firing devices from the ‘death-strip’ along the Wall. But the lethal hardware remaining was more than enough to discourage spontaneous emigration. I suppose Western intelligence was changing equally slowly: people like me and ‘Tiny’ were no longer travelling First Class. As I drifted off to sleep I was wondering how long it would be before that professional egalitarian Erich Honecker found himself adjusting to the rigours of flying Economy.
‘Did you manage to sleep on the plane?’ said the young Englishman who met me at the airport in Berlin and took me to his apartment. He put my luggage down and closed the door. He was a tall thin thirty-year-old with an agreeable voice, a pale face, uneven teeth and a certain diffident awkwardness that sometimes afflicts tall people. I followed him into the kitchen of his apartment in Moabit, near Turmstrasse U-Bahn. It was the sort of grimy little place that young people will endure in order to be near the bright lights. As a long-time resident of the city I knew it as one of the apartment blocks hastily built in the ruins soon after the war, and nowadays showing their age.
‘I’m all right.’
‘I’ll make some tea, shall I?’ he said as he filled the electric kettle. I reached the teapot from the shelf for him and found on its lid a sticky label with a message scrawled across it in a feminine hand: ‘Don’t forget the key, Kinkypoo. See you at the weekend.’
‘There’s a message here,’ I said and gave it to him. He smiled self-consciously and said: ‘She knows I always make tea as soon as I get home. That reminds me – I was told to give you something too.’
He went to a cupboard, found a box and got from it a slip of paper with typed dates, times and numbers. It was a good example of the bullshit that the people behind desks in London Central wasted their time with: radio wavelengths.
‘Okay?’ said the kid, watching me.
‘Typed on a 1958 Adler portable by a small dark curly-haired guy with a bandaged middle finger.’
‘Are you kidding?’ said the kid, reserving a margin of awe in case I was serious.
I tossed the paper into the kitchen bin, where it fluttered to rest among the dead teabags and accumulated strata of half-eaten frozen TV dinners, their seams marked by the azoic ooze of brightly coloured sauces. This was not a place to stay on full pension. ‘If we get into trouble over there,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to be wasting a lot of time trying to contact London by radio.’ I opened my suitcase and laid my suit across the back of the sofa.
A large fluffy cat came in to investigate the kitchen garbage, sniffing to make sure that the discarded message was not edible. ‘Rumtopf!’ said the kid. ‘Come over here and eat your fish!’ The cat looked at him but forsaking the fish strolled over to the sofa, jumped up on to its favourite cushion, collapsed elegantly and went to sleep. ‘He likes you,’ said the kid.
‘I’m too old for making new friends,’ I said, moving my suit so it didn’t pick up cat hairs.
‘There’s no hurry,’ said the kid as he poured tea for us both. ‘I know the route and the roads and everything. I’ll get you there on time.’
‘That’s good.’ It was still daylight in Berlin, or as near daylight as it gets in winter. It wasn’t snowing but the air shimmered with snowflakes that only became visible as they twisted and turned, while dark grey cloud clamped upon the rooftops like an old iron saucepan lid.
He looked at my red eyes and unshaven face. ‘The bathroom is the door with the sign.’ He pointed at an old enamel Ausgang sign, no doubt prised from one of Berlin’s abandoned railway stations. The apartment had many such notices, together with advertisements and battered American licence plates and some lovingly framed covers from ancient Popular Mechanics magazines. There were other curious artifacts: strange weapons and even stranger hats from far parts of the world. The collection belonged to a young German art director who shared the rent here but was temporarily living with a redheaded Irish model girl who was depicted in a large coloured photo doing handstands on the beach at Wannsee. ‘London said I was to give you anything you needed.’
‘Not just tea?’
‘Clothes, a gun, money.’
‘You don’t expect me to go across there carrying a gun?’
‘They said you’d find a way if you wanted to.’ He looked at me as if I was something out of the zoo. I wondered what he had been told about me; and who had been telling him.
‘Half a dozen different identity documents for you to choose from. And a gas-gun, handcuffs and sticky-tape and restraints.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We won’t need any of it,’ he hastened to assure me as he prodded at the discarded list of radio wavelengths to push it deeper into the garbage. ‘He just wants to talk to someone he knows; someone from the old days, he said. London thinks he’ll probably offer us paperwork; they want to know what it is.’ When I made no response he went on: ‘He’s a Stasi colonel … Moscow-trained. Nowadays we can be choosy who we take.’
‘Restraints?’ I said.
‘London said you might want handcuffs and things.’
‘London said that? Are they going crazy?’
He preferred not to answer that question. I said: ‘You’ve met this “Stasi colonel”? Seen him close up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Young? Old? Clever? Aggressive?’
‘Certainly not young,’ he said emphatically.
‘Older than me?’
‘About your age. Medium build. We talk to him in Magdeburg. And check the material if he has anything to show us. But if he arrives panting and ready to go, London said we must have everything prepared. It is prepared – a safe house and an escape line and so on. I’ll show you on the map.’
; ‘I know where Magdeburg is.’ It was useful to know that I was now officially in the ‘certainly not young’ category.
‘A back-up team will take him from us. They’ll do the actual crossing.’
‘Have you had a briefing from Berlin Field Unit? What does Frank Harrington say about all this?’ Frank Harrington ran our West Berlin office, doing the job my father once did.
‘Frank is being kept informed but the operation is controlled directly from London Central.’
‘From London Central,’ I repeated softly. It was getting worse every minute.
The kid tried to cheer me up: ‘If there is any problem we also have a safe house in Magdeburg.’
‘There’s no such thing as a safe house in Magdeburg,’ I said. ‘Magdeburg is home town for those people. They operate out of Magdeburg, it’s their alma mater. There are more Stasi men running around the Westendstrasse security compound in Magdeburg than in the whole of the rest of the DDR.’
‘I see.’ We finished our tea in silence, then I picked up the phone and dialled the number for Tante Lisl, a woman who’d been a second mother to me. I wanted to pass on to her Bret’s message of encouragement, and if surgery for her arthritis was going to prove costly I wanted to see the hospital and make my own financial arrangements with them. Meanwhile I planned to buy a big bunch of flowers and go round to her funny little hotel to hold her hand and read to her. But when I got through, someone at reception said she had flown to Miami and joined a winter cruise in the Caribbean. So much for my visions of Tante Lisl expiring on a couch; she was probably playing deck tennis and winning the ship’s amateur talent competition with her inimitable high-kick routine of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’.
‘I’ll shave, shower and change my clothes,’ I said as I sorted through my suitcase. To make conversation I added: ‘I’m putting on too much weight.’
