The Garden of Weapons (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  Herbie smiled, feeling a twinge of his own sadness. Women? What had he known of women? Only one who mattered. He looked at the little old man and thought what a change the years had made to him. Less than thirty years ago he had been small but so attractive to women that the young girls, it was said, lay down in his path. He must have been in his forties then.

  The old man did his scuttle towards Herbie, grabbed at the empty glass, which he refilled and handed back, moving all the time, as if to keep beyond the range of Herbie’s grasp. “Okay, what I do for you?”

  Herbie told him. In detail.

  “But your own people …?” the old man began.

  “Should not be troubled or consulted.” Herbie’s finger came up to his nose in a conspiratorial gesture. “This has to be untraceable.” He gave his stupid grin. “Don’t worry. It’s only unofficial for my own reasons. The money will come from the usual place.”

  “So I’m in business again. The old firm.”

  “Exactly, only you mustn’t say it aloud. Not even to the old firm. You can do it? Up to date? The very latest?”

  “No problem. I have two sons still there. I keep up with the times, my friend. For just such an emergency.”

  “Four days. Three if possible.”

  “Three will be easy. No worries.”

  “I’ll telephone.”

  Herbie Kruger then left the shop and, finally, went home to his flat in St. John’s Wood: doing the back-doubles; using a bus and two taxis.

  Worboys arrived ten minutes later. “Clean as a whistle,” he said.

  There was a time when Herbie would not have taken the chance of being covered by Tony Worboys. But he had personally trained the man since then. If Worboys played his cards correctly, he might even become moderately good at the job.

  The ‘grace and favour’ apartment smelled musty after Herbie’s time at Charlton. He opened the windows, cooked himself an omelette, shovelling herbs into it on a one-to-one ratio with the eggs. Herbie then uncorked a bottle of Burgundy, and sat down with the tray.

  Burgundy was wrong with eggs, but what the hell: he felt like Burgundy.

  After the meal, he planned to work—revive painful memories by going through the Telegraph Boys’ files. For that he needed background music. He thought, perhaps, the Mahler Tenth—the incomplete symphony, available in the performing version which was the genius of Deryck Cooke, musicologist extraordinary.

  11

  IT WAS STRANGE FOR Herbie to reflect that, during his formative years, he had lived within a society in which Mahler’s music was banned. The fact that the composer was a Jew wiped his work from the Nazi calendar at the stroke of a pen: even though, in Hitler’s early years the future Führer showed great excitement at Mahler’s direction of Wagner in Vienna. Hitler had also enjoyed the composer’s own work at that time—but then he had loved Mendelssohn also. Madness.

  As with sexual experience, it was another fact of life that Herbie remained a musical illiterate until well into his teens—the interest being first sparked by his American case officer. Later, as his education was completed with the British Service, music became an abiding passion.

  As Mahler’s Tenth Symphony—in its performing version—was not heard by the public until 1964 (over half a century after the composer’s death), Herbie Kruger did not experience it until the Schnitzer Group crumbled, and he was back safely in the West. He loved what he heard: the piece becoming more poignant to Kruger because its composer had completed the general symphonic sketch while in deep psychological crisis: already overtaken by the disease which would bear him to an early grave in 1911.

  Herbie remained unaware that he always listened to the Tenth Symphony when he was also going through deep periods of stress. It was a fact noted by the Service psychiatrists, who, with the other medics, thoroughly monitored all senior personnel every eighteen months.

  Now, with the meal eaten and dishes washed, Herbie seated himself in his favourite chair, the bottle of Burgundy, still half full, at his elbow. Lately he had made a conscious effort to cut down on spirits: turning to wine in the evenings.

  The files were out of the briefcase; placed on the floor, in two piles—one for the old disbanded Schnitzer Group, the other for the still active Telegraph Boys.

  The first passionate viola notes of the symphony flooded from the speakers. For a few seconds Herbie closed his eyes. The strings joined the violas, grasping at the first haunting melody of the adagio.

  Taking a gulp of wine, he reached down, sweeping up the whole pile of Schnitzer files in one great paw, dropping the folders on his lap, and flicking through them with an indolence which belied his personal concentration.

  As each faded, black and white ID photograph came into view, so Herbie heard voices from the past—incidents—words—fears. The Schnitzer Group had been his whole life for so long. His whole life, before Electra—Ursula Zunder—came into his private world.

  Fifteen years? Friends, comrades, colleagues in the secret war. Now, all but three of the faces were gone for ever—bones and skulls: only God knew where they lay, and He was unlikely to turn informer. Only the Birkemanns and Moritz Zeich were available, living on their pensions, in English retirement. Zeich and the Birkemanns—and one other: the girl Herbie had known as Luzia Gabell: the girl with no name, or two names: Luzia Gabell—Lotte Krug. She would be in her forties now: alive and out there, as far as Herbie knew, behind the Wall.

  The adagio rose to its rending crescendo, the orchestra becoming one great organ-like thunder. Herbie heard the other voice in his mind. Pavel Mistochenkov’s laugh—Schnitzer. Blunder. That was you, Herbie, wasn’t it? Blunder?

  Herbie smiled to himself. Yes, Schnitzer. Yes, Herbie was Schnitzer, he supposed. Schnitzer never existed. A name only. A figment. Schnitzer, the German word for blunder. Ironic now.

  For all Herbie’s adherence to conformity, to care in the field, the Schnitzer Group had been run against the established rules. It caused headaches, and gave the big man extra problems. But the circumstances demanded it.

  The rules maintained that the director, or controller, of a field network, that was unlinked to an embassy or consulate, should not expose his identity to his agents. The classic structure was a network, divided into cells, of two or three persons. The director kept contact through couriers. These were usually postmen, or brush-men—people who picked up the cells’ messages, or documents, by brush passes; or cleared out the dead-drops—letterboxes: hiding places where documents or messages could be concealed.

  Perhaps the techniques were better, but the general pattern went back for centuries. Controls and agents were like lovers, with go-betweens carrying their passions to and fro; arranging meetings—clandestine trysts.

  For Herbie’s Schnitzer Group, the old system was not possible. First, he had returned to the Soviet Zone of East Berlin in 1951, under his own name. The documentation was too good to waste, London argued. They had only to cobble up a story and a couple of documents. Herbie had the rest for real—his old ID, the deNazification certificate, a whole series of papers which showed he had been moved around from camp to camp. London merely had to fill in the last few years.

  Young Eberhard Lukas Kruger was the genuine article, returning to his old home, now a mass of rubble, still lying waste: flowers, weeds and grass growing from the bricks and slates, once the stable domicile of that long-ago happy Kruger family. Returning, Herbie took a small, two-room apartment, not far from those nostalgic roots. There were still people around who remembered him as a child. Herbie Kruger had built-in deep cover.

  From then until early 1955 Herbie Kruger worked as a singleton: establishing his bona fides, paying lipservice to the regime, training in simple engineering, making new friends, discovering the strange new life of East Berlin. In fact, London was grooming him for stardom.

  Herbie met his case officer—either in the Alexanderplatz safe house or in the West—about once a month. He supplied standard information: mainly gossip and obs
ervation. His real duties, they said, would begin later. In the meantime he was to keep alive to the possibility of recruits.

  For the intelligence and security services of both sides, it was the time of cowboys and Indians. The secret war did not stop at arrests for treason or espionage, but exploded into back-alley jobs, where operatives’ lives were lost to the silenced pistol, the knife or ‘swatting’—crushing against a wall with a speeding car. It was the open season, and to be suspected as a trained agent meant sudden death rather than arrest.

  After three years London instructed Herbie to begin gathering in a stock of potential recruits. In 1954 he became a Grenzgänger, making his daily trips to his ‘job’ in the Western Zone, and doing detailed research on prospective clients for the network. At the time Herbie did not realise he would be controlling these people on the ground, but he knew what was required, and cast his net wide, so that it covered almost the entire Eastern Zone.

  Willy Blenden and Gertrude Muller were his first prospects. So Herbie did his own detailed research on the pair before putting their names forward, establishing his own particular pattern: making certain of people before the scrutineers in the Rummage Department could make any errors.

  Luzia Gabell was also an early choice. Part of Herbie’s present bitterness was, he considered, caused by the facts of her recruitment, and their own personal friendship. She was the only agent Herbie ever tried to trap into the web through the love-reliance ploy. That this approach ended in ludicrous disaster only drew Luzia closer to him as a person.

  When they first met Luzia had only recently started work: as a typist in the press office on Thaelmann Platz. Now Herbie reflected on the tiny fact that Vascovsky’s abortive secret meeting with him had been called at the Thaelmann Platz.

  He supposed, thinking back over the time, that it really was the girl’s sexual appeal which first aroused him. Petite; short blonde curly hair; mischievous face of a guttersnipe; body in good proportion to her height, and what a drinker at the Rialto in Pankow once described as “The best little ass this side of dreamland”.

  Herbie, who had been talking to the drinker at the time, looked and decided that it was, indeed, a bottom of considerable nubility. As little Luzia wriggled her way through the tables Herbie had been immediately attracted to her. It was purely physical, and he was far from being the only man whose eyes followed the complicated series of movements. Luzia Gabell attracted men as a magnet draws iron filings: the original honeypot.

  She was also uncaring about what she said. Her visits to the Rialto were regular—two or three times a week. Within a fortnight Herbie had spoken to her—even warned her about talking the way she did. At that time the Rialto was a favourite haunt of those who worked for the Ulbricht administration: card-carrying Party members, people who belonged to the GSDF—Society for Soviet-German Friendship—and even the occasional Russian officer. Yet Luzia made no bones about her feelings. She hated the Communist regime and was not partial to Russians. “I may not have been long out of the cradle,” she would say loudly, “but the bastards raped my mother and shot my father. They’re worse than the Nazis. Arschlöcher,” and Herbie would shush her. He even argued with her—being a Party member himself: a fragment of his overt cover.

  “If you don’t like it, why stay?”

  “My old aunt is the only one left. I have to help.”

  “Then why work for them? You could find work in the American or British Zones. In the West.”

  Her aunt would worry. They had lived in the same area—her family—since Noah’s ark. The aunt would go crazy if she worked anywhere west of the Brandenburg Gate.

  She lived, with her aunt, in the nearby Weibensee district, and her aunt was a character. Luzia would have Herbie doubled up with laughter about her aunt, whose hearing had been affected by the bombing.

  Luzia would ask the aunt if she was going out, and the aunt would always reply by telling her the time. When the public telephones were still working properly, the aunt had a great friend who went down with scarlet fever and was taken to the Charité Hospital’s isolation ward. Each day the aunt would trot to a public telephone, carrying a small bottle of antiseptic in her bag. She would scream down the telephone to the isolation ward for news, then carefully clean the instrument with the antiseptic, before hurrying home to gargle, lest this form of communication should transmit the disease to her.

  “She never goes up past the Brandenburg Gate,” Luzia said. “She really believes that the people who live on that side of the city are strange. She’s never been to the Ku-damm in her life.”

  Herbie continued to caution her about loud anti-Soviet or Party comments—particularly at work, or in places like the Rialto. “You’re okay with someone like me. But if the Spitzbart’s SSD hear you there’ll be trouble. Not just for you, but for your aunt.” The East German SSD was a natural extension of the old Gestapo. Only the political viewpoint changed. The methods of secret police seldom alter.

  It was ten days after they met before Luzia went home with Herbie one night. They slept together regularly after that-though she never stayed away from the aunt for the whole night. Herbie was barely twenty-five, far from being a virgin; but Luzia Gabell, young as she was, had a way in bed which showed great experience—probably from a very early age.

  Herbie concentrated on all that his teachers had told him. The job entailed making the potential agent reliant on the seducer alone. It was, of course, impossible.

  One evening, returning from a session in the West, he saw her going into an apartment block, not far from the broken and bombed Cathedral, near the Marx-Engels-Platz. Herbie waited and watched half the night. She came out five hours later, standing on the steps of the building almost wrapped around a man, kissing him more than just a fond farewell.

  It was two days before he saw her again: time enough for Herbie to discover the man’s identity. He was harmless enough. A factory worker, as vociferous as Luzia in his condemnation of the Party.

  On their next meeting Herbie said nothing. They had a few drinks at the Rialto, then went to his apartment and made love. Looking back on it now, from the age of fifty-one, Herbie almost blushed at the things they did—he, and this lusty nymphet. She was as critical of her lover as of the regime: telling him what she liked, what to do next, then taking over the whole proceedings, mounting him and sitting astride, as though she was galloping a horse towards the winning post.

  After it was over Herbie asked her about the other man. She laughed at him. “Darling Herbie. Please, do you think you are the only one? I’m sorry.” Then, in a small panic, “You’re not in love with me?”

  He told her, no. But he was getting fond of her. She grinned, sadly, resting her hand affectionately on his loins. “Don’t, Herbie. I’m my own girl. I don’t intend marriage. I’m really not capable of fidelity—sexual fidelity, that is. If a man attracts me, I’ll have him. Is that so terrible?”

  Herbie said he understood, and she told him the only men she stayed away from were Russians. “Though you probably think I’m a little whore, now.”

  No, Herbie did not think she was a whore. The promiscuity was a drawback, but she was still excellent agent material. If she could be controlled, her sexual desires and agility could be harnessed. “Sex is a sport,” she would say. “Like football for two.” Then, “You want to score another goal, Herbie?”

  Later, after she was recruited, she changed the tune and would giggle, “Sex used to be a sport. Now it is a pleasant duty.” She also confided, in later years, that she liked Herbie more than most. She was paid to tempt men into indiscretions now, but never felt like a prostitute, because the payment came through Herbie.

  Odd, he thought now, from the vantage point of the present, how sexual activity pervaded the secret world. Not so much as ploys in field operations, for the days of the Japanese Hall of Pleasurable Delights, of the Delilah and Mata Hari honeytraps, were long played out. The sexual reliance ploy still worked, but Herbie was more interested i
n the way in which the whole enclosed life remained orientated towards sex. Operational men and women were, by nature, lonely, and sought comfort in either passing, quick relationships or full-blown affairs.

  Going through the file, now, in London, Herbie knew there had been a risk in her recruitment. Her indiscriminate choice of partners was a danger in those days. But her character was strong; her hatred of the Russians, and the Communist Party, genuine. Herbie took the trouble to put a trace on her parents. All she told him was true. Documented. The father had been killed on the Russian front, the mother had been raped. The aunt she cared for had also been a rape victim, and was as scatty as Luzia claimed. He discovered that the child, Luzia, at twelve years of age, had been present when a group of drunken Ivans invaded the house. Luzia had also been raped.

  Eventually he put her name forward. It came back, cleared, like eleven others from among those he submitted. This was in 1955, when Herbie received final instructions to take over the network of twelve agents. Normally the twelve would be split into operational cells of three or four; but, apart from the married Birkemanns, Herbie wanted no interrelation between individuals. No cells. So he argued it out with his masters in the West. It would be best if each individual in the Group remained unaware of the others.

  The hierarchy agreed, but only up to a point. “You’re asking for trouble not using couriers,” Maitland-Wood—who was present at one conference—told him. In the end Herbie agreed to use two couriers. The pair he knew and trusted best—Muller and Blenden—but only on the condition that they were kept unaware of Herbie’s situation. Like the others, they were to think Herbie was also only a courier.

  So it was that Schnitzer came into being. The imaginary Schnitzer—with no documents, no address, no being—became the Group’s director; while Herbie Kruger, together with Gertrude Muller and Willy Blenden, was a mere courier.

  One by one the newly-recruited agents were smuggled into the West—during week-ends and vacation periods: sometimes only for a day at a time. They were taught the principles of their trade, given special instructions—the total harvest to be as much information as possible on morale, troop movements, barrack-room gossip, the political and economic system. They were also engaged in acts of political and economic sabotage. The Schnitzer Group was a front-line force against Ulbricht’s DDR. So said London and the West Berlin Station.