by John Gardner
Herbie had looked at the sight lines from the window. There were binoculars and night glasses in the apartment. He went over the possible windows and rooftops, across the street, where people could set up a hide, or use parabolic listeners. Herbie checked that these points were visible from one of the other rooms, which would also afford Max a good view of the street.
Max asked if they were going to eat. “I only had one of British Airways’ plastic sandwiches.”
“Go and get some take-away.” Herbie told him there was a place on the corner he often used when in residence. “It’s open till all hours.”
“I’m supposed to be minding you.”
“I won’t run away. Tubby Fincher had you carry something in for me, yes? I’ll have it before you go.”
Max passed over the package he had brought through the clear channel, avoiding a security check. It contained the fast-sender Spendthrift was to take into the East. Then Max dumped his bag in one of the three bedrooms and went out to get food.
Herbie unwrapped the parcel and took the machine out of its polystyrene coffin. It was no larger than a normal hardback book, and about four inches thick. In fact, Herbie carried a book in his luggage that was slightly larger and deeper, hollowed out for the purpose of carrying the gadgetry over the border. Cloak and dagger: old hat stuff; movie business, Herbie thought. Some of the old ways, though, were just as effective as ever—bars of soap, shoe heels, tubes of toothpaste, orifice hides. All still viable, and used.
The fast-sender was set to the Trepan frequency. It also had a built-in microphone and a speed dial—more sophisticated than the machines Schnabeln and Girren already used in East Berlin. Herbie packed it away with the homers and his false documents. He then retrieved the Browning, undid its wrapping, weighed the weapon in his hand, slid back the mechanism, felt the firing pin, stripped the whole thing down and put it back together again. He slid a magazine into the butt, thumping it home with the heel of his hand. He then put the gun, together with the remaining spare magazines, into the pockets of the lurid American jacket in the closet.
By the time Max returned with the food Herbie was settled in an armchair, a huge glass of vodka snug in his paw. He dreaded bed, wanting to remain as active as possible, taking his mind off the fact that he was now back in the city of his father and mother; back, within a short distance, of the one person who mattered—who had mattered for so long, unseen; Ursula Zunder, to whom he had not spoken, whose face and body he had not seen, for fifteen years.
It was extraordinary, Herbie considered. Absence, time, usually dulled the memory—or distorted it—as with death. Yet Electra lived and breathed in his being, to the point where he could almost see and hear her: the laugh, the voice with its particular inflection—the hint of a lisp when she was excited. There were occasional nights when he could even feel her skin and flesh, soft but strong; the muscles firm under the smooth, almost translucid epidermis.
These visions pumped blood in his head, but did not rouse him sexually. Herbie knew that condition could only be treated by reality. Fantasy had never played a large part in his real life. Until he had her store of personal memories and her physical being close to him once more he would not be cured.
The main room in which Herbie now sat was out of joint with the times—great dusty red velvet-covered armchairs and a settee; a heavy ornate table and sideboard, solid uncomfortable stand chairs, and a sprinkling of rugs: cheap and threading imitations of Ispahan designs, badly knotted, strewn on stained wood. Surrounding a gas stove was a heavy marble mantelpiece, filched, probably, from the ruins. This was crammed with old photographs in silver frames—men in Kaiser Bill uniforms and moustaches; women staring, bewitched or bothered, frightened by the lens; a child—fourteen or fifteen years old—pretty in a pinafore, long ringlets of hair draping the shoulders; on a long-gone garden swing, her legs stretched out straight, parted slightly; buttoned boots pointing at the camera as though trying to shatter it. Herbie knew somehow the photograph had a subtle sensuality, but could not quite place the reason. In one corner there was a second table: a small, ugly piece, cluttered with more photographs, and some cheap ornaments. The whole effect was of some Victorian spinster’s sitting room—only the photographs did not match the period. The paintings, however, reflected Victorian popular art at its most abominable: several large canvases depicting mountains and woodlands. Herbie considered that they would be Wagnerian if a little better done. They looked dark, dirty and gloomy as the grave.
Max brought rolls filled with Weisswurste, and the raw spiced pork spread called Hackepeter. He drank only lager. Herbie refilled his own glass of vodka.
As they ate so Herbie Kruger went over matters with his minder. Conscious that Max had already been privately briefed by the Director and/or Tubby Fincher, Kruger now thought it time to perform his own briefing. Psychologically Max might react more strongly to a hard and firm set of orders from Herbie, on the spot, and so lose sight of London’s instructions to keep a careful eye on the German.
He went through the best look-out point—the window in Max’s own chosen room: far from this room, where he would talk with Spendthrift; the time and method of Spendthrift’s arrival tomorrow; telephone signals; body talk; house talk, including signs which meant that Max was free to enter the room when Herbie was with Spendthrift; or forbidden, apart from cases of genuine emergency and danger.
Max sat, chewing on his rolls, taking it all in, repeating the signals, but with some hint of deceit behind the eyes. Herbie now knew, for sure, London’s eyes and ears were on him through Max: or as near sure as he could be.
“You’re under my control now, Max?” he asked at last.
“Of course, old love. You know that. I’m to mind you and the bloke coming in.”
“Level with me, Max. They told you to watch me special, yes? Said I was slippery.”
“Well, you are a slippery big thing, aren’t you, Mr. Kruger?”
“They gave you direct orders, though? About me?”
“Only for your own good.”
“Forget it. You’re here to do my bidding now. Just remember that and we’ll have no unpleasantness. Don’t let London confuse you. We do a job, okay? Let’s make it a good one.”
“I’m here to see that you’re kept safe, that’s all.”
Herbie shook his head. He would be safe. They would have a few days of concentrated work. After that, back to London. “Tomorrow night we go to see your friends,” he smiled, cunning creasing the corners of his mouth.
Max said that would make a change, then suggested it was time to turn in. “Your asset’ll be here by eight-thirty, won’t he?”
Herbie nodded, giving Max a dismissive goodnight. He did not want the loneliness of the big feather bed with its smotheringly soft duvet. He went over to the window, throwing it open, smelling the air. It is funny how all cities have their own smell. Below, a couple of men were escorting their ladies into a car; from some cellar up the road a band played—guitars, the bases turned up, the throb of drums and discordant tinkling of an electric piano. In a pause of silence, Herbie thought he could hear another sound, further off: a violin sobbing and wailing a threnody of remote grief.
Funny, he thought again, how each city had a different odour. In the old days even West and East Berlin smelled differently. He liked neither side—deploring all the East stood for, and considering the garish, fleshy, consumer-beckoning of West Berlin to be a propaganda affront to any thinking human being.
Undressed, lying on the bed with no sleep, Herbie’s mind rotated slowly in the past. Back to Berlin as it had been just before the panic: in the months prior to that gigantic exodus from the East; when the reception centres of West Berlin, like Marienfelde, could hardly cope with the influx. In late 1959 none of that sudden anxiety for escape had permeated East Berlin. But, in his daily work in the West, Eberhard Lukas Kruger was just receiving instructions to mount his team of Telegraph Boys. The Director flew in for a week, and Herbie was clos
eted with him, the Head of Berlin Station, and a thin spare quiet man from Military Intelligence.
In one of Berlin Station’s offices, from the windows of which one could just see the shattered memorial that had once been the Kaiser Wilhelmskirche spire, they had enumerated the targets—the official jobs, or appointments, which had to be covered by surveillance. Later they got down to specifics: the trends and behaviour patterns that had to be noted by the watching Telegraph Boys.
At first sight, Herbie recalled, the list struck him as impossible. The Director of Liaison—usually at least a General—at the Karlshorst Soviet HQ; the Soviet Attache at the DDR’s Political HQ; the DDR’s Minister of the Interior; the Military and Air Attache at the Soviet Embassy; the General in charge of liaison between the NVA—the National People’s Army—and the Soviet Forces in East Germany; the Commander-in-Chief, General Soviet Forces in Germany. The list of targets seemed, at first hearing, to be reaching for the moon.
He was not to use any of his Schnitzer people. These new watchers were to be recruited fresh—turned over and clean, absolutely free from any taint of flying false flags.
The briefing on the targets went on for about a week, as Eberhard Lukas Kruger made his daily journey—a Grenzgänger—backwards and forwards between East and West. It was autumn. Almost exactly twenty-three months of freedom was left to East Berlin, before the August of 1961 and the closing of the border: the building of the Wall.
Two weeks after the initial briefing Herbie had his first stroke of luck. A chance meeting, as they so often are, with the chubby and scruffy Peter Sensel. Sensel was celebrating in a bar in the Stalinallee—as it still was then—buying drinks for everyone. He had been down and out for months, after losing his own little three-man building firm, now absorbed into the reorganised labour force on Party orders—which meant Walter Ulbricht’s orders.
“I don’t care if it’s working for the Ivans,” Sensel had declared. “It’s a good job; steady hours; the money’s fair, and I get my own accommodation out there.”
Herbie soon found that “out there” meant the General Soviet Forces Headquarters at Zossen-Wunsdorf, about forty kilometres to the West, in the heart of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. “I might even put a spanner in some of their works,” Sensel had grinned, arching eyebrows, and shrugging his shoulders with a curious, lopsided smile. It was an effeminate movement from someone who looked as clod-hopping as Peter Sensel.
Herbie began turning stones straight away: burrowing into Sensel’s past. “Doing some ferret work,” he called it. Sensel always came to the same bar at week-ends. He said he would probably not break the routine, now he was to work out of town. “Even if I make good friends there. Old habits, you know.” In fact, he returned on most week-ends. Herbie played him slowly; let Sensel make the running, before starting to draw him in. Sensel was recruited as a Telegraph Boy six months later. Peter Sensel had, all these years, been Priam.
It was in the same week that Herbie stumbled over a second possible convert. This time on his own stamping ground—at the Rialto in Pankow. He had known the girl by sight for a long time—Who did not know her at the Rialto? Men surrounded her, for she had an aura which spoke of high living in the bleak austerity of the DDR.
The night Herbie met her for the first time she was escorted by a young Russian: a pleasant, harmless junior officer wearing the collar patches of the armoured troops attached to the 20th Tank Army, who had their Headquarters at Bernau a few kilometres up the road. The girl was a stunning looker: tall, ash blonde, with incredibly long legs and a walk of acute sensuality. She made Herbie—in those days well-active—reel with pleasure when she passed near him. At close range you were always aware of the silken rustle of her thighs.
Herbie remembered the details with some clarity, if only because she was the last woman prior to Ursula Zunder. It was a Saturday night, and the Rialto was crowded: noisy with music and talk, the air clouded with smoke.
The young Russian officer was already a little drunk when he arrived with the girl. Herbie, standing near them, could not miss the fact that she was angry, and the Russian was making matters worse. Eventually the officer said something which really upset her. She became abusive—loud; not caring who heard. People were looking at the couple. The Russian spat something obscene at her, and she hit him: a crack over the cheek which seemed, in its ferocity, to silence the room. The young officer hissed an intake of breath, turned on his heel—Herbie could plainly see him now, half staggering on the turn—and left the bar, crimson-faced, trying to retain some dignity.
Herbie moved in before any other man could get near to the girl. Was there anything he could do? Did she need help? Martha Adler said another Schnapps would be pleasant. She appeared unconcerned. Good riddance to the lieutenant: he was nothing but a schoolboy anyway. She must have been all of twenty herself.
Several men came up—she seemed to know most of them by name—including a Russian captain, from the same outfit as the lieutenant. He apologised for his brother officer’s boorish behaviour. Martha Adler treated all these solicitous men politely, but dismissed them quickly by carrying on her conversation with Herbie Kruger.
The Schnapps had a mellowing effect. She started to appraise Herbie with her eyes. As they talked she began touching him from time to time: her slim hand resting, for a moment, on his wrist; or closing around his arm, in a gesture of affection, as she made some point.
Martha was always a beautifully groomed girl, her clothes fashionable and obviously bought in the West, the ash blonde hair rarely out of place—a toss of her head would send it flying, only for it to drop heavily back into place again. Herbie recalled how, even then, he felt like a lumbering, clumsy oaf when next to her in public.
They talked about the eternal subject of the times—politics: the zoned and split city of Berlin; the future of their country, which had now become two countries; and the discontent on both sides; the possibility of another war. “Just because I work at the Political Headquarters doesn’t mean I agree with all they’re trying to do,” she told him. Bells rang in Herbie’s head. Martha Adler was a secretary at the Niederschonhausen. “For two pins I’d settle in the West,” she said. “It’s a job, that’s all: not a political commitment. I do as I’m told and keep my thoughts to myself”—something she was not doing at that precise moment.
Martha had a small apartment nearby, in a block reserved for secretaries at the party Headquarters. “It’s the only really good thing. Goes with the job. If they kick me out or I throw it in then I lose my home. They have a girl by the armpits,” she giggled.
Herbie found her a voracious lover, but—after the disaster with Luzia Gabell—had no thought of doing a dependence act with her. In fact, looking back on it, she was more honest than Luzia. She left Herbie in no doubt about her philosophy and attitude towards men. She always had a lover: she was always faithful to him. Between lovers it was open season. At the moment of her meeting with Herbie, Martha Adler was between lovers. Another would appear soon. After one night in her company Herbie knew that it would not be him. He would not have wanted that in any case.
She hinted that, until the right man came along, Herbie was always welcome—to talk, drink, eat, or have her. She was a woman who craved for affection and love. In bed she became possessed with the necessity of being needed, “Lie to me,” she cried out when Herbie first had her. “Lie to me, please. Tell me you love me, and that there’s never been anyone else. Please, Herbie, please tell me …” This sentence rose to a choke as she climaxed, thrusting her body at him, pleading for him to go on through the experience.
In all, Herbie only slept with her three or four times. She was perfect material for the Telegraph Boys—if she could be trained, and trusted to control her tongue. He saw her at least once a week—even after the sexual jinks stopped, and she took a new, permanent lover. The lover was a convinced Communist: a German called Martin Schtemm, one of the male secretaries working for ‘Red’ Hilde Benjamin, the rut
hless Minister of Justice in Ulbricht’s regime. Martha Adler now received invitations to visit the exclusive residential compound for government heads at Wandlitz, where the leaders of the Ulbricht administration indulged their less proletarian passions.
It was from these visits that Herbie learned of the Minister of Justice’s ebony-panelled music room; the Deputy Prime Minister, Willi Steph’s, huge collection of ancient and valuable weapons; the aging socialist, Otto Grotewohl’s extensive, and priceless collection of carpets, paintings and antiques. It seemed that the old standards of the Nazi hierarchy had been passed on to the new elite of the Communist leadership. Ulbricht, Martha told him, was the only one to show any sign of restraint.
Martha Adler remained Herbie’s friend. Though she enjoyed the higher standard of living, obtainable through her Communist lover, the hypocrisy of it sickened her, closing her mind to any political claptrap Martin Schtemm might pour into her. Within a few months her secret thoughts were essentially anti-Party. Herbie taught her, by slow degrees, to keep silent. In all it took seven months to get her fully recruited and cleared; but Martha was worth it in the end.
Now, Herbie knew, she had long been the PPS to the Minister of Defence, within the Political Headquarters, and so had constant access to the Soviet Attaché. She had reported on him with clear and consistent accuracy for years. Out of all the Telegraph Boys, Martha Adler had, during the time when there was only sporadic servicing, been one of the most hard-working. She had even found alternative ways to get her reports into the West. Martha Adler was Hecuba: her material high grade.
It was about a month after that first meeting with Martha Adler in the Rialto that Herbie met Ursula Zunder for the first time—so altering his emotional life out of all proportion, and sealing the sadness of his future.
It happened on a chill November evening, when the city air was damp with mist, and the odd scent of woodsmoke crept into the streets. Herbie was returning from a day crammed with work in the West. He travelled back on the S-Bahn, his mind still active, alive with possible names for the team of Telegraph Boys.
