The Garden of Weapons (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  Tubby Fincher’s shoulders rose and fell. “You want me to go and hold Worboys’ hand. See it through.” He was not asking, but stating a fact.

  “It would still contain things, if …”

  “If Big Herbie happened to pull it off?” Fincher actually laughed aloud. “Okay, I’ll contain it for as long as possible. Rorke’s Drift, what? I’ll go, if that’s what you want. Contain, then wrap it up the moment it explodes.” He added that he was certain it would explode. Herbie Kruger could not last long in East Berlin. “Give him twenty-four hours. Probably less. Our Herbie’s a known commodity. Passage of time means little to Moscow Centre. They mark your card, it stays marked. Give you the Black Spot, that’s it. For life.”

  The Director agreed about the twenty-four hours, but said Herbie might just manage it in the time: clinging on to straws. Then, without warning, his fury burst. “I’ll have his balls for this: stupid, sentimental, big, idiotic Kraut.”

  Tubby was always one for rationalising other people’s thought processes. Now he found himself doing it for Herbie. If you put yourself into Herbie Kruger’s brain, the thinking was rational enough, he argued. With the confessing of Tapeworm, Herbie would consider his career fully blown anyway. The myth and legend had shattered. Within those given circumstances the revenge motive would be strong enough in any man. Herbie, the cold professional, had gone rogue on them; and not surprising. Revenge and, maybe, bring out the woman—Electra. They all knew about Electra, in spite of Herbie. “Bit of comfort for his old age, what?”

  “In lieu of pension,” the Director snapped. “You on then, Tubby?”

  Fincher nodded.

  Once more the Director grabbed at the telephone, this time to speak to movements control: ordering something very fast from the RAF, to Berlin for Fincher. “I want a magic carpet,” he said. Then, when it was arranged, he rattled off orders. Fincher was to assess and take action—the Director’s responsibility. If things were very bad, and they managed to track Herbie, Berlin Station could send the dogs in and pull him out. “But only if there’s grave risk. Try and contain for as long as possible; and remember, it would be better if Herbie went the journey rather than being dried out in Moscow—the stupid clown. Kill him if you have to.”

  The Director was known for his calm under pressure. Now the voice and the ruthlessness of the orders shook Tubby Fincher. He reflected that the Director must be very, very fond of Big Herbie.

  At that moment Herbie, now the American Herbert Kagen, bleeped the Trepan team from his room in the Metropol Hotel.

  “Bloody hell,” Tiptoes reacted as the map swivelled on the screen. “The bugger’s installed himself in their one decent doss house.”

  “Nerve,” Worboys said without betraying any feeling, controlling the quake in his bowels and knowing that it was for Herbie: fear for the lumbering giant.

  In the background Charles was doing his nut about Max. He had gone on about Max ever since Worboys unzipped Herbie’s message.

  “For Christ’s sake go out and find him yourself, Charles,” Worboys turned in his chair, glaring at the lion-tamer. “Out,” he shouted. “Out. You know which way they were heading when they left the Dahlmannstrasse. Follow your nose and get your little chum out.” He added that he presumed Charles had enough instruments concealed about his person to open up a car.

  Charles, taking Worboys at his word, turned and left without even thanking him.

  Worboys said it would stop the rattle anyway. He had the volume on the receiver turned right up—a low hum in the background—and hardly took his eyes off the VUs in case a screech came over sooner than expected. Miriam leaned back, watching the screen, smoking another of Worboys’ cigarettes.

  “Done it now, young fella-me-lad,” sneered Tiptoes. “Nobody to get coffee or grub.”

  “Just watch the bloody screen and keep reporting. I’m in the chair until they send someone else in.”

  “Soddin’ SNAFU,” Tiptoes snarled.

  “Masterful,” grinned Miriam Grubb.

  Tony Worboys could not think of any retort. He stayed silent, pondering on the pressures that had sent Herbie over the Wall into the East. Poor bugger, he thought.

  2

  IN THE LOBBY OF the Metropol they wanted to know if Herr Kagen required a car or taxi. They could arrange it in minutes. Herr Kagen said not today, thank you, in poor German, with an atrocious American accent. He would like a map, though. He thought a little stroll would do him good. Could they recommend a place to eat? The hotel restaurant was good; they thought he should come back to the hotel. Herr Kagen said he would think about it. He found it most interesting to be in East Berlin and, with that, left through the main doors, conscious of the hard black pistol, held with a makeshift harness—fashioned with a necktie—around his thigh. Not any good for the fast draw, he knew. But it was there if he wanted it, and had time to pull the tie end which would allow the weapon to fall down his trouser leg. Another trick they taught at the school, where a certain hypocrisy reigned, because they forbade the carrying of arms in the field—except under special authorisation.

  It was starting to sink into dusk, but there were, oddly, more people about: the warm evening dragging couples from their workers’ flats, or apartments, on to the streets. Whatever their politics Germans were all great evening strollers.

  Herbie walked without purpose: a harmless tourist with an envied expensive camera on his shoulder. A big American. A big quiet American, he smiled. The aimless ramble had purpose. With nobody to watch out for him, Herbie did all the tricks of a singleton. He watched faces; the few cars; feet; shoes and headgear; looking for repeats. As if on a whim, he would suddenly cross the road—glancing carefully left and right—turn down streets, or double back. At one point he stood, close to a handy shop-front, where the glass acted as a mirror, as though examining his map, which he carried open, a passport to his tourism.

  Yet, very gradually, going by a long and devious route, Herbie was getting nearer and nearer his goal. A clever street man would be able to follow the pattern. The dog-legs and angles he took brought Herbie in a series of ragged, zigzagged circles, closing in each time on the apartment block he knew so well. The place where, on that November evening so long ago now, he had returned Ursula Zunder; to stand waving farewell and think about holding the magazines that had been so close to the secrets of her body.

  There was a moment, when he began to close in on the area, that Herbie wished, with great fervour, that he had someone watching out for him. For no particular reason he recalled long talks with other field officers about whom they would choose to watch out for them. One American had been unyielding with his priorities. In a foreign country, alone and lost, he would prefer, first, the aid of Mossad, the Israeli service, because of their sense of survival; second, his own service which was, of course, the CIA. Herbie’s Service—the British—ran third; while the man’s fourth and fifth choices were, unequivocally, the KGB and the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence.

  In the same circumstances Herbie would have made similar choices, swapping the British Service and the CIA; but that was because of his personal familiarity with his own Service.

  He was behind the block now. Circle once more. Check the lights in the windows. Make sure she’s in, and pray there’s nobody with her. In a sudden flurry of anxiety he wondered if the block still had the same house superintendent, who would certainly recognise him. Then he realised that was not possible. The fellow had been old and on the point of retirement; a new one would have replaced him long ago. Herbie would still have to try avoidance. The last thing he wanted was to be spotted, by anyone, going in or out.

  There was a light in Ursula’s apartment. The curtains were not drawn; the window open against the warm evening. Herbie went on walking, occasionally glancing up, hoping to spot movement. One or two people? He would have liked to know.

  God in heaven, he wished he could have at least brought Schnabeln for cover. Again, impossible. If it was to be set
up quickly Christoph would have his own work cut out that night: a feigned illness to get him away from the tourist bus, then a fast round-up of the rest of the Quartet, who would have to take to the streets in search of their personal Telegraph Boys. The messages, the timings, the meets which had to be prepared for tomorrow. Then, on top of that, the word passed for a woman who used to live in the Weibensee district, and was known as Luzia Gabell or Lotte Krug; depending on the light and year.

  Schnabeln had said this would be relatively easy. There was an old buddy who worked in the Vopo Records Office. “Spin him the story. A flame from the past. He’s a romantic. I make it sound good, and he’ll go all starry eyed.” Thus Christoph Schnabeln in the Dahlmannstrasse house, openly, for part of Herbie’s brief had been to lay the ghost of Luzia Gabell. Max could pass all that to London. No problem.

  He was approaching the doors to the apartment block now, again wishing he had a car handy, or someone placed at a good angle to signal safety. At least he was ninety-nine per cent sure there were no leeches on his tail.

  The house superintendent was not in evidence. Low wattage bulbs burned in the bleak lobby—bare stone floor, walls of rough concrete on which some Party artist had tried to create a mural—great ugly figures, depicting the Workers’ Struggle: agricultural on one wall, industrial on the other, with a battle raging on the third. A lot of people seemed to be lifting barges and toting bales. An equally large number appeared to be getting shot. The artist was good with blood. He was, Herbie thought wryly, probably an ancestor of Jack the Ripper. All the figures had square faces with big chins, and even the women sported shoulders like nightclub bouncers.

  Slowly and heavily, Herbie began to mount the stone staircase. Ursula lived on the fourth floor. He knew the stairs almost by heart, and his memory had not played false. On the third floor he saw the door to the first flat. When he had been with Ursula, in this building, that particular apartment was owned by a couple of elderly people who seemed to have a vast army of sons and daughters. They would all come and visit every Sunday. One of the sons, Herbie knew, had been killed by the Grepos while trying to cross the Wall in ’63. The couple had been prostrate with grief, and the SSD had men there, quizzing them for days after it happened.

  At last the fourth floor. The crack in the wall, at the turning of the stairs, had not been plastered but had grown bigger with the years, like a jagged wound bursting from its stitches. Cement and plaster flaked away from either side in large lumps, making a map of tributaries and lakes from the broad river of the crack.

  Along the passage. Still bare concrete, some areas scrubbed clean; dirty patches elsewhere. Ursula’s was the third door on the right—a front-facing apartment.

  The first door—Kurt and Karren Pilger. Good Party members. Dour and devoted. Communists from Hitler’s day. The second door—they’d be dead and gone now, for they were an old couple, ailing, afraid of being separated and taken to different hospitals. The Händlers. Franz and Jessie Händler.

  Just before he knocked at her door—their old, special knock: duh-duh-duh dump-dump—Herbie thought about Christoph Schnabeln, hoping that he had managed to get away: that he was making contact. Then he heard her feet; quick, still the agile, half-loping, run. Did he imagine the sound of hope in the noise of her feet coming towards the door? The lock and the bolts. Then—

  The figure was still trim and neat. There were a few lines, small crows’ feet around the eyes; and a greyness to the hair, but it was still Ursula. Really she did not look changed at all, the hair remaining copper in spite of the frost of grey; the eyes dark with flecks showing, even in the dim passage light; the nose, unchanged—Italian from her grandmother. The oval face seemed flat, the expression blank for the fraction of a second, then her hand flew to her mouth, and he saw the tears springing into her eyes, the mouth breaking open half in grief and half in joy, as the words came out in a long whispering wail of disbelief—“Herbie—Herbie. My God. Herbie, my darling Herbie,” and she was in his arms, fragile but soft against him as though he had never been away.

  Herbie held her, crushed her with his great bear arms. Through the blur of tears in his own eyes he saw, over her shoulder, that nothing had changed—the Durer pen and ink drawing of the Avenging Angel hung near the door to the bedroom. The copy of the Meissen figurine stood on the shelf. And, behind it, the ruby glasses with facet-cut stems.

  3

  FROM THE SOUVENIR SHOP the coach party went as promised for a drink at the Budapest. They were then taken on a quick tour of the darkening streets—up the relatively new Lenin Allee, back through the Marx-Engels-Platz, then up the old Unter den Linden to view, from the coach, the Brandenburg Gate. It did not look much different when seen from the East than it did from the West.

  After this pointless joyride the party moved on to the radio tower, where, in the bulbous, ugly functional restaurant, they were to have dinner. After dinner, Schnabeln told them, they would visit one of East Berlin’s more famous night spots. He had forgotten which one was on tonight’s itinerary, and had to refer to his colleague—Rudy Frettcher—who said that tonight, being Saturday, was a special occasion. They would be taken to the Metropol bar and restaurant where there was dancing and a floor show.

  Christoph Schnabeln had missed that point. It consciously flicked through his mind that Herbie had better be out of sight when the tour arrived at the Metropol. The American lady from Des Moines had already asked him—quietly, thank God—if the big man who had been sitting next to her was all right. He assured her that everything was in order. She was not to worry if he did not show up again. “He wanted to spend the night with friends here. I’ve told him where to get permission.”

  At the radio tower restaurant Schnabeln made straight for the men’s room, hefting his briefcase, never letting it out of sight for a moment. The room was empty, and he quickly doused his face with water, watching the elderly attendant through the mirror as he combed his hair. The attendant was not interested in Schnabeln. In a few moments the male members of the coach party would be in, and the man’s mind was on the possibility of tips in foreign currency. Tipping was not allowed; but nobody refused it.

  With his head down, Schnabeln’s hand closed around the bar of cheap soap in place on the wash-basin, sliding a thumbnail deep over one corner to break off a small piece, slipping it into his mouth, holding it there for a moment and then swallowing. The nausea came very quickly. The thought of swallowing soap had already brought on a queasiness. The act itself did the trick. Schnabeln retched, grabbed the briefcase, turned, and headed for one of the lavatories.

  “Too much to drink, Comrade?” the old attendant shouted.

  Schnabeln retched again. The soap genuinely made him feel ill. “No,” he replied between the bouts of nausea. No, he had not taken anything to drink. A bug, perhaps. Or something he ate.

  “Something you ate here?” the elderly attendant did not seem surprised. Then there were noises; people coming into the men’s room.

  Schnabeln swallowed, held on to the briefcase, and came out to see Rudy Frettcher acting as shepherd to the tourists. As he made for the wash-basins again, Frettcher spotted him, asking if he was okay. “You look terrible. Like the walking dead.”

  Schnabeln said he had not felt good all day. It was terrible now. He had been sick.

  “Hoffer’s outside,” Frettcher motioned with his head. “Wants to see you. Seems anxious.”

  Schnabeln might have known that his boss would be on hand as soon as possible following the return from the West. He would be worried about the schedules. His threats before Schnabeln left were really caused by the man’s own anxiety. Even the Germans in the East seemed to have caught the Russian disease of passing the buck, as the Americans called it. Hoffer’s superiors would want to know if the regular tourist coach trips were to be reduced. If there were major changes which might affect the regular income they would scream at Hoffer. Hoffer would scream at Schnabeln.

  He went unsteadily out into th
e main body of the restaurant.

  “My God, you look terrible,” Hoffer greeted him.

  Schnabeln said he thought it was a bug. He had felt rotten all day, and had just been sick.

  “What’s the news?” Schnabeln’s illness would not deter Hoffer from the main course of business.

  Schnabeln asked if he could sit down for a minute, and his boss became solicitous. Eventually Schnabeln gave him the patter, just as Herbie had told him. The news was good. There was to be no reduction of coach trips for the time being—in spite of the high prices and the general recession. In fact the bookings appeared to be up for September, and the firm might even have to run two buses on some nights. However, they were not altogether happy about the evening trips. There had been some complaints. They would have to make certain that only the best places were used. He was sorry; that was mainly his fault. He would write a report tomorrow. Now, he felt too sick.

  Hoffer scowled at the business about complaints, but showed obvious relief that the tours were not to be reduced. Christoph Schnabeln had better go home, back to the Metropol. “See the doctor. Maybe he’ll give you something. You probably ate rich in the West. I would never trust the food over there.”

  Schnabeln thanked him, as Rudy Frettcher came out of the men’s room. Waiters stood near, ready to conduct the party to their tables. Again, Frettcher asked how his comrade was feeling. Hoffer, with his most brusque pomposity, announced that Rudy would have to take over the tour on his own. Christoph was not well enough to see the evening through.

  Schnabeln once more said thank you—starting towards the door, purposely only remembering that he held the passports in his briefcase when he was almost out of the restaurant. The nausea had begun to pass. With a weak, wry smile, he opened the case, handing over the passports to Frettcher. They included the American passport belonging to the large Elmer L. Krust, pushed down into the middle of the pile. As long as they had no trouble with a headcount—at the Eastern end of the checkpoint on the way back—the passport would be removed from the pile by someone at the control point at the Western end. Herbie had arranged all that.