by Adam Hall
I think I got the tone right: it wasn't an invitation, only a suggestion. We weren't so much a man and a woman as a secret police captain-and an Airforce lieutenant in a communist state; she'd pay her own bill when we left, if she decided to stay.
'Very well. I have time.'
The other two had been more feminine, more relaxed, and neither of them had known anything about Moscow, hadn't particularly cared, and that was why I hadn't gone any further with them. This one was into a fairly sophisticated summary, halfway through the meal, of her thoughts on the future of Europe.
'It's impossible for Greater Germany to remain bifurcated for much longer, given the climate of world-political thinking inside the Kremlin — given the undoubted genius of Gorbachev. And it's impossible to conceive of the new Germany following the corrupt and bourgeois system of the decadent West. The direction we shall be taking is obvious.'
We hadn't ordered wine. I'm driving. But when I get to my apartment I shall drink Underberg. She hadn't said when I get home.
'Have you been in the West?'
'Only for a few days,' she said, 'to the other side.'
'You were allowed to cross?'
She moved her head quickly to look at me. 'A group of us made a request to go there, for educational purposes. It was granted. There was no question of "being allowed" to go.'
I'd made a slip and she'd picked it up at once; I was thinking like a Westerner and I'd have to watch it.
'And how did it strike you?'
'Have you been there, comrade captain?'
'My name's Kurt, as you know. May I call you Lena?'
It stopped everything dead and she glanced down, and when she looked up again her eyes had changed. I'd thrown a personal note into the relationship, and her reaction was the same as when I'd suggested we have a meal together, but stronger, and she held my eyes for a moment, watchful, engaged.
'Very well, you may call me Lena.'
'"Thank you. Yes, I've been into West Berlin.'
In a moment, looking down again, her strong fingers toying with a crust, 'I found it pathetic. I don't think it's important that people can drive up to a bank and do business without having to get out of their car. I don't need the choice of a dozen different brands of breakfast cereal, all of which contain fifty per cent refined sugar. I need bread. Bread, food, work to do for the world. But the difference between the East and West isn't really significant. The people wear much the same clothes, have children, go to the movies, drive cars. War springs from fear, not from the slight difference in ways of life, and while there are these two all-powerful nations pitched together on the same planet there's bound to be fear. We need one world, not of nations but of people, earthlings, living in harmony, working for the future, poised on the threshold of space, the ultimate adventure. To achieve that, a last war is necessary. My air base, Werneuchen — ' she twisted in her chair to face me '- is in the front line of that war, and the thought excites me beyond all words. I am in the front line of the last war on earth, and when it's over I shall still be here to see the dawn of the new world. When I think of it in the night it's like an orgasm.'
The dark eyes were liquid suddenly, shimmering, the mouth parted and the tips of the sharp teeth touching together, the small face drawn into a rictus, fierce, vulpine, carnal.
'I can imagine,' I said.
Third time lucky: I'd creased the rear ends of a Fiat and a VW last night and toyed with schweinfleisch and sauerkraut in two shifts and hadn't got anywhere, but this was the one I wanted, manic, obsessed and pro-Gorbachev.
''That surprised me.' She was still twisted in her chair, watching me.
'What did?'
'My reference to orgasm.'
'When feelings get intense enough, there's nowhere else they can finish up.'
'You don't seem,' she said, 'the kind of man who lets his brakes fail.'
Still watching me, her eyes dipping to my mouth, lifting to my eyes again.
'It didn't have to look like a pickup.'
'But that isn't all it is.'
'No.'
The man in the moth-eaten fur hat had been sitting opposite, under the portraits of Lenin and Honecker; now he was leaving, shrugging to his coat. I'd been checking him, because he'd come in here soon after I had; but I was satisfied; he'd sat too close, and was known here, a regular. And Werneuchen Air Force Base was eighteen kilometres from Berlin and I'd driven here with enough feints and detours to arrive totally clean. That was essential. Back in Berlin I would have to leave myself open again, but I was here to get information and I didn't want to be disturbed.
'I'm not the type,' she said, 'that men want to pick up.'
'Most men are conservative.'
In a moment, her eyes still on me, 'I think we have a lot in common. You're very disciplined. So am I.'
'I don't take it. But I could give it.'
'I'm more complicated,' she said, 'than that.'
I looked for the boy in the apron. 'Would you like some more coffee?'
'No. I'm going now. Will you come with me?'
'Of course.'
Underberg, black, bitter, gold-rimmed on the surface, the German version of Fernet Branca, lighter but not much, in a shot-glass, scented, viscid.
Light came from slits in a shutter, blue light falling across black leather, black silk, turning the smoke milky, the tendril of smoke curling from the incense in the black lacquer bowl. A single gold eye, fixed in the brow of a mask on the wall, watched.
'There are these,' she said, the blue light dwelling on pale skin and the darkness of coarse hair, the shadows sculpting the long lines of muscle.
Metal glinted, chased, knurled, cloisonne; the smell of leather came into the air, underlying the sandalwood and the emanations from her body.
'Where did you get them?'
'I collect them.'
It wasn't an answer. Heat came in waves from a floor unit, the thermostat cutting on and off.
'How did you get them through the customs?'
'Are you serious? They were smuggled in from Poland.'
Faintly, from inside the building, the voice of the guardian. Someone coming in late.
'Feel this,' she said. 'Feel it now.'
The thermostat cut on, cut off. Try this one, look how they made it. Have you ever seen such imagination? There was no fierceness in her now, in this different aspect of her obsessiveness; she became loosened, languid, pliant. I wasn't uninterested; the libido is linked with the urgent needs of the psyche, not the body, and there were the same dark reaches in her that were in me, the same urge to go beyond the knowable. Here was the demesne not of Eros but Thanatos, and this had nothing to do with the creation of life, but with the expression of the fear of death.
She masked herself and unmasked, during the night hours, revealing herself in a way that left her with a nakedness that seared the nerves.
I'm taking so much risk, she said again and again, and this was the nucleus of her innermost identity, the dark heart of the vortex: she talked of risk as she talked of love, and I had the thought, at some time before dawn, that in this brief exposition of her psyche she was expressing the same pathological drives that had goaded me into mission after mission, each time seeking the ultimate experience — a kiss from death.
She made coffee and we drank it in the first pooling of daylight that came through the shutters. She looked sated, drained, liberated.
'This brave new world of yours,' I said, 'isn't some kind of facade?'
'I know it seems contradictory, but no, it's all I live for. It's an intellectual concept, nothing to do with — what goes on underneath.'
So I told her there was a major threat to General-Secretary Gorbachev and that she could help to defuse it by tunnelling immediately into the substructure of Werneuchen Airforce Base and looking for any changes of plan in its routine training operations during the next four days. I gave her the number of my room at the hotel and told her to use the code-name Renata.
11: MIRROR
<
br /> Twelve noon: meeting with Yasolev.
I'm not absolutely sure, but at that time I think he was ready to cancel Quickstep and tell us to get out of Berlin. 'We wanted information.' Standing with his feet placed solidly apart to balance him. 'We now have information. We should act upon it.' Thick square hands chopping at the air.
'It's not exactly information,' Cone said quietly.
'It has been confirmed that the target is Gorbachev. Your department has alerted you to Werneuchen Airforce Base and its bombers as a possible threat.'
'It's just possibilities, Viktor, not information.'
'In any case,' I said, 'I've got someone working for us at Werneuchen.'
'Who?' His eyes sunk deep under their brows, defensive, impatient. I believe he might have thought we were trying to play down the few shreds we had to work with, for our own reasons. Yasolev hadn't been trained to trust people.
'One of the officers,' I said, 'in their administration.'
'An agent-in-place?'
Cone looked down. I didn't answer. Yasolev tilted his head, didn't persist. London and the KGB were working in liaison for a single mission, and that didn't mean exposing our networks. Nor was I going to blow 'Renata'.
'I can send ten agents into Werneuchen.'
'We know.' Cone, hunched forward, hands lost in his pockets, watching Yasolev intently. 'You can send fifty in, and the whole of the personnel is going to close up like crabs, and you — '
'Going to shut their mouths,' I said, because Cone's Russian was patchy and he'd meant clams — molluski — and I didn't want any misunderstandings. Yasolev was tricky enough to handle as it was.
'That's right,' Cone said, 'and you wouldn't get anything out of them.'
Yasolev was quiet for a bit, looking anywhere but at us, at the Wall through the window, at the tea tray with its cups still upside down, at the carpet with its cigarette-burns and its worn threads. We hadn't poured any tea; we didn't even sit down; the tension was keeping us on our feet like puppets with their wires jammed.
'You know my responsibilities.' Not chopping now; motionless, sunk into obduracy. 'The welfare of the General-Secretary is in my hands. My hands.'
'We think we all need him,' I said, 'or we wouldn't be here. There's more at stake than your neck.' I didn't use those exact words, but that was the tone. But the stand he was making wasn't entirely because he'd be shot at dawn if anything happened to his General-Secretary; he was a KGB man and when the KGB wanted information they normally sent in a regiment and turned the building upside down and beat on the sides.
'You seriously believe that one agent can do as well as ten?'
'One whiff,' Cone said, 'of any KGB action inside Werneuchen and they'll shut their mouths and Horst Volper will immediately make an alternative plan. We've got to go very careful.'
''Then I will send one of my agents in. One.'
'All right,' Cone said quietly, 'then we'll wrap up the mission and go home.'
That surprised me. But we'd got less than four days left and Yasolev had called us in to do the job our way and that was how it would have to be done.
''That is putting the matter too strongly.' He was chopping at the air again, and I was glad my hand wasn't in the way. 'We agreed to liaise with each other, on the understanding that — '
'Viktor.' Cone's voice was as quiet as Shepley's. 'If you won't stick the rules, we're going home.'
Yasolev swung his body to one side and then to the other like a trapped bear, and I had a flash of what he'd be like when he lost patience and gave the order for someone's destruction.
'You will not see my point of view.'
'I see it very clearly,' Cone said. 'And I want you to see ours. You guaranteed that while the mission was running the KGB wouldn't interfere.'
We waited.
'But you fail to understand the weight of my responsibilities. If — '
'You knew how heavy they were,' Cone told him, 'when you first approached London. Nothing's changed.'
'But of course it has changed. The General-Secretary is now to make a visit here.'
That was true and there was only one way out. 'Do you think,' I asked him, 'there's any threat to the General-Secretary from Werneuchen Airforce Base?'
'But of course. Your department in London spoke of it. Isn't that so?'
'Yes. So the day before Gorbachev lands in Berlin you can send as many people as you like into Werneuchen and close the place down and ground all the bombers and lock up all the pilots. Your General-Secretary isn't at risk until his plane touches down here, so until then we want you to leave us alone.'
1:15: lunch with Pollock at the Steingarten.
'It's just that I can't work up any interest in soccer. Can you?'
'Not really,' I said.
'I don't imagine. Nothing like cricket, is there?' Spoken with passion. 'I spend most of the winter replaying the Tests on the VCR. Any time you'd like to watch, give me a buzz.'
'I'll do that.'
At 2:15 I would walk into the street.
'But even with the videotapes it seems an awfully long time till May.'
'May?'
'When the cricket starts again.'
'Ah, yes.'
Walk into the street, if I could face it.
He'd told me he'd only got an hour for lunch, awfully sorry. 'Miki's' visit had relegated all other business to the back burner. That was why I would walk into the street at 2:15. And there wasn't any question, really, of not facing it. They expected it of me: Shepley, Cone, Yasolev. I expected it of myself.
'Losing your appetite?'
'I had rather a late breakfast.'
'Ah.'
I had asked Pollock to lunch because Horst Volper would have stationed a permanent watch on him. So far I hadn't found a tag on me when I'd left the hotel. So far the safe-house near Spittelmarkt was unblown. Unless Cone or Yasolev had been picked up, Pollock would unwittingly provide Volper's cell with a potential contact with me, and they'd go whenever he went. They would have come to the Steingarten. They would be waiting outside.
It was beginning to feel hot in here, and this was normal; in fact the place was underheated.
'Well, well.' Looking at his watch. 'Tempus fugit.'
I got my wallet out but he put down a 1,000-mark note on top of the bill. 'Honoured guest of the embassy.' Clean white smile, lowering his voice. 'Not often we get anyone out here with your kind of credentials.'
I thanked him.
'Are they looking after you at the hotel?'
'No complaints, except for the view.'
'Oh yes, you're at the front, aren't you? It's a bit sinister, I know what you mean. I'm not really used to it myself, yet, and I've been here three years. Kind of presence, isn't it?'
I’m rather relieved. I thought I was being over-sensitive.'
He got up and fetched his coat from the rack. 'Oh no, it gives most visitors the willies. I send quite a few of them to that hotel, visiting artists, culture vultures. I've booked Cat Baxter in there.' Chasing the sleeve of his coat. I helped him. 'Thanks.'
Rock star.
When is she coming?'
''Tomorrow.'
'She's bringing her group?'
Yea. Got a concert scheduled, big one. God, I hope she's going to behave herself — she's worse than Vanessa Redgrave, except that Cat's thing is human rights. Share my cab?'
'I'm not going far.'
Hoped it wasn't true. Hoped very much it wasn't true.
'Take care, then, and you know where your friends are if ever you need anything.'
'Yes.'
And where my enemies are.
Outside.
I found a telephone near the rest rooms. Cone answered at the second ring.
'For what it's worth,' I told him, 'Cat Baxter is bringing her rock group here tomorrow. The embassy's putting them up at our hotel.'
'Well, now.'
'I suggest you tell London. How is Yasolev?'
'I don't know. He's
across at the Soviet Embassy.'
'Do you think he's breaking up under us?'
'I don't know. He's a very tough bloke, but he's got a very tough assignment. Thatcher and Reagan are one thing, but Gorbachev is turning half the world inside out and we don't want anyone to stop him. But that's my worry. You're still with Pollock?'
'He's just left here.'
'The Steingarten?'
'Yes.'
'And when are you leaving there?'
'Now.'
'Immediate plans?'
One, two, three: 'I'm going to see if I can get them interested.'
He didn't answer right away. 'You'll have support.'
Not really.
I said, 'Understood.'
'I want you to keep in contact.'
Said I would. What else could I say? If I made contact with him before this day's end it would simply mean I was still alive and had access to Horst Volper. If I didn't make contact then he'd have to signal London: shadow down.
I dropped the receiver back and walked through the lobby, big poster over the door — Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic! — they put it everywhere, on posters, book matches, hotel stationery, as if they might be having a little trouble getting people to believe it.
Swing doors, a woman behind me — Danke schon, bitte — and out into the street.
Felt suddenly naked, vulnerable.
The afternoon's operation was simple enough. I was going to make myself conspicuous so that they could catch me in the open and try killing me off as they tried before and I was going to give them a chance because Volper was the target for Quickstep and we didn't know where to find him and the only way to do it was to meet with his people at close quarters and ask them questions. It hadn't worked very well with Skidder but at least we'd got Werneuchen into the picture. This afternoon it might work better. But as I went down the steps onto the pavement and turned west along Dieckmannstrasse I felt so very vulnerable because they'd known I was in the Steingarten with Pollock and they could have got a hunting-rifle set up on a rooftop across the street and they could be lining up the reticle and putting pressure on the trigger spring now, and the air felt supernaturally cold and my body felt strangely light because whether you are very close to death or only think you are very close to death the nervous system reacts in precisely the same way: you go through a subtle shift in reality and feel poised, floating.
