The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  The West Berlin Police scurried to the spot below the window . . . Over the heads in front of him Wilderness could see the archaic, opéra-bouffe hats of the police and the tin helmets of the fire brigade.

  “Springen Sie, Oma, springen!” went up from the crowd.

  Jump, Granny, jump!

  Wilderness couldn’t see it, but it was obvious that a net or blanket was being held out for her.

  She didn’t jump. She threw the cat into the blanket and froze. In the precious seconds wasted the VoPos came up behind her. Wilderness would have bet a fiver they hadn’t known what was happening until the chant of “Jump!” had begun.

  A VoPo grabbed her by one arm, a cloth-capped workman off the building site by the other. She slipped off the ledge, her own weight jerking her free of the VoPo, and dangled by her left arm fit to tear it from its socket.

  “Springen Sie, Oma!”

  Both men tried to pull her back inside.

  “Springen Sie, Oma!”

  Out of nowhere a young man in a singlet leapt at her as though in a rugby tackle and missed. A brief tug-of-war followed. Two men above, two below, arms versus legs. The German version of the judgement of Solomon. Pull grandma in two.

  Gravity won and the old lady toppled into the hands of her rescuers. A cheer, followed by blown raspberries, and a host of two-fingered “fuck you”s held up to the defeated representatives of the East.

  He’d seen enough. He’d had enough. There’d been no death or injury, not so much as a bruise, but if not fatality then there seemed to be finality in the leap of an old woman. This . . . whatever it was . . . seemed to have hit rock bottom. Here he was, a British Intelligence officer, at the geopolitical crossroads of the world in the twentieth century looking up an old woman’s skirt on behalf of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government. It was a circus, the Cold War Circus . . . roll up roll up.

  He turned to leave. The West Berlin cops were pushing the crowd back. Everyone between him and the little fat bloke had left.

  The little fat bloke stared at him and said,

  “Вена, не так ли?”

  Vienna, am I right? Bugger. Who would have thought the little man took in quite so much? To remember his face out of dozens, perhaps hundreds.

  “Да.”

  “Если бы я был нервным характером, я мог бы думал, что ЦРС следит за мной по всей Европе.”

  If I were a nervous man I might think the CIA were following me around Europe.

  “A я MI6, товарищ Хрущев.”

  I’m MI6, Comrade Khrushchev.

  “Ага. Что привело вас сюда, это не ради меня, что ли?”

  Ah. What brings you here, surely not me?

  “Did anyone know you were coming?”

  “Of course not, and unless you tell him Ulbricht will never know.”

  “You just had to see?”

  “Yes. I had to see for myself.”

  “From this side?”

  “Yes. To see what you see.”

  It was irresistible. The only man Wilderness could think of who would resist this temptation was Burne-Jones, and Burne-Jones was a thousand miles away.

  “Comrade Khrushchev, if the British or the Americans were to just come over here and rip up the barbed wire and concrete blocks, what would you do?”

  “I have thirty-four divisions surrounding Berlin.”

  “Doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Your question is hypothetical. A month ago it probably wasn’t, but you did nothing and your moment passed. It’s here to stay.”

  “If you’re unlucky, comrade . . .”

  He cocked his head momentarily back towards the nailed-up Bernauer Straße apartment block.

  “. . . This will be your monument.”

  “How so?”

  “You want to bring peace, you talk about a united, free Germany. If this . . . barbed wire and concrete . . . this . . . I almost said ‘wall’ but it’s hardly a wall yet . . . if this stays, it will be what the world remembers Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev for . . . and I’ll remember the day I stood with the leader of half the world just to look at an old woman’s knickers.”

  “You English can be so damned cheeky. Хуй тебе! Fuck you!”

  Hackles raised, Khrushchev returned to his car. Wilderness was about to walk off himself, slightly disappointed not to have kick-started World War III, when the window wound down and a finger beckoned.

  “What’s your name, English?”

  “John Holderness.”

  “Before you make this my monument you should come and see the Soviet Union. Come whenever you like. My people will have your name. There is so much more that the world will remember me by far better than Berlin, barbed wire, concrete blocks and an old lady’s knickers. You’ll see. You are wrong, comrade, but вы увидите . . . you’ll see.”

  Later, on the nightly news, Wilderness finally learnt the name of the old woman he had watched leap to freedom—Frieda Schulze.

  §96

  Wilderness called on Radley after breakfast the following day. He had no intention of mentioning his brief encounter with Khrushchev. He had no intention of ever telling anyone.

  And if he had, Radley would not have heard him.

  Radley looked awful. He hadn’t shaved and had the raggy look of a man who’d been up all night. The blinds were still drawn. The ashtray was full, and a bottle of Bell’s stood, cap off, on his desk with less than an inch in the bottom.

  “Tom?”

  Radley stood up, ran his fingers through his hair, dusted the fag ash off his lap.

  “Sorry, Joe. Wasn’t expecting you today. Well, not this early at any rate.”

  “It’s after nine, Tom.”

  “Fuck me. Is it?”

  “Tom. Just tell me.”

  Wilderness swept a pile of documents off the chair, sat down and waited for Radley to do the same.

  Instead he scrabbled around among the mess of papers on his desk to retrieve just one teleprinter page.

  “TASS release. Midnight Moscow time.”

  He handed it to Wilderness, sat down and helped himself to the last of the scotch.

  On August 25th, officers of the USSR arrested the British secret agent known as Geoffrey Stephen Masefield. Masefield has made a full confession of his crimes against the USSR and will be tried accordingly. Trial commences Thursday September 28th.

  “August twenty-fifth? They’ve had him for a month and you didn’t know?”

  “It was due to be a longish trip this time. He was supposed to tour half a dozen zinc or iron smelters or something. I didn’t expect to hear from him at all while he was there. Off radar. Par for the course after all. Truth is he’s only a week overdue. They busted him the third day he was there.”

  “A week overdue. Tom. For fuck’s sake. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Radley was weeping now. Salt tears and scotch.

  “Did you tell Burne-Jones?”

  Radley just shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s . . . it’s messy.”

  “How messy?”

  “His sources . . . I wasn’t wholly straight with BJ about Masefield’s sources.”

  Wilderness stood up, kicked the chair backwards and hauled Radley to his feet by the front of his shirt.

  “You stupid sod. Are you saying this professor of his set him up?”

  “Joe . . . Joe . . . please put me down. I might puke any second.”

  Wilderness threw him back in his chair.

  “You fucking idiot.”

  Radley was rummaging around in a desk drawer only to surface with another bottle of scotch.

  Wilderness threw it against th
e wall, only to hear it bounce off without breaking.

  “Tom. Tell me everything.”

  He picked up the scotch bottle, righted his chair and stared back at the weeping Radley.

  “No. It’s not that. Matsekpolyev was . . . is real . . . completely kosher I would imagine . . . but he wasn’t the source for the rolls of film Masefield was giving us . . . you said yourself that it seemed odd a professor of physics in Leningrad would have that kind of access . . . truth is Masefield had . . . had got off with his Intourist guide . . .”

  “Got off?”

  “A relationship . . . developed.”

  “Jesus Christ, Tom, did you not tell him they’re all KGB?”

  “Of course I did, but . . .”

  “You mean they were lovers? He’s been fucking her?”

  “Yes. But there’s more than that.”

  Wilderness waited. Radley was sucking in air like a man surfacing from near drowning—head back, eyes up, tears coursing down his face.

  “There’s more. He was fucking this woman. He was. But . . . but . . . he was fucking her sister too.”

  More desperation-breathing. Head down now. Trying to look anywhere but at Wilderness.

  “The sister . . . she works at the Ministry of Defence. It was her. She gave him everything we’ve seen. The U-2 photos. The lot. Matsekpolyev was a useful bit of cover. The truth is he gave us nothing. It was . . . what? A purely academic relationship. They swapped ideas about physics and metals and what have you. He got our man into that plant in Estonia, but that was all. But if I’d told you the real source of the photographs you’d have thrown them back at me.”

  “Provokatsiya.”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s the nearest I can get to ‘honeytrap’ in Russian. Our Geoffrey walked into a honeytrap and you, you stupid bastard, let him. One woman I might just have found credible. He’s an unprepossessing creature, but God knows, some woman might want to fuck him. But two? Two sisters? For Christ’s sake! Tom, where’s your brain been holidaying the last six months?”

  Wilderness unscrewed the cap on the bottle of scotch, took a swig and offered none to Radley.

  “Joe . . . I’m so . . . so sorry.”

  “Tom, bugger off home and sober up.”

  Wilderness opened the blinds on a bright, Berlin morning. Waited twenty minutes or more until Radley’s assistant got in at ten.

  “Gretchen?”

  She stuck her head around the door, blinked a little at the mess but showed no surprise at seeing him instead of Radley.

  “It’s nine o’clock in London. In an hour I’ll need a secure line to Burne-Jones. Make that an hour and a half. He likes a lazy breakfast. I’ll be here all day. And I want to see anything TASS has to say as soon as you get it. OK?”

  §97

  “I heard,” Burne-Jones said. “Of course I bloody heard. Why in God’s name did I not hear it from Radley? Why didn’t the bugger get me out of bed for this one? He’s never held back from doing that in the past.”

  Wilderness said nothing.

  “The BBC won’t be reporting it until the evening news. Gives us a few hours. We deny it all, of course. Innocent British businessman. Do you have the exact wording in front of you?”

  Wilderness did not embellish. Burne-Jones heard him out in silence as he read TASS’s midnight release to him.

  A long silence, then he said, “I do feel I have fucked up.”

  “Alec, we both fucked up. You overestimated Masefield and I for my part underestimated him. But that’s not the point. The point is Radley. Not telling you in person is just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “I’m not following you here, Joe.”

  “Radley told us that Masefield had a tame professor in Leningrad, of whom neither you nor I had heard.”

  “No names over the phone, but the feller checked out. He’s real.”

  “I know. A published scholar. A distinguished scholar. That’s as may be, but he was not the source of the documents Masefield gave us.”

  “What?”

  “Masefield had a Russian lover.”

  “Oh Christ, I can hear this one coming.”

  “More than that, he had two Russian lovers.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “They were feeding him the documents.”

  The line went quiet for a while. All Wilderness could hear were the sighs of a deeply unhappy man.

  “A honeytrap?”

  “What other conclusion could we draw?”

  “And Radley knew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ. The fucking idiot.”

  “Masefield was set up from the start. The Russians have fed us stuff just one degree above useless to keep us interested. They must have got bored with the game and decided there was more international fun to be had with a show trial. There’s been a second TASS release, less than half an hour ago. They’ll be making a statement this evening—­television and radio. At 6:00 p.m. their time. That’s a couple of hours ahead of the BBC news, so short of a D-Notice you can be pretty certain both that and last night’s statement will be on the news in London tonight, closely followed by the usual diplomatic protests.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Alec, if you have any thoughts of tempering your explanation of this cock-up with your resignation, don’t. Radley knew what the source was, he could see the implications as clearly as you or I would have done, yet he let Masefield go back to Moscow when the only sensible course was to pull him out for good. He lied to you . . . reel him in. Get someone else out here as soon as possible. Assign Radley to guarding Princess Anne or the royal corgis. Somewhere, anywhere, just bury him for a while. And when the shit hits the fan, let them have him.”

  Another long silence.

  “Would you consider staying on?”

  Again, the same old question.

  “Only till you can get a replacement.”

  “I could do with you there. I need someone I can rely on.”

  Wilderness wished this could have waited until he got home, till scrambled eggs and toast and Twinings Blue Mountain, but Burne-Jones would ask now, and if Wilderness failed to speak his mind he would go on asking.

  “Alec, I’m through. I’ll be putting my papers in as soon as I get back.”

  The silence didn’t last long. Wilderness had barely counted to twenty.

  “Ah . . . I see. Masefield?”

  “Partly. As I said. We both fucked up. They won’t shoot him, but we just bought a tubby little Englishman a lifetime stay in the Lubyanka.”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  “Alec, one of the things you pay me for is to say no.”

  “You offered plenty of warnings. I just —”

  “But I didn’t say no. As we used to say in Stepney when I was a kid, I just farted into a colander. I should have put a gun to your head.”

  Another silence. A world spinning.

  “Joe, you say ‘partly.’ Why ‘partly’?”

  “Frieda Schulze.”

  “Who the hell is Frieda Schulze?”

  §98

  Wilderness had had moments of feeling lower, but at this low moment he could not quite bring any of them to mind. Try as he might he could not dismiss the idea that he was letting Burne-Jones down. Burne-Jones was one of those people in his life “but for whom . . . ,” and it was possible he was the person “but for whom . . .” He waited three days, between Radley’s recall and the arrival of the new bloke, Elsworth “call me Dickie” Delves, a man he had met but scarcely knew, a man whom there was no necessity to know more than scarcely.

  The three days were a waste of time, racked up only because Delves had chosen to use two of them driving from London. He pulled up at the “office” in a two-seater 1954 Austin-Healey 100M roadster in British
racing green. Bonnet down, windscreen folded, open to the elements. The sort of car that was incomplete without a leather strap across the bonnet. The sort of driver that was incomplete without corduroy trousers and a cravat.

  “Couldn’t leave the old bus behind, could I?”

  This man looked likely to be as big an arse as Radley. If this was the kind of man to run the Cold War, the same “breed” that had only lately run the Empire, a bunch of rugby-playing, yard-of-ale swilling Hooray Henries and Bullingdon Billies, then Burne-Jones was welcome to them.

  A line had been drawn.

  Wilderness wished him good luck, offered not a word of advice, left him standing on the pavement and caught a cab out to Tempelhof before Delves had even hefted his suitcase from the car.

  A line had been drawn. Drawn at the sight of Frieda Schulze’s knickers. He had been the one to draw it. He was through with Berlin. How many times in the last fifteen or so years had he been through with Berlin? He was through with Berlin.

  §99

  London

  “You heard?”

  “Do I work for BBC or behind the biscuit counter in Woolies? Heard? We hoicked buggers out of bed to deal with this one. Hardly enough pundits to go round. Muggeridge, Huggeridge, and Buggeridge. Can I take it Mr. Masefield is one of yours?”

  “Not really. I knew him, I met him a couple of times. He was your dad’s man not mine. But . . .”

  “But?”

  “But I meant . . . you’ve heard about me. I put my papers in.”

  “Oh sweetie pie, of course I heard. Do you think you get sirloin, Brunello, candles, the red dress, and matching knickers just because you’ve lost a spy and created the biggest international punch-up since the Bay of Pigs? Noooooo . . . you only get this when you quit. Think of it as a version of the Last Supper, only with sex.”

  “Have you seen your father?”

  “Just the once. I dropped in on the way home. Didn’t say much. In fact didn’t say anything.”

  “I think that’s his version of being furious.”

  “Yep.”

  “And . . .”

  “And he’ll get over it. You’ve given my old man fifteen years of your life. More than you’ve given me. He may not think you’ve done the right thing for Queen and Country, the right thing for him, or the right thing for you, but you’ve done the right thing for us.”