The Innocent

by Ian Mcewan

  The following morning he was up at six for a bath. He took time choosing his clothes, lingering over shades of gray and textures of white. He put on his second-best suit and then took it off. He did not want to look the way he had sounded on the phone. The young man who stood in his Y-front underpants and the extra-thick undershirt his mother had packed, staring into the wardrobe at three suits and a tweed jacket, had an intimation of the power of American style. He had an idea there was something visible about his stiffness of manner. His Englishness was not quite the comfort it had been to a preceding generation. It made him feel vulnerable. Americans, on the other hand, seemed utterly at ease being themselves. He chose the sports jacket and a bright red knitted tie, which was more or less concealed by his homemade high-necked jumper.

  Ten Nollendorfstrasse was a tall thin building undergoing renovation. Workmen who were decorating the hallway had to move their ladders to allow Leonard up the narrow stairs. The top floor was already completed and had carpets. Three doors faced onto the landing; one of them stood ajar. Through it Leonard could hear a buzzing. Above it a voice shouted, “Is that you, Marnham? Come in, for Chrissakes.”

  He entered what was partly an office, partly a bedroom. On one wall was a large map of the city, and under it was an unmade bed. Glass sat at a chaotic desk, trimming his beard with an electric razor. With a free hand he was stirring instant coffee into two mugs of hot water. An electric kettle was on the floor.

  “Sit down,” Glass said. “Throw that shirt on the bed. Sugar? Two?”

  He spooned the sugar from a paper package and dried milk from a jar, and stirred the cups so vigorously that coffee slopped onto nearby papers. The moment the drinks were ready he turned off the razor and handed Leonard his cup. As Glass buttoned his shirt, Leonard had a glimpse of a stocky body beneath wiry black hair that grew right across the shoulders. Glass buttoned his collar tightly round a thick neck. From the desk he picked up a ready-knotted tie attached to a hoop of elastic that he snapped on as he stood. He wasted no movements. He took his jacket from the back of a chair and walked to the wall map as he put it on. The suit was dark blue, creased and worn in places to a shine. Leonard was watching. There were ways of wearing clothes that made them quite irrelevant. You could get away with anything.

  Glass struck the map with the back of his hand. “You been around it yet?”

  Leonard, still not trusting himself to avoid more of his “Well, actually, no,” shook his head.

  “I’ve just been reading this report. One of the things it says, and this is just anyone’s guess, but what they say is that between five and ten thousand individuals in this city are working in intelligence. That’s not counting backup. That’s guys on the ground. Spies.” He tilted his head and pointed his beard at Leonard until he was satisfied with the response. “Most of them are free-lancers, part-timers, kids, Hundert Mark Jungen who hang around the bars. They’ll sell you a story for the price of a few beers. They also buy. You been over to the Café Prag?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Glass was striding back to his desk. He had had no real need of the map after all. “It’s the Chicago futures market down there. You should take a look.”

  He was about five foot six, seven inches shorter than Leonard. He seemed bottled up in his suit. He was smiling, but he looked ready to wreck the room. As he sat down he slapped his knee hard and said, “So, Welcome!” His head hair was also wiry and dark. It started well up on his forehead and flew backward, giving him the high-domed appearance of a cartoon scientist facing into a strong wind. His beard, in contrast, was inert, trapping light into its solidity. It protruded as a wedge, like the beard of a carved wooden Noah.

  From across the landing, through the open door, came the urinous scent of burned toast smelled at a distance. Glass bounced up, kicked the door shut and returned to his chair. He took a long pull of the coffee that Leonard was finding almost too hot to sip. It tasted of boiled cabbage. The trick was to concentrate on the sugar.

  Glass leaned forward in his chair. “Tell me what you know.”

  Leonard gave an account of his meeting with Lofting. His voice sounded prissy in his ears. In deference to Glass, he was softening his t’s and flattening his a’s.

  “But you don’t know what the equipment is or what the tests are that you have to carry out?”

  “No.”

  Glass stretched back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “That dumb Sheldrake. Couldn’t keep his ass still when his promotion came through. He left no one accountable for your stuff.” Glass looked pityingly at Leonard. “The British. It’s hard to make those guys at the stadium take anything seriously. They’re so busy being gentlemen. They don’t do their jobs.”

  Leonard said nothing. He thought he should be loyal.

  Glass raised his coffee cup at him and smiled. “But you technical people are different, right?”

  “Perhaps we are.”

  The phone rang while he was saying this. Glass snatched the receiver and listened for half minute and then said, “No. I’m on my way.” He replaced the phone and stood. He guided Leonard toward the door. “So you know nothing about the warehouse? No one’s mentioned Altglienicke to you?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “We’re going there now.”

  They were on the landing. Glass was using three keys to lock his door. He was shaking his head and smiling to himself as he murmured, “Those Brits, that Sheldrake, that dumb fuck.”

  Two

  The car was a disappointment. On his way to Nollendorfstrasse from the U-Bahn Leonard had seen a pastel American vehicle with tailfins and swags of chrome. This was a dun-colored Beetle, barely a year old, which seemed to have suffered an acid bath. The paintwork was rough to the touch. From the interior all comforts had been stripped away: the ashtrays, the carpets, the plastic moldings round the door handles, even the gearstick knob. The silencer was deficient, or had been tampered with to enhance the effect of a serious military machine.

  A blur of road surface was visible through a perfectly round hole in the floor. In this cold and resonating shell of tin they were creeping under the bridges of the Anhalter Bahnhof at a roar. Glass’s method was to put the car in fourth and drive it like an automatic. At nineteen miles an hour the frame was shuddering. The pace was not timid but proprietorial; Glass clenched the top of the wheel in both hands and fiercely surveyed pedestrians and other drivers. His beard was raised up. He was an American, and this was the American sector.

  Once they were on the wider run of Gneisenau Strasse, Glass opened out to twenty-five miles an hour and moved his right hand off the steering wheel to grip the stem of the gearstick.

  “Now,” he called out, settling deeper into his seat like a jet pilot. “We’re heading south to Altglienicke. We’ve built a radar station just across from the Russian sector. You’ve heard of the AN/APR9? No? It’s an advanced receiver. The Soviets have an airbase nearby, at Schönefeld. We’ll be picking up their emissions.”

  Leonard was uneasy. He knew nothing about radar. At the G.P.O. research laboratories his work had been in telephones.

  “Your stuff is in a room there. You’ll have testing facilities. Anything you want, you tell me, okay? You don’t ask anyone else. Is that clear?”

  Leonard nodded. He stared ahead, sensing a terrible mistake. But he knew from experience that it was poor policy to express doubts about a procedure until it was absolutely necessary. The reticent made, or appeared to make, fewer mistakes.

  They were approaching a red light. Glass dropped his speed to fifteen before riding the clutch until they had stopped. Then he shifted to neutral. He turned right around in his seat to face his silent passenger. “Come on, Marnham. Leonard. For Chrissakes, loosen up. Speak to me. Say something.” Leonard was about to say he knew nothing about radar, but Glass was embarked on a series of indignant questions. “Are you married or what? Where did you go to school? What do you like? What do you think?” It was the chan
ging light and the search for first gear that interrupted him.

  In his orderly fashion, Leonard dealt with the questions in reciprocal sequence. “No, I’m not married. Haven’t even been close to it. I’m still living at home. I went to Birmingham University, where I did electronics. I found out last night that I like German beer. And what I think is that if you want someone to look at radar equipment—”

  Glass raised his hand. “Don’t tell me. It all comes back to that asshole Sheldrake. We’re not going to a radar station, Leonard. You know that. I know that. The aerial on the roof connects to nothing. But you don’t have level three clearance yet. So we are going to a radar station. The screwup, the real humiliation, is going to come at the gate. They’re not going to let you through. But that’s my problem. You like girls, Leonard?”

  “Well, yes, actually, I do, as a matter of fact.”

  “Fine. We’ll do something together tonight.”

  Within twenty minutes they were leaving the suburbs for flat, charmless countryside. There were large brown fields divided by ditches choked with sodden, matted grasses, and there were bare, solitary trees and telegraph poles. The farmhouses crouched low in their domains with their backs to the road. Up muddy tracks were half-built houses on reclaimed portions of fields—the new suburbs. There was even a half-built apartment building rising from the center of a field. Further on, right by the roadside, were shacks of recycled wood and corrugated tin which, Glass explained, belonged to refugees from the East.

  They turned down a narrower road that tapered off into a track. Off to the left was a newly surfaced road. Glass tilted his head back and indicated with his beard. Two hundred yards ahead, obscured at first by the stark forms of an orchard that lay behind it, was their destination. It resolved itself into two principal buildings. One was two storeys high and had a gently pitched roof; the other, which ran off from the first at an angle, was low and gray, like a cell block. The windows, which formed a single line, appeared to be bricked in. On the roof of the second building was a cluster of four globes, two large, two small, arranged to suggest a fat man with fat hands extended. Close by were radio masts making a fine, geometric tracery against the dull white sky. There were temporary buildings, a circular service road, and a strip of rough ground before the double perimeter fence began. In front of the second building were three military trucks and men in fatigues milling around them, unloading perhaps.

  Glass pulled to the side of the track and stopped. Up ahead was a barrier, and a sentry standing beside it, watching them. “Let me tell you about level one. The Army engineer who built this place is told he’s putting up a warehouse, a regular Army warehouse. Now, his instructions specify a basement with a twelve-foot ceiling. That’s deep. That means shifting a hell of a lot of earth, dump trucks to take it away, finding a site, and so on. And it isn’t the way the Army builds a warehouse. So the commander refuses to do it till he has confirmation direct from Washington. He’s taken aside, and at this point he discovers there are clearance levels, and he’s being upgraded to level two. He’s not really building a warehouse at all, he’s told, it’s a radar station, and the deep basement is for special equipment. So he gets to work, and he’s happy. He’s the only guy on site who knows what the building is really for. But he’s wrong. If he had level three clearance, he’d know it wasn’t a radar station at all. If Sheldrake had briefed you, you’d know too. I know, but I don’t have authority to upgrade your clearance. But the point is this—everybody thinks his clearance is the highest there is, everyone thinks he has the final story. You only hear of a higher level at the moment you’re being told about it. There could be a level four here. I don’t see how, but I’d only hear about it if I was being initiated. But you …”

  Glass hesitated. A second sentry had stepped out of his hut and was waving them forward. Glass spoke quickly. “You have level two, but you know there’s a level three. That’s a breach, an irregularity. So I might as well fill you in. But I’m not going to, not without covering my ass first.”

  Glass drove forward and wound down his window. He took a card from his wallet and passed it up to the sentry. The two men in the car stared at the midriff buttons on the soldier’s greatcoat.

  Then a friendly, big-boned face filled the window and spoke across Bob Glass’s lap to Leonard. “You have something for me, sir.”

  Leonard was pulling out his letters of introduction from the Dollis Hill research unit. But Glass murmured “Christ, no” and pushed the letters out of the sentry’s reach. Then he said, “Move your face, Howie. I’m getting out.”

  The two men walked toward the guard hut. The other sentry, who had taken up a position in front of the barrier, kept his rifle raised in front of him in almost ceremonial style. He nodded at Glass as he passed. Glass and the first sentry went into the hut. Through the open doorway it was possible to make out Glass talking on the phone. After five minutes he came back to the car and spoke through the window.

  “I have to go in and explain.” He was about to leave when he changed his mind, opened the door and sat down. “Another thing. These guys on the gate know nothing. They don’t even know about a warehouse. They’re told it’s high security and they’re going to guard it. They can know who you are, but not what you do. So don’t go showing letters. In fact, give them here. I’ll put them through the office shredder.”

  Glass slammed his door hard and strode away, folding Leonard’s letters into his pocket as he went. He ducked under the barrier and headed toward the two-storey building.

  Then a bored, Sunday silence settled on Altglienicke. The sentry continued to stand in the center of the road. His colleague sat in the hut. Inside the perimeter wire there was no movement. The trucks were lost to view, around the other side of the low building. The only sound was the irregular tick of contracting metal. The car’s tin plate was drawing in the cold. Leonard pulled his coat around him. He wanted to get out and walk up and down, but the sentry made him uneasy. So he banged his hands together, and tried to keep his feet off the metal floor, and waited.

  Presently a side door in the low building opened and two men stepped out. One of them turned to lock the door behind him. Both men were well over six feet tall. They wore crew cuts, and gray T-shirts that were untucked from their loose khaki trousers. They seemed immune to the cold. They had an orange rugby ball which they lobbed back and forth as they walked away from each other. They kept on walking until the ball was arcing through an improbable distance, spinning smoothly around its longer axis. It was not a two-handed rugger throw-in but a single-handed pitch, a sinuous, whiplike movement over the shoulder. Leonard had never seen an American football game, never even heard one described. This routine, with the catches snapping high, right up on the collarbone, seemed overdemonstrative, too self-loving, to represent any serious form of game practice. This was a blatant exhibition of physical prowess. These were grown men, showing off. Their only audience, an Englishman in a freezing German car, watched with disgusted fascination. It really was not necessary to make such extravagant play with the outstretched left hand just before the throw, or to hoot like an idiot at the other man’s pitch. But it was a jubilant uncoiling power that made the orange ball soar; and the clarity of its flight through the white sky, the parabolic symmetry of its rise and fall, the certainty that the catch would not be fumbled, were almost beautiful, an unforced subversion of the surroundings—the concrete, the double fence and its functional Y-shaped posts, the cold.

  That two adults should be so publicly playful—that was what held him, irritated him. Two British sergeants with a taste for cricket would wait for a team practice, properly announced, or at least get up a proper impromptu game. This was all swank, childishness. They played on. After fifteen minutes one of them looked at his watch. They strolled back to the side door, unlocked it and stepped inside. For a minute or so after they had gone their absence dominated the strip of last year’s weeds between the fence and the low building. Then that faded.
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br />   The sentry walked the length of the striped barrier, glanced inside the hut at his companion, then returned to his position and stamped his feet on the concrete. After ten minutes Bob Glass came hurrying from the two-storey building. At his side was a U.S. Army captain. They ducked under the barrier, passing on both sides of the sentry. Leonard went to get out of the car, but Glass motioned to him to wind down the window. He introduced the man as Major Angell. Glass stepped back and the major leaned in and said, “Young man, welcome!” He had a long, sunken face to which his closely shaved stubble imparted a green hue. He wore black leather gloves and he was handing Leonard his papers. “I saved these from the shredder.” He dropped his voice in mock confidentiality. “Bob was being kind of zealous. Don’t carry them around with you in future. Keep them at home. We’ll issue you a pass.” The major’s aftershave invaded the cold car. The smell was of lemon sherbet. “I’ve authorized Bob to show you around. I’m not authorized to make exceptional clearances over the phone, so I’ve come out to speak to these guys myself.”

  He moved away toward the sentry hut. Glass got in behind the wheel. The barrier lifted, and as they passed through the major saluted comically, with only one finger raised to his temple. Leonard started to wave, then, feeling foolish, let his hand drop and forced a smile.