Cover Designer’s Note

The great challenge I faced when asked to produce the covers for new editions of Len Deighton’s books was the existence of the brilliant designs conceived by Ray Hawkey for the original editions.

However, having arrived at a concept, part of the joy I derived in approaching this challenge was the quest to locate the various props which the author had so beautifully detailed in his texts. Deighton has likened a spy story to a game of chess, which led me to transpose the pieces on a chessboard with some of the relevant objects specified in each book. I carried this notion throughout the entire quartet of books.

Since smoking was so much part of our culture during the Cold War era, I also set about gathering tobacco-related paraphernalia.

On reading a reference in the text to a Cinzano ashtray, I instantly recognized a visual analogy in its unique triangular shape to the triumvirate of the Allied occupying forces and their zones in Berlin. The three lit cigarettes point at each other like the loaded barrels of guns. I then incorporated a spectrum of smokers’ accessories, including a packet of British Woodbine cigarettes and an American Camel Zippo cigarette lighter. To represent the Soviets, I included a KGB lighter and an identity pass, both of which I located in the Ukraine.

The ever-present pack of Gauloises cigarettes, belonging to the nameless protagonist of the book, along with a red pawn, is positioned behind the Iron Curtain on a map of Berlin.

A fallen bust of a German soldier lies over a list of names of concentration camp inmates, headed by that of Paul Louis Broum, the book’s ‘person of interest’.

The back of the jacket shows a US Army Berlin District patch, a DMR 5 Mark coin, a vintage Hotel Adlon baggage label, and a couple of story-related cigarette cards, the significance of all of which will become evident as you read this fine book.

I photographed the jacket set-up using natural daylight, with my Canon OS 5D digital camera.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

LEN DEIGHTON
Funeral in Berlin

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1964

Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1964

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2009

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN 9780586045800

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN 9780007343003

Version: 2017-08-10

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Epigraph

ALLEN W. DULLES (then director CIA):

‘You, Mr Chairman, may have seen some of my intelligence reports from time to time.’

MR KHRUSHCHEV:

‘I believe we get the same reports – and probably from the same people.’

MR DULLES:

‘Maybe we should pool our efforts.’

MR KHRUSHCHEV:

‘Yes. We should buy our intelligence data together and save money. We’d have to pay the people only once.’

News Item, September 1959

‘But what good came of it at last?’

Quoth little Peterkin,

‘Why, that I cannot tell,’ said he:–

‘But ’twas a famous victory.’

SOUTHEY, After Blenheim

‘If I am right the Germans will say I was a German and the French will say I was a Jew; if I am wrong the Germans will say I was a Jew and the French will say I was a German.’

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Most of the people who engaged in this unsavoury work had very little interest in the cause which they were paid to promote. They did not take their parts too seriously, and one or the other would occasionally go over to the opposite side, for espionage is an international and artistic profession, in which opinions matter less than the art of perfidy.

DR R. LEWINSOHN,

The Career of Sir Basil Zaharoff

Contents

Cover

Cover Designer’s Note

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Appendix 1: Poisonous insecticides

Appendix 2: Gehlen organization

Appendix 3: The Abwehr

Appendix 4: Soviet security systems

Appendix 5: French Security System

Appendix 6: Official Secrets Act 1911 (as amended by the OS Acts of 1920 and 1939)

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

Standing at the bar of the National Film Theatre there was a plump balding man of about fifty. He was unmistakably German and despite his fluent command of the English language he was having some difficulty with the barman. I went to sort it out and found it was no more than a shortage of change in the till.

The man was Kurt Jung-Alsen and it was a film he had directed – The Vengeance of Private Pooley – that was showing that evening as part of a festival of films from communist East Germany. I had no idea of what a warm friendship would develop from this chance meeting and what a tremendous change in my life this mutual trust would bring.

It was rewarding to show Kurt around London because he was so knowledgeable and so appreciative. Like any self-respecting German he was prepared for everything and had a notebook listing the places he must see. The Sunday morning street market in Petticoat Lane was on his list. Today was Sunday and here he was. Guessing that he would arrive on time I had coffee ready. ‘You’d better see this, Herr Jung-Alsen.’ I took him into the sitting room where I had been watching BBC TV carrying the alarming news that the communists were building a Wall right across Berlin.

Kurt went back there, of course. He was certainly no communist but his home and all his possessions were at stake. Kurt was a dedicated Berliner and had a successful pre-war career in theatre production before becoming a film director. The following summer I toured Czechoslovakia in my battered little VW Beetle car. Nearing the Ukraine border I had some difficulties with the local police there because I hadn’t stuck to my prearranged route and itinerary. In fact, I had written ‘camping’ into the blank space on the visa form and then wandered around stopping when and where I chose. From Prague I drove north to Berlin. In those days the Cold War was very chilly. I had been delayed in setting out and it was about 2.00am when I was flagged down by Russian army traffic police because I was on a road that led directly into East Berlin. They had spotted my British licence plate. There were very few Western vehicles coming north from Prague and the Russian military decreed that foreigners like me must approach Berlin only from the west. With a military escort I was taken to the local army barracks and held there. A young Russian officer decided it was an opportunity to try out his English language skills, which were on a par with my command of Russian. It was after an hour or so of limited communication that I remembered that I had an unopened bottle of brandy in my baggage. It was soon opened and eventually the officer was telephoning some unknown person with the news that everything was all right after all. Accompanied by a Russian army jeep I was allowed to proceed up the forbidden road. I arrived at the Adlon Hotel in East Berlin just as they were mopping the lobby of this dilapidated remnant of the old luxury hotel.

It was a dramatic beginning to my stay in East Berlin. Kurt more than returned any favour I had done for him in London. He introduced me to many people and made me feel at home. As I said to him, not once but many times, that of all my friends he was the only one that enjoyed the bourgeois benefits of domestic servants and a valuable art collection. And this was communism? I made a few forays to West Berlin and came back with all manner of desirables for Kurt and his friends. A child’s wheelchair, asparagus and ladies fashion magazines such as Burda was one consignment. The wheelchair was a tight fit in my car and I was grilled about it but Burda magazine was the only thing confiscated that time; I suppose the border guards had fashion-conscious wives. But while I was feeling at home in East Berlin I was aware of the fact that I had no friends or acquaintances in West Berlin. On subsequent visits to the city, that gradually changed until I had very good and generous friends in West Berlin, but that initial stay in East Berlin had a lasting effect upon the way I saw it all. And Kurt was kind enough to include me in the listed production staff for a film he made about the Spanish Civil War. This included journeys and long periods in East Germany, and the chance to visit towns such as Leipzig and Weimar; grim and grey under communist rule. In Weimar I was accommodated in the Elephant Hotel, which was a favourite stopover for Adolf Hitler. Kurt told me that the room I was given was the one Hitler always used. The bath was about six feet long; the biggest bath tub I have ever been in. Despite his earnest assurances, I always suspected that Kurt might have been joking. He was a droll fellow and he liked to counter what he said was my English sense of humour with japes of his own.

Berlin was soon a second home to me. I became obsessed by Berlin. I studied its history and collected old photographs of its streets, street life and architecture. I talked to many who had served and many who had suffered under the Third Reich. I still can wander through its streets and alleys and see the past, even when there is little evidence of the past remaining. I learned about its electricity, gas and sewage systems, much of which could not be divided and had to be shared; a fact kept secret by both sides. The whimsical way in which the town was split made it even more bizarre. It was a microcosm of a divided world.

In all my time behind the ‘iron curtain’ I made no secret of my dislike of the repressive and regimented society that is essential to socialism. I had been advised by a very experienced English newspaperman to air my ‘capitalist’ beliefs. As far as I could tell, this procedure in no way impeded my life and my researches. I did have the occasional confrontation with cops and bureaucrats but I suffered no lasting damage.

My second book – Horse Under Water – had sidestepped the Cold War but now I was in the front line. The critics had been kind to my previous books and this encouragement helped me to discover what sort of books I wanted to write. I’d never had any childhood ambitions to be a writer, so I was not tempted to write ‘serious literature’. My feelings have never changed. This is not because I think that serious literature is too serious. It’s because I think most serious literature is not serious at all.

By some measures, Funeral in Berlin was my most successful book. The American edition spent six months on the New York bestseller list. The New York Times, Life magazine and the news magazines all gave the book a generous reception. To get away from it all, I went for a holiday in Paris and spent my days researching the town’s best restaurants. Perhaps I should have gone to New York instead but I had become a professional writer, and I decided that any writer’s fatal enemies were alcohol and praise.

Len Deighton, 2009

1

Players move alternately – only one at a time.

Saturday, October 5th

It was one of those artificially hot days that they used to call ‘Indian summer’. It was no time to be paying a call to Bina Gardens, in south-west London, if there was a time for it.

Outside the house I sought there was a bright card tied to the railings with green twine. On it in large exact capitals was penned ‘Lost – Siamese cat. Answers to the name Confucius.’

Answers what? I walked up the steps where the sun was warming up a pint of Jersey and a banana-flavour yoghurt. Tucked behind the bottles a Daily Mail peeped its headline ‘Berlin a new crisis?’ There were buttons on that door-post like on a pearly king’s hat but only one said ‘Robin J. Hallam, FRSA’ in a flowing copper-plate; that was the one I pressed.

‘You haven’t seen Confucius?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I only missed him last night.’

‘Really,’ I said, feigning warm interest.

‘The bedroom window doesn’t close properly,’ said Hallam. He was a gaunt-faced man of about forty-five well preserved years. His dark-grey flannel suit was baggy and in the lapel of it he wore three neat discs of egg yolk, like the Legion of Honour.

‘You will be one of Dawlish’s little men,’ he said.

He exposed a white palm and I walked into the cool stone hall while he closed the daylight out.

He said, ‘Could you let me have a shilling – the gas will go any moment.’

I gave him one and he galloped away with it.

Hallam’s room was tidy the way a cramped room has to be. He had a desk that was a sink and a cupboard that was a bed and under my feet a battered kettle on a gas ring was sending Indian signals to the bookcase. Flies were whining in great bed-spring spirals of sound, then going to the window to beat on it with their feet. Through the window there was a large section of grey brick wall; on it there were two perfect rectangles of white sunlight reflected from some high sunny place. I moved three Bartok LPs and sank into a mutilated chair. Hallam turned on the tap in the disguised sink and there was a chugging sound like a bronchial road-drill. He rinsed the cups and wiped them on a tea-cloth that depicted the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in primary colours. There was a clink as he set the cups into their ordained saucers.

‘Don’t tell me. You’ve come about the Semitsa business’, he said to the gas meter as he poured boiling water on to the Darjeeling. ‘You like Darjeeling?’

‘Darjeeling’s OK,’ I said. ‘What I’m not so keen about is you batting that name about like that. Have you ever heard of the Official Secrets Act?’

‘My dear boy, I am trussed up with the OS Act twice a year like a very old and intractable turkey.’ He put half a dozen wrapped sugar pieces on the table and said, ‘You won’t take milk in Darjeeling’: it wasn’t a question. He sipped his unsweetened tea from an antique Meissen cup; around mine it said ‘British Railways SR’ in brown grot letters.

‘So you are the man who is going to make Semitsa defect from the Moscow Academy of Sciences and come to work in the west; no, don’t tell me.’ He waved down my protest with a limp palm. ‘I’ll tell you. In the last decade not one Soviet scientist has defected westward. Did you ever ask yourself why?’ I unwrapped one of the sugar pieces; the paper had ‘Lyons Corner House’ printed on it in small blue letters.

‘This fellow Semitsa. A member of the Academy. Not a party member because he doesn’t need to be; Academy boys are the top dogs – the new elite. He probably gets about six thousand roubles¹ a month. Tax paid. On top of that he can keep any money he gets for lecturing, writing or being on TV. The lab restaurants are fabulous – fabulous. He has a town house and a country cottage. He has a new Zil every year and when he feels in the mood there is a special holiday resort on the Black Sea which only the Academy people use. If he dies his wife gets a gigantic pension and his children get special educational opportunities in any case. He works in the Genetics of Molecular Biology department where they use refrigerated ultra centrifuges.’ Hallam waved his sugar cube at me.

‘They are one of the basic tools of modern biology and they cost around ten thousand pounds each.’

He waited while that sank in.

‘Semitsa has twelve of them. Electron microscopes cost around fourteen thousand pounds each, he …’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘What are you trying to do, recruit me?’

‘I’m trying to let you see this situation from Semitsa’s point of view,’ said Hallam. ‘His biggest problems at this moment are likely to be whether to give his son a Zaporozhets or a Moskvich motor car for a twenty-first birthday present, and deciding which of his servants is stealing his Scotch whisky.’

Hallam unwrapped the sugar cube and ate it with a loud crunching noise.

‘What are you offering him? Have you seen those semi-detached houses they are putting the Porton people into? And as for the labs, they are little more than hardboard shacks. He’ll think it’s the prison camp and keep asking when he gets released,’ Hallam tittered.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘That’s enough dialectical materialism for one cup of Darjeeling. Just tell me if your people at the Home Office will do your bit if we deliver him to you.’

Hallam tittered again and extended a finger like he was tapping me on the nose.

‘You get him first, that’s all I’m saying. We’d love to have him. He’s the best enzyme man in the world today, but you just get him first.’

He popped another piece of sugar in his mouth and said, ‘We’d just love him, love him.’

One of the flies was beating on the window trying to escape; the sound of its buzzing wings rose to a loud frantic hammering. The tiny body smashing itself against the glass made faint clicks. As the energy oozed out of it, it sank down the glass, kicking and fluttering in fury at the force that had solidified the very air. Hallam poured more tea and dug around inside one of his little cupboards. He moved a packet of Omo and a wad of travel agents’ literature. The top leaflet showed people waving out of a bus which was parked in the Alhambra and said ‘Suntraps of Spain’ in blobby lettering. Across the side of the bus it said, ‘For as little as 31 guineas.’ He found a brightly coloured packet and gave a little yap of triumph.

‘Custard creams,’ he said.

He arranged two of them on an oval dish. ‘I don’t eat breakfast on Saturdays. Sometimes I go down the El Mokka for a sausage-and-chip lunch but quite often I manage with a biscuit.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. I took one.

‘You can’t trust the waiter there, though,’ said Hallam.

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘They pad the bills,’ said Hallam. ‘Last week I found a shilling for bread and butter slipped in.’ He picked up the final few biscuit crumbs with a moistened finger-tip.

Outside in the hall I could hear a woman’s voice saying, ‘If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times – no bicycles.’

I couldn’t hear the man’s voice properly but the woman’s voice said, ‘Outside – that’s what we pay road taxes for.’

Hallam said, ‘I never have bread and butter.’

I sipped my tea and nodded while Hallam opened the window for the fly.

Hallam said, ‘And what’s more he knows it.’ Hallam gave a little laugh at the irony of life with an emphasis on the frailty of human nature.

‘He knows it,’ said Hallam again. Suddenly he said to me, ‘You aren’t sitting on my Bartoks by any chance?’

Hallam counted his records in case I had hidden a couple in my raincoat. He collected the cups and stacked them near the sink ready for washing.

He plucked back his sleeve to commune with a large wristwatch. He looked at it for a second or so before he carefully undid the grimy leather strap. The glass was scratched with a thousand tiny scratches and one or two deep ones. The green hands had come to rest at 9.15. Hallam held the watch to his ear.

‘It’s 11.20,’ I told him.

He shushed me and his eyes rolled gently to demonstrate the expertise with which he was listening to the silent mechanism.

I could take a hint. Hallam had the door open before I had even said, ‘Well I must …’

He walked behind me through the hall to make sure that I didn’t steal the lino. A fanlight over the entrance let a William Morris design in coloured sunlight fall across the stone floor. Fixed against one wall was a pay telephone with notices and old undelivered mail marked ‘Inland Revenue’ tucked behind the telephone directories. One notice said ‘Miss Mortimer is away in Spain on business.’ It was written in lipstick on the back of a used envelope.

At waist level the old brown wallpaper had suffered a series of horizontal white gashes. From the floor under them Hallam picked up a tin that had the words ‘Acme Puncture Outfit’ enmeshed in a design of scrolls, daisies and bicycle wheels. He made a clicking noise with his tongue and put the tin on top of the A – D telephone directory.

Hallam gripped the huge street door with two hands. Another notice on it said ‘Slamming this at night disturbs early risers.’ The Daily Mail and the yoghurt were still in the same position and from farther down the street I could hear the clink of milk bottles.

Hallam offered me a hand like a dead animal. ‘Best enzyme man,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘In the world,’ I said, and eased sideways through the partly open door.

‘Give him this,’ said Hallam. He pushed a wrapped cube of Lyons sugar into my hand.

‘Semitsa?’ I said very quietly.

‘The milkman’s horse, you silly. There. Friendly creature. And if you do see Confucius …’

‘OK,’ I said. I walked down the steps into the hot dusty sunlight.

‘My goodness. I haven’t paid you back for the gasmeter shilling,’ said Hallam. It was a simple statement of fact; he wasn’t turning his pockets out.

‘Donate it to the RSPCA,’ I called. Hallam nodded. I looked around but there was no sign of Confucius anywhere.

¹ Over £2,000.

2

ROBIN JAMES HALLAM

Saturday, October 5th

After his visitor had left Hallam looked in the mirror again. He was trying to guess his age.

‘Forty-two,’ he said to himself.

His hair was all there, that was one good thing. A man with plenty of hair looked young. It would need a little colouring of course but then colouring his hair was something he had thought of doing for years before he had this problem of finding a new job. ‘Brown,’ he thought, ‘a mousy brown.’ So that it wouldn’t be too obvious; no point in going in for one of those really bright colours because it would be spotted as phoney in two minutes. He turned his head and tried to see how much of his profile he could see in reflection. He had a lean, very aristocratic Anglo-Saxon face. The nose had sharp ridges and the cheekbones were tight under his skin. A thoroughbred. He often thought of himself as a racehorse. It was a pleasant thought and one that was easily associated with acres of green grass, horse shows, grouse-shooting, hunt balls, elegant men and bejewelled women. He liked to think of himself in that context even though his function as a thoroughbred was nearer the seat of Government. He liked that; the seat of Government. Hallam laughed at his reflection and his reflection laughed back in a friendly, dignified, handsome way. He decided to tell someone at the office but it was difficult to decide which one of them would appreciate the joke – so many of them were dullards.

Hallam walked back to the gramophone. He stroked the shiny immaculate veneer top and took pleasure in the silent way it opened; well-made – British made. He selected a record from his large collection. They were all there, all the finest composers of the twentieth century. Berg, Stravinsky, Ives. He selected a recording of a work of Schönberg. The shiny black disc was impeccable. It was as hygienic and dustfree as as as … why wasn’t there anything as clean as his records? He put it on the gramophone and applied the pick-up head to the merest brim of the record. He did this skilfully. There was a faint hissing noise, then the room was suddenly full of rich sounds: ‘Variations for wind band’. He liked it. He sat well back in his chair, fidgeting his back to find the exact position of maximum comfort like a cat. ‘Like a cat,’ he thought and he was pleased with that thought. He listened to the plaited threads of the instrumental sounds and decided that when the music stopped he would have a cigarette. ‘After both sides,’ he thought: ‘after I’ve played both sides I will have a cigarette.’ He rested back in the chair again, pleased with the self-imposed discipline.

He thought of himself as a monk-like person. Once, in the toilet at the office, he had heard one of the junior clerks refer to him as an ‘old hermit’. He had liked that. He looked around at his cell-like room. Every item there had been carefully chosen. He was a man who understood quality in the old-fashioned sense of the word. How he despised those people who have a fancy modern oven and then only heat frozen supermarket food in it. All he had was a gas ring but it was what you cooked on it that counted. Fresh country eggs and bacon, there was nothing in the world to beat that. Cooked carefully, cooked in butter even though he wasn’t a man given to extravagance. Few women understood how to cook eggs and bacon. Or anything else. He remembered a housekeeper he had had at one time, she always broke the yolks of the eggs and had tiny black burnt specks on the whites. She didn’t clean the pan properly. It was as simple as that. She didn’t clean the pan properly. The times he had told her. He walked across to the washbasin and looked in the mirror. ‘Mrs Henderson,’ he mouthed the words, ‘you simply must clean the pan with paper – not with water – thoroughly before you fry eggs and bacon.’ He gave a pleasant smile. It wasn’t a nervous smile, on the other hand it wasn’t the sort of smile that encouraged argument. It was in fact exactly the right sort of smile for this situation. He rather prided himself on his ability to provide the right sort of smile for every occasion.

The music was still playing but he decided to have a cigarette anyway, he certainly wasn’t going to become a slave to his own machine. What he decided to do was to compromise. He could have a cigarette but it would be one of the Bachelor brand – the cheap ones that he kept in the large cigarette box for visitors. He rather prided himself on his ability to compromise. He went across to the cigarette box. There were four in there. He decided not to take one of those. Four was about right. Yes. He got a Player’s No. 3 from a box of twenty that he kept in the cutlery drawer. ‘Thirty-nine,’ he thought suddenly. ‘That’s what I shall give as my age.’

The sound ended abruptly. Hallam took the record and washed it and dressed it and put it to bed with tender devotion. He remembered the girl who had given him the record. That red-haired girl he met at the awful Saddle Room. A pleasant girl in a way. American, volatile, rather incoherent in her speech mannerisms, but then Hallam supposed that there were no proper schooling facilities in America. He felt sorry for the girl. No he didn’t. He didn’t feel sorry for any girls, they were all … carnivorous. What’s more some of them were none too clean. He thought about this man that Dawlish had just sent along to see him; he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had been to school in America. Hallam picked up the Siamese cat.

‘Where is your little sister?’ he asked her. If only they could talk. They were more intelligent than many humans. The cat stretched its legs and the long claws sank into the shoulder of Hallam’s suit and dragged at it with a tearing sound.

‘Secret Service man?’ thought Hallam. He laughed out loud and the cat looked up in surprise.

‘Upstart,’ said Hallam.

He put a finger against the cat’s ear. The cat purred. An upstart from Burnley – a supercilious, anti-public-school technician who thought he was an administrator.

‘We must do our duty,’ said Hallam quietly to himself. It was the duty of men in Government; they mustn’t be too influenced by the personalities of Government servants. He preferred to think of the Secret Service man as a Government servant rather like the man with the wart who did the savings bank accounts at the Post Office. He said ‘Government servant’ aloud and thought of all the ways he could work the phrase into the next conversation he had with that man.

Hallam put the Player’s No. 3 into his real ebony cigarette holder. He lit it while watching himself in the mirror. He parted his hair a little more towards the centre. He might as well lunch at the coffee bar. They did a very fine egg and chips there. The waiter was Italian and Hallam always ordered in Italian. Not very trustworthy the Italians, Hallam decided, it’s all a matter of breeding. He sorted out his change and put ninepence in his ticket pocket for a tip. He gave a final look round before leaving. Fang was asleep. The ashtray that his visitor had used was brimming with cigarette ends. Foreign, coarse, cheap, inferior cigarettes.

Hallam picked up the ashtray with a shudder and tipped the contents into the little bin where the tea-leaves went. He felt in many ways the type of cigarette that man smoked typified him. So did the man’s clothes, they were mass-produced, off-the-peg clothes. Hallam decided he did not like the man that Dawlish had sent to see him. He didn’t like him at all.

3

Where pieces are used to protect other pieces, there will be high casualty rate. Better by far to assign only pawns to supporting roles.

Saturday, October 5th

‘Best enzyme man in the world,’ I said.

I heard Dawlish cough.

‘Best what?’ he said.

‘Enzyme man,’ I said, ‘and Hallam would just love him.’

‘Good,’ said Dawlish. I flipped the switch of my squawk box and turned back to the documents on my desk.

‘Edmond Dorf,’ I read.

I riffed through the battered British passport.

‘You are always saying that foreign names are more convincingly English,’ said my secretary.

‘But not Dorf,’ I said, ‘especially not Edmond Dorf. I don’t feel like an Edmond Dorf.’

‘Now don’t go metaphysical on me,’ said Jean, ‘Whom do you feel like?’

I liked that ‘whom’ – you’ve got to pay real money these days to get a secretary that could say that.

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘What sort of name do you feel like?’ said Jean very slowly and patiently. It was a danger signal.

‘Flint McCrae,’ I said.

‘Act your age,’ said Jean and she picked up the Semitsa file and walked towards the door.

‘I’m not being horrible Edmond Dorf,’ I said a little louder.

‘You don’t have to shout,’ said Jean, ‘and I’m afraid the travel vouchers and tickets are ordered. Berlin has been told to expect Edmond Dorf. If you want it changed now you must do it yourself unless I leave the Semitsa work.’

Jean was my secretary, really it was her job to do as I told her.

‘OK,’ I said.

She said, ‘Let me be the first to congratulate you on a wise decision, Mr Dorf,’ and left the room quickly.

Dawlish was my boss. He was around fifty, slim and meticulous like a well-bred boa-constrictor. He moved with languid English grace across the room from his desk and stood staring out into the jungle of Charlotte Street.

‘They thought one wasn’t serious at first,’ he said to the window.

‘Uh huh,’ I said; I didn’t want to appear too interested.

‘They thought I was joking – even the wife thought I wouldn’t go through with it.’ He turned away from the window and fixed me with a mocking gaze. ‘But now I’ve done it and I don’t intend to kill them off.’

‘Is that what they want you to do?’ I said. I wished I had been listening more closely.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I’m not going to do it.’ He walked across to me in the big leather armchair like Perry Mason appealing to the jury. ‘I like weeds. It’s as simple as that. Some people like one sort of plants and some people like others. I like weeds.’

‘They are easy to cultivate,’ I said.

‘Not really,’ said Dawlish sharply. ‘The most powerful ones tend to strangle the others. I’ve got hedge parsley, comfrey, meadow cranesbill, primroses … it’s just like a country lane, not a damned by-pass. One has wild birds and butterflies. It’s something to walk in; not one of these things with flower-beds, laid out like a cemetery.’

‘I agree,’ I said. I agreed.

Dawlish sat down at his antique desk and arranged some typewritten sheets with file cards that his secretary had brought from the IBM machine. He aligned all the paperwork in geometrical patterns with his pencils and stapling machine and then began to polish his spectacles.

‘And thistles,’ said Dawlish.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘I’ve got a lot of thistles,’ said Dawlish, ‘because they attract butterflies. Later we’ll have tortoise-shells, red admirals, yellow brimstones, perhaps even commas. Fabulous. The weed-killers are destroying life in the country – it’s a disgrace.’ He picked up one of the folders and began to read it. He nodded once or twice and then put it down.

‘I rely on you to be discreet,’ he said.

‘That sounds like a change of policy,’ I said. Dawlish sprinkled a cold smile over me. He wore the sort of spectacles that customs men tap for hollow noises. He rested them on his large ears and then tucked a handkerchief as big as a bedsheet into his cuff. It was a signal that we were what Dawlish called ‘on parade’.

Dawlish said, ‘Johnnie Vulkan’. Then he rubbed the palms of his hands together.

I knew the sort of thing Dawlish was going to complain about now. We had other people in Berlin, of course, but Vulkan was the one we always used; he was efficient, understood what we needed, he knew the Berlin layout and, most important, he was noisy enough to draw attention away from our residential boys whom we preferred to let lie fallow as long as possible.

Dawlish was saying ‘… can’t expect any of our people to be saints …’ I remembered Vulkan. He could deliver a bomb or a baby and smile as he did it.

‘… no orthodox way of collecting information and there never can be …’ Vulkan may have had a mixed political background but he knew Berlin. He knew every cellar, bandstand, bank account, brothel and abortionist from Potsdam to Pankow. Dawlish sniffed loudly and rubbed his hands again.

‘Even earning additional payments need not be out of the question but unless he gives us full details of these associations he will no longer enjoy the protection of this department.’

‘Protection,’ I said. ‘What sort of protection have we ever offered him? The only protection he ever had from us was old-fashioned money. People like Vulkan are in danger – physical danger – every moment of every day. The only weapon they have is money. If Vulkan is always asking for more, it’s worth considering the motives.’

‘Men like Vulkan don’t have motives,’ said Dawlish. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. Vulkan is working for us – however remotely – and one will work like the very deuce to see that he is looked after, but don’t move this discussion into the sublime world of philosophy. Our friend Vulkan changes his motive every time he comes through that East Berlin checkpoint. When men become double agents it’s just a matter of time before they lose their grip on reality. They begin to drown in a sea of confusion. Any piece of information they can snatch at will keep them afloat and alive for a few more hours.’

‘You want to write Vulkan off?’

‘Not at all,’ said Dawlish, ‘but one does want to keep him in a cul-de-sac. A fellow working against us can be very useful if we have him in a nice sterile test-tube.’

‘You are being a bit complacent,’ I said. Dawlish raised an eyebrow.

‘Vulkan is good,’ I said. ‘Look at his record. 1948: his blockade prediction was with this department eleven weeks before FOIU¹ and fifteen weeks before Ross had heard anything. He can’t do that if you are selecting his drinking companions.’

‘Wait now …’ said Dawlish.

‘Let me finish, sir,’ I insisted. ‘The point I’m making is, that the moment Vulkan feels we are putting him on ice he’ll shop around for another job. Ross at the War Office or O’Brien at the FO will whip him into the Olympia Stadion² and that’s the last we will see of him. Certainly they will all tut-tut and agree with you at the Combined Intelligence Meetings but they’ll go behind your back and employ him.’

Dawlish touched his finger-tips together and looked at me sardonically.

‘You think I am too old for this job, don’t you?’

I said nothing.

‘If we decide not to continue with Vulkan’s contract there is no question of leaving him available for the highest bidder.’

I didn’t think old Dawlish could make me shiver.

¹ Foreign Office Intelligence Unit.

² West Berlin HQ. MI6 use the offices.

4

The Berlin Defence is a classic defence by means of counter-attack.

Sunday, October 6th

The parade ground of Europe has always been that vast area of scrub and lonely villages that stretches eastward from the Elbe – some say as far as the Urals. But halfway between the Elbe and the Oder, sitting at attention upon Brandenburg, is Prussia’s major town – Berlin.

From two thousand feet the Soviet Army War Memorial in Treptower Park is the first thing you notice. It’s in the Russian sector. In a space like a dozen football pitches a cast of a Red Army soldier makes the Statue of Liberty look like it’s standing in a hole. Over Marx-Engels Platz the plane banked steeply south towards Tempelhof and the thin veins of water shone in the bright sunshine. The Spree flows through Berlin as a spilt pail of water flows through a building site. The river and its canals are lean and hungry and they slink furtively under roads that do not acknowledge them by even the smallest hump. Nowhere does a grand bridge and a wide flow of water divide the city into two halves. Instead it is bricked-up buildings and sections of breeze block that bisect the city, ending suddenly and unpredictably like the lava flow of a cold-water Pompeii.

Johnnie Vulkan brought a friend and a black Cadillac to meet me at Tempelhof.

‘Major Bailis, US Army,’ said Johnnie. I shook hands with a tall leathery American who was buttoned deep into a white Aquascutum trench coat. He offered me a cigar while the baggage was being checked.

‘It’s good to have you with us,’ said the major and Johnnie said the same.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘This is a town where one needs friends.’

‘We’ve put you into the Frühling,’ the major said. ‘It’s small, comfortable, unobtrusive and very, very Berlin.’

‘Fine,’ I said; it sounded OK.

Johnnie moved quickly through the traffic in the sleek Cadillac. Cutting across the city from west to east is a ten-lane highway that successive generations have named ‘Unter den Linden’ and ‘Strasse des 17. Juni’ and once was a gigantic path leading through the Brandenburger Tor to the royal palace.

‘We just call it Big Street,’ said the American as Johnnie moved into the fast lane. In the distance the statue on the Tor glinted gold in the afternoon sun, beyond it in the Soviet sector a flat concrete plain named Marx-Engels Platz stood where communist demolition teams had razed the Schloss Hohenzollern.

We turned towards the Hilton.

Just a little way down the street beyond the shell of the Gedächtniskirche with its slick modern tower – like a tricky sort of hi-fi speaker cabinet – apeing the old broken one is Kranzlers, a café that spreads itself across the Kurfürstendamm pavement. We ordered coffee and the US army major sat on the far side of the table and spent ten minutes tying the laces of his shoes. Across in the ‘Quick Café’ two girls with silver hair were eating Bockwurst.

I looked at Johnnie Vulkan. Growing older seemed to agree with him. He didn’t look a day over forty, his hair was like a tailored Brillo pad and his face tanned. He wore a well-cut Berlin suit of English pinhead worsted. He leaned back in his chair and pointed a finger lazily towards me. His hand was so sunburned that his nails seemed pale pink. He said, ‘Before we start, let’s get one thing clear. No one here needs help; you are superfluous to requirements as far as I am concerned. Just remember that; stay out of the way and everything will be OK. Get in the way and …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘This is a dangerous town.’ He kept his hand pointing into my face and gave a flash of a smile.

I looked at him for a moment. I looked at his smile and at his hand.

‘Next time you point a finger at someone, Johnnie,’ I said, ‘remember that three of your fingers are pointing back at you.’ He lowered his hand as though it had become heavy.

‘Stok is our contact,’ he said quietly.

I was surprised. Stok was a Red Army colonel in State Security.¹

‘It’s official then?’ I asked. ‘An official exchange.’

Vulkan chuckled and glanced at the major.

‘It’s more what you might call extra-curricular. Official but extra-curricular,’ he said again, loud enough for the American to hear. The American laughed and went back to his shoelace.

‘The way we hear it, there is a lot of extra-curricular activity here in Berlin.’

‘Dawlish been complaining?’ Vulkan asked, captiously.

‘Hinting.’

‘Well, you tell him I’ll have to have more than my present lousy two thousand a month if it’s exclusive service he’s after.’

‘You tell him,’ I said. ‘He’s on the phone.’

‘Look,’ said Vulkan, his solid gold wristwatch peeping out from the pristine cuff. ‘Dawlish has no idea of the situation here. My contact with Stok is …’ Vulkan made a movement with his cupped hand to indicate a superlative.

‘Stok is one thousand times brighter than Dawlish and he runs his show from on the spot, not from an office desk hundreds of miles away. If I can bring Semitsa over the wire it will be because I personally know some important people in this town. People I can rely on and who can rely on me. All Dawlish has to do is collect the kudos and leave me alone.’

‘What I think Dawlish needs to know,’ I said, ‘is what Colonel Stok will require in return if he delivers Semitsa – what you call – over the wire.’

‘Almost certainly cash.’

‘I had a premonition it would be.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Vulkan, loud enough to bring the American out of his reverie. ‘Major Bailis is the official US Army observer for this transaction. I don’t have to put up with dirty talk like that.’

The American took off his sun-glasses and said, ‘Yes, siree. That’s the size of it.’ Then he put his glasses back on again.

I said, ‘Just to make quite sure that you don’t promise anything we wouldn’t like: make sure I’m there at your next meeting with comrade Colonel Stok, eh?’

‘Difficult,’ said Johnnie.

‘But you’ll manage it,’ I said, ‘because that’s what we pay you for.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Vulkan.

¹ KGB (see Appendix 4).

5

When a player offers a piece for exchange or sacrifice then surely he has in mind a subsequent manœuvre which will end to his advantage.

Monday, October 7th

Brassieres and beer; whiskies and worsteds; great words carved out of coloured electricity and plastered along the walls of the Ku-damm. This was the theatre-in-the-round of western prosperity: a great, gobbling, yelling, laughing stage crowded with fat ladies and dwarfs, marionettes on strings, fire-eaters, strong men and lots of escapologists. ‘Today I joined the cast,’ I thought. ‘Now they’ve got an illusionist.’ Beneath me the city lay in huge patches of light and vast pools of darkness where rubble and grass fought gently for control of the universe.

Inside my room the phone rang. Vulkan’s voice was calm and unhurried.

‘Do you know the Warschau restaurant?’

‘Stalin Allee,’ I said; it was a well-known bourse for information pedlars.

‘They call it Karl Marx Allee now,’ said Vulkan sardonically. ‘Have your car facing west in the car park across the Allee. Don’t get out of your car, flash your lights. I’ll be ready to go at 9.20. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

I followed the line of the canal from the Berlin Hilton to Hallesches Tor U-Bahnstation, then turned north on to Friedrichstrasse. The control point is a few blocks north. I flipped a passport to the American soldier and an insurance card to the West German policeman, then in bottom gear I moved across the tram tracks of Zimmerstrasse that bump you into a world where ‘communist’ is not a dirty word.

It was a warm evening and a couple of dozen transients sat under the blue neon light in the checkpoint hut; stacked neatly on tables were piles of booklets and leaflets with titles like ‘Science of the GDR in the service of Peace’, ‘Art for the People’ and ‘Historic Task of the GDR and the future of Germany’.

‘Herr Dorf.’ A very young frontier policeman held my passport and riffed the corners. ‘How much money are you carrying?’

I spread the few Westmarks and English pounds on the desk. He counted them and endorsed my papers.

‘Cameras or transistor radio?’

At the other end of the corridor a boy in a leather jacket with ‘Rhodesia’ painted on it shouted, ‘How much longer do we have to wait here?’

I heard a Grepo say to him, ‘You’ll have to take your turn, sir – we didn’t send for you, you know.’

‘Just the car radio,’ I said.

The Grepo nodded.

He said, ‘The only thing we don’t allow is East German currency.’ He gave me my passport,¹ smiled and saluted. I walked down the long hut. The Rhodesian was saying, ‘I know my rights,’ and rapping on the counter but everyone else was staring straight ahead.

I walked across to the parking bay. I drove around the concrete blocks, a Vopo gave a perfunctory glance at my passport and a soldier swung the red-and-white striped barrier skywards. I drove forward into East Berlin. There were crowds of people at Friedrichstrasse station. People coming home from work, going to work or just hanging around waiting for something to happen. I turned right at Unter den Linden – where the lime trees had been early victims of Nazidom; the old Bismarck Chancellery was a cobweb of rusty ruins facing the memorial building where two green-clad sentries with white gloves were goose-stepping like Bismarck was expected back. I drove around the white plain of Marx-Engels Platz and, at the large slab-sided department store at Alexanderplatz, took the road that leads to Karl Marx Allee.

I recognized the car park and pulled into it. Karl Marx Allee was still the same as when it had been Stalin Allee. Miles of workers’ flats and state shops housed in seven-storey Russian-style architecture, thirty-foot-wide pavements and huge grassy spaces and cycle tracks like the M1.

In the open-air café across the road, lights winked under the trees and a few people danced between the striped parasols while a small combo walked their baby back home with lots of percussion. ‘Warschau’, the lights spelled out and under them I saw Vulkan get to his feet. He waited patiently until the traffic lights were in his favour before walking towards the car park. A careful man, Johnnie; this was no time to collect a jaywalking ticket. He got into a Wartburg, pulled away eastward down Karl Marx Allee. I followed keeping one or two cars between us.

Johnnie parked outside a large granite house in Köpenick. I edged past his car and parked under a gas lamp around the corner. It was not a pretty house but it had that mood of comfort and complacency that middle-class owners breathe into the structure of a house along with dinner-gong echoes and cigar smoke. There was a large garden at the back and here near the forests and the waters of Müggelsee the air smelled clean.

There was just one name-plate on the door. It was of neat black plastic: ‘Professor Eberhard Lebowitz’, engraved in ornate Gothic lettering. Johnnie rang and a maid let us into the hall.

‘Herr Stok?’ said Johnnie.

He gave her his card and she tiptoed away into the interior.

In the dimly lit hall there stood a vast hallstand with some tricky inlaid ivory, two clothes-brushes and a Soviet officer’s peaked hat. The ceiling was a complex pattern of intaglio leaves and the floral wallpaper looked prehensile.

The maid said, ‘Will you please come this way?’ and led us into Stok’s drawing-room. The wallpaper was predominantly gold and silver but there were plenty of things hiding the wallpaper. There were aspidistras, fussy lace curtains, shelves full of antique Meissen and a cocktail cabinet like a small wooden version of the Kremlin. Stok looked up from the 21-inch baroque TV. He was a big-boned man, his hair was cropped to the skull and his complexion was like something the dog had been playing with. When he stood up to greet us his huge hands poked out of a bright red silk smoking-jacket with gold-braid frogging.

Vulkan said, ‘Herr Stok; Herr Dorf,’ and then he said, ‘Herr Dorf; Herr Stok,’ and we all nodded at each other, then Vulkan put a paper bag down on the coffee table and Stok drew an eight-ounce tin of Nescafé out of it, nodded, and put it back again.

‘What will you drink?’ Stok asked. He had a musical basso voice.

‘Just before we move into the chat,’ I said, ‘can I see your identity card?’

Stok pulled his wallet out of a hip pocket, smiled archly at me and then peeled loose the stiff white card with a photo and two rubber stamps that Soviet citizens carry when abroad.

‘It says that you are Captain Maylev here,’ I protested as I laboriously pronounced the Cyrillic script.

The servant girl brought a tray of tiny glasses and a frosted bottle of vodka. She set the tray down. Stok paused while she withdrew.

‘And your passport says that you are Edmond Dorf,’ said Stok, ‘but we are both victims of circumstance.’

Behind him the East German news commentator was saying in his usual slow voice, ‘… sentenced to three years for assisting in the attempt to move his family to the West.’ Stok walked across to the set and clicked the switch to the West Berlin channel where a cast of fifty Teutonic minstrels sang ‘See them shuffle along’ in German. ‘It’s never a good night, Thursday,’ Stok said apologetically. He switched the set off. We broke the wax on the fruit-flavoured vodka and Stok and Vulkan began discussing whether twenty-four bottles of Scotch whisky were worth a couple of cameras. I sat around and drank vodka until they had ironed out some sort of agreement. Then Stok said, ‘Has Dorf got power to negotiate?’ – just like I wasn’t in the room.

‘He’s a big shot in London,’ said Vulkan. ‘Anything he promises will be honoured. I’ll guarantee it.’

‘I want lieutenant-colonel’s pay,’ Stok said, turning to me, ‘for life.’

‘Don’t we all?’ I said.

Vulkan was looking at the evening paper; he looked up and said, ‘No, he means that he’d want the UK Government to pay him that as a salary if he comes over the wire. You could promise that, couldn’t you?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘We’ll say you’ve been in a few years, that’s five pounds four shillings a day basic. Then there’s ration allowance, six and eight a day, marriage allowance, one pound three and something a day, qualification pay five shillings a day if you get through Staff College, overseas pay fourteen and three and … you would want overseas pay?’

‘You are not taking me seriously,’ Stok said, a big smile across his white moon of a face. Vulkan was shifting about on his seat, tightening his tie against his Adam’s apple and cracking his finger joints.

‘All systems go,’ I said.

‘Colonel Stok puts up a very convincing case,’ said Vulkan.

‘So does the “find the lady” mob in Charing Cross Road,’ I said, ‘but they never come through with the QED.’

Stok threw back two vodkas in quick succession and stared at me earnestly. He said, ‘Look, I don’t favour the capitalist system. I don’t ask you to believe that I do. In fact I hate your system.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘And you are in a job where you can really do something about it.’

Stok and Vulkan exchanged glances.

‘I wish you would try to understand,’ said Stok. ‘I am really sincere about giving you my allegiance.’

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I bet you say that to all the great powers.’

Vulkan said, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time and money in setting this up. If you are so damn clever why did you bother to come to Berlin?’

‘OK,’ I told them. ‘Act out the charade. I’ll be thinking of words.’

Stok and Vulkan looked at each other and we drank and then Stok gave me one of his gold-rimmed oval cigarettes and lit it with a nickel-silver sputnik.

‘For a long time I have been thinking of moving west,’ said Stok. ‘It’s not a matter of politics. I am just as avid a communist now as I have ever been, but a man gets old. He looks for comfort, for security in possessions.’ Stok cupped his big boxing-glove hand and looked down at it. ‘A man wants to scoop up a handful of black dirt and know it’s his own land, to live on, die on and give to his sons. We peasants are a weak insecure segment of socialism, Mr Dorf.’ He smiled with his big brown teeth, trimmed here and there with an edge of gold. ‘These comforts that you take for granted will not be a part of life in the East until long after I am dead.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We have decadence now – while we are young enough to enjoy it.’

‘Semitsa,’ said Stok. He waited to see what effect it would have on me. It had none.

‘That’s what you are really interested in. Not me. Semitsa.’

‘Is he here in Berlin?’ I asked.

‘Slowly, Mr Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Things move very slowly.’

‘How do you know he wants to come west?’ I asked.

‘I know,’ said Stok.

Vulkan interrupted, ‘I told the colonel that Semitsa would be worth about forty thousand pounds to us.’

‘Did you?’ I said in as flat a monotone as I could manage.

Stok poured out his fruit vodka all round, downed his own and poured himself a replacement.

‘It’s been nice talking to you boys,’ I said. ‘I only wish you had something I could buy.’

‘I understand you, Mr Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘In my country we have a saying, “a man who trades a horse for a promise ends up with tired feet”.’ He walked across to the eighteenth-century mahogany bureau.

I said, ‘I don’t want you to deviate from a course of loyalty and integrity to the Soviet Government to which I remain a friend and ally.’

Stok turned and smiled at me.

‘You think I have live microphones planted here and that I might attempt to trick you.’

‘You might,’ I said. ‘You are in the business.’

‘I hope to persuade you otherwise,’ said Stok. ‘As to being in the business: when does a chef get ptomaine poisoning?’

‘When he eats out,’ I said.

Stok’s laugh made the antique plates rattle. He groped around inside the big writing-desk and produced a flat metal box, brought a vast bunch of tiny keys from his pocket and from inside the box reached a thick black file. He handed it to me. It was typed in Cyrillic capitals and contained photostats of letters and transcripts of tapped phone calls.

Stok reached for another oval cigarette and tapped it unlit against the white page of typing. ‘Mr Semitsa’s passport westward,’ he said putting a sarcastic emphasis on the ‘mister’.

‘Yes?’ I said doubtfully.

Vulkan leaned forward to me. ‘Colonel Stok is in charge of an investigation of the Minsk Biochemical labs.’

‘Where Semitsa used to be,’ I said. It was coming clear to me. ‘This is Semitsa’s file, then?’

‘Yes,’ said Stok, ‘and everything that I need to get Semitsa a ten-year sentence.’

‘Or have him do anything you say,’ I said. Perhaps Stok and Vulkan were serious.

¹ To catch people with stolen passports, or people who spend nights in the East, the passports are often marked with a tiny pencil spot on some pre-arranged page.

6

A bad bishop is one hampered by his own pawns.

Monday, October 7th

Going along the Unter den Linden wasn’t the fastest way of getting to the checkpoint but I had to keep to the main roads in order to find my way about. I saw the ‘S’ signs on the Schnellstrasse and moved up to the legal 60 kph. As I came level with the old Bismarck Chancellery, black and gutted in the bright velvet moonlight, a red disc was moving laterally across the road ahead. It was a police signal. I stopped. A Volkspolizei troop carrier was parked at the roadside. A young man in uniform tucked the signal baton into the top of his boot, walked slowly across to me and saluted.

‘Your papers.’

I gave him the Dorf passport and hoped that the department had gone to the trouble of getting it made up by the Foreign Office and not been content with one of the rough old print jobs that the War Office did for us.

A Skoda passed by at speed without anyone waving it down. I began to feel I was being picked on. Around at the rear of the Taunus another Vopo shone a torch on the US Army plates and probed the beam across the rear seat and floor. My passport was slapped closed and it came through the window accompanied by a neat bow and salute.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the young one.

‘Can I go?’ I said.

‘Just switch on your lights, sir.’

‘They’re on.’

‘Main beams must be on here in East Berlin. That is the law.’

‘I see.’ I flicked the switch on. The troop carrier glowed in the fringe of the beam. It was just a traffic cop doing a job.

‘Good night, sir.’ I saw a movement among the dozen policemen on the big open bus. By now Johnnie Vulkan had also passed me. I turned left on to Friedrichstrasse and tried to catch up with him.

Johnnie Vulkan’s Wartburg was some fifty yards ahead of me as I drove south on Friedrichstrasse. As I reached the red-striped barrier the sentry was handing Johnnie his passport and lifting the pole. The American sector was just a few feet away. He allowed the Wartburg through, then lowered the boom and walked round to me, hitching the automatic rifle over his shoulder, so that it clanged against his steel helmet. I had the passport handy. Beyond the barrier the low hardboard building that was the control post was a mass of red geraniums. In front of it two sentries exchanged words with Vulkan, then they all laughed. The laughter was loud in the still night. A blue-uniformed Grenz-polizist clattered down the steps and ran across to my car.

‘You are wanted inside,’ he said to the sentry in his shrill Saxon accent. ‘On the phone.’ He turned to me. ‘Won’t keep you a moment, sir,’ in English; ‘I am sorry for the delay,’ but he took the sentry’s automatic rifle to hold just the same.

I lit a Gauloise for myself and the Grepo, and we smoked and stared across the hundred yards that separated us from the little walled island that is West Berlin and we thought our different thoughts or maybe the same ones.

It was less than two minutes before the Vopo returned. He said would I please get out of the car and leave the keys where they were. There were three soldiers with him. They all had automatic rifles, none of which were slung on anyone’s shoulder. I got out of the car.

They walked me a few yards west on Leipziger where no one in the west sector could see us no matter how high on the ladder they were. There was a small green van parked there. On the door was a little badge and the words ‘Traffic Police’. The motor was running. I sat between the German soldiers and one of them offered me a strange-tasting cigarette which I lit from the stub of my Gauloise. No one had searched me, put on handcuffs or made a formal statement. They had merely asked me to come along; no one was using coercion. I had agreed to go.

I watched the street through the rear window. By the time we had reached Alexanderplatz I had a pretty good idea of where we were headed. A couple of blocks away was Keibelstrasse: the Polizei Praesidium.

In the cobbled centre courtyard of the Praesidium I heard the sound of half a dozen marching men. Words of command were shouted and the rhythm of the boots varied. I was in a room on the first floor. It was thirty-three steps above the main entrance, where a guard in an armoured glass cubicle must press a small button to unlock the entrance gate. The aged wooden seat upon which I sat backed up against the cream-painted wall; there were two well-thumbed copies of Neues Deutschland lying on it. To my right a large window had the view divided into square spaces by solid-looking bars. Behind the desk was a middle-aged woman, her hair drawn tightly back into a bun. Every action on the desk brought the loud rattle of a large bunch of keys. I knew there must be a way out. None of those young fellows on late-night TV would find it any sort of dilemma.

The grey-haired woman looked up. ‘Are you carrying any sort of knife or weapon?’ Her eyes glinted clearly behind the thick circular lenses.

‘No,’ I said.

She nodded and wrote something on a sheet of paper.

‘I mustn’t be late back,’ I said. Which didn’t seem so hilarious a thing to say at that time.

The grey-haired woman locked each drawer of her desk and then left the room, carefully fixing the door wide open to preclude my taking a short walk around the filing cabinet. I sat there for five minutes, maybe ten. The whole situation was curiously simple and matter-of-fact, like waiting for a driving-licence renewal at County Hall. When the grey-haired woman came back she had my passport in her hand. She gave it to me. She didn’t smile but it seemed friendly just the same.

‘Come,’ she said.

I went with her down the long cream corridor to a room at the extreme western wing of the building. The décor too was like County Hall. She tapped gently on a large door and without waiting for a reply motioned me through. It was dark inside the room with just enough light filtering through the window from the courtyard to see where the desk was. From behind the desk was a sudden red glow like an infra-red flash-bulb. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw that the far side of the room was filled with a silvery sheen.

‘Dorf,’ said the voice of Stok. It boomed almost like an amplifier. There was a click from his desk; the yellow tungsten light came on. Stok was sitting behind his desk almost obscured by a dense cloud of cigar smoke. There was Scandinavian-style East German furniture in the room. On the table behind me there was a Hohner simple button-key accordion, piles of newspapers, and a chessboard with some of the pieces fallen over. There was a folding bed near the wall with two army blankets on it and high leather boots placed together at the head. Near the door was a tiny sink and a cupboard that might have held clothes.

‘My dear Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Have I caused you great inconvenience?’

He emerged from the cigar smoke in an ankle-length black leather overcoat.

‘Not unless you count being scared half to death,’ I said.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said Stok, then he exhaled another great billow of cigar smoke like a 4.6.2 pulling out of King’s Cross.

‘I wanted to contact you,’ he spoke with the cigar held between tight lips, ‘without Vulkan.’

‘Another time,’ I said, ‘write.’

There was another tap at the door. Stok moved across the room like a wounded crow. The grey-haired one brought two lemon teas.

‘There is no milk today I am afraid,’ said Stok; he drew the overcoat around him.

‘And so Russian tea was invented,’ I said.

Stok laughed again in a perfunctory sort of way. I drank the scalding hot tea. It made me feel better, like digging your finger nails into your palm does.

‘What is it?’ I said.

Stok waited while the grey-haired one closed the door behind her. Then he said, ‘Let’s stop quarrelling, shall we?’

‘You mean personally?’ I said. ‘Or are you speaking on behalf of the Soviet Union?’

‘I mean it,’ said Stok. ‘We can do far better for ourselves if we co-operate than if we obstruct each other.’ Stok paused and smiled with studied charm.

‘This scientist Semitsa is not important to the Soviet Union. We have other younger men with newer and better ideas. Your people on the other hand will think you marvellous if you can deliver him to London.’ Stok shrugged his shoulders at the idiocy of the world of politics.

‘Caveat emptor?’ I said.

‘Not half,’ said Stok in a skilful piece of idiom. ‘Buyer watch out.’ Stok rolled the cigar across his mouth and said, ‘Buyer watch out,’ a couple of times. I just drank the lemon tea and said nothing. Stok ambled across to the chessboard on the side-table, his leather coat creaking like a windjammer.

‘Are you a chess player, English?’ he said.

‘I prefer games where there’s a better chance to cheat,’ I said.

‘I agree with you,’ said Stok. ‘The preoccupation with rules doesn’t sit well upon the creative mind.’

‘Like communism?’ I said.

Stok picked up a knight. ‘But the pattern of chess is the pattern of your capitalist world. The world of bishops and castles and kings and knights.’

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I’m just a pawn. I’m here in the front rank.’ Stok grinned and looked down at the board.

‘I’m a good player,’ he said. ‘Your friend Vulkan is one of the few men in Berlin who can consistently beat me.’

‘That’s because he is part of the pattern of our capitalist world.’

‘The pattern,’ said Stok, ‘has been revised. The knight is the most important piece on the board. Queens have been made … impotent. Can you say impotent of a queen?’

‘On this side of the wall you can say what you like,’ I said.

Stok nodded. ‘The knights – the generals – run your western world. General Walker of the 24th Infantry Division lectured all his troops that the President of the USA was a communist.’

‘You don’t agree?’ I asked.

‘You are a fool,’ boomed Stok in his Boris Godunov voice.

‘I am trying to tell you that these people …’ he waved the knight in my face, ‘… look after themselves.’

‘And you are jealous?’ I asked seriously.

‘Perhaps I am,’ said Stok. ‘Perhaps that’s it.’ He put the knight back and he pulled the skirt of his overcoat together.

‘So you are going to sell me Semitsa as a little bit of private enterprise of your own?’ I said. ‘If you’ll forgive the workings of my bourgeois mind.’

‘You live only once,’ said Stok.

‘I can make once do,’ I said.

Stok heaped four spoonfuls of coarse sugar into his tea. He stirred it as though he was putting an extra rod into an atomic pile. ‘All I want is to live the rest of my life in peace and quiet – I do not need a lot of money, just enough to buy a little tobacco and the simple peasant food that I was brought up on. I am a colonel and my conditions are excellent but I am a realist; this cannot last. Younger men in our security service look at my job with envy.’ He looked at me and I nodded gently. ‘With envy,’ he repeated.

‘You are in a key job,’ I said.

‘But the trouble with such jobs is that many others want them too. Some of my staff here are men with fine college diplomas, their minds are quick as mine once was; and they have the energy to work through the day and through the night too as once I had the energy to do.’ He shrugged. ‘This is why I decided to come to live the rest of my life in your world.’

He got up and opened one of the big wooden shutters. From the courtyard there was the beat of a heavy diesel engine and the sound of boots climbing over a tailboard. Stok thrust his hands deep in his overcoat pockets and flapped his wings.

I said, ‘What about your wife and your family, will you be able to persuade them?’

Stok continued to look down into the courtyard. ‘My wife died in a German air raid in 1941, my only son hasn’t written to me for three and a half years. What would you do in my position, Mr Dorf? What would you do?’

I let the sound of the lorry rumble away down Keibelstrasse.

I said, ‘I’d stop telling lies to old liars for a start, Stok. Do you really think I came here without dusting off your file? My newest assistant is trained better than you seem to think I am. I know everything about you from the cubic capacity of your Westinghouse refrigerator to the size your mistress takes in diaphragms.’

Stok picked up his tea and began to batter the lemon segment with the bowl of his spoon. He said, ‘You’ve trained well.’

‘Train hard, fight easy,’ I said.

‘You quote Marshal Suvarov.’ He walked across to the chessboard and stared at it. ‘In Russia we have a proverb, “Better a clever lie than the foolish truth”.’ He waved his teaspoon at me.

‘There was nothing clever about that clumsy piece of wife-murder.’

‘You’re right,’ said Stok cheerfully. ‘You shall be my friend, English. We must trust each other.’ He put his tea down on the desk top.

‘I’ll never need an enemy,’ I said.

Stok smiled. It was like arguing with a speak-your-weight machine.

‘Truthfully, English,’ he said, ‘I do not want to defect to the West but the offer of Semitsa is a genuine one.’ He sucked the spoon.

‘For money?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Stok. He tapped the fleshy palm of his left hand with the bowl of the spoon.

‘Money here.’ He closed his hand like a vault.

7

Knights can pass over squares controlled by enemy forces. Knights always end their move on a square of the opposite colour.

Tuesday, October 8th

There was plenty of activity at Checkpoint Charlie. Photoflashes sliced instants from eternity. The pavement shone with water and detergent under the pressmen’s feet. Way down towards Hallesches Tor a US military ambulance flasher sped towards the emergency ward and was all set to change direction to the morgue.

One by one the reporters gunned their VWs and began composing tomorrow’s headlines in their minds. ‘Young Berliner killed in wall crossing’ or ‘Vopos Gun Down Wall-Hopper’ or ‘Bloody Sidewalk Slaying at the Wall’. Or maybe he wouldn’t die.

I waved the insurance papers at the guard box and moved gently through. It’s not far to Hallesches Tor – a district of pimps and brothels – and that’s where I had to go next.

An ill-lit doorway gave on to a steep stone staircase. There were a dozen grey metal post-boxes in the hallway. On one of them it said, ‘Bureau for the rehabilitation of German Prisoners of War from the East’. There were no letters inside. I doubt if there ever had been. I walked up the stairs and pressed a small buzzer. I had a feeling that, even had I not pressed it, the front door would have opened.

‘Yes?’ said a calm young man in a dark-grey flannel suit. I used the words of greeting which London had provided.

‘This way, please,’ said the young man. The first room was like a dentist’s waiting room. There were lots of periodicals, lots of chairs and very little else except a distinct lack of privacy. They left me there for a few moments before they took me inside. I was ushered through the door only to find another door – a steel one – facing me. The second door was locked and I stood nervously in the tiny ‘cupboard’ which was lit by a blinding overhead light. There was a soft whirr and then the steel door moved open.

‘Welcome to the Feldherrnhügel,’¹ said the calm young man.

It was a large room lit by blue neon tubes that produced a soft hum. There was a bookcase full of files and several pull-down maps hung on the wall. Two long metal tables were crammed with phones of various colours, a TV screen, and a powerful radio receiver. Four young men sat along one table. They were like the man who had opened the door; young, pale, clean-shaven and white-shirted, they might represent the new prosperous Germany but they were also representatives of something rather older. This was a cell of the Gehlen Bureau.² From here men were spirited in to the DDR³ or spirited out. These were the men that the East Germans said were Nazis and the ones that Bonn never talked of at all.

I wasn’t exactly a welcome visitor but I represented a section of the Gehlen Organization income; they gave me coffee.

One of the identical men slid into steel-rimmed spectacles and said, ‘You need us to help you out.’ It had a discreet layer of insult. I sipped the Nescafé.

‘Whatever you need – the answer is, yes we can do it,’ the spectacled one said. He passed me a small jug of cream. ‘What is it that you need done first?’

‘I’m trying to decide between having Dover encircled and Stalingrad subjugated.’

Steel Spectacles and the other two men smiled, perhaps for the first time.

I fed them some Gauloises and then we got down to business.

‘I need something moved,’ I said.

‘Very well,’ said Steel Spectacles. He produced a small tape machine.

‘Place of consignment’s origin?’

‘I’d try to arrange that to your convenience,’ I said.

‘Excellent.’ He clicked the switch on the mike. ‘Origin nul,’ he said.

‘To?’ he asked me.

‘Channel ports,’ I said.

‘Which one?’

‘Any,’ I said. He nodded again and repeated my answer into the tape recorder. We were getting on fine together.

‘Size?’

‘One human,’ I said. No one batted an eyelid; he immediately said, ‘Willing or unwilling?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said.

‘Conscious or unconscious?’

‘Conscious willing or unconscious unwilling.’

‘We prefer conscious,’ said Spectacles before relaying it on to the tape.

The phone rang. Spectacles spoke into the mouthpiece in a rapid series of orders, then two of the Gehlen boys slipped into dark raincoats and hurried for the door.

‘A shooting at the wall,’ Spectacles said to me.

‘No kidding,’ I said.

‘Right at Checkpoint Charlie,’ said Spectacles.

‘One of your boys?’ I asked.

‘Yes, just a courier,’ said Spectacles. He uncupped the phone; the caller was to wait there and phone back if he wasn’t contacted in thirty minutes. He hung up.

‘We are the only people who get anything done here in Berlin,’ Spectacles said. The other man, blond with a large signet ring said, ‘Ja’. Then Spectacles and he nodded to each other.

‘Since Hitler?’ I almost said, but I swallowed the words with a second cup of hot coffee. Spectacles produced a street map and clipped a piece of transparent acetate across the face of it. He began marking circles here and there across the east side of the city.

‘These are the sort of places we favour as jumping-off places,’ he said.

‘Not too near the Sektor boundary and within a mile of the Soviet Zone. Things can heat up very quickly in this burg, especially if you grab someone hot. Sometimes we prefer to put our cargo on ice in the zone somewhere. Anywhere from Lübeck to Leipzig.’ Spectacles had a smooth American accent and here and there it came through his lucid Rhineland German.

‘We will need at least forty-eight hours’ notice,’ said Spectacles. ‘But after that we will be responsible even if we take longer to actually do the movement. Do you have any questions?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What’s the procedure if I want to contact your people and I am in the East?’

‘You phone a Dresden number and they will give you an East Berlin number. It changes every week. The Dresden number changes sometimes too. Check with us before you go over.’

‘OK but does anyone have phones going across the city of Berlin?’

‘Officially one. It connects the Russian Command in Karlshorst with the Allied Command in the Stadion here in West Berlin.’

‘Unofficially?’

‘There have to be lines. The water, electricity, sewage and gas authorities all have lines to speak to their opposite number in the other half of the city. There could be an emergency but they are not officially recognized.’

‘And you don’t ever use these lines?’

‘Very seldom.’ There was a buzz. He flipped a switch on his desk. I heard the voice of the calm young man say, ‘Yes. Good evening,’ and another voice. ‘I’m the man you were expecting from Dresden.’ Spectacles clicked another switch and the TV screen flashed blue. I could see the waiting room as a short man entered it and I saw him enter the brightly lit cupboard. Spectacles swung the TV receiver around so that I couldn’t see it.

‘Security,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t give you much confidence if we let you penetrate another operation, would it?’

‘You’re damn right it wouldn’t,’ I said.

‘So if that’s all,’ said Spectacles, closing a big ledger with a snap.

‘Yes,’ I said. I could take a hint.

He said, ‘You will act as Vulkan’s case officer⁴ for this operation. His code name is “King”. Your code name will be …’ he looked down at his desk. ‘… Kadaver.’

‘Corpse,’ I said. ‘That’s very chummy.’

Spectacles smiled.

I thought about ‘King’ Vulkan when I got back to the Frühling. I was surprised that he was one of the best chess players in Berlin but he was full of surprises. I thought about my code name – Kadaver – and about Kadavergehorsam, which is the sort of discipline which makes a corpse jump up and salute. I poured a Teacher’s and stared down at the screaming shining lights. I had begun to get the feel of the town; both sides of the wall had wide well-lit streets separated by inky lakes of darkness. Perhaps this was the only city in the world where you were safer in the dark.

¹ Feldherrnhügel: the mound upon which the commanding generals stood to direct the battle.

² Later the BND or Federal German Intelligence Service, but still generally referred to as the ‘Gehlen Bureau’. See Appendix 2.

³ Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

⁴ Case officer: In the American system of espionage (from which the Gehlen Bureau had borrowed the term) the case officer is the go-between connecting Washington to the agent in the field. He is generally empowered to vary slightly the aims and objects of the operation and always controls payment. In the case of the above operation I did not act as Vulkan’s case officer in the strict sense of the term, since a case officer keeps well concealed and does not reveal himself to other units.

8

Skilful use of knights is the mark of the professional player.

Tuesday, October 8th

Examine closely the eyes of certain bold young men and you’ll see a frightened little man staring anxiously out. Sometimes I saw him in Vulkan’s eyes and at other times I wasn’t so sure about it. He carried himself like an advert for hormone pills; his muscles rippled under well-cut lightweight wool suits. His socks were silk and his shoes were made on a personal last by a shop in Jermyn Street. Vulkan was the new breed of European man: he spoke like an American, ate like a German, dressed like an Italian and paid tax like a Frenchman.

He used all the Anglo-Saxon idioms with consummate skill and when he swore did it with calm and considered timing and never with frustration or rage. His Cadillac Eldorado was a part of him; it was black with real leather upholstery, and the wooden steering wheel, map-reading lights, hi-fi, air conditioning and radio phone were unobtrusive, but not so unobtrusive that you could fail to notice them. There were no woolly tigers or plastic skeletons, no pennants or leopard-skin seat-covers in Vulkan’s car. You could scrape the surface of Johnnie Vulkan however you liked; he was gold as deep as you cared to go.

The commissionaire at the Hilton saluted and said, ‘Shall I park the Strassenkreuzer, sir?’ He spoke English and, although the term street-cruiser is an uncomplimentary word for American cars, Johnnie liked it. He flipped him the car keys with a practised movement of the fingers. Johnnie walked ahead of me. The tiny metal studs that he affected in his shoes made a rhythm of clicks across the marble. The discreetly shaded light fell across the carefully oiled rubber-plants and shone on the Trinkgeld of the girl in the newspaper stand where they sold yesterday’s Daily Mail and Playboy and coloured postcards of the wall that you could send to friends and say, ‘Wish you were here’. I followed Vulkan into the bar where it was too dark to read the price-list and the piano player felt his way among the black and white keys like someone had changed them all around.

‘Glad you came?’ Vulkan said.

I wasn’t sure I was. Vulkan had changed almost as much as the city itself. Both found themselves in a permanent state of emergency and had discovered a way of living with it.

‘It’s great,’ I said.

Johnnie sniffed at his bourbon and downed it like it was medicine. ‘But you thought it would be different by now,’ he said. ‘You thought it would all be peacetime, eh?’

‘It’s too damn peacetime for my liking,’ I said. ‘It’s too damn “sundowners on the veranda” and “those infernal drums, Carruthers”. There are too many soldiers being Brahmins.’

‘And too many German civilians being untouchables.’

‘I was in the Lighthouse cinema in Calcutta once,’ I said. ‘They were showing Four Feathers. When the film came to that section when the beleaguered garrison could hold out no longer, across the horizon came a few dozen topees piping “Over the seas to Skye”, some short-muzzle Lee Enfields saying, “Cor blimey”, and some gay young sahibs with punkah wallahs in attendance.’

‘They put the tribesmen to flight,’ said Vulkan.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but in the cinema the Indian audience cheered as they did it.’

‘You think we are cheering on our Allied masters?’

‘You tell me,’ I said and I looked around and listened to English speech and drank the sherry that cost twice the price it would fetch anywhere else this side of the wall.

‘You English,’ said Vulkan. ‘You live out there in the middle of that cold sea surrounded by herring. How will we ever get you to understand? June the sixth, 1944, was D-Day; up till then you British had lost more people in wartime traffic accidents than you had lost in battle,¹ while we Germans had already suffered six and half million casualties on the Eastern front alone. Germany was the only occupied country that failed to produce a resistance organization. It failed to produce one because there was nothing left; in 1945 we had thirteen-year-old kids standing where you are standing now, pointing a bazooka down the Ku-damm waiting for a Joseph Stalin tank to clank out of the Grunewald. So we fraternized and we collaborated. We saluted your private soldiers, gave our houses to your non-coms and our wives to your officers. We cleared the rubble with our bare hands and didn’t mind that empty lorries passed us coming back from your official brothels.’

Vulkan ordered two more drinks. A girl with too much make-up and a gold lamé dress tried to catch Vulkan’s eye, but when she saw me looking took a tiny mirror from a chainmail bag and gave her eyebrows a working over.

As Vulkan turned to me he spilled his bourbon over the back of his hand.

‘We Germans didn’t understand our role,’ he said. He licked the whisky from his hand. ‘As a defeated nation we were to be forever relegated to being customers – supplied by the Anglo-American factories – but we didn’t understand that. We began to build factories of our own, and we did it well because we are professionals, we Germans, we like to do everything well – even losing wars. We became prosperous and you English and Americans don’t like it. There has to be a reason that lets you keep your nice cosy feeling of superiority. It’s because we Germans are toadies, weaklings, automatons, masochists, collaborators or——lickers that we are doing so well.’

‘You are breaking my heart,’ I said.

‘Drink,’ said Vulkan and downed his most recent one with lightning speed. ‘You aren’t the one I should be shouting at. You understand better than most, even though you hardly understand at all.’

‘You are too kind,’ I said.

At about 10 P.M. a bright-eyed boy that I had seen at the Gehlen Bureau flashed his cuffs at the bartender and ordered a Beefeater martini. He sipped at it and turned slowly to survey the room. He caught a sight of us and gulped at his drink.

‘King,’ he said quietly. ‘Here’s a surprise.’

It was like finding a cherry in a sweet martini; a big surprise but you raise hell if it’s not there.

‘I’m Helmut,’ said the bright-eyed boy.

‘I’m Edmond Dorf,’ I said; two can play at that game.

‘Do you want to speak in private?’ Vulkan said.

‘No,’ said Helmut politely and offered his English cigarettes. ‘Our latest employee is, alas, in a traffic accident.’

Vulkan produced a gold lighter.

‘Fatal?’ asked Vulkan.

Helmut nodded.

‘When?’ said Vulkan.

‘Next week,’ said Helmut. ‘We bring him around the corner² next week.’ I noticed Vulkan’s hand flinch as he lit the cigarette.

Helmut noticed it too, he smiled. To me he said, ‘The Russians are bringing your boy into the city in two weeks from next Saturday.’

‘My boy?’ I said.

‘The scientist from the Academy of Sciences Biology Division; he will probably stay at the Adlon. Isn’t that the man you want us to move?’

‘No comment,’ I said. It was very annoying and this boy was making the most of it. He flashed me a big smile before giving his teeth a rebore with the Beefeater martini.

‘We are arranging the pipeline now,’ he added. ‘It would help us if you supply these documents from your own sources. You will find all the data there.’ He handed me a folded slip of paper, shot his cuffs a couple of times to show me his cuff-links, then finished his martini and vanished.

Vulkan and I looked across the rubber-plants.

‘Gehlens Wunderkinder,’ said Vulkan. ‘They’re all like him.’

¹ In the first four years of war British casualties (including POWs and missing) were 387,966. The number killed and injured in traffic accidents was 588,742.

² Helmut used the expression ‘Um die Ecke bringen’, which in German means to kill.

9

In certain circumstances pawns can be converted into the most powerful unit on the board.

Tuesday, October 8th

I put the Gehlen request for documents on the teleprinter to London and marked it urgent.

The paper said:

Name: Louis Paul BROUM

National Status: British

Nationality of Father: French

Profession: Agricultural Biologist

Date of birth: August 3rd, 1920

Place of birth: Prague, Czechoslovakia

Residence: England

Height: 5 ft 9 ins Weight: 11 st 12 lb

Colour of eyes: brown Colour of hair: black

Scars: 4-inch scar inside of right ankle

Documents required.

1. British Passport issued not before beginning of current year.

2. British Driving Licence.

3. International Driving Permit.

4. Current Insurance Policy on a motor vehicle in British Isles.

5. Motor Vehicle Registration Book (for same vehicle).

6. Diners’ Club credit card (current).

10

JOHN AUGUST VULKAN

Wednesday, October 9th

‘Oh boy,’ thought Johnnie Vulkan Edelfresswelle – a great calorific abundance of everything but faith – and quite frankly it was great. There were times when he saw himself as an untidy recluse in some village in the Bavarian woods, with ash down his waistcoat and his head full of genius, but tonight he was glad he had become what he had become. Johnnie Vulkan, wealthy, attractive and a personification of Knallhärte – the tough, almost violent quality that post-war Germany rewarded with admiring glances. The health cures at Worishofen had tempered him to a supple resilience and that’s what you needed to stay on top in this town – this was no place for an intellectual today, whatever it may have been in the ’thirties.

He was glad the Englishman had gone. One could have too much of the English. They ate fish for breakfast and always wanted to know where they gave the best rate of exchange. The whole place was reflected in the coloured mirror. The women were dressed in sleek shiny gowns and the men were wearing 1,000-mark suits. It looked like those advertisements for bourbon that one saw in Life magazine. He sipped his whisky and eased his foot on to the foot-rail of the bar. Anyone coming in would take him for an American. Not one of those crummy stringers who hung around writing groundless rumours with ‘Our special correspondent in Berlin’ on the dateline, but one of the Embassy people or one of the businessmen like the one sitting against the wall with the blonde. Johnny looked at the blonde again. Boy, oh boy! he could see what type of suspender belt she was wearing. He flashed her a smile. She smiled back. A fifty-mark lay, he thought, and lost interest. He called the barman and ordered another bourbon. It was a new barman.

‘Bourbon,’ he said. He liked to hear himself saying that. ‘Plenty of ice this time,’ he said. The barman brought it and said, ‘The right money, please, I am short of change.’ The barman said it in German. It made Vulkan annoyed.

Vulkan tapped a Philip Morris on his thumbnail and noticed how brown his skin was against the white cigarette. He put the cigarette in his mouth and snapped his fingers. The bloody fool must have been half-asleep.

Along the bar, there were a couple of tourists and a newspaper writer named Poetsch from Ohio. One of the tourists asked if Poetsch went across to the ‘other side’ very much.

‘Not much,’ Poetsch said. ‘The Commies have me marked down on their black list.’ He laughed modestly. Johnnie Vulkan said an obscene word loud enough for the barman to look up. The barman grinned at Johnnie and said, ‘Mir kann keener.’¹

Poetsch didn’t speak German so he didn’t notice.

There were lots of radio men here tonight: Americans with the blunt accents of their fathers who spoke strange Slav dialects over the jammed night air. One of them waved to Vulkan but didn’t beckon him across there. That was because they considered themselves the cultural set of the city. Really they were mental lightweights equipped with a few thousand items of cocktail-time small talk. They wouldn’t know a string quartet from a string vest.

The barman lit his cigarette for him.

‘Thanks,’ said Johnnie. He made a mental note to cultivate the barman in the near future, not for the purpose of getting information – he hadn’t sunk to that peanut circuit yet – but because it made life easier in a town like this. He sipped his bourbon and tried to think of a way to appease London. Vulkan felt glad that Dawlish’s boy was heading back to London. He was all right as the English go, but you never knew where you were with him. That’s because the English were amateurs – and proud of it. There were some days when Johnnie wished that he was working for the Americans. He had more in common with them, he felt.

All around there was a rumble of courteous conversation. The man with nose, moustache and spectacles that looked like a one-piece novelty was an English MP. He had the managerial voice that the English upper class used for hailing taxis and foreigners.

‘But here in the actual city of Berlin,’ the Englishman was saying, ‘taxes are twenty per cent below your West German taxes and what’s more your chaps at Bonn waive the four per cent on transactions. With a bit of wangling they will insure your freight free and if you bring in steel you have it carted virtually without charge. No businessman can afford to overlook it, old chap. What line of business you in?’ The Englishman brushed both ends of his moustache and sniffed loudly.

Vulkan smiled to a man from the Jewish Documentation Section. That was a job Vulkan would enjoy, but the pay was very small, he heard. The Jewish Documentation Section in Vienna collected material about war crimes to bring ex-SS men to trial. There was plenty of work about, Vulkan thought. He looked through the tobacco smoke; he could count at least five ex-SS officers in here at this moment.

‘Best thing that ever happened to the British motor car industry.’ The Englishman’s loud voice cut the air again.

‘Your Volkswagen people felt the draught in no time. Ha ha. Lost a source of cheap labour and found the trade union johnnies dunning them for money. What happened? Up went the price of the Volkswagen. Gave our chaps a chance. Say what you like, best thing that ever happened to the British motor car industry, that wall.’

Johnnie fingered the British passport in his pocket. Well, the wall didn’t make much difference to him. He preferred it in fact. If the communists hadn’t stopped all their riff-raff streaming across here in search of jobs, then where would they have got people to work in the factories? Johnnie knew where they would have got them: from the East. Who wanted to go swimming out on the Müggelsee and have it full of Mongolians and Ukrainians? Lot of chance there would be then of restoring East Prussia. Pomerania and Silesia to Germany. Not that Vulkan gave a damn about the ‘lost territories’ but some of these loudmouths, who did, shouldn’t shout about the wall so much.

There was a girl from Wedding. He wondered whether it was true what they said about her chauffeur. It was a strange place for a girl like her to live, horrible low-class district. That tiny house with the TV set over the bed. He had put the Scots colonel on to her. What was it he had said afterwards about her wanting a 21-inch model with colour and remote control? Vulkan remembered how the whole bar had laughed at the time. Vulkan blew her a kiss and wrinkled his eyes in greeting. She waved a small gold-mesh evening bag at him. She was still sexy, Vulkan thought, and in spite of all his resolution found himself sending the barman across to her with a champagne cocktail. He wrote a little note to go with it. He wrote the note with a small gold propelling pencil on the back of an engraved visiting card.

‘Take dinner with me,’ he wrote. He debated whether to add a query but decided that women hate indecision. Domination was the secret of success with women.

‘Will join you later,’ he added, before giving it to the barman.

Two more people had joined Poetsch down at the far end of the bar; a man and a girl. The man looked English. Poetsch said, ‘You saw it, did you? We call it the “wall of shame”, as you know. I’d like to show it to every living person in the world.’

A man called ‘Colonel Wilson’ winked at Vulkan. To do this, ‘Colonel Wilson’ had to remove a large pair of dark glasses. Around his left eye and upper cheek there was a mesh of scars. Wilson slid a cigar along the bar to Vulkan.

‘Thanks, Colonel,’ Vulkan called. Wilson was an ex-corporal cook who had got his scars from spluttering fat in a mess hall in Omaha. It was a good cigar. ‘Colonel’ wouldn’t be such a fool as to give him a cheap one. Vulkan smelled it, rolled it and then decapitated it scientifically with a small flat gold cigar-cutter that he kept in his top pocket. A gold guillotine. An amalgam of sharp steel and burnished gold. The barman lit the cigar for him.

‘Always with a match,’ Vulkan told him. ‘A match held a quarter of an inch away from the leaf. Gas lighters never.’ The barman nodded. Before Vulkan had the cigar properly alight, ‘Colonel’ had moved alongside him at the bar. ‘Colonel Wilson’ was six feet one-and-a-half inches of leathery skin encasing meaty sinew, packed dense like a well-made Bockwurst. His face was grey and lined: his hair trimmed to the skull. He could have made a living in Hollywood playing in the sort of film where the villains have thick lips. He ordered two bourbons.

Vulkan could hear Poetsch saying, ‘Truth – I’m fond of saying – is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of freedom.’ Poetsch was fond of saying that, Vulkan thought. He knew that ‘Colonel Wilson’ wanted something. He drank the bourbon quickly. ‘Colonel Wilson’ ordered two more. Vulkan looked at the barman and tipped his head a millimetre towards the girl from Wedding. The barman lowered his eyelids. It was one of the great things about this town, thought Vulkan, this sensitivity to signs and innuendo. He heard the English MP’s voice, ‘Good heavens, no. We have a few tricks left up our sleeve I can tell you.’ The English MP chortled.

The British were deadly, Vulkan decided. He remembered his last visit there. The big hotel in Cromwell Road, and the rain that never stopped for a week. A nation of inventive geniuses where there are forty different types of electrical plug, none of which works efficiently. Milk is safe on the street but young girls in danger, sex indecent but homosexuality acceptable, a land as far north as Labrador with unheated houses, where hospitality is so rare that ‘landlady’ is a pejorative word, where the most boastful natives in the world tell foreigners that the only British shortcoming is modesty.

Vulkan winked to the girl from Wedding. She smoothed her dress slowly and touched the nape of her neck. Vulkan turned to ‘Colonel Wilson’ and said, ‘OK, what’s on your mind?’

‘I want thirty-nine Praktika cameras; with the f/2 lens.’

Vulkan reached for a piece of ice from the canister on the bar. The piano-player did a fancy cadenza and stopped playing. Vulkan put his cigar in his mouth and clapped his hands. His face scowled at the ribbon of smoke. Several people joined in the applause. Vulkan said, ‘Do you?’ still looking at the piano-player.

‘Good price and in dollars,’ said Colonel Wilson. There was no reply from Vulkan.

Wilson said, ‘I know that you don’t do that kind of thing for a living; but this is a special favour for a friend of mine. It’s more of a memento – you know, a camera smuggled out of the East – these guys like that kind of thing.’

‘What guys?’ said Vulkan.

‘Trade delegation,’ said Wilson.

‘Thirty-nine,’ said Vulkan reflectively.

‘It would be no trouble to you,’ said Wilson. ‘Just bring them with you when you come back with a Russian. You are the only guy I know who ever rides through Checkpoint Charlie with a Russian.’ He laughed nervously.

‘Thirty-nine must be the delegation of American radio and TV producers. Poetsch is running that, isn’t he?’

‘Aw,’ said Wilson, ‘don’t go yelling it around. I told you in strict confidence. If you can deliver them before …’

‘You told me nothing,’ said Vulkan. ‘I told you. I’m not a camera dealer, tell Poetsch that.’

‘Leave P’s name out of this.’

Vulkan gently blew smoke at Wilson, saying nothing.

‘Don’t cross me, Vulkan,’ Colonel Wilson said. ‘You don’t want me spilling it to your British pal that I’m no longer a US Army major.’

‘No longer,’ said Vulkan gleefully, almost choking on his drink.

‘I can make plenty of trouble,’ said Wilson.

‘And you can make a one-way trip through the wire,’ said Vulkan quietly.

They stared at each other. Wilson swallowed to moisten his throat and turned back to his drink.

‘OK Johnnie,’ Wilson said over his shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, eh, pal?’

Johnnie pretended not to hear and moved along the bar calling for another bourbon.

‘Two?’ said the barman.

‘One will be enough,’ said Johnnie.

He could see Wilson’s face in the mirror; it was very pale. He could see the girl from Wedding too, touching the hair at the nape of her neck like she didn’t know she was straining her brassiere. She crossed her legs and smiled at his reflection.

‘Poetsch,’ Johnnie thought.

He had wanted to get something on Poetsch, if only to cut down his ranting at the bar. He could hear his voice now. Poetsch was saying, ‘The very same people who made the great little TV film about the tunnel. The whole thing was paid for by the TV company, NBC. And what I’m saying, folks, is that those fifty-nine people who escaped owe their very freedom to our American system of unshackled enterprise and bold corporate drive …’ There were a couple of favours Poetsch could do for Johnnie Vulkan. Johnnie relished the idea of telling Poetsch about them; even the girl from Wedding wasn’t a better prospect than that.

The lounge was beginning to fill up now. Vulkan leaned back against the bar, tensed his muscles and relaxed. It was good to feel he knew them all and that even Americans like ‘Colonel Wilson’ couldn’t take advantage of him. Johnnie Vulkan could pick out the tarts and the queens, the hustlers and the fairies. He knew all the heavies waiting assignment: from the nailers-up of notices to the nailers up of Christs. He saw the girl from Wedding trying to catch his eye. Poetsch’s crowd had grown too. There was that elderly English queer with the dyed hair, and a stupid little Dresdener who thought he was going to infiltrate the Gehlen Bureau – except that Johnnie had told them all about him last week. He wondered whether Helmut had been serious about having the Dresdener killed in a traffic accident. It was possible. King was right as a code name Vulkan decided; they acknowledged his stature by alloting it to him. Freudian. King Vulkan of Berlin.

He supposed the red-haired girl talking to Poetsch now was the one Poetsch had mentioned to him; the girl from Israeli Intelligence.

‘Boy, oh boy!’ thought Vulkan. ‘What a town this is!’ and he eased his way down the bar towards them, smiling at Poetsch.

¹ Mir kann keener: you can’t fool me (a typical Berliner comment).

11

Zugzwang: to move a chess piece under duress.

London, Thursday, October 10th

I moved into top as I passed Parliament Square. The night was young and it had nothing much to do. Tiny moons moved across St James’s Park playing tiddly-winks with the shiny leaves, and the speedometer moved up to nudge sixty. The radiotelephone called me back to earth. It was the Charlotte Street Control Room: ‘Message for you oboe ten from Northern Car Hire.¹ Do you read me? Over.’

‘Loud and clear. Let’s have it.’

‘Message from Mr D. You are to contact Mr Hallam at Betty’s Club. Is that roger? Oboe ten. Over.’

‘Only too roger.’

‘Observe your r/t procedure, oboe ten. Your customer will ask you for change of ten shillings. You will have four half-crowns ready for him. Is that roger? Over.’

‘What are you talking about? What’s Hallam want ten bob for?’

‘Oboe ten. Observe procedure please. I am giving you your introduction formality for this customer. Is that roger? Over.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I said. ‘Phone me at home later on. On the landline. OK?’

The Scots operator’s nerve broke before I got to Hyde Park Corner.

‘For Christ’s sake. Oboe ten. You know what the Home Office people are like. He wants you to give him four half-dollars so that he knows who you are.’

‘What do you mean “so that he knows who I am”? I saw Hallam only the other day. Who the hell is he going to think I am if I don’t give him four half-crowns – James Bond?’

‘Please just give him the half-crowns, oboe ten.’

‘I don’t know how many make ten bob,’ I said, but the operator didn’t come back on the air again. Inside the car the radio shone with a faint green spot of light. I turned the volume and filled the car with big band sound as a volley of raindrops spattered across the windscreen.

Betty’s was one of the small set of London clubs that have been going over twenty years on a mixed membership, face up to the financial crisis of imminent closure once a year but never get around to pasting the corners of the wallpaper back into place. Next to the magazine rack, a brown-haired man was slugging shillings into a one-armed bandit without letting go of his Tuborg lager. The crash of the machine punctuated some gentle Sinatra. Without looking at me he sensed my approach, but he continued to watch the spinning oranges and pineapples.

‘Got change of ten bob?’ he said. Before I could reply, the fruit machine gave three neat clicks and then a shudder as shillings showered into the metal tray.

‘Looks like you won’t be needing change now,’ I said.

He turned suddenly and grasped my cuff. His watery brown eyes stared into mine for a long time before he said, ‘Don’t you believe it, dear. I still do.’ It was Hallam, the man from Bina Gardens, but his hair was now a rich brown colour. He scooped up the shillings and showered them into his already sagging pockets.

‘First-rate for the gas meter,’ he said. I held four half-crowns extended towards him while he spent five minutes trying to pry apart two ten-shilling notes that were only one. Reluctantly he gave it to me. Then he took his time fitting the base of a Player’s No 3 into a four-inch holder. I flicked a Swan Vesta alight with my thumbnail and he nosed his fag down into the fire and flame. He was well alight before he spoke.

‘Stok and the Gehlen boys are both being helpful?’

‘Both being very helpful,’ I said. ‘Did you ever find Confucius?’

‘Yes,’ said Hallam. ‘The fickle creature came back to me Tuesday morning, very early. So dirty; heaven knows where he had been. So independent the Siamese. I really should buy a collar for him but it seems so cruel.’ Somehow he got four syllables into ‘cruel’.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I had a street map of Berlin in my pocket. I moved a couple of ashtrays and a vase of plastic tulips and spread it across the table.

‘Stok will bring Semitsa into East Berlin somewhere within this rectangle.’ I drew a very light pencil mark just north of Alexanderplatz.

‘He will tell me where later. If I don’t like it, I can fix somewhere else in the same district.’ Hallam had his Tuborg wrapped around his face but I knew he was taking in every word.

‘Why don’t you make the Russkies bring him down to Marienborn and hand him over the West German frontier?’ he asked.

‘Not possible,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Outside Stok’s district. How foolish of me. Very well then. You have Semitsa – or you think you have him – here.’ He stabbed the street map.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘from there the Gehlen boys will post him special delivery to West Berlin.’

‘Then what?’ asked Hallam.

‘If I know anything about the Gehlen boys they will delay the transfer at least twenty-four hours so that they can pump Semitsa for anything that might be useful to them. Then using the documents that your Home Office people are going to provide we bring him to London as a naturalized British subject returning home.’

‘How will the Gehlen people move him across the wall?’ said Hallam.

‘You know better than to ask that and so do I,’ I said. ‘If I ask, they’ll just tell me a lot of reasonably creative lies.’

‘Did you give me my change?’ he said.

‘Yes I did,’ I said, ‘four half-crowns.’

Hallam opened his wallet and counted his paper money.

‘The Home Office won’t release the documents until one of our own people actually sees Semitsa in the flesh in West Berlin.’ I could see the slack red lining of his watery eyes. He swung his chin from side to side to emphasize the negative and the jaw opened to repeat the decision.

‘You see why …’ he began.

I reached out and with my finger-tips gently closed Hallam’s mouth. ‘You wouldn’t want to see Semitsa’s flesh,’ I said. ‘You don’t like flesh, do you, Hallam? It isn’t nice.’

His face flushed like dipped litmus. I went across to the bar, bought two XO brandies and set one in front of Hallam. His face was still red.

‘Just have the papers ready, love,’ I said. ‘I’ll manage.’

Hallam poured the brandy down his throat and his eyes watered more than ever as he nodded agreement.

¹ Our radio procedure is designed to make an eavesdropper think we are a taxi service. For this same reason our car pool uses radio-equipped taxi-cabs with the flags always set at ‘hired’.

12

Every piece has its mode of attack but only a pawn will attack en passant. Similarly only a pawn can be captured in this manner.

Thursday, October 10th

When I left Hallam I drifted north. The Saddle Room was rocking until the spurs jingled and a girl with a back-combed bouffon of red hair was twisting with obsessive grace on a table top which put her ten inches above floor level, not allowing for the back-combing. Her feet knocked the glasses to the floor with rhythmic abandon. No one seemed to mind. I walked as far as the stairs and peered into the smoke and noise. Two girls with large but tight sweaters narcissistically twisted back to back. I poured two or three double whiskies into the back of my throat, watched the floor and tried to forget what a crummy trick I had pulled on Hallam.

It was still raining outside. The doorman and I looked around for a taxi. I found one, gave the doorman a florin and climbed in.

‘I saw it first.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘I saw it first,’ said the girl with the back-combed bouffon. She said it slowly and patiently. She was about five foot ten, light in complexion, nervous of movement, dressed with skilful simplicity. She had a rather wide, full mouth and eyes like a trapped doe. Now she kneaded her face around while querulously telling me yet again that she’d seen the cab before I had.

‘I’m going towards Chelsea,’ she said, opening the door.

I looked around. The bad weather had driven cabs into hiding. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘hop in. We’ll do your journey first.’

The cab pulled into a tight lock and my new friend eased her back-combing on to the leather-work with a sigh.

‘Cigarette?’ she said and flicked the corner of a pack of Camels with a skill that I can never master. I took one and brought a loose Swan Vesta match from my pocket. I dug my thumbnail into the head and ignited it. She was impressed and stared into my eyes as I lit the cigarette. I took it pretty calmly, just like I didn’t have a couple of milligrammes of flaming phosphorus under the nail and coming through the pain threshold like a rusty scalpel.

‘Are you in Advertising?’ she said. She had a soft American accent.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m an account executive with J. Walter Thompson.’

‘You don’t look like any of the Thompson people I know.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘I’m the vanguard of the button-down shirt mob.’ She gave a polite little laugh. ‘Where in Chelsea?’ the driver called. She told him. ‘It’s a party,’ she said to me.

‘Is that why you have that bottle of Guinness in your pocket?’ I asked.

She tapped it to make sure it was still there. ‘Ghoul,’ she said smiling. ‘That’s to wash my hair in.’

‘In Guinness?’ I said.

‘If you want body,’ she said patting her hair.

‘I want body,’ I said. ‘Believe me, I do.’

‘My name is Samantha Steel,’ she said politely. ‘People call me Sam.’

13

Roman Decoy: a piece offered as bait to save a hazardous situation.

London, Friday, October 11th

Charlotte Street runs north from Oxford Street and there are few who will blame it. By midmorning they are writing out the menus, straining yesterday’s fat, dusting the plastic flowers and the waiters are putting their moustaches on with eyebrow pencils.

I waved to Wally who runs the delicatessen across the road before turning into the doorway marked, among other things, ‘Ex-Officers’ Employment Bureau’, by a smooth polished brass plate. In the hall the same floral wallpaper had moved ever nearer autumn. The first-floor landing smelled of acetone and from behind a doorway marked ‘Acme Films Cutting Rooms’, I could hear the gentle purr of a movie projector. The next floor pretended to be a theatrical tailor so that we could buy, alter or make any kind of uniform we needed. This is where Alice sat. Alice was the cross between librarian and concierge. Anyone who thought they could do anything in that building without having Alice’s approval should just try doing it.

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