‘I don’t want an eager beaver in the Berlin office,’ said Bret Rensselaer, pausing long enough for me to register the personal pronoun that said Bret Rensselaer was the one who decided who got that coveted post. ‘Frank Harrington’ – the surname was used to distance Bret Rensselaer from his subordinate – ‘went over there to sort out a mess of incompetence, and he did that. He’s not a goddamned superstar, and we all knew it. He was a receiver, sent in to preside over a bankruptcy.’ Bret Rensselaer had appointed Frank Harrington to Berlin and he resented anything said against his appointee.
‘Frank did wonders,’ said Dicky Cruyer. It was a reflex response, and while I was admiring it he added, ‘You took a chance putting Frank into that job, Bret, and you did it with half the Department heads telling you it would be a disaster. Disaster!’ Dicky Cruyer devoted a precious moment to making a clicking noise with his mouth that indicated his contempt for those amazingly shortsighted people who had questioned Bret Rensselaer’s bold decision. He looked at me while he did it, for among those doubters I was numbered.
Rensselaer said, ‘Did you notice anything else about the material that this fast-disappearing helper’ – a glance at me as the person who’d let the helper slip through our hands – ‘slammed down on Frank’s desk?’
‘You want me to answer, Bret?’ I said. ‘Or are we both going to wait for Dicky to say something?’
‘Now, what the hell’s this?’ said Dicky anxiously. ‘There are quite a few things about that material that I noticed. In fact, I’m in the process of writing a report about it.’ Being in the process of writing a report about something was the nearest that Dicky ever came to admitting total ignorance.
‘Bernard?’ said Rensselaer, looking at me.
‘That it all came through Giles Trent’s office?’
Rensselaer nodded. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Every document that was in that bundle of material leaked to the Russians had, at some stage or other, passed through Trent’s hands.’
‘Well, let me hang this one on you,’ I said. ‘A few years ago – I have the dates and details – the Berlin office made an intercept that was reported back to Karlshorst within three days. Giles Trent was on duty there that night.’
‘Then why the hell wasn’t that on his file?’ said Cruyer. I noticed that he was wearing a gold medallion inside his dark blue silk shirt. It went with his white denim trousers.
‘He was completely cleared,’ I said. ‘Berlin decided who was responsible and took all necessary action.’
‘But you don’t believe it,’ said Rensselaer.
I raised my hands in the sort of shrug of resignation that would have been over the top for a road-show actor’s Shylock.
‘But he was in the building?’ said Rensselaer.
‘He was on duty,’ I said, avoiding the question. ‘And he did handle everything that arrived in Berlin last week.’
‘What do you think, Dicky?’ said Rensselaer.
‘Perhaps we’re being too sophisticated,’ said Dicky. ‘Perhaps we’ve got a very straightforward case of Trent selling us out, but we insist upon looking for something else.’ He smiled. ‘Sometimes life is simple. Sometimes things are what they appear to be.’ It was a cry from the heart.
I didn’t say anything and neither did Rensselaer. He glanced at my face and didn’t ask me what I thought. I guess I’m not as inscrutable as Cruyer.
When Rensselaer had finished with us, Dicky Cruyer invited me into his office. It was the sort of invitation I could decline at my peril, as Dicky’s voice made clear, but I looked at my watch for long enough to make him open the drinks cabinet.
‘All right,’ he said as he put a big gin and tonic into my hand. ‘What the hell is this all about?’
‘Where do you want to begin?’ I asked, and looked at my watch again. My difficulty in dealing with the stubborn and intractable mind of Bret Rensselaer was compounded by the myopic confusion that Dicky Cruyer brought to every meeting.
‘Are you now trying to say that Giles Trent is innocent?’ he said petulantly.
‘No,’ I said. I drank some of the very weak mixture while Cruyer was fishing around in his glass to scoop a fragment of tonic-bottle label from where it was floating among the ice cubes.
‘So he is guilty?’
‘Probably,’ I said.
‘Then I fail to understand why you and Bret were going through that rigmarole just now.’
‘Can I help myself to a bit more gin?’
Cruyer nodded, and watched to see how much of it I poured. ‘So why don’t we just pull Trent in, and have done with it?’
‘Bret wants to play him. Bret wants to find out what the Russkies want out of him.’
‘Want out of him!’ said Cruyer scornfully. ‘Great Scott! They’ve been running him for all that time, and now Bret wants to give them more time…How long before Bret is going to be quite sure what they want?’ He looked up at me and said, ‘They want to know what we do, say and think up here on the top floor. That’s what they want.’
‘Well, that’s not so worrying. You could get everything important that is done, said or thought up here written on the back of a postage stamp, and still have room for the Lord’s Prayer.’
‘Never mind the wisecracks,’ said Cruyer. He was right about Trent. There would be only one use for an agent who was so close to us; they’d use him to provide ‘a commentary’. ‘Trent’s a Balliol man, like me,’ said Dicky suddenly.
‘Are you boasting, confessing or complaining?’ I asked.
Dicky smiled that little smile with which all Balliol men like him confront the envy of lesser mortals. ‘I’m simply pointing out that he’s no fool. He’ll guess what’s going on.’
‘Trent’s no longer doing any harm,’ I said. ‘He’s been debriefed and now we might as well play him for as long as we can.’
‘I don’t go along with all this damned doubleagent, triple-agent, quadruple-agent stuff. You get to a point where no one knows what the hell is going on any more.’
‘You mean it’s confusing,’ I said.
‘Of course it’s confusing!’ said Cruyer loudly. ‘Trent will soon have got to the point where he doesn’t know which side he’s working for.’
‘As long as we know, it’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re making sure that Trent only gets to hear the things we want Moscow to hear.’
Dicky Cruyer didn’t resent my talking to him as if he were an eight-year-old; he appreciated it. ‘Okay, I understand that,’ he said. ‘But what about this new leak in Berlin?’
‘It’s not a new leak. It’s an incident dating from years ago.’
‘But newly discovered.’
‘No. Frank knew about it at the time. It’s only new to us, and that only because he didn’t think it was worth passing back here.’
‘Are you covering for someone?’ said Cruyer. However numb his brain, his antennae were alive and well.
‘No.’
‘Are you covering for Frank, or for one of your old Berlin schoolmates?’
‘Let it go, Dicky,’ I advised. ‘It’s for background information only. Frank Harrington has closed the file on this one. You go digging it all up again and someone is going to say you are vindictive.’
‘Vindictive! My God, I ask for a few details about a security leak in Berlin and you start telling me I’m vindictive.’
‘I said you’ll run the risk of being accused of it. And Frank sees the D-G socially whenever he’s in town. Frank is near enough to retirement to scream bloody murder if you do anything to make ripples on his pond.’ Cruyer’s face went a shade paler under his tan and I knew I’d touched a nerve. ‘Do what you like,’ I added. ‘It’s just a word to the wise, Dicky.’
He shot me a glance to see if I was being sardonic. ‘I appreciate it,’ he said. ‘You’re probably right.’ He drank some of his gin and pulled a face as if he hated the taste. ‘Frank lives in style, doesn’t he? I was out at his country place last month. What a magnificent house. And
he’s got all the expense of living in Berlin as well.’
Two houses in Berlin, I felt tempted to say, but I sipped my drink and smiled.
Dicky Cruyer ran a finger along the waist of his white denim jeans until he felt the designer’s leather label on his back pocket. Thus reassured, he said, ‘The Harringtons are treated like local gentry in that village, you know. They have his wife presenting prizes at the village fête, judging at the gymkhana, and tasting the sponge cakes at the village hall. No wonder he wants to retire, with all that waiting for him. Have you been there?’
‘Well, I’ve known him for a long time,’ I said, although why the hell I should find myself apologizing to Dicky for the fact that I’d been a regular guest at Frank’s house ever since I was a small child, I don’t know.
‘Yes, I forget. He was a friend of your father’s. Frank brought you into the service, didn’t he?’
‘In a way,’ I said.
‘The D-G recruited me,’ said Dicky. My heart sank as he settled down into his Charles Eames leather armchair and rested his head back; it was usually the sign of Cruyer in reminiscent mood. ‘He wasn’t D-G then, of course, he was a tutor – not my tutor, thank God – and he buttonholed me in the college library one afternoon. We got to talking about Fiona. Your wife,’ he added, just in case I’d forgotten her name. ‘He asked me what I thought about the crowd she was running around with. I told him they were absolute dross. They were too! Trotskyites and Marxists and Maoists who could only argue in slogans and couldn’t answer any political argument without checking back with Party headquarters to see what the official line was at that moment. Of course, it was years afterwards that I discovered Fiona was in the Department. Then of course I realized that she must have been mixing with that Marxist crowd on the D-G’s orders all that time ago. What a fool she must have thought me. But I’ve always wondered why the D-G didn’t drop a hint of what was really the score. Did you know Fiona infiltrated the Marxists when she was still only a kid?’
‘Thanks for the drink, Dicky,’ I said, draining my glass and deliberately putting it on his polished rosewood desk top. He jumped out of his chair, grabbed the glass and polished energetically at the place where it had stood. It never failed as a way of getting him back to earth from his long discursive monologues, but one day he was sure to tumble to it.
Having polished the desk with his handkerchief, and peered at the surface long enough to satisfy himself that it had been restored to its former lustre, he turned back to me. ‘Yes, of course, I mustn’t keep you. You haven’t seen much of the family for the last few days. Still, you like Berlin. I’ve heard you say so.’
‘Yes, I like it.’
‘I can’t think what you see in it. A filthy place bombed to nothing in the war. The few decent buildings that survived were in the Russian Sector and they got bulldozed to fill the city with all those ghastly workers’ tenements.’
‘That’s about right,’ I admitted. ‘But it’s got something. And Berliners are the most wonderful people in the world.’
Cruyer smiled. ‘I never realized that you had a romantic streak in you, Bernard. Is that what made the exquisite and unobtainable Fiona fall in love with you?’
‘It wasn’t for my money or social position,’ I said.
Cruyer took my empty glass, the bottle caps and the paper napkin I’d left unused and put them on to a plastic tray for the cleaners to remove. ‘Could Giles Trent be connected to our problems with the Brahms net?’
‘I’ve been wondering that myself,’ I said.
‘Are you going to see them?’
‘Probably.’
‘I’d hate Trent to get wind of your intention,’ said Cruyer quietly.
‘He’s a Balliol man, Dicky,’ I said.
‘He could inadvertently pass it to his Control. Then you might find a hot reception waiting for you.’ He finished his drink, wiped his lips and put his empty glass with the other debris on the tray.
‘And Bret would lose his precious source,’ I said.
‘Don’t let’s worry about that,’ said Cruyer. ‘That’s strictly Bret’s problem.’
14
I collected Fiona from her sister’s house that evening. She’d left a message asking me to take the car there, so she could bring back a folding bed that she’d lent to Tessa at a time when she’d decided to sleep apart from George. The bed had never been put to use. I always suspected that Tessa had used its presence as a threat. She was like that.
Tessa had prepared dinner. It was the sort of nouvelle cuisine extravaganza that Uncle Silas had been complaining of. A thin slice of veal with two tiny puddles of brightly coloured sauces, peas arranged inside a scooped-out tomato, and a few wafers of carrot with a mint leaf draped over them. Tessa had learned to prepare it at a cookery school in Hampstead.
‘It’s delicious,’ said Fiona.
‘He was yummy,’ said Tessa when she’d finished eating. She never seemed to need more than a spoonful of food at any meal. Nouvelle cuisine was invented for people like Tessa, who just wanted to go through the pretence of eating a meal for the sake of the social benefits. ‘He had these wonderful dark eyes that could see right through your clothes, and when he was demonstrating the cooking he’d put his arm round you and take your hands. “Like zis, like zis,” he used to say. He was Spanish, I think, but he liked to pretend he was French of course.’
Fiona said, ‘Tessa has cooked the most wonderful things for me while you were away.’
‘Like zis?’ I asked.
‘And meals for the children,’ said Fiona hurriedly, hoping to appeal to my feelings of obligation. ‘She has given me a gallon of minestrone for the freezer. It will be useful, Tess darling, and the children just love soup.’
‘And how was Berlin?’ said Tessa. She smiled. We understood each other. She knew I didn’t like the tiny ladies’ snack she’d prepared, or her supposed antics with the Spanish cookery teacher, but she didn’t give a damn. Fiona was the peacemaker, and it amused Tessa to see her sister intercede.
‘Berlin was wonderful,’ I said with spurious enthusiasm.
‘German food is more robust than French food,’ said Tessa. ‘Like German women, I suppose.’ It was directed at me and more specifically at the buxom German girl I was with when Tessa first met me, back before I married Fiona.
‘You know that German proverb: one is what one eats,’ I said.
‘Feast on cabbage and what do you become?’ said Tessa.
‘A butterfly?’ I said.
‘And if you eat dumplings?’
‘At least you are no longer hungry,’ I said.
‘Give him some more meat,’ Fiona told her sister, ‘or he’ll be bad-tempered all evening.’
When Tessa returned from the kitchen with my second helping of dinner, the plate no longer exhibited the finer points of la nouvelle cuisine. There was a chunky piece of veal and a large spoonful of odd-shaped carrot pieces that showed how tricky it was to slice thin even slices. There was only one kind of sauce this time, and it was poured over the meat. ‘Where’s the mint leaf?’ I said. Tessa aimed a playful blow at the place between my shoulders, and it landed with enough force to make me cough.
‘Did you notice anything different in the hall?’ Tessa asked Fiona while I was wolfing the food.
‘Yes,’ said Fiona. ‘The lovely little table, I was going to ask you about it.’
‘Giles Trent. He’s selling some things that used to belong to his grandmother. He needs the extra room and he has other things for sale. Anyone who could find space enough for a dining table…Oh, Fiona, it’s such a beautiful mahogany table, with eight chairs. I’d sell my soul for it but it would never fit here and this table belonged to George’s mother. I dare not say I’d like to replace it.’
‘Giles Trent?’ I said. ‘Is he selling up?’
‘He’s working with you now, isn’t he?’ said Tessa. ‘He told me he has talked with you and everything is going to be all right. I’m so pleased.’
>
‘What else is he selling?’
‘Only furniture. He won’t part with any of his pictures. I wish he’d decide to let me have one of those little Rembrandt etchings. I’d love one.’
‘Would George agree?’ asked Fiona.
‘I’d give it to George for his birthday,’ said Tessa. ‘There’s nothing a man can do if you buy something you want and say “Happy birthday” when he first sees it.’
‘You’re quite unscrupulous,’ said Fiona without bothering to conceal her admiration.
‘I’d go carefully on Rembrandt etchings,’ I told her. ‘There are lots of plates around, and the dealers just print a few off from time to time, and ease them into the market through suckers like Giles Trent.’
‘Are they allowed to do that?’ Tessa asked.
‘What’s to stop them?’ I said. ‘It’s not forgery or faking.’
‘But that’s like printing money,’ said Fiona.
‘It’s better,’ I said. ‘It’s like using your husband’s money and saying “Happy birthday”.’
‘Have you had enough veal?’ said Tessa.
‘It was delicious,’ I said. ‘What’s for dessert – Chinese gooseberries?’
‘Tess wants to watch the repeat of “Dallas” on TV tonight. We’d best be getting that bed downstairs and go home,’ said Fiona.
‘It’s not heavy,’ said Tessa. ‘George carried it all by himself, and he’s not very strong.’
I had the folding bed tied on to the roof rack of the car and we were on our way home by the time Tessa sat down to watch TV. ‘Drive carefully,’ said Fiona as we turned out of the entrance to the big apartment block where George and Tessa lived and saw the beginning of the snow. ‘It’s so good to have you home again, darling. I do miss you horribly when you’re away.’ There was an intimacy in the dark interior of the car and it was heightened by the bad weather outside.