Then I spotted Billy. I waved but he was too shy to wave back; he just smiled. He was marching round the gym with all the other juniors. I suppose even clumsy boys like Billy were allowed in the obstacle race.
It was a relay race and for some unexplained reason Billy was first in his team. He scrambled through two rubber tyres, zigzagged round a line of plastic cones, and then climbed on a box before beginning his final sprint back to his number 2. He skidded at speed and went full length. When he got up, his face was covered with blood, and blood was spattered on his white vest. His teammates were shouting at him and he wasn’t quite sure which way he was facing. I knew the feeling very well.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Fiona.
I prevented her jumping down and running to him. ‘It’s just his nose,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’ said Fiona.
‘I just know,’ I said. ‘Leave him alone.’
18
Rolf Mauser always turned up where and when he was least expected. ‘Where the hell have you sprung from?’ I said, unhappy to be dragged out of bed by a phone call in the early hours of the morning. Unhappy too to be standing ankle-deep in litter, drinking foul-tasting coffee from a machine in London’s long-distance bus station at Victoria.
‘I couldn’t wait until morning, and I knew you lived nearby.’ I’d known Rolf Mauser since I was a schoolboy and he was an unemployed onetime Wehrmacht captain who scratched a living from the Berlin black market and ran errands for my father. Now he was sixty-six years old but he’d not changed much since the last time we’d met, when he was working as a barman in Lisl Hennig’s hotel.
‘Your son Axel said you were in East Berlin.’
‘In a manner of speaking, I still am,’ said Rolf. ‘They let us old people out nowadays, you know.’
‘Yes, I know. Have you seen Axel? He worries about you, Rolf.’
‘Rolf now, is it? I remember a time when I was called Herr Mauser.’
‘I can remember a time when you were called Hauptmann Mauser,’ I reminded him. It was my father who, noting that Mauser’s promotion to captain had come only three weeks before the end of the war, had addressed him as Hauptmann Mauser. Rolf had glowed with pride.
‘Hauptmann Mauser.’ He smiled dutifully, the sort of smile that family groups provide for the amateur photographer. ‘Yes, your father knew how to play on a young man’s vanity.’
‘Did he, Rolf?’
He heard the resentment in my voice and didn’t reply. He looked round the bus station as if seeing it for the first time. He wore a brown leather overcoat of the sort that they sold on East Berlin’s Unter den Linden in the shops where only rich Western tourists could afford to buy. Like so many Germans, he liked his clothes tightly fitted. The belted overcoat on this big round-shouldered man, and the pointed nose that twitched each time he spoke, made him look like an affluent armadillo standing on its hind legs. His face was round and he had pale skin and tired eyes, the legacy of years of dark bars, late hours, tobacco smoke and alcohol. There was little sign now of that tough young artillery officer who won the oak leaves to his Knight’s Cross at Vinnitsa on the River Bug in the Red Army’s spring offensive of 1944.
‘Going far, Rolf?’
‘Did you bring everything?’
‘You’ve got your goddamned nerve, Rolf.’
‘You owe me a favour, Bernd.’
A bus arrived, the sound of its diesel engine amplified by the low entrance arch. It backed carefully into its designated position under the signs and half a dozen weary travellers scrambled down to get their luggage, yawning and scratching as if not yet fully awake. ‘You’ll be conspicuous in your loden hat and leather coat once you get into the British hinterland,’ I told Mauser. He didn’t react to this advice. The driver of the bus got out and wound the roller to change the destination plate to Cardiff.
‘Give me the packet, Bernd. Save the lectures for young Werner.’ He twitched his nose. ‘Getting nervous about this sort of thing? I don’t remember you getting nervous in the old days.’
‘What the hell do you want with a gun, Rolf?’ I felt like saying that I was only nervous because I didn’t trust Rolf to know what he was doing with a gun. In the ‘old days’ Rolf had run messages and told stories of his exploits both in the war and after. God only knows what dark deeds he might once have committed. But for many years he’d done little more than hide letters and packets under his bar counter and give them to strangers who knew the right password.
‘Did I ask you what you wanted with the motorcycle that day in Pankow?’ he said.
It seemed a silly comparison but Rolf obviously thought it appropriate. Funny that he’d not mentioned some of the other favours he’d done for me. He hadn’t risked his life but he’d risked his job for me more than once, and laying down a job for a friend comes high on my friendship scale.
He said, ‘Do I get the briefcase or are you going to unpack it all here in the middle of the bus station?’ As a child, I’d been intimidated by Rolf Mauser’s appearance and by the big bushy eyebrows that turned up at the outer ends to give him a fierce demonic appearance. When I’d realized that he brushed his straggly eyebrows upwards to keep them out of his eyes, my fears of Rolf Mauser had vanished and I saw in him a lonely old man who liked to wallow in memories of his youth.
‘Suppose I told you I had no money?’ I said.
Behind us a thin Negro wielded a gigantic broom, sweeping fried chicken bones, ice-cream wrappers and brightly coloured litter before him. Rolf turned and tossed his empty paper cup into the heap as the man brushed it slowly past us. ‘All British senior staff have five hundred pounds in used notes available at home at all times. That’s been the regulation for years now, Bernd. We both know that.’
‘The briefcase is for you.’ I passed it to him.
‘You were always considerate, Bernd.’
‘I don’t like it, Rolf.’
‘Why?’
‘What do you want with a gun, Rolf?’
‘Who taught you to crack a safe?’
‘That wasn’t a safe, Rolf. That strongbox where they kept the school reports could have been opened with a knife and fork.’
‘My son Axel said you were a good friend, Bernd.’
‘Did you need Axel to confirm it, Rolf?’
‘We both know you are a good friend.’
‘Or did you decide I was the only one fool enough to give you money and a gun and ask no questions?’
‘Good friend. I appreciate it. We all do.’
‘Who are “we all”?’
Rolf Mauser smiled. ‘We all do, Bernd; me, Axel, Werner and the others. And now we owe you something.’
‘Maybe,’ I said cautiously. Rolf was the sort of man whose favours could get you into a lot of trouble.
He put the briefcase down on the ground and held it upright between his ankles while he undid his magnificent leather coat. When he rebuttoned it, he belted it more tightly as if he hoped that would make him warmer.
‘Who is Brahms Four, Bernd? What’s his name?’
‘I can’t tell you, Rolf.’
‘Is he still in Berlin?’
‘No one knows,’ I said. It wasn’t true of course, but it was the nearest I could go.
‘Rumours say Brahms Four is not working for you any longer. We want to know if he’s left Berlin.’
‘What does it matter to you?’ I asked.
‘Because when Brahms Four is kaputt you’ll pay off the Brahms network and close us down. We need to know in advance. We need to get ready.’
I looked at him for a moment without replying. Rolf Mauser’s participation in Brahms was – as far as my information went – recent and minimal. Then the penny dropped: ‘Because of your rackets, you mean? Because London is supplying you with things you need to keep Werner’s import-export racket functioning?’
‘You haven’t reported that, have you, Bernd?’
‘I have enough of my own problems without trying to find more,’
I said. ‘But London Central aren’t here to help you run rackets in East Germany, or anywhere else.’
‘You didn’t always talk that way, Bernd. I remember a time when everyone agreed that Brahms was the best source in Berlin System. The best by far.’
‘Times change, Rolf.’
‘And now you’d throw us to the wolves?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You think we don’t know that you have a KGB spy here in London Central. Brahms net is going to be blown any minute.’
‘Who says so? Did Werner say it? Werner is not a member of the network. He’s not employed by the Department at all. Do you know that?’
‘It doesn’t matter who said it,’ replied Rolf.
‘So it was Werner. And we both know who told him, don’t we, Rolf?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rolf staunchly, although his eyes said different.
‘That bloody wife of his. That bloody Zena,’ I said. I cursed Frank Harrington and his womanizing. I knew Frank too well to suspect him of revealing to her anything really important. But I’d seen enough of Zena Volkmann to know that she’d trade on her relationship with Frank. She’d make herself sound important. She’d feed Werner any wild guesses, rumours and half-truths. And Werner would believe anything he heard from her.
‘Zena worries about Werner,’ said Rolf defensively.
‘You must be very stupid, Rolf, if you really believe that Zena worries about anything but herself.’
‘Perhaps that’s because no one else worries about her enough,’ said Rolf.
‘You’ll break my bloody heart, Rolf,’ I said.
I’m afraid we parted on a note of acrimony. When I looked back, he’d still not boarded the bus. I suspected that he had no intention of boarding any bus. Rolf Mauser could be a devious devil.
19
Some of the most secret conversations I’d ever heard took place not in any of the debugged ‘silent rooms’ under the Department’s new offices but in restaurants, St James’s clubs or even in the backs of taxicabs. So there was nothing surprising about Dicky Cruyer’s suggestion that I go to his house about nine ‘for a confidential chat’.
A man repairing the doorbell let me in. Dicky’s wife, Daphne, was working at home that morning. A large layout pad occupied most of the corner table in the front room. A jam jar of coloured felttip pens was balanced on the TV, and scattered across the sofa were scribbled roughs for advertising a new breakfast food. Daphne’s art-school training was everywhere evident; brightly painted bits of folk art and crudely woven cushion covers, a primitive painting of Adam and Eve over the fireplace and a collection of matchbox covers displayed in an antique cabinet. The only personal items in the room were photos: a picture of the Cruyers’ two sons amid a hundred other grimfaced, grey-uniformed boys in front of the huge Gothic building that was their boarding school; and, propped on the mantelshelf, a large shiny colour photo of Dicky’s boat. There was some very quiet Gilbert and Sullivan leaking out of the hi-fi. Dicky was humming.
Through the ‘dining area’ I could see Daphne in the kitchen. She was pouring hot milk into large chinaware mugs. Looking up she said ‘Ciao!’ with more than her usual cheerfulness. Did she know her husband had been having an affair with my sister-in-law? Her hair was that straggly mess that only comes from frequent visits to very expensive hairdressers. From what little I knew about women, that might have been a sign that she did know about Dicky and Tessa.
‘Traffic bad?’ said Dicky as I threw my raincoat onto a chair. It was his subtle way of saying I was late. Dicky liked to have everyone on the defensive right from the start. He’d learned such tactics in a book about young tycoons. I secretly borrowed it from his office bookshelf one weekend so that I could read it too.
‘No,’ I lied. ‘It only took me ten minutes.’
He smiled and I wished I’d not got into the game.
Daphne brought cocoa on a dented tin tray advertising Pears soap. My cup celebrated the silver jubilee of King George V. Dicky complimented Daphne on the cocoa and pressed me to have a biscuit, while she gathered up her pens and paper and retreated upstairs. I sometimes wondered how they managed together; secret intelligence was a strange bedfellow for a huckster. It was better to be married to a Departmental employee; I didn’t have to ask her to leave the room every time the office came through on the phone.
He waited until he heard his wife go upstairs. ‘Did I tell you the Brahms network was going to fall to pieces?’
It was, of course, a rhetorical question; I was expected to confirm that he’d predicted that very thing with uncanny accuracy a million times or more, but I looked at him straightfaced and said, ‘You may have done, Dicky. I’m not sure I remember.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Bernard! I told Bret only two days ago.’
‘So what’s happened?’
‘The people have scattered. Frank is here.’
‘Frank is here?’
‘Don’t just repeat what I say. Yes, dammit. Frank is here.’
‘In London?’
‘He’s upstairs taking a bath and cleaning up. He arrived last night and we’ve been up half the night talking.’ Dicky was standing at the fireplace with fingers tapping on the mantelshelf and one cowboy boot resting on the brass fender.
‘Aren’t you going into the office?’ I cradled the cocoa in my hands, but it wasn’t very hot so I drank it. I hate cold cocoa.
Dicky tugged at the gold medallion hanging round his neck on a fine chain. It was a feminine gesture and so was the artful smile with which he answered my question.
I said, ‘Bret will know Frank is in London. If you are missing from the office, he’ll put two and two together.’
‘Bret can go to hell,’ said Dicky.
‘Are you going to drink your cocoa?’
‘It’s real chocolate, actually,’ said Dicky. ‘Our neighbours across the road brought it back from Mexico and showed Daphne how the Mexicans make it.’
I recognized Dicky’s way of saying he didn’t like it. ‘Here’s health,’ I said, and drank his cocoa too. His mug was decorated with rodents named Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter. It was smaller than mine; I suppose Daphne knew he didn’t much like cocoa the way the Mexicans fixed it.
‘Yes. Bret can go to hell,’ repeated Dicky. The gas fire wasn’t on. He gently kicked the artificial log with the tip of his boot.
If Dicky was hell-bent on a knock-down-drag-out fight my money would be on Bret Rensselaer. I didn’t say that; I didn’t have to. ‘This is all part of your plan to keep Bret out of things?’
‘Our plan,’ said Dicky. ‘Our plan.’
‘I still haven’t had that confidential memo you promised me.’
‘For God’s sake. I’m not going to let you down.’ From upstairs there came the sound of the Rolling Stones. ‘It’s Daphne,’ explained Dicky. ‘She says she works better to music.’
‘So what is Frank up to? Why come here to whisper in your ear? Why not report to the office?’
Again came Dicky’s artful smile. ‘We both know that, Bernard. Frank is after my job.’
‘Frank is a hundred years old and waiting for retirement.’
‘But retiring from my desk would give him another few thousand a year on his pension. Retiring from my desk, Frank would be sure of a CBE or even a K.’
‘Have you been encouraging Frank to think he’s getting your job? There’s not a chance of it at his age.’
Dicky frowned. ‘Well, don’t let’s rake that over, at least not for the time being. If Frank has unspoken ambitions, it’s not for us to make predictions about them. You follow me, don’t you?’
‘Follow you, I’m way ahead of you. Frank helps you to get rid of Bret Rensselaer. Then you get Bret’s job and Frank gets yours – except that Frank won’t get yours.’
‘You’ve got an evil mind,’ said Dicky without rancour. ‘You always think the worst of everyone around you.’
‘And the distressing thing about th
at is the way I’m so often proved right.’
‘Well, take it easy on Frank. He’s shaken.’
Dicky was of course exaggerating wildly, both about the disintegration of the Brahms net and about Frank Harrington’s morale. Frank came downstairs ten minutes later. He looked no worse than I would have looked after sitting up with Dicky all night. He was freshly shaved, with two tiny cuts where he’d trimmed the edges of his blunt-ended moustache. He wore a chalk-stripe three-piece suit, clean shirt and oxford shoes polished to a glasslike finish, and he was waving that damned pipe in the air. Frank was tired and hoarse with talking, but he was an expert at making the best of himself and I knew he’d display no sign of weakness in front of Dicky and me.
Frank seemed pleased to see me. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Bernard. Has Dicky put you in the picture?’
‘I’ve told him nothing,’ said Dicky. ‘I wanted him to hear it from you. Drinking chocolate, Frank?’
Frank looked quickly at his gold wristwatch. ‘A small gin and tonic wouldn’t go amiss, Dicky, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘It’s cocoa, Frank,’ I said. ‘Made the way they drink it in Mexico.’
‘You said you liked it,’ said Dicky defensively.
‘I loved it,’ I said. ‘I drank two of them, didn’t I.’
‘If you’ve got Plymouth gin,’ said Frank, ‘I’ll have it straight or with bitters.’ He went over to the fireplace and knocked out his pipe.
When Dicky came back from the drinks wagon and saw the charred tobacco ashes in the hearth, he said, ‘Christ, Frank! Can’t you see that that’s a gas fire.’ He handed Frank the gin and then went down on his knees at the fireplace.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ said Frank.
‘It looks just like a real open fire,’ said Dicky as he used one of Daphne’s discarded breakfast-food roughs to marshal the pipe dottle into a tiny heap that could be hidden under the artificial log.
‘I’m sorry, Dicky. I really am,’ said Frank as he sat back on the sofa with a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch on his knees. He looked at me and nodded before sipping his gin. Then, in a different sort of voice, he said, ‘It could become bad, Bernard. If you’re going over there, this would be the time to do it.’