‘Keep driving till you see me,’ said Werner. ‘It’s better that I choose somewhere I like the look of. You’ll find me. There won’t be many bright yellow thirty-ton articulated trucks parked along that section of road on a weekday.’
‘At twelve-thirty,’ I said. ‘We’ll hope the traffic cops will be having lunch.’
‘Do you think his wife might be claustrophobic? A lot of women are. There was a case some years ago, I remember, where an escapee started beating on the floor of a car to get out. She just couldn’t stand being locked in the luggage compartment. They were all arrested. If I gave Brahms Four a needle, could we rely on him to give her a shot?’
‘If necessary.’
‘I knew you wouldn’t go first,’ said Werner. ‘I knew you’d want to get Brahms Four out before you went yourself.’
‘What made you think so, Werner?’
‘You wouldn’t put yourself into a position where London Central could have a change of mind and you not be able to do much about it.’
‘Go to the top of the class, Werner,’ I said.
‘Fait accompli, that’s your style. It always has been.’ He jumped down from the truck.
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘Just to be on the safe side, I want Brahms Four under observation right from the time he gets on the streetcar at Buchholz to go to work tomorrow.’
‘No problem,’ said Werner.
‘Any divergence from what I’ve told him to do and we’ll scrub the whole thing.’
‘I like you, Bernie. You’re the only man I know who’s more suspicious than I am, and that reassures me.’
‘Any divergence at all,’ I said.
‘You won’t tell him about Müggelheimer Damm before he gets there?’
‘I won’t even answer if he says good morning.’
‘Even if it is Fiona,’ said Werner, ‘she can’t act on this day-to-day information without making it obvious that she’s the KGB agent.’
‘Moscow might decide it’s worthwhile. Brahms Four is a good source – maybe the only really big leak they haven’t been able to plug.’
‘That’s why you want him to go first. Moscow will let the first one through even if they know about it. They’ll let it go believing it’s you and thinking the second escape will be their only chance of getting Brahms Four. It’s a dangerous game, Bernie. If you are right, you’ll get caught.’
‘But maybe I’m wrong,’ I said.
26
‘Don’t worry, Frau Doktor von Munte,’ I said. ‘Your husband will soon be back.’ I looked out the window. The little gardens of fruit and vegetables stretched in every direction across the flat land, and the curious assortment of hutments and sheds looked even more bizarre by daylight. On every side there were heaps of sand, bags of cement, and piles of bricks, blocks and timber for more amateur building work.
Now May was here. Fruit trees, climbing flowers, shrubs and bushes were engulfing the buildings. There was lilac – the smell of it was everywhere – and cherry trees in snowy bloom, tubs of roses and dwarf rhododendrons. But the vegetation was not enough to hide the one-storey building that the next-door neighbour had painted bright red, and laboriously drawn wobbly lines of yellow upon, to produce the effect of a medieval castle.
The little house that the Muntes owned was more restrained. Painted dark green, to blend with the surroundings, its wooden window shutters bore old-fashioned flower designs. On the side of it there was a tiny lean-to greenhouse with pots of herbs, boxes of lettuce plants and some carnations, all crowded together to catch the sunshine. The garden too was more in keeping with the elderly couple; everything neat and tidy, like an illustration from a gardening manual.
‘Why did you tell him to say he wasn’t feeling well?’ she asked. Mrs Munte was a severe-looking woman, in a black dress with a white lacy collar. Her hair was drawn back tight into a bun and her face had the high cheekbones and narrowed eyes that marked the German communities of the Baltic States. Blue eyes and reddish-flaxen hair are common in Estonia. ‘Why did you?’ It was an inscrutable face but it was calm too, the sort of face that, apart from a few wrinkles and spots, remains unchanged from early teens to old age.
‘So that no one will be surprised when he’s away from the office for a couple of days.’
‘I wish we had stayed at the apartment in Erkner. Here we have no TV. I get so bored here.’
‘Your neighbour is sunning himself. Why don’t you spend half an hour outside?’ The owner of the Schloss next door had stretched a blanket on his minuscule lawn. Now he was applying lotion to his bare chest and searching the sky for dark clouds, a wary frown upon his face.
‘No. He’ll chatter to me,’ said Mrs Munte. ‘He’s a retired bus driver. He’s on his own. Once he starts talking, you can’t stop him. He grows tulips. I hate tulips, don’t you? They look like plastic.’ She was standing at the tiny window looking out at her rhododendrons and roses. ‘Walter has worked so hard on his flowers. He’ll miss them when we’re somewhere else.’
‘There’ll be other roses and rhododendrons,’ I said.
‘Even this morning he went out to spray the roses. I said it was silly but he insisted on doing it.’
‘They need it at this time of the year,’ I said. ‘Mine have got black spots.’
‘Will you go with us?’
‘I follow on.’
‘You’ve done this sort of thing before, I suppose?’
‘You’ll be quite safe, Frau von Munte. It’s uncomfortable but not dangerous.’
‘Of course you’d say that,’ she said peevishly. ‘It’s your job to encourage us.’
‘By the time Dr von Munte gets back here, it will be time to think about leaving.’
‘Why do you make him come all the way back here before we leave? Why couldn’t we meet him in town?’
‘It’s the way it’s been planned,’ I said.
She looked at me and shook her head. ‘It’s so that you can look at those papers he’s bringing you. It’s to give you a chance to cancel everything. Walter told me what you said.’
‘Why not read your book?’ I said. It was an anthology called More Short Stories from Poland. Twice or three times she’d started to read it and then put it down. Her mind was on other things. I said, ‘There is nothing to be gained from letting these thoughts go round and round in your mind.’
‘How do I know my husband isn’t already on his way?’
‘To the West?’
‘Yes. How do I know he’s not already on his way?’
‘He wouldn’t go anywhere without you, Frau von Munte.’
‘Perhaps that disappointed you,’ she said. There was a hard note of satisfaction in her voice. ‘You wanted Walter to go on his own, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, you did. You made the arrangements for just one person. You were going to leave me here.’
‘Is that what Dr von Munte told you?’
‘He confides in me. That is what our marriage has always been.’
‘What else has he confided to you?’ I asked. I smiled to soften my question.
‘I know what he’s gone back to his office for, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Tell me, then.’
‘A paper of some kind, handwritten by a communist agent. Someone very highly placed in the London intelligence service.’
I didn’t deny that she was right.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And you’ll recognize the handwriting and you’ll know who it is.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
‘But what will you do then, I wonder. Will you reveal who it is or will you use it for your own purposes?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘It’s obvious to me,’ she said. ‘If you wanted only to reveal the truth, you could have had the papers sent to London. But you want to look at them. You want to be the one who has the power.’
‘Would you make some more coffee, please?’
‘My husb
and is too nice,’ she said. ‘He’d never use the sort of power he has to advance himself. He does what he does because of his beliefs.’ I nodded. She went to a tiny sink, which could be closed inside the cupboard when not in use, filled the electric kettle and switched it on. ‘We bought this Laube during the war. Walter said the bombs were less dangerous in the soft earth. We grew potatoes, leeks and onions. There was no electricity then, of course, and we had to go a long walk to get drinking water.’ She talked compulsively, her arms akimbo as she stared at the kettle. I noticed her small red hands and her red bony elbows as she rubbed her arms as if she felt cold. She had concealed her nervousness until now, but it is often accompanied by such bodily chills. She waited until the kettle came to the full boil before pouring the water into the pot. ‘Do you have a wife?’ she asked. She’d put a felt cover on the coffee pot and now she clasped it with her open hands to feel the warmth of it. ‘Does she sit at home all day getting bored?’
‘She goes to work,’ I explained. ‘She works with me.’
‘Is that how you met? I met Walter at the big house his parents had near Bernau. They are an important old family, you know.’
‘I met your husband’s father once,’ I said. ‘He was a remarkable old man. I was only a small child, but he spoke to me as an equal. And a few days later, he sent me a leatherbound copy of Die schöne Müllerin. It had come from his library, and had his name embossed in gold on the cover and an engraved bookplate inside. My father told me that only a dozen books from his library had survived the war. I have it still.’
‘You lived in Berlin as a child. That explains your perfect Berlin accent.’ She seemed more relaxed now that she knew I’d met old von Munte. ‘Hundreds of local people went to the old gentleman’s funeral. They had it out there at the house where all the rest of the family had been buried. My father was a country physician. He attended the old man right until the end. What did your father do for a living?’
‘He started out as a clerk. In the thirties he was unemployed for a long time. Then he went into the Army. The war began and he became an officer. After the war, he stayed in the Army.’
‘I’m Walter’s second wife, of course. Ida was killed in one of the very first air raids.’ She poured coffee for us. ‘Do you have children?’
‘Two: a boy and a girl.’
‘It’s Ida’s child, of course – the one he wants to see.’ She pushed the large cup of black coffee across the table to me in a gesture that contained an element of rejection.
‘In São Paulo?’
‘There’s only the one child. That’s why Walter dotes on him so much. I hope and pray he is not disappointed.’
‘Disappointed how?’
‘It’s such a long time,’ she said as if on that account the chances of the two men disappointing each other were self-evident.
‘He’s sure to be grateful,’ I said. ‘Walter has given him so much.’
‘He’s given his son everything,’ she said. ‘He’s given him every penny he’s earned from you. He’s given him the life that was rightfully mine.’ She drank some coffee. Her words were bitter but her face was calm.
‘And now his son will be able to thank you both.’
‘We’ll be strangers to him. His son won’t want the burden of looking after us. And Walter has no chance of earning any more.’
‘It will be all right,’ I promised vaguely.
‘Our presence will remind him of his obligation, and he will resent that. Then he’ll start feeling guilty about such feelings and associate us with that guilt.’ She drank more coffee. She’d obviously been thinking about it a great deal. ‘I’m always a pessimist. Is your wife a pessimist?’
‘She had to be an optimist to marry me,’ I said.
‘You haven’t told me how you met,’ said Mrs Munte.
I mumbled something about meeting her at a party, and went over to look out the window. She’d arrived with two other girls. Dicky Cruyer knew her name, and so I immediately approached her with a bottle of Sancerre and two empty glasses. We’d danced to music from an old broken record player and discussed our host, a Foreign Office junior clerk who was celebrating a posting to Singapore.
Fiona was typing letters for a travel company in Oxford Street. It was a temporary job, due to finish the next week. She asked me if I knew of any really interesting work for someone with a good degree who could type and take shorthand in three languages. I didn’t think she was serious at first. Her clothes and jewellery made her look anything but desperate for employment.
‘She told me she was out of work,’ I said.
At the time, Bret Rensselaer was setting up an undercover operation that worked out of an office block in Holborn and processed selected data from the Berlin office. We needed staff and Bret had already decided that we would not go through the normal civil-service recruitment procedure. It took too long and involved too much form-filling and interviewing; to make matters worse, the civil service only sent us applicants that the Foreign Office had already decided were not good enough for them.
‘What was she wearing?’ said Mrs Munte.
‘Nothing special,’ I said. It was a tight sweater of angora wool. I remember it because it took two dry cleanings and a lot of brushing to remove the final fluffs of wool from my only good suit. I asked her where she’d learned shorthand and typing and she cracked some silly joke that made it clear that she was an Oxford graduate, and I pretended not to understand such subtlety. Dicky Cruyer tried to cut in on our dancing at that point, but Fiona said couldn’t he see that she was dancing with the most handsome man in the room?
‘But you saw her again?’ said Mrs Munte.
I had a date with her the very next evening. And I wanted to be able to say I had a job for her. It was an attractive idea to have her in the same office with me. Bret Rensselaer didn’t much like the idea of taking on someone we hadn’t properly vetted, but when we found out that she was related to Silas Gaunt – who’d become something of a legend in the Department – he gave me a grudging okay. At first it was conditional on her working only out of my office, and not having access to the really sensitive material or any contact with our Berlin people. But in a few years, hard work and long hours gave her a series of promotions that put her in line for an Operations desk.
‘I got her a job,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it was the job, rather than you, she was after,’ said Mrs Munte, tilting her head on one side to show me it was not a serious suggestion.
‘Perhaps it was,’ I said.
I was watching two men at the far end of the narrow lane that led up from the Buchholz church. They were both in civilian clothes, but unmistakably Stasis. It was government policy that the secret police never wore beards or moustaches, and dressed in plain clothes of a type that made them immediately recognizable to every East German who saw them. Everyone except the most naïve realized that there were other plainclothes policemen who weren’t so easy to spot, but where the hell were they? ‘Frau von Munte,’ I said matter of factly, ‘there are a couple of policemen coming up the lane checking each of the houses in turn.’ I kept watching them. Now I could see that there were two more men – one in police uniform – and, behind them, a black Volvo negotiating the narrow lane with great care. Beyond that came a minibus with a light fixed to the roof. ‘Four policemen,’ I said. ‘Perhaps more.’
She came over to the window, but had the good sense to stand well back from it. ‘What kind of policemen?’ she asked.
‘The kind who get Volvos,’ I said. With the scarcity of any sort of hard currency, only senior ranks or special squads could get an imported car.
‘What do we do?’ She gave no sign of fear. Married to a spy for a couple of decades, I suppose she’d lived through this nightmare times without number.
‘Get two boxes of those seedlings from the greenhouse,’ I said. ‘I’ll just look round in here before we leave.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Back to my c
ar.’
‘We’ll have to go past them.’
‘They’ll see us whichever way we go. Better to brazen it out.’
She put on an absurd fez-like hat and fastened it into her hair with ferocious-looking hatpins. She looked round the room. There were obviously many things she’d planned to take with her, but she grabbed only a fur coat from a box under the bed and put it on. She went out to the greenhouse, came back, and handed me a box of seedlings and kept one for herself. As we went out, I smiled to the neighbour stretched out on a blanket in front of his castle. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Closing the little garden gate carefully after Mrs Munte, I followed her down the lane towards the policemen.
They were working systematically, a two-man team on each side of the lane. One man to go into the garden and knock at the door, the other to watch the back. The driver of the car would be ready to take a potshot at anyone trying to run for it. In the back of the Volvo there was another man. It was Lenin, the senior officer of the team that had arrested Rolf Mauser. He was sprawled across the back seat ticking off names and addresses from papers on a clipboard.
‘Who are you, where are you going?’ said one of the policemen as we got near. It was the young Saxon conscript again. He’d been given the job of plodding along the lane to hold back the bushes that might scratch the paintwork of the car.
‘None of your business, young man,’ said Mrs Munte. She made an incongruous figure, standing there in the sunshine holding the plants and wearing her fur coat and Kaffeeklatsch hat.
‘Do you live here?’ He moved out to block the path. I noticed that the flap of his pistol holster was undone. His arms were folded across his body, a gesture that policemen like to think looks friendly.
‘Live here?’ said Mrs Munte. ‘What do you think we are, squatters?’
Even the policeman smiled. Whatever Mrs Munte looked like, she could not be mistaken for one of the dirty longhaired squatters seen so frequently on TV news from the West Sector. ‘Do you know anyone here named Munte?’
‘I don’t know any of these people,’ she said disdainfully. ‘I come to this dreadful place only to buy things I can’t get elsewhere. My son is helping me with these carnations. It’s his day off and he’s brought his car here. Ten marks for these few seedlings. It’s disgraceful. You should be concerning yourself with the profiteers that are flourishing here.’