Page 32 of Berlin Game


  ‘I’ll take you right through the checkpoint,’ said Stinnes. The driver touched the horn. The frontier police recognized the car, put the booms up and we drove through without stopping.

  The American soldier in the glass-sided hut on the Western side gave us no more than a glance. ‘Far enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll get one of these cabs.’ But in fact I’d already caught sight of Werner. He was seated in the car over the road where we always parked when we waited at Checkpoint Charlie. The Volvo turned and stopped. I got out and took a deep breath of that famous Berliner Luft. I wanted to run down to the canal and follow it to Lützowplatz and then to Dad’s office on Tauentzienstrasse. I would open his desk and take the chocolate bar that was his ration. I’d climb up the mountain of rubble that filled half the street, and slide down the other side in a cloud of dust. I’d run through the carefully swept ruins of the clinic, where cleaned bottles, dusted bricks and salvaged pieces of charred timber were arranged so proudly. At the shop on the corner I’d ask Mr Mauser if Axel could come out to play. And we’d go and find Werner and maybe go swimming. It was that sort of day…

  ‘Did it go all right, Werner?’

  ‘I phoned England an hour ago,’ said Werner. ‘I knew it would be the first thing you’d ask. There’s an armed police guard around your mother’s house. Anything the Russians try won’t work. The children are safe.’

  ‘Thanks Werner,’ I said. Thinking about the children made it easier not to think about Fiona. Better still would be not having to think at all.

  About the Author

  Berlin Game

  Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

  After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

  Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.

  Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.

  As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  By Len Deighton

  FICTION

  The Ipcress File

  Horse Under Water

  Funeral in Berlin

  Billion-Dollar Brain

  An Expensive Place to Die

  Only When I Larf

  Bomber

  Declarations of War

  Close-Up

  Spy Story

  Yesterday’s Spy

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

  SS-GB

  XPD

  Goodbye Mickey Mouse

  MAMista

  City of Gold

  Violent Ward

  THE SAMSON SERIES

  Berlin Game

  Mexico Set

  London Match

  Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945

  Spy Hook

  Spy Line

  Spy Sinker

  Faith

  Hope

  Charity

  NON-FICTION

  Action Cook Book

  Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain

  Airshipwreck

  French Cooking for Men

  Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk

  ABC of French Food

  Blood, Tears and Folly

  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.

  Harper

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  This paperback edition 2010

  FIRST EDITION

  First published in Great Britain by

  Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1983

  Copyright © Len Deighton 1983

  Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010

  Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

  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 non-exclusive, non-transferable 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.

  EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-38718-2

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Len Deighton, Berlin Game

 


 

 
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