London Match

‘I came to Berlin for a week. They paid my fare. I went through to the East and spent a week in a training school. All the other students were German, but as you see I speak German well. My father always insisted that I kept up my German.’

  ‘A week at Potsdam?’

  ‘Yes, just outside Potsdam, that’s right.’

  ‘Don’t miss out anything important, Mrs Miller,’ I said.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ she promised nervously. ‘I was there for ten days learning about shortwave radios and microdots and so on. You probably know the sort of thing.’

  ‘Yes, I know the sort of thing. It’s a training school for spies.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me you came back from there without realizing you were a fully trained Russian spy, Mrs Miller?’

  She looked up and met my stare. ‘No, I’ve told you, I was an enthusiastic Marxist. I was perfectly ready to be a spy for them. As I saw it, I was doing it on behalf of the oppressed and hungry people of the world. I suppose I still am a Marxist-Leninist.’

  ‘Then you must be an incurable romantic,’ I said.

  ‘It was wrong of me to do what I did; I can see that, of course. England has been good to me. But half the world is starving and Marxism is the only solution.’

  ‘Don’t lecture me, Mrs Miller,’ I said. ‘I get enough of that from my office.’ I got up so that I could unbutton my overcoat and find my cigarettes. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ I said.

  She gave no sign of having heard me.

  ‘I’m trying to give them up,’ I said, ‘but I carry the cigarettes with me.’

  She still didn’t answer. Perhaps she was too busy thinking about what might happen to her. I went to the window and looked out. It was too dark to see very much except Berlin’s permanent false dawn: the greenish white glare that came from the floodlit ‘death strip’ along the east side of the Wall. I knew this street well enough; I’d passed this block thousands of times. Since 1961, when the Wall was first built, following the snaky route of the Landwehr Canal had become the quickest way to get around the Wall from the neon glitter of the Ku-damm to the floodlights of Checkpoint Charlie.

  ‘Will I go to prison?’ she said.

  I didn’t turn round. I buttoned my coat, pleased that I’d resisted the temptation to smoke. From my pocket I brought the tiny Pearlcorder tape machine. It was made of a bright silver metal. I made no attempt to hide it. I wanted her to see it.

  ‘Will I go to prison?’ she asked again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I hope so.’

  It had taken no more than forty minutes to get her confession. Werner was waiting for me in the next room. There was no heating in that room. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, the fur collar of his coat pulled up round his ears so that it almost touched the rim of his hat.

  ‘A good squeal?’ he asked.

  ‘You look like an undertaker, Werner,’ I said. ‘A very prosperous undertaker waiting for a very prosperous corpse.’

  ‘I’ve got to sleep,’ he said. ‘I can’t take these late nights any more. If you’re going to hang on here, to type it all out, I’d rather go home now.’

  It was the drink that had got to him, of course. The ebullience of intoxication didn’t last very long with Werner. Alcohol is a depressant and Werner’s metabolic rate had slowed enough to render him unfit to drive. ‘I’ll drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll make the transcription on your typewriter.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Werner. I was staying with him in his apartment at Dahlem. And now, in his melancholy mood, he was anticipating his wife’s reaction to us waking her up by arriving in the small hours of the morning. Werner’s typewriter was a very noisy machine and he knew I’d want to finish the job before going to sleep. ‘Is there much of it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s short and sweet, Werner. But she’s given us a few things that might make London Central scratch their heads and wonder.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Read it in the morning, Werner. We’ll talk about it over breakfast.’

  It was a beautiful Berlin morning. The sky was blue despite all those East German generating plants that burn brown coal so that pale smog sits over the city for so much of the year. Today the fumes of the Braunkohle were drifting elsewhere, and outside the birds were singing to celebrate it. Inside, a big wasp, a last survivor from the summer, buzzed around angrily.

  Werner’s Dahlem apartment was like a second home to me. I’d known it when it was a gathering place for an endless stream of Werner’s oddball friends. In those days the furniture was old and Werner played jazz on a piano decorated with cigarette burns, and Werner’s beautifully constructed model planes were hanging from the ceiling because that was the only place where they would not be sat upon.

  Now it was all different. The old things had all been removed by Zena, his very young wife. Now the flat was done to her taste: expensive modern furniture and a big rubber plant, and a rug that hung on the wall and bore the name of the ‘artist’ who’d woven it. The only thing that remained from the old days was the lumpy sofa that converted to the lumpy bed on which I’d slept.

  The three of us were sitting in the ‘breakfast room’, a counter at the end of the kitchen. It was arranged like a lunch counter with Zena playing the role of bartender. From here there was a view through the window, and we were high enough to see the sun-edged treetops of the Grunewald just a block or two away. Zena was squeezing oranges in an electric juicer, and in the automatic coffeemaker the coffee was dripping, its rich aroma floating through the room.

  We were talking about marriage. I said, ‘The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change. Both are invariably disappointed.’

  ‘What rot,’ said Zena as she poured the juice into three glasses. ‘Men do change.’

  She bent down to see better the level of the juice and ensure that we all got precisely the same amount. It was a legacy of the Prussian family background of which she was so proud, despite the fact that she’d never even seen the old family homeland. For Prussians like to think of themselves not only as the conscience of the world, but also its final judge and jury.

  ‘Don’t encourage him, Zena darling,’ said Werner. ‘That contrived Oscar Wilde-ish assertion is just Bernard’s way of annoying wives.’

  Zena didn’t let it go; she liked to argue with me. ‘Men change. It’s men who usually leave home and break up the marriage. And it’s because they change.’

  ‘Good juice,’ I said, sipping some.

  ‘Men go out to work. Men want promotion in their jobs and they aspire to the higher social class of their superiors. Then they feel their wives are inadequate and start looking for a wife who knows the manners and vocabulary of that class they want to join.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I meant that men don’t change in the way that their women want them to change.’

  She smiled. She knew that I was commenting on the way she had changed poor Werner from being an easygoing and somewhat bohemian character into a devoted and obedient husband. It was Zena who had stopped him smoking and made him diet enough to reduce his waistline. And it was Zena who approved everything he bought to wear, from swimming trunks to tuxedo. In this respect Zena regarded me as her opponent. I was the bad influence who could undo all her good work, and that was something Zena was determined to prevent.

  She climbed up onto the stool. She was so well proportioned that you only noticed how tiny she was when she did such things. She had long, dark hair and this morning she’d clipped it back into a ponytail that reached down to her shoulder blades. She was wearing a red cotton kimono with a wide black sash around her middle. She’d not missed any sleep that night and her eyes were bright and clear; she’d even found time enough to put on a touch of makeup. She didn’t need makeup – she was only twenty-two years old and there was no disputing her beauty – but the makeup was someth
ing from behind which she preferred to face the world.

  The coffee was very dark and strong. She liked it like that, but I poured a lot of milk into mine. The buzzer on the oven sounded and Zena went to get the warm rolls. She put them into a small basket with a red-checked cloth before offering them to us. ‘Brötchen,’ she said. Zena was born and brought up in Berlin, but she didn’t call the bread rolls Schrippe the way the rest of the population of Berlin did. Zena didn’t want to be identified with Berlin; she preferred keeping her options open.

  ‘Any butter?’ I said, breaking open the bread roll.

  ‘We don’t eat it,’ said Zena. ‘It’s bad for you.’

  ‘Give Bernie some of that new margarine,’ said Werner.

  ‘You should lose some weight,’ Zena told me. ‘I wouldn’t even be eating bread if I were you.’

  ‘There are all kinds of other things I do that you wouldn’t do if you were me,’ I said. The wasp settled in my hair and I brushed it away.

  She decided not to get into that one. She rolled up a newspaper and aimed some blows at the wasp. Then with unconcealed ill-humour she went to the refrigerator and brought me a plastic tub of margarine. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m catching the morning flight. I’ll get out of your way as soon as I’m shaved.’

  ‘No hurry,’ said Werner to smooth things over. He had already shaved, of course; Zena wouldn’t have let him have breakfast if he’d turned up unshaven. ‘So you got all your typing done last night,’ he said. ‘I should have stayed up and helped.’

  ‘It wasn’t necessary. I’ll have the translation done in London. I appreciate you and Zena giving me a place to sleep, to say nothing of the coffee last night and Zena’s great breakfast this morning.’

  I overdid the appreciation I suppose. I’m prone to do this when I’m nervous, and Zena was a great expert at making me nervous.

  ‘I was damned tired,’ said Werner.

  Zena shot me a glance, but when she spoke it was to Werner. ‘You were drunk,’ she said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be working last night.’

  ‘We were, darling,’ said Werner.

  ‘There wasn’t much drinking, Zena,’ I said.

  ‘Werner gets drunk on the smell of a barmaid’s apron,’ said Zena.

  Werner opened his mouth to object to this put-down. Then he realized that he could only challenge it by claiming to have drunk a great deal. He sipped some coffee instead.

  ‘I’ve seen her before,’ said Werner.

  ‘The woman?’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘She says it’s Müller, but she was married to a man named Johnson at one time. Here? You’ve seen her here? She said she lives in England.’

  ‘She went to the school in Potsdam,’ said Werner. He smiled at my look of surprise. ‘I read your report when I got up this morning. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Of course not. I wanted you to read it. There might be developments.’

  ‘Was this to do with Erich Stinnes?’ said Zena. She waved the wasp away from her head.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was his information.’

  She nodded and poured herself more coffee. It was difficult to believe that not so long ago she’d been in love with Erich Stinnes. It was difficult to believe that she’d risked her life to protect him and that she was still having physiotherapy sessions because of injuries she’d suffered in his defence.

  But Zena was young; and romantic. For both of those reasons, her passions could be of short duration. And for both those reasons, it could well be that she had never been in love with him, but merely in love with the idea of herself in love.

  Werner seemed not to notice the mention of Erich Stinnes’s name. That was Werner’s way – honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil to him who evil thinks – that could well be Werner’s motto, for Werner was too generous and considerate to ever think the worst of anyone. And even when the worst was evident, Werner was ready to forgive. Zena’s flagrant love affair with Frank Harrington – the head of our Berlin Field Unit, the Berlin Resident – had made me angrier with her than Werner had been.

  Some people said that Werner was the sort of masochist who got a perverse pleasure from the knowledge that his wife had gone off to live with Frank, but I knew Werner too well to go in for that sort of instant psychology. Werner was a tough guy who played the game by his own rules. Maybe some of his rules were flexible, but God help anyone who overstepped the line that Werner drew. Werner was an Old Testament man, and his wrath and vengeance could be terrible. I know, and Werner knows I know. That’s what makes us so close that nothing can come between us, not even the cunning little Zena.

  ‘I’ve seen that Miller woman somewhere,’ said Werner. ‘I never forget a face.’ He watched the wasp. It was sleepy, crawling slowly up the wall. Werner reached for Zena’s newspaper, but the wasp, sensing danger, flew away.

  Zena was still thinking of Erich Stinnes. ‘We do all the work,’ she said bitterly. ‘Bernard gets all the credit. And Erich Stinnes gets all the money.’ She was referring to the way in which Stinnes, a KGB major, had been persuaded to come over to work for us and given a big cash payment. She reached for the jug, and some coffee dripped onto the hotplate making a loud, hissing sound. When she’d poured coffee for herself, she put the very hot jug onto the tiles of the counter. The change of temperature must have made the jug crack, for there was a sound like a pistol shot and the hot coffee flowed across the counter top so that we all jumped to our feet to avoid being scalded.

  Zena grabbed some paper towels and, standing well back from the coffee flowing onto the tiled floor, dabbed them around. ‘I put it down too hard,’ she said when the mess was cleared away.

  ‘I think you did, Zena,’ I said.

  ‘It was already cracked,’ said Werner. Then he brought the rolled newspaper down on the wasp and killed it.

  2

  It was eight o’clock that evening in London when I finally delivered my report to my immediate boss, Dicky Cruyer, Controller German Stations. I’d attached a complete translation too, as I knew Dicky wasn’t exactly bilingual.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘One up to Comrade Stinnes eh?’ He shook the flimsy pages of my hastily written report as if something might fall from between them. He’d already heard my tape and had my oral account of the Berlin trip so there was little chance that he’d read the report very thoroughly, especially if it meant missing his dinner.

  ‘No one in Bonn will thank us,’ I warned him.

  ‘They have all the evidence they need,’ said Dicky with a sniff.

  ‘I was on the phone to Berlin an hour ago,’ I said. ‘He’s pulling all the strings that can be pulled.’

  ‘What does his boss say?’

  ‘He’s spending his Christmas vacation in Egypt. No one can find him,’ I said.

  ‘What a sensible man,’ said Dicky with admiration that was both sincere and undisguised. ‘Was he informed of the impending arrest of his secretary?’

  ‘Not by us, but that would be the regular BfV procedure.’

  ‘Have you phoned Bonn this evening? What do BfV reckon the chances of a statement from him?’

  ‘Better we stay out of it, Dicky.’

  Dicky looked at me while he thought about this and then, deciding I was right, tried another aspect of the same problem. ‘Have you seen Stinnes since you handed him over to London Debriefing Centre?’

  ‘I gather the current policy is to keep me away from him.’

  ‘Come along,’ said Dicky, smiling to humour me in my state of paranoia. ‘You’re not saying you’re still suspect?’ He stood up from behind the rosewood table that he used instead of a desk and got a transparent plastic folding chair for me.

  ‘My wife defected.’ I sat down. Dicky had removed his visitors’ chairs on the pretext of making more space. His actual motive was to provide an excuse for him to use the conference rooms along the corridor. Dicky liked to use the conference rooms; it made him feel important and it meant
that his name was exhibited in little plastic letters on the notice board opposite the top-floor lifts.

  His folding chairs were the most uncomfortable seats in the building, but Dicky didn’t worry about this as he never sat in them. And anyway, I didn’t want to sit chatting with him. There was still work to clear up before I could go home.

  ‘That’s all past history,’ said Dick, running a thin bony hand through his curly hair so that he could take a surreptitious look at his big black wristwatch, the kind that works deep under water.

  I’d always suspected that Dicky would be more comfortable with his hair cut short and brushed, and in the dark suits, white shirts and old school ties that were de rigueur for senior staff. But he persisted in being the only one of us who wore faded denim, cowboy boots, coloured necker-chiefs, and black leather because he thought it would help to identify him as an infant prodigy. But perhaps I had it the wrong way round; perhaps Dicky would have been happier to keep the trendy garb and be ‘creative’ in an advertising agency.

  He zipped the front of his jacket up and down again and said, ‘You’re the local hero. You are the one who brought Stinnes to us at a time when everyone here said it couldn’t be done.’

  ‘Is that what they were saying? I wish I’d known. The way I heard it, a lot of people were saying I did everything to avoid bringing him in because I was frightened his debriefing would drop me into it.’

  ‘Well, anyone who was spreading that sort of story is now looking pretty damned stupid.’

  ‘I’m not in the clear yet, Dicky. You know it and I know it, so let’s stop all this bullshit.’

  He held up his hand as if to ward off a blow. ‘You’re still not clear on paper,’ said Dicky. ‘On paper…and you know why?’

  ‘No, I don’t know why. Tell me.’

  Dicky sighed. ‘For the simple but obvious reason that this Department needs an excuse to hold Stinnes in London Debriefing Centre and keep on pumping him. Without an ongoing investigation of our own staff, we’d have to hand Stinnes over to MI5…That’s why the Department haven’t cleared you yet: it’s a department necessity, Bernard, nothing sinister about it.’