With Werner, I walked along Kantstrasse to Zoo station. The rain had stopped, but the trees dripped disconsolately. There was more rain in the air. The station was busy as usual, the forecourt crowded, a group of Japanese tourists taking photos of each other, a man and woman – both in ankle-length fur coats – buying picture postcards, a boy and girl with stiff dyed hair and shiny leather trousers singing tunelessly to the strumming of a guitar, French soldiers loaded with equipment climbing into a truck, two arty-looking girls selling pictures made from beads, an old man with a pony collecting money for animal welfare, a young bearded man asleep in a doorway, an expensively dressed mother holding a small child at arm’s length while it vomited in the gutter, and two young policemen not noticing anything. It was the usual mix for Zoo station. This was the middle of the Old World. Here were Berlin’s commuter trains and here too were trains that had come direct from Paris and went on to Warsaw and Moscow.
I went inside with Werner and bought a ticket so that I could accompany him up to the platform. The S-Bahn is Berlin’s ancient elevated railway network and the simplest way to get from the centre of West Berlin (Zoo) to the heart of East Berlin (Friedrichstrasse). It was chilly up there on the platform; the trains rattled through, bringing a swirl of damp air and a stirring of wastepaper. The stations are like huge glass aircraft hangars, and like the tracks themselves they are propped up above street level on ornate cast-iron supports.
‘Don’t worry about Lisl’s eyebrow pencil,’ I told Werner. ‘I’ll get that for her on the way back.’
‘Do you know the colour she wants?’
‘Of course I do. You’re always forgetting to get them.’
‘I hope you’re wrong about Stinnes,’ said Werner.
‘You forget about all that,’ I said. ‘You get over there and get your papers signed and get back. Forget about me and the Department. Forget all that stuff until you get back.’
‘I think I might stay the night,’ said Werner. ‘There’s someone I must see in the morning, and there are long lines at the passport control if I come through when everyone’s coming back from the operas.’
A Friedrichstrasse train came in, but Werner let it go. I had the feeling that he didn’t want to go over. That was unusual for Werner; he might get jumpy, but he never seemed to mind going over there. Sometimes I had the feeling that he liked the break it made for him. He got away from Zena and lived his own bachelor life in the comfortable apartment he’d created over a truck garage. Now he lingered. It was a perfect chance for me to tell him how Fiona had gone to Holland and talked to Tessa about having the children with her. But I didn’t tell him.
‘Where will you eat tonight?’ I said, as my contribution to the kind of conversation that takes place on railway stations and airports.
‘There are some people I know in Pankow,’ said Werner. ‘They’ve invited me.’
‘Do I know them?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Werner. ‘You don’t know them.’
‘What time tomorrow?’
‘Don’t fuss, Bernie. Sometimes you’re worse than Lisl.’
The train arrived. ‘Take care,’ I said as he stepped into it.
‘It’s all legit, Bernie.’
‘But maybe they don’t know that,’ I said.
Werner grinned and then the doors closed and the train pulled away. It felt very very cold on the platform after the train had departed, but that might just have been my imagination.
25
At midnight the front door to Lisl Hennig’s hotel was locked. That had always been the routine, ever since I could remember. Any hotel guest who occasionally returned after that time was given a key on request. Any guest frequently returning after that time was asked to find another hotel.
Guests arriving there after midnight without a key had to tug the old bellpull. You couldn’t hear the bell from outside in the street and sometimes guests made a great deal of noise before they got in. I couldn’t hear the bell from my little garret room at the very top of the house. Lisl could hear the bell. She slept downstairs – she’d been sleeping downstairs ever since her arthritis had got really bad. Lisl never went down to open the door, of course; just that one flight of stone stairs, from the salon to the front hall, was something she didn’t attempt very often. One of the servants opened the door if the bell rang. They took it in turns. Usually it was Klara, but on that night after Werner went over to the East it was Richard, a youngish man from Bremen who worked in the kitchen. Klara was not out that night, of course – she was in bed and asleep and awakened by the bell as always. But when she was off duty, she was off duty, and she just turned over and forgot about it.
So it was Richard who went down to the front door when the bell went at 2:30 a.m. It was dark and still raining, and Richard took with him the wooden bat used for flattening slices of veal to make Wiener schnitzels. As he said afterwards, he knew that there were no guests still not back and he wanted something to defend himself with.
So it was Richard who woke me up out of a deep sleep in which I was dreaming about old Mr Storch who was making me recite a poem about Hitler. It was a silly dream in which I knew no poems about Hitler except a rude one which I was frightened to tell Mr Storch.
‘A gentleman to see you, sir,’ said Richard, having shaken me by the shoulder and put Storch and my classmates to flight. ‘There’s a gentleman to see you.’ He said it in English. I suspected that he’d got it from one of those film butlers because he had exactly the right accent and inflection whereas the rest of his English was appalling.
‘Who?’ I said. I switched on the bedside light. Its yellow plastic shade made patterns on the wall and its light made Richard look jaundiced and ferocious.
‘It’s me.’ I put my glasses on and looked towards the doorway. It was Bret Rensselaer. I could hardly believe my eyes. For a moment I thought it was all a part of my dream. I got out of bed and put on my dressing gown.
‘My God, Bret, what are you doing in Berlin?’ I said. ‘It’s okay,’ I told Richard. ‘It’s a friend of mine.’
As Richard left and closed the door, Bret stepped into the light. He was hardly recognizable. This wasn’t the Bret I knew. His dark overcoat was so soaked with rain that it was dripping pools onto the ancient carpet. There was mud on his shoes. He had no necktie and his shirt was dirty and open at the throat. His staring eyes were deep sunk into his ashen face and he needed a shave badly.
‘You look like you could do with a drink,’ I said, opening the corner cupboard where I had a bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker and some glasses. I poured him a big shot of whisky. He almost snatched it from me and drank a couple of gulps.
‘I had to find you, Bernard. You’re the only one who can help me.’
Was this really Bret Rensselaer? I never thought I’d see the day when Bret was asking anyone for help, let alone asking me. ‘What’s wrong, Bret?’
‘You’re the only one I can trust any more.’
‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Get out of that wet coat and take the weight off your feet.’
He did as I told him, moving with the shambling robotic pace of the sleepwalker. ‘They’ll go for you too,’ said Bret.
‘Start at the beginning, Bret,’ I said.
But he was too tired to understand. He didn’t look up at me, he was slumped on the chair studying his muddy shoes. ‘They arrested me.’ He said it very quietly so that I had to lean close to him to hear.
‘Who did?’
‘A team from Five…it was all kosher. They had all the documentation…even a chit from the Deputy with the two authorized signatures.’
‘Morgan had signed?’
‘Yes, Morgan had signed. But it’s not all Morgan’s doing; they’ve got a whole file on me.’
I poured myself a drink while I pulled my thoughts together. Was Bret admitting to me that he was a KGB mole? Had he come to me convinced that I was a KGB agent too? And how the hell was I going to find out? I sipped the drink and felt the warm
th of it slide down my throat. It didn’t make my thinking any clearer, but it was waking me up in the best possible way. ‘What now?’ I said tentatively. ‘How can I help?’
‘It all began when the committee went down to Berwick House,’ said Bret, as if he hadn’t heard my question. ‘Some of them wanted to be present at an interrogation. There had been a lot of argument about whether Stinnes was really cooperating or just playing us along. Ladbrook was there. Ladbrook’s straight, you know that.’
I nodded. Ladbrook was the senior interrogator. He kept out of office politics as much as possible.
‘We used one of the big downstairs rooms; there wasn’t room for everyone in the recording room.’ Bret held out his glass for another drink. I poured him one, a small one this time. He didn’t drink it right away. He swirled it round in his hands. Bret said, ‘The interrogation was concerned with codes and communications. I wasn’t listening all that closely at first; I figured that it was all stuff I’d heard before. But then I realized that Stinnes was offering some goodies. Five had one of their communications boffins assigned to the committee just for that sequence, and he got excited. He didn’t jump up and down and sing “Rule, Britannia!” but he might have if there’d been more leg room.’
‘Stuff you hadn’t heard before?’
‘Really good material, Bernard. Stinnes started out by offering us the whole signals procedure at the Embassy, and the boffin from Five asked some questions that Stinnes answered easily and unequivocally. This was a different sort of Stinnes I was seeing; he was smooth and charming and polite and deferential. He cut a hell of a good figure with them. Jokes too. They were even laughing, and Stinnes was more at ease than I’d ever seen him before. Then one of the Five people said it was a pity that he hadn’t given us some of this material a few weeks earlier because there were sure to be signals alterations any time now, in the light of Stinnes changing sides. And Stinnes calmly said that he’d told me all this stuff in the first days I saw him.’
‘And you denied it?’
Bret’s voice was shrill. ‘He never gave us any of that hard intelligence. He didn’t give it to me, he didn’t give it to Ladbrook, and he didn’t give it to you.’
‘So what was your reaction?’
‘I’m the chairman of that lousy committee. What am I supposed to do, call myself to order and appoint a subcommittee? I let it roll. What could I do, except sit there and listen to all that crap.’
‘And they swallowed it?’
A thought struck Bret Rensselaer. ‘He didn’t tell you any of that stuff, did he? Codes and communications? Embassy contact lists? Foreign country routings? Signals room security? Did he tell you any of that? For God’s sake…’
‘No, he didn’t tell me any of that,’ I said.
‘Thank Christ for that.’ He wiped his brow. ‘There are moments when I wonder if I’m tipping off my trolley.’
‘They arrested you?’
‘That wasn’t until two days later. From what I heard afterwards, it seems that the people from Five got together that night for some kind of council. They were excited, Bernard, and convinced. They hadn’t seen Stinnes before. All they knew about him was this smooth, dynamic guy who’s falling over himself trying to give away Soviet secrets. What are they supposed to think except that I’ve been sitting on him?’
‘And Ladbrook?’
‘He’s a good man, Bernard. Apart from you, Ladbrook is the only person who can see what’s really going on. But that won’t make any difference. Ladbrook will tell them the truth, but that won’t help me.’
‘What will he say?’
Bret looked up with alarm and annoyance. I had become the interrogator now, but there was nothing he could do about that; I was his last hope. ‘He’ll say that Stinnes has given us only operational material.’
‘Good operational material,’ I said. It wasn’t a statement, it wasn’t a question; it was a bit of both.
‘Wonderful operational material,’ said Bret sarcastically. ‘But every time we acted on it, things seemed to go unaccountably wrong.’
‘They’ll say that was your fault,’ I said. And to some extent it was his fault: Bret had wanted to show everyone what a fine field agent he might have made, and he’d failed.
‘Of course they will. That’s the brilliance of it. There is just no way of proving whether we did it wrong or if it was material arranged to fail right from the word go.’
I said, ‘Stinnes is a plant. A solitary. His briefing must have been lengthy and complex. That’s why it took so long to get him to move. That’s why he went back to Berlin before coming out to Mexico again.’
‘Thanks, buddy,’ said Bret. ‘Where were you when we needed you?’
‘It’s easy to see it now,’ I admitted. ‘But it looked okay at the time. And some of the stuff was good.’
‘Those early arrests in Hannover, the dead-letter drops, the kid in our office in Hamburg. Yes, it was good, but it wasn’t anything they couldn’t spare.’
‘How did they arrest you?’
‘Five sent two men from K7 who searched my house. That was Tuesday…no, maybe Monday…I’ve lost all track of time.’
‘They found nothing?’
‘What do you think they found?’ said Bret angrily. ‘A radio transmitter, invisible ink and one-time pads?’
‘I just want to get the facts straight,’ I said.
‘It’s a frame-up,’ said Bret. ‘I thought you were the one person who’d see that.’
‘I do see it. I just wanted to know if there was anything planted at the house.’
‘Shit,’ said Bret. He went pale. ‘Now I remember!’
‘What?’
‘They took a suitcase out of the loft.’
‘What was in it?’
‘Papers.’
‘What papers?’
‘I don’t know, typewritten paper, reams of it. They took them away to examine them. There were several pieces of baggage in the loft. I thought they were all empty.’
‘And now one is full of papers. Any recent visitors to the house?’
‘No, none. Not for weeks.’
‘No repairmen or telephone wiring?’
‘A man came to fix the phone, but that was okay. I had our own engineers out the next day to check the house.’
‘Check the house for bugs and wires, not check the house for suitcases full of papers.’
He bit his lip. ‘I was a fool.’
‘It sounds as if you were, Bret. They would put your phone on the blink and then turn up.’
‘That’s right. They arrived after I had trouble – they said they were in the street, working on the lines. It was a Saturday. I said I didn’t know you guys work on Saturdays.’
‘The KGB work a long week, Bret,’ I said.
‘He can’t sustain it,’ said Bret, hoping that I would agree. He was talking about Stinnes. I didn’t answer. ‘It’s a bravura performance and the committee are eating out of his hand right now. But he can’t sustain it.’
‘When did they arrest you?’
‘First the senior grade officer from K7 came to my home. He told me I wasn’t to leave the house.’
‘Your house?’
‘I wasn’t to go to the office. I wasn’t even to go to the shops in the village.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I couldn’t believe my ears. I told him to remain in the room with me while I phoned the office. I tried to get the D-G, but Sir Henry was on a train going to Manchester.’
‘Clever Sir Henry,’ I said.
‘No, it was genuine enough. His secretary tried to reach him with messages at both ends.’
‘Are you crazy, Bret? Five send a K7 search and arrest team to pick up a senior officer, and the D-G just happens to have another appointment that he can’t break and no contact number? Are you telling me the D-G wasn’t in on the secret?’
Bret looked at me. He didn’t want to believe they could do that to him. Or that they would want t
o. Bret didn’t just happen to be born in England like the rest of us – Bret was an Anglophile. He loved every blade of bright green grass that Shakespeare might have trodden on. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said at last.
‘And you skipped?’
‘I left a message saying that I urgently wanted an appointment with the D-G and gave my phone number. I said I’d stay by the phone and wait for the call.’
‘And then you took off. That was good, Bret,’ I said with genuine admiration. ‘That’s what I would have done. But they’ll have you on the airline manifest even if Immigration didn’t identify you.’
‘I have a friend with a Cessna,’ said Bret.
He needn’t have told me that, and I felt reassured that he was prepared to fill in the details. ‘Did they leave anyone outside the house?’ Bret shrugged. ‘Do you think they tailed you?’
‘I changed cars.’
‘And the watchers don’t run to anything that could follow a Cessna, so they’ll be trying to trace the plane landing.’
‘I flew to Hamburg and then came on by car. I rented the car in a false name. Luckily the girl at the counter didn’t read the driving licence carefully.’
‘You can’t win them all, Bret. You forgot about the computer on the autobahn entrance point. They even get traffic violators on that one.’
‘I’m innocent, Bernard.’
‘I know you are, Bret. But it’s going to be tough proving it. Did anyone say anything about a Cabinet memo?’
‘Cabinet memo?’
‘They’re trying to lock you up tight, Bret. There is a Cabinet memo; the numbered copy is the one to which you had access. It’s been to Moscow and back again.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘And a lot of people have been told about it since then.’
‘Who?’
‘I was singled out to be shown a copy, and so was Dicky
Cruyer. You can bet there were others. The implication is that the full report went to Moscow too.’