by John Lawton
The greatest propaganda coup, Wilderness thought, hadn’t happened. The Beatles had played Sweden, they hadn’t yet played Finland. Perhaps they never would. But he’d bet money someone at the British Council had asked our four cultural ambassadors in Cardin jackets to earn their MBEs.
Now—it was undeniably quiet now. As he had said to Burne-Jones, “What is there we don’t already know?” It was quiet because Intelligence had reached saturation point. The latest file was not only thin, it was six months old. Burne-Jones might be right. Lapland was due for another look. Nothing undermined Intelligence like complacency.
Wilderness read everything back to 1962, then read pickily from each year until 1948.
By six o’clock he was feeling print-blind, when a blob appeared between him and the window.
An Eddie-shaped blob.
It was a curious phenomenon, a bit like baldness—once attained it never seemed to change much. Premature aging passed off as eternal youth. Eddie wasn’t bald, but he’d been tubby since the day they met at the Cambridge spooks’ language course in 1946. But he got no tubbier. He liked his grub, and his favourite word in the English language was probably cake. At the best of times food was never far from his thoughts, and six in the evening wasn’t the best of times so much as the hungriest of times. He was Caesar’s man—“fat, sleek-headed, such as sleep a-nights.”
“I hear you’re staying with me tonight?”
“Yes. Not a good night to be at home. Not a good night to answer the phone either.”
“Then maybe we should eat out. There’s a crackin’ chippie on Borough High Street.”
Chippie—perhaps Eddie’s second-favourite word.
“It’s Monday. Chippies don’t open on Mondays.”
“You’ve been abroad too long and too often. This is Swinging London. It never closes.”
“Really?”
§17
The cod was Friday’s cod. And the batter was soggy. However, Wilderness would not be the one to fault the mushy peas, and if this was to be his last taste of England for the indefinite future, he wasn’t displeased with Eddie’s choice. He’d have preferred claret to Tizer, but you can’t have everything, even in the city that never closes.
A polite burp into a clenched fist indicated that Eddie was getting to the point of speech and might not be plying his right elbow for a minute or two.
“Boss reckons Reg Thwaite is trying to nail your balls to the floor.”
“He’s right. Hence the suddenness of this posting to Finland. This … fiction.”
“And it’s all about Bernard.”
“Yep.”
“Have they asked about me?”
“No. I don’t think they will. I left you out of my report on the Glienicke Bridge. You were never there. You were back at the hotel. The last you saw of Bernard was when Frank and I left for the bridge. If asked that’s all you need to say. But, hate to spell it out Ed, you are small fry. They’re not after you.”
“I love hearing it spelt out. There’s safety in being small fry, always has been. I couldn’t work for dodgy buggers like you and Troy if there weren’t.”
“How is Mr. Troy?”
“Bored. Trying to bury himself in growing leeks and raising pigs, but bored all the same. His brother’s delighted to have him off the streets. Freddie’s capacity to fuck up life for Rod quadrupled when Rod became Home Secretary.”
A pause while Eddie ordered jam roly-poly with custard.
Then, “Berlin?”
“Loose ends, Ed. I’d rather see them tied up before Alec drops me down in nowhereland.”
§18
Memory was a flood he could not fold. So he accepted it. Every time he went back to Grünetümmlerstraße he knew he would be drenched by wave after wave of memories, mostly of Nell Burkhardt. So he stood awhile on the landing outside Erno Schreiber’s door and looked up the staircase to the one-room flat he had shared with Nell all those years ago. On one visit it had been empty, an unlikely gap between tenants in a city where every room could be let twice over. He had looked around. Furnished a stripped room with the bits and bobs that had littered his mind for years.
Temptation had him set one foot on the step up when the door to his old flat was yanked open and someone danced lightly down the stairs to the landing. A young woman. Much the age Nell had been when she left him—but nothing like her. Tall and blonde, a lightness to her smile that Nell would never manage. A child of the postwar era—history had not yet inscribed its frown.
He must have struck her as hesitant or lost.
“Guten Tag. Sie suchen Herrn Schreiber?”
(Good day. Are you looking for Herr Schreiber?)
Without waiting for an answer she banged on Erno’s door.
“Erno, du hast Besuch!”
Then to Wilderness.
“Er wird ein bisschen taub, weißt du.”
(He’s getting a bit deaf, you know.)
She skipped lightly down the stairs and out into the street. Wilderness had not spoken a word, but it was as though she had seen the spell cast around him and had broken it simply by not being Nell.
Erno’s door opened slowly.
He was stooping a little. He pulled off the eyeshade he wore for close work—in the middle of forging some document, no doubt—and peered out.
“Joe? My, my … so eine Überraschung!”
“Sorry, Erno. I didn’t have time to warn you.”
“No matter, no matter.”
He ushered Wilderness in. Summer or winter, his rooms were always crepuscular—deep, dark corners and contrasting pools of bright light from the reading lamps he had dotted around. Wilderness had scarcely known him to open a window, even in June, and the fire was never permitted to go out.
“So, you met Trudie?”
“Yes. Quite a looker.”
“At my age I wouldn’t know or care—but she keeps an eye on me. At my age perhaps somebody should.”
Wilderness had no idea how old Erno was, but he’d seemed old when they met almost twenty years ago.
“Let me put the kettle on, and over tea you can tell me what brings you back to Berlin so soon.”
Wilderness told him.
Perhaps everyone needs someone from whom they have no secrets. A role no wife or husband can play.
“Hmm,” Erno said at last. “Lapland? I don’t even think I want to think about Lapland. The very word makes me shiver. How can I help? Some paperwork you need? I may be getting deaf, as Trudie said, all too loudly, but my eyes are still fine.”
“No. No papers. I have a new identity. Or I will as soon as I can be bothered to open the envelope. I’m here for the loose ends. Westminster is out to get me, and I’d rather not give them the chance.”
“What loose ends, Joe? The biggest has to be Frank. The last time we were all together in this room you knocked him to the floor.”
That had been a decisive, perhaps fateful day. All of them in that room. The last supper of the Schiebers. Within a matter of hours he had turned Bernard Alleyn loose, decked Frank with a right hook, had Yuri die on him and seen Nell for the last time.
“No. Frank is backing me. The CIA is backing me. I don’t know why but I conclude there is some advantage for Frank in not ratting me out. Frank has put it on record that Bernard crossed into the East. Perhaps his better nature has emerged.”
“I doubt that, unless his better nature is coloured green and has a picture of a dead president on the front. So, what loose ends did you have in mind?”
“Do you hear from Bernard?”
“Surprisingly, yes. A card in the New Year. All the usual good wishes, and another about two weeks ago. He seems to have discovered the joys of cricket. Apparently they play a lot of cricket in—”
“Don’t tell me. If I don’t know, it’s one less lie to tell.”
“And …?”
“And Nell. She was here that night. I met her at the street door. As she was leaving.”
“I cannot h
ear your question, my boy.”
“Did Nell and Bernard ever meet?”
“Yes.”
“Did she know who he was?”
“Of course. Eddie was here that night. You think Eddie can keep a secret?”
No, in that respect Eddie was badly prepared to be any kind of spy.
“Your masters will not come looking for Nell, surely?”
“No, I don’t think they will. But Nell has a fatal flaw. She’s honest. If asked …”
Erno pooh-poohed this with a simple wave of the hand.
“They won’t ask, you know that. She is … out of reach. And I don’t just mean geography. She is … how to put it … risen.”
“Not with you here, Erno.”
“Brandt lost the election for chancellor of the Bundesrepublik last year. But this is Germany. We can change governments as rapidly as most men change their socks. Everyone knows Erhard won’t last, and when he goes Brandt gets another chance. He is but a step away from the Chancellery. So, he has Nell shuffling back and forth between Berlin and Bonn as his … hmmm … representative on Earth, his apostle of the gospel of coexistence, his … Nell the Baptist. She’s there right now, as it so happens.”
Wilderness found this close to incredible. As long as he had known her, Nell had sung the song of Berlin. She was a Berliner. She’d lived nowhere else, been nowhere else since the day she rode her bike back into the ruins of the city in 1945. And Bonn … what was Bonn? It would be a one-horse town if somebody happened to ride in. The rest of the time it was a cultural desert. He’d never spent more than forty-eight hours in Bonn at any one time, and each time it had seemed forty-seven hours too long. It was just a small town in Germany. Nell would be bored silly—keine Berliner Luft.
§19
USSR Murmansk Oblast Rayakoski or Thereabouts:
May 1966
When icicles hung by the wall, Marinin’s arse was red and raw.
Child of a peasant family, he held the institution of an indoor lavatory to be a triumph of Soviet planning, to say nothing of Soviet plumbing. A man utterly loyal to the state, a Komsomol member since the age of fourteen, willing to suffer hardship for Marxism-Leninism, could grow decadent in a warm cubicle with a bolt on the door. It was a level of privacy previously unexperienced. With a hint of guilt nestling in a corner of his mind, he would slide the bolt back and forth, delighted at the sound it made and the idea it represented. Peace, privacy, the individualism of a good shit. But for one thing … the waxy, shiny Red Army–issue bog roll, every sheet stamped with a hammer and sickle, lacked absorbency and seemed to glide across Marinin’s arse ineffectually. It came in boxes, one hundred forty-four rolls to a box, twelve boxes a month, delivered to this far-flung outpost of the Republics. Until the bright May day delivery stopped, and it came home to him that shiny bog roll was far better than no bog roll.
In his official capacity as Clerical Corporal in Charge of Stores, he put in a telephone call to Murmansk HQ.
“No bog roll? … Ha ha ha,” said the bloke on the other end.
“If an army,” Marinin replied, “marches on its stomach, it does so a lot better with a clean arse!”
“OK, OK. Keep your underpants on. I’ll ask Moscow.”
Three hours later a reply came through on the teleprinter.
TOP SECRET FYEO.
National shortage of paper.
It is the duty of every Soviet Citizen to improvise.
Waste will not be tolerated.
Followed by a name of which he’d never heard, bearing the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Later the same day Marinin posted a notice in every room in the camp instructing clerical staff to save all printed paper, including teleprinter printouts and envelopes, regardless of classification.
He thought he’d get an argument from the resident KGB-nik, Konstantin Ilyich Zolotukhin, but Zolotukhin merely said, “So now we shove our secrets up our backsides? Where could be safer?”
By the end of the day Marinin had two eighteen-year-old privates quartering classified documents and nailing them in sheaves of fifty to the back of lavatory doors.
It was close to a return to reality, but not quite. The pleasure of privacy, the audible reassurance of a sliding bolt was somehow diminished as the harshness of the new paper registered with his arse. It wasn’t shiny, it was in all probability marginally more absorbent, but the damn stuff just wouldn’t flush. It was at least three times the thickness of bog roll. It would never flush.
Marinin issued a chit for twelve galvanised buckets, one for each lavatory, and in the morning instructed a hapless private that he was to empty them each evening onto rough ground behind Hut 3, and when he had enough for a bonfire he was to burn the contents.
After breakfast Marinin sat on the loo, slid the bolt a few times to enhance his defecatory pleasure, and gazed at the quarter-sheet of paper in his hand.
Troop Movem—
Armored Cav—
Fourteenth D—
Commencing Sept—
Fragmentary.
Less than interesting.
He crouched and wiped and tossed the details of a 150,000-man Red Army exercise on the Finnish border into the bucket—a pot for some other greasy bastard to keel.
IV
Fig Biscuits
§20
Wilderness was on the plane, ten minutes out of Tempelhof, before he thought to open the envelope Alice had thrust at him on Monday evening.
Her notes began, “Joe, all you need to know,” ran for six pages … and ended, “Please remember to burn after reading or at the very least don’t leave it lying around.”
In between he had been assigned a new identity, an embassy pass and a new passport in the name of Michael Young. Mr. Young was to be a Second Secretary/cultural attaché (that old lie) at the British Embassy in Helsinki.
He flipped through the passport. Diplomatic status. A fake history in the inky triangles and ovoids made by the rubber stamps of half a dozen countries Mr. Young had visited in the last three years … Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland … my, but this man was a real adventurer, always kicking the dust off his shoes … all the world’s trouble spots … television’s Danger Man in the flesh … and Wilderness began to worry that he might not be able to make his version of Michael Young sufficiently boring. He had the rank of Second Secretary—not a bad place to begin if boredom and anonymity were your goals.
“You report to Head of Station: Burton, J.”
Burton? Which Burton. He’d known a few Burtons in the service. There’d been Jimmy Burton back in Vienna … but Wilderness was pretty sure he still was in Vienna—and there’d been Jerry Burton in Beirut, but Jerry had gone into Kurdistan or perhaps it had been Kazakhstan … one of the Stans … and never come back. He wasn’t nicknamed Reckless Sir Richard for nothing.
No … he hadn’t a clue which Burton, J this was.
A plain postcard was paper-clipped to the last page of Alice’s instructions. Handwritten and unsigned was “… and leave the fucking gun behind!”
Even if he’d read that before leaving London he would not have done it. He could hear Alice’s argument in the mind’s ear: “A cultural attaché doesn’t need a gun, Joe. Ballet dancers don’t shoot back!” He’d got his Smith & Wesson .44 in his briefcase, and everything he carried bore the status of “diplomatic bag.” No one would search it.
§21
The British Embassy in Helsinki was beautiful. A rose-pink house, the “Villa Damsen,” on the Baltic seashore at Kaivopuisto. The British had owned it almost since the Grand Duchy of Finland had been formally recognised as an independent state at the end of the Great War. Wilderness had never seen it. He wondered if he’d ever get to see it. All the mundane stuff of “chancery”—communications, archiving, missing passports, stranded tourists … spying—was conducted out of more mundane offices at 34 Korkeavuorenkatu in the centre of the city. Receptions were held at the Villa Damsen—those sorts of evenings when women wore long frock
s and men wore medals, if they had them, or sashes, if they came from the sort of country that thought men in sashes didn’t look like buffoons.
Wilderness probably never would get to see the Villa Damsen. He had no medals—he’d never understood the logic of medals … did you get them for getting shot at or merely for surviving, whether shot at or not? His dad had medals, but then his dad had been a homicidal maniac. And Wilderness certainly didn’t own a buffoon sash. The poshest garment in his wardrobe was his dinner jacket, one of Alec’s cast-offs. What Ambassador would invite a Second Secretary in a secondhand dinner jacket to socialise? What ambassador would invite an MI6 officer to socialise? What ambassador in his right mind would invite an MI6 officer under a cloud of suspicion to socialise, with or without his own dinner jacket, sash or medals?
It was a short walk in summer sunshine from Helsinki central station to Korkeavuorenkatu. He sat a while in a park he’d never learned the name of, looked around, pondered, remembered his previous visits to Finland.
Helsinki probably wasn’t the most boring city in the world, but it might be a contender. He’d never found much to like or dislike about the place. Hardly a recommendation. The newer bits were on a grid system. Hardly a recommendation—yet, as a tram whizzed by on the Esplanade (a word more readily associated with a rare childhood trip to the seaside at Southend) he thought of trams … and cobblestones … and trams and cobblestones and realised any city that still had both would never feel wholly alien. London had no trams now and only a handful of cobblestones, but the sight of a rattling iron galleon gliding on rails set in cobblestones was another glimpse of a vanished childhood. Perhaps he’d get to like Helsinki. If this was a punishment posting, there were surely worse places he could have been sent?