by John Lawton
“No—I mean here, here in Lapland.”
“Joe, we’ve had this out time and again—”
“No we haven’t.”
“Yes we have. You just haven’t said anything. It’s all been going on inside your head.”
Wilderness let it drop. Let his king topple. Leaned back and gazed around the bar. The same old faces. The same half a dozen men in business suits he’d been seeing all summer. He thought too little of it. It was all too familiar. Part of the new-found domesticity of espionage. Once upon a time he might have enjoyed that—Berlin had been somewhat like that, sitting in Paradies Verlassen with the enemy in plain sight, with the enemy buying him cocktails, trading gossip, flirting with him. But that was BTFWWU—Before The Fucking Wall Went Up. A break point in history on a par with the ending of the last Ice Age.
Niilo withdrew the watch on Kostya with a single word, “Pointless.”
Wilderness had a suspicion, that he wished was a theory, that he wished might be evidence. He did not tell this to Niilo—that too would have been pointless. But it was, all the same, all he had.
§66
West Berlin: November
They sat in the mayoral Mercedes-Benz at the corner of Hessische Straße, about a hundred and fifty yards east of the Invalidenstraße Crossing—East Berlin to the British Sector of West Berlin: Germans Only.
Nell had flown in from Bonn specially for the meeting—any chance to be at home again, to sleep in her own bed, eat in her favourite café, walk on what she saw as “her own streets.”
It had been a waste of time. A risk and a waste of time. A risk in that a clandestine meeting in the Adlon Hotel with the Soviet ambassador to the DDR would go down like a lead balloon in Bonn—when or if they found out. A waste of time in that Piotr Andreyevich Abrassimov had appeared to have only two replies to anything Brandt said: “No” and “We shall see.” Perhaps that was the secret to all diplomacy—never commit, never reveal, never agree, never disagree. Nell had spent over an hour in the same room as the ambassador, and while it was obvious that he liked Brandt as a man—there had been not a hint of personal animosity—what the ambassador thought about the policy suggestions Brandt had ventured was a mystery. She wondered if the mayor was any clearer about it than she was herself.
He wasn’t asleep, he just had his eyes closed. Rubbing at his forehead as though easing pain within.
“Keine Rose ohne Dornen. No rose without thorns,” Nell said.
“What?”
“He rolled out that phrase as though it were poetry. What does it mean?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Is the rose meant to represent a unified Germany at some future date? And the thorns are what … every obstacle he’ll ever throw at us?”
“Nell, honestly, I didn’t give it a second thought. He was just showing off his knowledge of German idiom.”
The car jerked forward as the queue speeded up.
The East Berlin border guards were checking papers. Less than precise, more than random.
Nell wondered if they were doing this—late on a Sunday evening as hundreds of West Germans allowed east to visit “those left behind” made their way home—just to slow down the mayor. But there were no markings on the car, no flag—just an ordinary top-of-the-range Mercedes in a pleasing shade of black. At this distance there was no way they could know who was sitting in the back seat.
When at last the car rolled under the floodlights into the concrete corridor, and a border guard shone his torch on the documents the chauffeur held out to him, the inspection was cursory—he didn’t even glance at Nell and Brandt.
§67
When the chauffeur asked “where to?” Nell was surprised Brandt said “office” not “home.” It was Sunday, a dark, miserable, drizzly Sunday evening. Berlin did dark and miserable in spades—she would not change it for the world. But surely even Brandt would want to be home with his wife and kids … with Rut and Lars and Mathias? At the very least there’d be a new episode of Bonanza to watch.
From her office she heard a thump. Something falling. Someone falling?
She found Brandt sprawled on the floor, out cold.
She should have spotted the signs. The fingers pressed to the temple, the uncharacteristic snappiness about Abrassimov’s rose conundrum.
She found a pulse in his neck, heard the rasp of his struggle to breathe and grabbed the phone.
“Doctor to the mayor’s office now!”
“Fräulein Burkhardt. It’s Sunday, there’s no one here. Only cleaners.”
“Find someone. Brandt is ill!”
A few moments later an elderly cleaning lady shuffled in. Put her bucket and mop by the door and leant down over Brandt.
Nell had him on his back, a cushion under his head, his tie loosened. He lay exactly where he’d lain the day she’d found him listening to Schubert.
The cleaner slapped Brandt sharply on both cheeks.
Nell was about to yell out, when the cleaner said, “He’s only fainted. Trust me. I seen lots of it during the war. People dead from the blast. Not a bleedin’ mark on ’em. People blown apart. And people who just drop down dead on account they was tired o’ living. Most of ’em … most of ’em had just fainted with the shock of it all. C’mon Mr. Willy … Wakey wakey!”
Brandt’s eyes opened. His breathing slackened off.
“I … I was choking … I thought I was choking.”
“’Appen you was, but you’ll be right as a rain after a nice cup of tea.”
She turned to Nell.
“Won’t he, dearie?”
And Nell realised what her role was in the crisis.
§68
Stretched out on the office couch, Brandt balanced a cup and saucer on his sternum and seemed more inclined to inhale tea than drink it.
“I meant to tell you …”
Nell said nothing. Wondered how long he’d pause.
“Bonn,” he said at last.
“Yes. That place in the west. Think of all the interesting cities on the Rhine and then pick the one that isn’t. Bound to be Bonn.”
“Have you finished?”
“Never. But I am listening.”
“The new coalition of the Bundesrepublik …”
In the pause Nell heard bad news begin to whisper. He’d said nothing in the last few days about this latest development, the end of Ehrhard’s government. All the same she knew he wanted a government post—Minister of Research. A title she found hard to credit with meaning. Was he now going to tell her he’d got it? Or perhaps, he hadn’t and they’d be returning full-time to Berlin?
“I’m not going to be the minister of research.”
Nell said nothing. The whisper was still there. Berlin? Bonn?
“They—that is, the party—are rather insistent I become foreign minister.”
“They? The party?”
“Yes.”
“And the new chancellor?”
“I thought you’d have something to say about that.”
“Do we work with Nazis?”
“Kiesinger was a Mitläufer. A fellow-traveller. Never … committed to the party.”
“A Nazi all the same.”
“I can’t remember who said this—indeed I wish I had—Kiesinger is a man ‘always on the lookout for a four-leaf clover.’ ”
“An opportunist.”
“If you want to put it as cruelly as you can—yes. Now, Nell, you won’t work with a Nazi—goes without saying. But can you work with an opportunist?”
Nell said nothing.
The cleaning lady came back to check on her patient.
“Sit up straight, Mr. Willy, an’ drink yer tea.”
And Nell wished she could speak to Brandt as plainly as that.
§69
Persereiikkä
The first heavy snow fell in early November. Snow that would not be washed away by rainfall or melted by the sporadic sunshine. The thermometer had plummeted.
Out at the
lake Momo was dismantling their camp.
“What do you do now?”
“Do?”
“Where do you … live?”
“Oh, we built a cabin in the woods about half a mile back. Three walls of pine stuffed with whatever we could pack in the gaps. Straw mostly. You got any books in English you’re through with, bring ’em up next time. We can always use books in winter. I read that War and Peace a couple of years back. We kind of hibernate, y’know, like a couple of old bears. ’Cept we do emerge before spring from time to time … wine, women, song … work. Did you know lady bears don’t even wake up to give birth?”
Having nothing to say to this, Wilderness ignored it.
“Work? So you carry on flying?”
“Some. We fly some. Tomorrow we’ll fit skis to the Bobcat. They’re on a pantograph … y’know, like the top of a tram. There’s up for wheels and down for skis. All depends on the terrain. But you can bet your last razoo that we’ll be landing on snow from now on. But … you bring me nicely to a point. How many more Russian trips were you expecting?”
“I hadn’t thought. Enough to keep my Russian on the hook till I find out what he’s up to.”
“Well I’ll tell you now, just looking at the sky … forget it. You’re in Napapiiri.”
As Momo looked up, Wilderness did too. The eastern sky was curiously pink. He’d never seen that before. Some phenomenon of light, cold and latitude, all melding into pink. Pink was a colour almost anyone would associate with warmth … his twin babies, the cat’s nose, the wife’s knickers … but it didn’t look that way.
“Napapiiri?”
“Means you’re inside the arctic circle. So don’t be fooled by a good summer. Once the lake freezes … you can forget it. There’s nowhere on the far side flat or smooth enough for wheels or skis and I won’t land skis on ice … too fuckin’ dangerous. You can go into skid and who knows where the fuck that might end. Wrapped around a fir tree with your bollocks up in the branches with the pine nuts. The lake’ll freeze solid any day now. And I do mean solid. Right now the ice is like glass. Thin and brittle. Solid—you can stomp on it with pit boots and not see a crack—for all I know you could shoot holes in it and not see it shift. Before it freezes solid we’ll haul the Beaver out of the water, and once we do then the Russian run’s over.”
“Of course,” Wilderness said. “I wouldn’t want to put you at risk.”
For a moment Wilderness thought Bruce might laugh, but then it was immediately obvious he was holding laughter in to make another point.
“Joe—you are a risk, everything you do is a risk. Don’t get me wrong, you’re a nice guy—not like those ponces I served with in the RAF—but I hate this spook business and I won’t be sorry to see the back of it. The Helsinki run? Happy to carry on if you are—as long as we can put the bobcat down somewhere, we can get the vodka and you can peddle it down south. Come spring—if you’re still here I’d rather not resume flogging vodka to the Russians. So, if you want to nick this bloke … you’re gonna have to spin him a yarn and spin it pretty damn quick.”
“Not sure I can do that. My people want me in the east—more villages, more films. My arrangement with Kostya is for December. An appointment I mean to keep.”
“Then, like I said, you’re going to have to spin him a yarn.”
“I’ve been doing that for weeks. I’m just hoping he shows up regardless of the weather. He’s not a flyer … he may well not work it out.”
“If you can nick him … what do you want to do? Arrest him?”
“I don’t have that authority. I could shoot him.”
“So, you’re licensed to kill? Like 007?”
“No. That double-0 stuff is just bollocks. I mean, if I could get him somewhere as remote as this I could just shoot him and no one would ever find the body.”
“Bears might.”
“Do bears eat dead people.”
“Course they fuckin’ do. They eat dead anything.”
“Then I refer you to my previous answer.”
“Joe, there are times you rip me up. For a cockney spiv you can’t half turn on the toff. ‘I refer you to my previous answer’—you wanker.”
§70
Mid-December
The east looked pretty much like the north, more lakes, more villages, more polished pine rooms, more saunas. Wilderness took his “British Night Out” to Mikkeli (four times) to Imatra (three times) and to a couple of dozen villages along the Karelian border with Russia, up as far as Lake Pielinen. On several occasions he calculated he was less than a hundred miles from Leningrad. Winter brought one blessing—the exquisite poets, the chroniclers of English folk music and the historians of Celtic archaeology didn’t want anything to do with a sub-zero Finland or a Finland under snow. Wilderness travelled in white silence.
Momo proved to be the bellwether of Finnish taste. The avant-garde received a glacial gratitude and the Carry On films left them wanting more.
It became almost a delight—but not quite—to get back to Helsinki and news from home.
Eddie to Wilderness:
—I’ve got a barrow-load of statistics for you. Boring as hell but you did ask.
Wilderness could not remember why he’d asked. He glanced through, flipping pages far too quickly. It had taken him over an hour to decode and he was already getting impatient.
—Most nickel comes out of former colonies. Belgian Congo, Northern Rhodesia, now just called Congo and Zambia. China’s on the rise, but still lags a long way behind the Congo. USA hardly charts, UK not even on the map. Russian production fair to middling.
Get on with it, Eddie!
—But here’s something you didn’t ask about. Cobalt. Number 27 on the periodic table. Most cobalt is derived from nickel ore. It’s not rare. 32nd most common element on Earth. But there’s rarity and rarity. Most nickel ore comes out of central Africa. Most refined cobalt comes from Finland, simply because they import and refine so much nickel on top of what they mine themselves. I can’t find any figures for Finnish cobalt for the last two years. Or for that matter for Russian cobalt. But I’ve gone over all the stats for cobalt from the Congo since 1948. The Congo got its independence from Belgium in 1960. Ever since then it’s been in a state of intermittent civil war, Katanga, Lumumba and so on …
Get on with it, Eddie!
—… and that’s disrupted production and accounting. Figures for 1959 are pretty consistent with figures for the previous ten years. No figures for 1960. 1961 appears to record a surge in production that I find unbelievable. Production drops every year since, so it looks as though the war is taking its toll. It doesn’t make sense. I would have expected a pattern showing production trailing off right from the outbreak of hostilities in 1960—the one year for which I don’t have figures. So I went over them all again. You know what? Sometime between the 1959 stats and the 1961 stats some dozy apeth put the decimal point in the wrong place. There was no surge and production has trailed off steadily for over five years. I reckon that there is only 10% of Congolese cobalt in “circulation” than what is currently estimated from the stats. For all that it’s a common element, the world is short of cobalt right now. As I said, there’s rarity and rarity. Shares in cobalt stocks may be undervalued by 40-50%. If I were that sort of bloke, and I’m not, I’d be buying cobalt stock as fast as I could.
§71
“I’m sort of following you here, Joe … but what does it mean? What does it all add up to?”
Janis Bell tucked her legs up. Wilderness had long ago concluded she was part cat.
“Let me begin with a tangent.”
“If you must.”
“Do you remember the Tsar Bomba the Russians set off over Novaya Zemlya in ’61?”
“Do I? I went on a demo in protest in my last year at Cambridge!”
“Cambridge? OK. Here … they were somewhat closer to it. The bomb broke windows even in Sweden. It was five hundred megatons, and utterly impractical … can’t fit it ont
o a missile, few planes are big enough to carry it and even then you’re sending the crew on a suicide mission. It may just be the most pointless big bang in history. Five years later the Russians haven’t attempted anything else on that scale and no one is copying them.”
With a cheek he admired rather than resented, Janis Bell took herself off to the kitchen and returned with wine and glasses.
“I get the feeling it’s going to be a long night.”
“So … if big bombs have proved their uselessness, what is a country to do?”
“I dunno … join CND?”
“Think about it, Janis.”
She knocked back a big gulp of red, did her best to assume the expression of someone drinking and thinking. Then another. “Mini,” she said at last.
“Eh?”
“You make the Morris Mini of bombs. Put the engine on sideways or summat like that. It’s a metaphor, you will understand.”
“I will?”
“Make something smaller and better.”
“By George, I think she’s got it.”
“So … how do you make a smaller atom bomb as effective as a big one.”
“Sorry, Professor ’Iggins. I shot my bolt with the Mini.”
“You make the outer casing out of cobalt-59.”
“In what way does that differ from cobalt?”
“It is cobalt. Cobalt-59 is the atomic mass of cobalt’s most stable isotope.”
“I hear a ‘but’ coming.”
“But cobalt-59 is turned into cobalt-60 by the thermonuclear explosion that sets off a chain reaction and beta decay. Cobalt-60 is not a stable isotope. It’s a law of nature, in a manner of speaking, that matter is always in search of stability. Imagine a sinking ship jettisoning cargo until it’s buoyant again. Unstable isotopes throw out stuff until the atom is stable. The stuff-thrown-out, for want of a better term, is what makes for radioactivity. It stops when the atom is stable again—the eventual stable atomic isotope from cobalt-60 is nickel-60. Meanwhile cobalt-60 is highly radioactive. It has a half-life of 5.27 years.”