by Len Deighton
I looked at the photo for a long time. The informality of the child’s clothes could not conceal the care and attention that had preceded this visit to the photographer. Nor could the stern expression on the face of the man conceal an immense pride in his handsome son. And yet the shutter had caught a moment of tension in the boy’s face as he stiffened in the embrace of his autocratic father. There was an element of tragedy in the gulf between them and I wondered why this was the picture that the son had carried in his personal baggage for so many years.
There was a book-shelf above the desk. I flipped through the usual array of books about knots and flags, and ‘vessels running free giving way to vessels that are close-hauled’. There was a visitors’ book, too: a beautiful leather-bound volume, kept in neat handwriting and dutifully signed by the Reid-Kennedys’ guests. Some of the pages had been roughly torn from it, and I noted those dates.
Then I replaced everything I’d moved, and wiped the things I’d touched, and walked back to the house where Mrs Reid-Kennedy was nursing a treble brandy, and Mann was pouring himself a soda-water on the rocks.
‘I told Douglas,’ she said.
‘Told him what?’ Mann asked.
‘Hello,’ she said to me. ‘Told him not to go to Europe this time.’
‘Why’d you tell him that?’
‘I want to phone my lawyer. You’ve got no right to stop me.’
‘No sense in phoning your lawyer,’ said Mann. While she was looking at the phone, he caught my eye. I gave him the least amount of nod I could manage.
‘Did you wipe your feet?’ she asked me suddenly.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘When the sprinklers are on, the grass-marks tread in to the carpet,’ she said. It was a tired voice that had explained that problem many times before.
‘I know,’ I said. I smiled. Perhaps that was a mistake.
‘Maybe you could talk to your friend about coming back tomorrow or the next day,’ she suggested to me. ‘I don’t want to offend you but a couple of days to recover would be worth so much to me.’ I didn’t answer, and Mann didn’t say anything either.
‘I’ll phone my lawyer,’ she said. She opened her handbag. It was made from a couple of yards of the Bayeux Tapestry, and had gold handles, and a leather strap that went over the shoulder. She searched through it to find a plastic smile but finally she closed the bag with a lot of sighs and tut-tutting. ‘I’ll phone the yacht-club, the people there will know a good lawyer.’
‘Mrs Reid-Kennedy,’ said Mann. ‘A real good lawyer might be able to reduce the fifty-year sentence you are liable to get, by ten years. But I have the kind of authority that could leave you out of this investigation altogether …’
She misinterpreted Mann’s offer. I suppose rich people have to develop sharp ears for subtle offers of corruption. She said, ‘A couple of days to recover from …’ she lifted a limp hand ‘… all this, would be worth anything to me. Let me send you away with some little gift for your wives. I have lovely things in the house – porcelain and gold, and all kinds of little things – your wife would probably love some little treasure like that to add to her collection. Wouldn’t she?’ She was looking at me now.
‘To tell you the truth, Mrs Reid-Kennedy,’ I said, ‘my complete collection of porcelain and gold is here in my dental work. And right now, I don’t have a wife.’
‘You mind if I take this jacket off?’ asked Mann. She didn’t answer but he took it off anyway.
‘My husband hated air-conditioning. He said he’d rather put up with the heat than have the endless noise of it.’
She went over to the small unit in the window and adjusted the controls.
Mann said, ‘You’d better face up to it, Mrs Reid-Kennedy. There’s not going to be any yacht-club lawyer who can get you off the hook. And if you don’t spill it to us right now, there’s not going to be any yacht-club. Not for you, anyway. Even yacht-club secretaries get sticky about espionage.’
She flinched at the word espionage but she didn’t argue about it. She took a deep draught of her brandy and when she next spoke her voice was angry. ‘Ask this one,’ she said, jabbing a thumb at me. ‘Ask him – he’s been down to the boat, hasn’t he. He can see what happened.’
‘I wish you’d understand that I’m trying to help you,’ Mann told her in his wanting-to-help-you voice. I recognized that voice, because he’d used it on me so often. ‘Sure, my colleague can tell me a lot of the answers, because he’s been down to the boat. But if you tell me the same thing, I’ll be able to write it down as coming from you. I don’t have to tell you how much that could help you, do I?’
‘You’re a couple of schnorrers,’ she said bitterly, but it was the last of her resentment. She sighed. ‘You ever been to Berlin?’ she said.
Probably every life has a moment when it reaches its very lowest: for Mrs Marjorie Dean it was Berlin in the summer of 1955. Physically she had completely recovered from the miscarriage, but psychologically she was far from well. And Berlin made her feel rootless. Her fluent German made no difference to the way that Berliners regarded her, as a prosperous American of the occupying army. Yet the other Americans could not forget her German-born grandparents and were always reminding her that she should feel at home here. But Berlin was a claustrophobic city, ‘the island’ Berliners called it, a tiny bastion of capitalism in the vast ocean of Soviet Zone Germany. And for her, the wife of a senior intelligence official, there could be no jaunts into Berlin’s Eastern Sector, and the long ride down the autobahn to the western half of Germany required the special permission of the commanding general.
And she hated this old house, it was far too big for just the two of them, and the Steiners who looked after the place lived in the guest house at the far end of the overgrown garden, with its dilapidated greenhouses, dark thickets and high hedges. It was easy to see why the US army had taken over the house as VIP accommodation, and then as a school for agents learning radio procedures before going over to the East, but it wasn’t really suitable for housing Major Dean and his wife. The furniture was still the same as it had been when this was the home of a fashionable Nazi neurologist. The hall still had the paintings of men in Prussian uniforms, and, on the piano, there was a vignetted photograph of a woman wearing a tiara. The Deans had decided that it must have been the Nazi doctor’s mother.
That Thursday, Marjorie Dean stayed in bed until almost noon. Her husband was away for a few days – these trips of his seemed to be getting more and more frequent – and there was nowhere to go until the ladies’ bridge tournament at tea-time in the officers’ club at Grunewald. But she bathed and put on her favourite linen dress because at one o’clock the courier would arrive from the barracks.
The coffee that Frau Steiner had brought her was now cold, but Marjorie sipped at it just the same, staring at herself as she applied make-up as slowly as she could to spin out the time. On the bedside table there was a tall pile of novels, about romance in America’s deep South. She despised herself for reading such books but it helped to numb the mind that otherwise would think about the way the marriage was going, her husband’s terrible disappointment at the miscarriage, and the all-pervading boredom.
Suddenly from the drawing-room she heard the piano. Someone was playing an old German song about a farmer and a rich merchant. Her father used to sing it to her. She thought her mind was wandering until she remembered that she’d told the Steiners that their daughter could practise on the piano for an hour each morning. She could hear the Steiners talking. It was so hot that the kitchen window was open wide. She could also hear the voice of Steiner’s brother-in-law. Marjorie hoped that the brother-in-law wouldn’t stay too long. What had started out as only one weekend had now become frequent visits. He claimed to be a master book-binder from Coburg in Thuringia but Marjorie’s ear for German accents put him in Saxony, now in the Russian Zone. The lilt was unmistakable and slightly ridiculous. As she heard him again through the open window, she could hardly su
ppress a smile. But as she listened more carefully to what was being said, the smile faded. The argument flared up, and the brother-in-law’s voice was threatening and abusive. The tempo of his speech, the shrill Saxon accent and the use of much German soldier’s slang made the conversation difficult for Marjorie to follow, but suddenly she was afraid. Her intuition told her this visitor was not a relative of the Steiners, and that his presence – and his anger – was in some awful way connected with her husband and the secret work he was engaged in. She heard the window being closed, and could hear no more. Marjorie put the matter from her mind. It was too easy to let one’s imagination run away in a town like this.
The courier arrived at one o’clock every day, bringing classified paperwork in a locked metal case. He was always punctual. She looked forward to his visit, and she knew that he enjoyed it too. Usually he would find time to have coffee and a snack. He liked the old-fashioned German Süssgebäck, and Frau Steiner was an expert at making a whole range of spice and honey breads and sometimes more intricate examples, with marzipan inside and a thick coating of toasted almonds. There is a tradition that Lebkuchen are exchanged by lovers, and although the relationship between Marjorie Dean and the young corporal was proper almost to the point of being staid, there was sometimes an element of tacit flirtation in the choice of these breads and cakes.
On this particular day, Frau Steiner had cooked hazelnut biscuits. There was a plate of them on the kitchen table, covered with a starched napkin. Alongside she had left the coffee and the percolator and a tray set with one of the antique lace tray-cloths that were on the inventory of this old house. Usually, she found Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy brought some new snippet of small-talk or rumour with him. Sometimes they would talk of their childhood in New York. They had both grown up there and Douglas insisted that he had noticed the pretty girl who sat always in the same church pew with two parents and a brother. Once he had told her all about himself and his family. His father was born in Hamburg. He’d emigrated to the USA in 1925, after losing everything in the inflation period. His father had changed the name to Reid-Kennedy after meeting some neighbours who didn’t like Germans, and said so. And yet in the ’thirties it became an advantage to be German. The Jewish man from the US Army procurement office who in 1940 gave them a contract to manufacture radio tuners for B-17 bombers, assumed that they were refugees from Hitler.
The army contract brought a change in the fortunes of the Reid-Kennedys. His father rented more space and took on extra workers. From being a four-man radio component sub-contractor, they ended the war with a turn-over only a few hundred dollars short of two million. Douglas was sent to a swanky private school, and acquired a million-dollar accent but was still unable to pass the US Army officers’ selection board. He’d been annoyed at the time but now he had decided they were probably right; he was too irresponsible and too lazy to be an officer. Look at Major Dean, for instance, he seemed to work twenty-four hours a day, and had no time for getting drunk, chasing women or mixing with the real Berliners.
Mixing with ‘real Berliners’ was one of Douglas’s very favourite occupations. It was quite amazing the people he knew; a selection of German aristocracy, a Nazi film star, a professional lion-tamer, sculptors and painters, radical playwrights and ex-Gestapo officers with a price on their heads. And if you were after a new camera or some priceless antiques, Douglas knew where the newly impoverished sold their wares at knock-down prices. Douglas was young and amusing, he was a raconteur, a gambler who could lose a little money without crying too hard. He’d been too young for the war, he didn’t give a hoot about politics, and for the army he did only what he had to do to stay out of trouble until the happy, happy day when he went back home. In short, Douglas was as different to Hank Dean as any man could get.
And so it was surprising to find this day a changed Corporal Reid-Kennedy who was serious and downcast. Even his clothes were different. His job with the army permitted him to wear civilian clothes and he liked to dress in the slightly ostentatious style of a newly rich Berliner. He chose silk shirts and soft leather jackets and the sort of hand-made hunting clothes that looked good in a silver Porsche. But today he was wearing a cheap blue suit, shiny on the elbows and baggy at the knees. And he wasn’t wearing his gold wrist-watch, or the fraternity ring, or the heavy gold identity bangle. He looked like one of the Polish refugees, who went from door to door offering to do odd jobs in exchange for a meal.
He sat down in the kitchen and left the coffee and hazelnut biscuits untouched. He asked her if she could let him have a Scotch. Marjorie was amazed at such a suggestion but she tried not to show it. She put the bottle on the table and Douglas poured himself a treble measure and swallowed it down hastily. He looked up and asked her if she knew what Major Dean’s job was in intelligence. Marjorie knew that Dean had ‘the police desk’ but she didn’t know what a police desk was. She’d always assumed that he was a liaison officer between the US Army and the West Berlin police; getting drunken GIs out of jail and dealing with all those German girls who wanted to be a wife in the USA but found themselves alone in Berlin and pregnant. Douglas told her what the police desk really was: Major Dean assembled all the accumulating intelligence material to build a complete picture of the East German Volkspolizei. The trouble was that he’d become so interested in his work that he had gone across to the East for a first-hand look.
She drank some of the fresh coffee and tried the biscuits. Douglas let her have a few minutes to think about the situation before he spoke again. Marjorie, he said finally, you’d better understand that they are holding your husband in East Berlin, and the charge is spying. And they don’t fool about over there, they could shoot him. He took her wrist across the table as he said it. It was a sudden change in the relationship. Until now he’d always called her Mrs Dean, and treated her with all the deference due to the wife of his major. But now the problem they shared, and the fact that they were very nearly the same age, unified them, just as it separated them from the older man who was at the centre of the problem. Suddenly Marjorie began to cry, softly at first and then with the terrible racking sobs of hysteria.
The events that came after had been repressed and repressed until she no longer had a clear idea of the order in which they happened. Douglas made long telephone calls. People arrived at the house and departed. There was a chance, he said. The East German police had not transferred custody of Major Dean to the Russians at Berlin-Karlshorst. They offered to exchange Dean for a document stolen from the East Berlin police HQ the previous week. She hesitated. The safe was built into the wall and concealed at the back of the desk in the library. She told Douglas that she didn’t have the key and didn’t know the combination. Douglas didn’t take her seriously. It’s your husband, Mrs Dean! Eventually she opened the safe and got it. They looked through the document that the East Germans wanted. There were forty-nine pages of it; mimeographed on poor quality pulp paper, tinted pink. There had been file numbers on it but these were now obliterated with black ink. The edges of the paper had faded in the sunlight and Marjorie felt that it couldn’t be all that secret if it had been lying around in the sun long enough to fade.
She wondered if she shouldn’t telephone Dean’s senior officer but Douglas reminded her of what he was like. Can you imagine him taking the responsibility? He wouldn’t give the OK to hand over even a used Kleenex tissue to the East Germans. No, he’ll shuffle the responsibility to Frankfurt, and we’ll wait a week for an answer. By that time Major Dean will be in Moscow.
But how can you be certain that this document isn’t of vital importance? Douglas laughed and said it was only of vital importance to the East German official who’d had it stolen from his safe. Now he wanted to get it back and forget the whole thing as soon as possible. These things happen all the time. Marjorie was still worried about how important it was. Look for yourself, said Douglas, but Marjorie couldn’t understand the jargon-heavy officialese of his report on police organization in the Eastern Z
one. Do you imagine that someone like your husband would keep any really important stuff in his safe at home? Marjorie didn’t answer but she finally decided that it was unlikely.
Marjorie remembered Douglas making her go to a cinema. She sat through Jolson Sings Again. The dialogue was dubbed into German but the songs were the original recordings. She didn’t get home until late. There was a glorious sunset behind the trees in the Grunewald. When she came through the garden to the front door she thought that the roses had bloomed. It was only when she went to look at them that she discovered that behind the rosebushes the whitewash had been spattered with blood. She became hysterical. She blundered through the back garden to the apartment the Steiners used but there was no answer to her rings at the doorbell. Then Douglas arrived in a black Opel Kapitan and persuaded her to spend the night in the VIP quarters at the barracks. He had arranged the necessary permission.
She didn’t go back to the house until after Major Dean arrived from the East. The Volkspolizei had kept their word: as soon as the returned papers had been verified, Major Dean was brought to the crossing checkpoint. From there he took a taxi. She never again saw the Steiners. At her insistence the Deans moved to a smaller and more modern house in Spandau. Soon after that, Marjorie became pregnant, and for a time the marriage seemed to go very well but there was now an abyss separating Hank Dean and his young wife.
The perfunctory inquiry was held behind closed doors and its findings were never made public. It was agreed that the document passed to the Volkspolizei was a document originating from that East German force. It had already passed across the desk of Dean’s analysers and was in any case of a grading no higher than confidential. Steiner’s brother-in-law was found dead and floating in the River Spree, having suffered severe wounding ‘by a person or persons unknown’ prior to death. He was described on the record as ‘a displaced person’. Mrs Dean’s evidence about the man’s argument with Steiner was rejected as ‘inadmissible hearsay’. Major Dean was reprimanded for taking official documents home, and was removed from his job. Mrs Dean was totally exonerated. Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy took much of the blame. It was inevitable that he should face the inquiry’s wrath, for he was a draftee. Reid-Kennedy had no military career at stake; he wasn’t even an officer. However, his quiet acceptance of the findings was rewarded by a transfer to a US Army recruitment depot in New Jersey, promotion and an early release.