by Len Deighton
‘Did you?’
‘Berlin is not a good town for a man on the run,’ he said reflectively, almost as if I wasn’t there. ‘Your people and the Americans still have military powers. They can censor mail, tap phones and jail anyone they want out of the way. They even have the death penalty at their disposal.’ He looked at me as if a thought had suddenly come into his mind. ‘Did you see that item in the newspaper about the residents of Gatow taking their complaints about the British army to the High Court in London? Apparently the British army commander in Berlin told the court that since he was the legitimate successor to Hitler he could do anything he wished.’ A tiny smile as if it caused him pain. ‘Berlin is not a good place for a man on the run, Bernd.’
‘Who says I’m on the run?’
‘You’re the only man I know who both sides would be pleased to be rid of,’ said Rudi. Perhaps he’d had a specially bad day. There was a streak of cruelty in him and it was never far from the surface. ‘If you were found dead tonight there’d be ten thousand suspects: KGB, CIA, even your own people.’ A chuckle. ‘How did you make so many enemies, Bernd?’
‘I don’t have any enemies, Rudi,’ I said. ‘Not that kind of enemies.’
‘Then why do you come here dressed in those old clothes and with a gun in your pocket?’ I said nothing, I didn’t even move. So he’d noticed the pistol, that was damned careless of me. I was losing my touch. ‘Frightened of being robbed, Bernd? I can understand it; seeing how prosperous you are looking these days.’
‘You’ve had your fun, Rudi,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what I want to know, so I can go home and get some sleep.’
‘And what do you want to know?’
‘Where the hell has Lange Koby gone?’
‘I told you, I don’t know. Why should I know anything about that schmuck?’ It is not a word a German uses lightly: I guessed they’d had a row, perhaps a serious quarrel.
‘Because Lange was always in here and now he’s missing. His phone doesn’t answer and no one comes to the door.’
‘How should I know anything abut Lange?’
‘Because you were his very close pal.’
‘Of Lange?’ The sour little grin he gave me made me angry.
‘Yes, of Lange, you bastard. You two were as thick…’
‘As thick as thieves. Is that what you were going to say, Bernd?’ Despite the darkness, the sound of the piano and the way in which we were both speaking softly, the dancers seemed to guess that we were quarrelling. In some strange way there was an anxiety communicated to them. The smiles were slipping and their voices became more shrill.
‘That’s right. That’s what I was going to say.’
‘Knock louder,’ said Rudi dismissively. ‘Maybe his bell push is out of order.’ From upstairs I heard the loud slam of the front door. Werner Volkmann came down the beautiful chrome spiral staircase and slid into the room in that demonstratively apologetic way that he always assumed when I was keeping him up too late. ‘All okay?’ I asked him. Werner nodded. Kleindorf looked round to see who it was and then turned back to watch the weary dancers entangle umbrellas as they danced into the nonexistent wings and cannoned against the wall.
Werner didn’t sit down. He gripped a chairback with both hands and stood there waiting for me to get up and go. I’d been at school, not far from here, with Werner Jacob Volkmann. He remained my closest friend. He was a big fellow and his overcoat, with its large curly astrakhan collar, made him even bigger. The ferocious beard had gone – eliminated by a chance remark from Ingrid, the lady in his life – and it was my guess that soon the moustache would go too.
‘A drink, Werner?’ said Rudi.
‘No thanks.’ Although Werner’s tone showed no sign of impatience I felt bound to leave.
Werner was another one who wanted to believe I was in danger. For weeks now he’d insisted upon checking the street before letting me take my chances coming out of doorways. It was carrying caution a bit too far but Werner Volkmann was a prudent man; and he worried about me. ‘Well, goodnight, Rudi,’ I said.
‘Goodnight, Bernd,’ he said, still looking at the stage. ‘If I get a postcard from Lange I’ll let you put the postmark under your microscope.’
‘Thanks for the drink, Rudi.’
‘Any time, Bernd.’ He gestured with the cigar. ‘Knock louder. Maybe Lange is getting a little deaf.’
Outside, the garbage-littered Potsdamerstrasse was cold and snow was falling. This lovely boulevard now led to nowhere but the Wall and had become the focus of a sleazy district where sex, souvenirs, junk food and denim were on sale. Beside the Babylon’s inconspicuous doorway, harsh blue fluorescent lights showed a curtained shop window and customers in the Lebanese café. Men with knitted hats and curly moustaches bent low over their plates eating shreds of roasted soybean cut from the imitation shawarma that revolved on a spit in the window. Across the road a drunk was crouched unsteadily at the door of a massage parlour, rapping upon it while shouting angrily through the letter-box.
Werner’s limp was always worse in the cold weather. His leg had been broken in three places when he surprised three DDR agents rifling his apartment. They threw him out of the window. That was a long time ago but the limp was still there.
It was while we were walking carefully upon the icy pavement that three youths came running from a nearby shop. Turks: thin wiry youngsters in jeans and tee shirts, seemingly impervious to the stark cold. They ran straight at us, their feet pounding and faces contorted into the ugly expressions that come with such exertions. They were all brandishing sticks. Breathlessly the leader screamed something in Turkish that I couldn’t understand and the other two swerved out into the road as if to get behind us.
My gun was in my hand without my making any conscious decision about needing it. I reached out and steadied myself against the cold stone wall as I took aim.
‘Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!’ I heard Werner shout with a note of horrified alarm that was so unfamiliar that I froze.
It was at that moment that I felt the sharp blow as Werner’s arm knocked my gun up.
‘They’re just kids, Bernie. Just kids!’
The boys ran on past us shouting and shoving and jostling as they played some ritual of which we were not a part. I put away my gun and said, ‘I’m getting jumpy.’
‘You over-reacted,’ said Werner. ‘I do it all the time.’ But he looked at me in a way that belied his words. The car was at the kerbside. I climbed in beside him. Werner said, ‘Why not put the gun into the glove compartment?’
‘Because I might want to shoot somebody,’ I said, irrit able at being treated like a child, although by then I should have become used to Werner’s nannying. He shrugged and switched the heater on so that a blast of hot air hit me. We sat there in silence for a moment. I was trembling, the warmth comforted me. Huge silver coins smacked against the windscreen glass, turned to icy slush and then dribbled away. It was a red VW Golf that the dealer had lent him while his new BMW was being repaired. He still didn’t drive away: we sat there with the engine running. Werner was watching his mirror and waiting until all other traffic was clear. Then he let in the clutch and, with a squeal of injured rubber, he did a U-turn and sped away, cutting through the backstreets, past the derelict railway yards to Yorckstrasse and then to my squat in Kreuzberg.
Beyond the snow clouds the first light of day was peering through the narrow lattice of morning. There was no room in the sky for pink or red. Berlin’s dawn can be bleak and colourless, like the grey stone city which reflects its light.
My pad was not in that part of Kreuzberg that is slowly being yuppified with smart little eating places, and apartment blocks with newly painted front doors that ask you who you are when you press the bell push. Kreuzberg 36 was up against the Wall: a place where the cops walked in pairs and stepped carefully over the winos and the excrement.
We passed a derelict apartment block that had been patched up to house ‘alternative’ ventures: shops for
bean sprouts and broken bicycles, a cooperative kindergarten, a feminist art gallery and a workshop that printed Marxist books, pamphlets and leaflets; mostly leaflets. In the street outside this block – dressed in traditional Turkish clothes, face obscured by a scarf – there was a young woman diligently spraying a slogan on the wall.
The block in which I was living had on its façade two enormous angels wielding machine guns and surrounded by men in top hats standing under huge irregular patches of colour that was the underpainting for clouds. It was to have been a gigantic political mural called ‘the massacre of the innocents’ but the artist died of a drug overdose soon after getting the money for the paint.
Werner insisted upon coming inside with me. He wanted to make sure that no unfriendly visitor was waiting to surprise me in my little apartment which opened off the rear courtyard. ‘You needn’t worry about that, Werner,’ I told him. ‘I don’t think the Department will locate me here, and even if they did, would Frank find anyone stouthearted enough to venture into this part of town?’
‘Better safe than sorry,’ said Werner. From the other end of the hallway there came the sound of Indian music. Werner opened the door cautiously and switched on the light. It was a bare low-wattage bulb suspended from the ceiling. He looked round the squalid room; the paper was hanging off the damp plaster and my bed was a dirty mattress and a couple of blankets. On the wall there was a tattered poster: a pig wearing a policeman’s uniform. I’d done very little to change anything since moving in; I didn’t want to attract attention. So I endured life in this dark hovel: sharing – with everyone living in the rooms around this Hinterhof – one bathroom and two primitive toilets the pungent smell of which pervaded the whole place. ‘We’ll have to find you somewhere better than this, Bernie.’ The Indian music stopped. ‘Somewhere the Department can’t get you.’
‘I don’t think they care any more, Werner.’ I looked round the room trying to see it with his eyes, but I’d grown used to the squalor.
‘The Department? Then why try to arrest you?’ He looked at me. I tried to see what was going on in his mind but with Werner I could never be quite sure.
‘That was weeks ago. Maybe I’ve played into their hands. I’ve put myself into prison, haven’t I? And they don’t even have the bother or the expense of it. They are ignoring me like a parent might deliberately ignore some child who mis behaves. Did I tell you that they are still paying my salary into the bank?’
‘Yes, you told me.’ Werner sounded disappointed. Perhaps he enjoyed the vicarious excitement of my being on the run and didn’t want to be deprived of it. ‘They want to keep their options open.’
‘They wanted me silenced and out of circulation. And that’s what I am.’
‘Don’t count on anything, Bernie. They might just be waiting for you to make a move. You said they are vindictive.’
‘Maybe I did but I’m tired now, Werner. I must get some sleep.’ Before I could even take my coat off a very slim young man came into the room. He was dark-skinned, with large brown eyes, pockmarked face and close-cropped hair, a Tamil. Sri Lanka had provided Berlin’s most recent influx of immi gr ants. He slept all day and stayed awake all night playing ragas on a cassette player. ‘Hello, Johnny,’ said Werner coldly. They had taken an instant dislike to each other at the first meeting. Werner disapproved of Johnny’s indolence: Johnny disapproved of Werner’s affluence.
‘All right?’ Johnny asked. He’d appointed himself to the role of my guardian in exchange for the German lessons I gave him. I don’t know which of us had the best out of that deal: I suspect that neither of us gained anything. He’d arrived in East Berlin a zealous Marxist but his faith had not endured the rigours of life in the German Democratic Republic. Now, like so many others, he had moved to the West and was reconstructing a philosophy from ecology, pop music, mysticism, anti-Americanism and dope.
‘Yes, thanks, Johnny,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to bed.’
‘There is someone to see you,’ said Johnny.
‘At four in the morning?’ said Werner and glanced at me.
‘Name?’ I said.
Suddenly there was a screech from across the courtyard. A door banged open and a man staggered out backwards and fell down with a sickening thud of a head hitting the cobbles. Through the dirty window I could see by the yellow light from an open door. A middle-aged woman – dressed in a short skirt and bra – and a long-haired young man carrying a bottle came out and looked down at the still figure. The woman, her feet bare, kicked the recumbent man without putting much effort into it. Then she went inside and returned with a man’s hat and coat and a canvas bag and threw them down alongside him. The young man came out with a jug of water and poured it over the man on the ground. The door slammed loudly as they both went back inside.
‘He’ll freeze to death,’ said the always concerned Werner. But even as he said it the figure moved and dragged itself away.
‘He said he was a business acquaintance,’ continued Johnny, who remained entirely indifferent to the arguments of the Silesian family on the other side of the yard. I nodded and thought about it. People announcing themselves as business acquaintances put me in mind of cheap brown envelopes marked confidential, and are as welcome. ‘I told him to wait upstairs with Spengler.’
‘I’d better see who it is,’ I said.
I plodded upstairs. This sort of old Berlin block had no numbers on the doors but I knew the little musty room where Spengler lived. The lock was long since broken. I went in. Spengler – a young chess-playing alcoholic who Johnny met after being arrested at a political demonstration – was sitting on the floor drinking from a bottle of apple schnapps. The room smelled noticeably more foul than the rest of the building. Sitting on the only chair in the room there was a man trying not to inhale. He was wearing a Melton overcoat, and new string-backed gloves. On his head he had a brown felt hat.
‘Hello, Bernd,’ said Spengler. He wore an earring and steelrimmed glasses. His hair was long and very dirty. His name wasn’t really Spengler. No one knew his real name. Rumours said he was a Swede who exchanged his passport for the ident ity papers of a man named Spengler so that he could collect welfare money, while the real Spengler went to the USA. He was growing a straggling beard to assist the deception.
‘You looking for me?’ I asked the man in the hat.
‘Samson?’ He got to his feet and looked me up and down. He kept it formal, ‘How do you do. My name is Teacher. I have a message for you.’ His precise English public school accent, his pursed lips and hunched shoulders displayed his distate for this seedy dwelling, and perhaps for me too. God knows how long he’d been waiting for me; top marks for tenacity.
‘What is it?’
‘I…’
‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘Spengler’s brain was softened by alcohol years ago.’ A dazed smile crossed Spengler’s white face as he heard and understood my words.
The visitor, still doubtful, looked round again before picking his words carefully. ‘Someone is coming over tomorrow morning. Frank Harrington is inviting you to sit in. He guarantees your personal freedom.’
‘Tomorrow is Sunday,’ I reminded him.
‘That’s right, Sunday.’
‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Where?’
‘I’ll collect you,’ said the man. ‘Nine o’clock?’
‘Fine,’ I told him.
He nodded goodbye without smiling and eased his way past me, keeping the skirt of his overcoat from touching anything that might carry infection. It was not easy. I suppose he’d been expecting me to shout with joy. Anyone from the Field Unit – even a messenger – must have sniffed out something of my present predicament: disgraced ex-field agent with a warrant extant. Being invited to the official interrogation of a newly arrived defector from the East brought an amazing change of status.
‘You’re going?’ Werner asked after the front door banged. He was watching over the balcony to be sure the visitor actually departed
.
‘Yes, I’m going.’
‘It might be a trap,’ he warned.
‘They know where to find me, Werner,’ I said, making him the butt of my anger. I knew that Frank had sent his stooge along as a way of demonstrating how easy it was to pick me up if he felt inclined.
‘Have a drink,’ said Spengler, from where he was still sprawled on the floor. He pushed his bent glasses up on his nose and prodded the buttons on the machine he was holding so that the little lights flashed. He’d finally found new batteries for his pocket chess computer and despite his alcoholic daze he was engaging it in combat. Sometimes I wondered what sort of genius he would be if he ever sobered up.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’
2
Take me to a safe house blindfolded and I’d know it for what it was. Werner once said they smelled of electricity, by which he meant that smell of ancient dust that the static electricity holds captive in the shutters, curtains and carpets of such dreary unlived-in places. My father said it was not a smell but rather the absence of smells that distinguishes them. They don’t smell of cooking or of children, fresh flowers or love. Safe houses, said my father, smelled of nothing. But reflexes conditioned to such environmental stimuli found hanging in the air the subtle perfume of fear, a fragrance instantly recognized by those prone to visceral terror. Somewhere beyond the faint and fleeting bouquet of stale urine, sweat, vomit and faeces there is an astringent and deceptive musky sweetness. I smelled fear now in this lovely old house in Charlottenburg.
Perhaps this young fellow Teacher smelled something of it too, for his chatter dried up after we entered the elegant mirrored lobby and walked past the silent concierge who’d come out of the wooden cubicle from where every visitor was inspected. The concierge was plump, an elderly man with grey hair, a big moustache and heavy features. He wore a Sunday church-going black three-piece suit of heavy serge that had gone shiny on the sleeves. There was something anachronistic about his appearance; he was the sort of Berliner better suited to cheering Kaiser Wilhelm in faded sepia photos. A fully grown German shepherd dog came out of the door too. It growled at us. Teacher ignored dog and master and started up the carpeted staircase. His footfalls were silent. He spoke over his shoulder. ‘Are you married?’ he said suddenly as if he’d been thinking of it all along.