by Len Deighton
‘Tessa’s gone to sleep,’ I said.
‘Something good had to happen,’ said Teacher. ‘It’s the law of averages.’
‘Don’t bet on it,’ I said. The wipers squeaked and squealed at the rain. Teacher reached for the radio switch but seemed to have second thoughts about it.
We came up behind a line of heavy trucks, the wind whipping the covers of the rearmost vehicle, and stayed there for a bit. ‘Keep awake. We’ll check all the exits,’ said Teacher. ‘The message may have got it wrong.’
‘No comment,’ I said.
These East German Autobahnen were in poor condition. Little had been done on this stretch since it was first built in Hitler’s time. Subsidence here and there had caused wide cracks, and hasty patches of shoddy maintenance had failed to cure the underlying fractures. All over Europe the motorways were poxed with signs, and littered with the equipment of construction gangs, as the Continent’s roads succumbed to an arterio-sclerosis that had every sign of proving fatal.
There had been roadworks at several places along the route, but after the turn-off for Brandenburg – a town that forms the centre of a complex of lakes to the west of Berlin – the westbound side of the Autobahn was reduced to single-lane working. Teacher slowed as our headlights picked out the double row of plastic cones, some of them overturned by the gusts of wind that accompanied ceaseless heavy rain.
The road curved gently to the left and began a downward gradient. From here I saw ahead of us the ribbon of highway marked by pinpoints of light that climbed like a file of insects and disappeared suddenly over the distant hill only just visible against the purple horizon.
This section of the Autobahn was being widened. Lining the road were colossal machines: bulldozers and towering power shovels, spreaders, graders and rollers, the bizarre toys of a Gargantuan world.
‘Look there!’ I said as I spotted a car parked amongst the machines, its parking lights just visible through the downpour.
‘That’s them,’ said Teacher, the relief audible in his voice. He swung the wheel. We bumped off the edge of the roadway and down on to the mud, picking the way carefully past metal drums, steel reinforcements, abandoned materials, broken wooden fencing and other undefinable debris. We were about fifty yards from the other car when Teacher judged us close enough. He stopped and turned off the engine: the lights died. The noise of the rainstorm was suddenly very loud. It was dark except when passing cars, coming round the curve, swept the site with their headlight beams. The light came swinging across it like the revolving rays of a lighthouse. There was no movement anywhere.
‘Careful,’ I said. ‘When you open the door we’ll be lit up by the interior light. We’ll be sitting targets.’ I slid into the back of the van, opened the suitcase and rummaged to find the ammunition and the pistol. I loaded it carefully. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could tuck into the waistband of a pair of cheap trousers so I kept it in my hand.
‘I’m getting out,’ said Teacher. ‘You two stay here.’
‘Whatever you say.’
It was no time to start a row, but as he opened the door and got out of the driver’s seat I slid out the back and into the darkness and pouring rain. Outside there was the sort of stink that roadworks always exude, the smell of disturbed earth, faeces and fuel oil. But the road here runs through a tall forest and the felling of the trees had added sap to the medley of odours. The rain soaked me to the skin before I’d taken more than two steps through the sticky mud. I kept the gun under my coat and out of sight, and watched the dim figure of Teacher walking cautiously towards the car. Some traffic swung past, driving carefully along the prescribed lane, their beams dulled by the steady rain.
While Teacher moved forward, someone got out of the car which I could now recognize as a Wartburg. The other side had taken the precaution of taping up the interior light switch. The Wartburg’s interior remained dark, and the glare of the parking lights was enough to make it impossible to see whether it was a man or a woman standing there. Nearer to me – and directly behind the nearest of the big yellow machines – there was a barrier. It fenced off the deep ex cavations where the foundations were being extended.
‘Please walk forward, one at the time,’ I heard Teacher call, his uncertain German evident from only those few words.
Suddenly the full beams of the Wartburg came on. This light was hard and brilliant. It came cutting through rain that shone like glass beads, and exposed Teacher as an absurd and soaking wet gorilla. Teacher was alarmed and jumped aside into the darkness but I could still see his outline.
From the bulldozer closest to me I heard a movement, a soft metallic click that might have been the safety catch of a gun. A figure had shifted position from behind the bulldozer’s tracks in order to see where Teacher had gone. I moved closer to the line of earth-moving machinery which would provide me with the sort of cover that the other side had taken advantage of. Now I could see more clearly in the darkness. There seemed to be a woman standing by the Wartburg and possibly others still inside it. The metallic sound I’d heard had come from someone standing near the barrier. It was a man holding a gun with a long silencer attached. All their attention was on Teacher.
It was like watching a performance on a fully lighted stage, its backdrop the tall trees of the immense forest while to one side there were the twin lines of traffic – one red one white – flickering away into the far distance. Now I could see Teacher, but he couldn’t see the figure with the gun who was silhouetted against the mud and puddles which shone like silver in the beams of the Wartburg’s headlights.
I heard a shout – almost a scream – a woman’s voice, and there was someone running through the squelching mud behind me. I turned to see but our Transit van was in my field of view. Then came the first shot: the sort of soft plop you only get the first time from a gun with a brand-new silencer. It wasn’t Teacher. The woman called again. She was shouting, ‘Do as you were told!’ In German, Berlin German.
Then came another shot, a loud report from an un silenced gun and the smashing of glass. It was a single shot from somewhere to the left of me. Now came a confusion of darkness, pierced by pistol shots and the sudden beams of passing headlights. Traffic rumbling past gave light enough to show that the Wartburg had suffered a broken windscreen, its shattered glass scattered around like hail. In that brief flicker of light I saw Teacher standing crouched with a pistol held at arm’s length, the way actors stand in TV movies about cops. I couldn’t be sure whether he’d fired the shot. Had he I wondered tried to hit someone inside the car, and if so had he succeeded?
Then something came fluttering out to make a glowing pattern between me and the light of the Wartburg headlights. Until that moment I thought Tessa was still in the back of the Transit van, but there could be only one person who would go whirling through the mud, twisting and turning, oblivious to the rain and the gunfire.
Whoever shot her was standing near the front nearside wheel of the Wartburg. She was very close to the gunman when she was hit and lifted in the air. Bang. Bang. Two rounds from a shotgun floated her through the headlight beams with her skirt and draped sleeve shining and trans lucent yellow. As she fell back to earth she metamorphosed to crimson and the cloth wrapped round her like some beautiful flying insect that in fast playback becomes a twitching chrysalis. Illuminated by the headlights she lay full-length in the mud. The rain beat down. She moved again and then was still.
‘You bastard!’ said someone in English. It must have been Teacher. And then he fired, I recognized the pump-pump sound of the 9mm Browning I’d seen him carrying. Two shots very loud and very close together. One of them hit the steel frame of a big earth-moving machine, and was deflected into the sky with the piteous little cry that spent rounds give. But the other shot hit the Wartburg’s near-side headlight and it went out with a secondary explosion and much hissing as the rain found the hot metal of the light.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. There were men with guns in the dar
kness over beyond Teacher. No silencers. They returned the fire immediately. Several shots, so close together in time that they sounded almost like one. Teacher ran, stumbled and then went down with a loud scream. I could just see him in the gloom beyond the light provided by the Wartburg’s solitary beam. He writhed and shouted, hugging himself with both arms like a man trying to escape from a straitjacket of pain.
But under cover of the attention he was getting I was able to slide round the back of the bulldozer and scramble up on to the wide track. The blade was elevated and I used it for cover as I climbed as high as I could.
I was rewarded with a view of the whole site. More traffic moving slowly past in single file provided light to see the wide trench of the excavations, the line of earth-moving machines and at the end of it the Wartburg. In the centre of the stage there was the Transit van parked askew and to the left of it Teacher’s body. Two men came from the direction of the shots and stood over Teacher. One of them prodded the body with the toe of a shoe. There was no sign of life. ‘It’s all safe now,’ he said. I recognized the voice of Erich Stinnes.
From behind the Wartburg there came the woman. She walked carefully so as not to put her shoes into the worst of the muddy pools. It was Fiona, my wife.
‘How many did they send?’ said one of the men.
‘A man and a woman,’ said Stinnes. ‘They are both dead.’ Fiona walked past Tessa’s body and looked down at Teacher without giving any sign of recognizing him. I realized then that she’d not recognized her sister either. Stinnes turned to look at the Transit van. He was probably considering the smashed windscreen of the Wartburg and what it would be like to be behind it driving through the rain that was still falling.
At that moment I had many alternatives. I suppose the textbook would have wanted me to negotiate with them, but I wasn’t a dedicated reader of textbooks and training manuals, which is the principal reason that I was still alive. So I raised my big revolver and resting the barrel on the dozer’s heavy steel blade – the sort of position considered unsporting by the instructors supervising the Department’s outdoor firing range – I fired at the one who was farthest away, aiming for the centre of the body. The heavy Webley round hit him like a sledgehammer slamming him into the darkness where he remained still and silent. The second man – the one called Stinnes – stepped back in alarm but his training overcame his fear and, without seeing me, he raised his gun and fired three times, aiming in my general direction. The bullets buzzed past my head and one plucked at my coat. It was the right thing to do: the prevailing theory being that your adversary stops shooting and seeks cover. But my reactions were far too slow for such theories and by that time I’d hit him with my second round. It struck him in the neck.
It was a sight that was to interrupt my sleep, a finale to nightmares that awoke me sweating in the middle of so many dark nights. For Erich Stinnes spurted blood like a fountain, high in the air. And with blood spurting – hands to his throat – he stumbled backwards with a gasping noise and went slipping and sliding along in the mud until he hit the barrier around the excavation. There he stayed for a moment and then slowly he toppled and went head-first down into the waterlogged trench with a loud splash.
Fiona, frozen in fear, and spattered with fresh blood stayed where she was. I waited. There was no sound from anywhere. There was a pause in the passing traffic and the forest absorbed the sounds of the wind and rain.
Then Fiona ran back to the Wartburg. As she did so the heel of her shoe broke and she twisted her ankle, stumbling so that as she reached the car she was down on one knee and sobbing with the pain of it. From the assumed security that the darkness gave her – and unaware of how close I was – she called, ‘Who is it? Who is there?’
I didn’t reply, make a sound or even move. There was someone with a silenced gun somewhere out there, and until I settled with him it wasn’t safe to climb down to the mud.
I waited a long time. Then Fiona hobbled to the Wartburg, leaned in and doused the headlight beam. Now the site was entirely in darkness except for the occasional lights from passing traffic as it swept round the bend and started down the hill.
Fiona tried to start the car but the bullet that had smashed the headlight must have done some other damage, for the starter motor screamed but didn’t turn the engine over. In the silence of the forest I heard her curse to herself, gently and softly. There was desperation in her voice.
It was then that I saw the other one. He was creeping very slowly along the line of the barrier. I caught only a glimpse of him but I could see he was wearing a trenchcoat and the sort of waterproof hat that Americans wear when golfing. I guessed who it was: Thurkettle.
For a long long time I saw and heard nothing except the sounds and light of the passing traffic. Then I heard a man’s voice call, ‘Are we going to wait here all night, Samson?’
It was Thurkettle’s voice. I remained silent.
Thurkettle called again, ‘You can take the woman and take the Ford and go. Take your gorilla too. I don’t want any of you.’
I didn’t respond.
‘Do you hear me?’ he said. ‘I’m working your side of the street. Get going. I’ve got work to do.’
I called, ‘Fiona! Do you hear me?’
She looked around but couldn’t spot me.
‘Get to the Ford, start up the engine and roll forward a yard or two. Then keep it ticking over.’
Fiona stepped forward and then kicked both shoes off and went squelching through the mud. Nervously, and pained by her twisted ankle, she made her way slowly to the van. She got into it and started up the engine. After a moment finding the controls she drove forward a little way and cut the engine to idling softly.
‘Now you owe me one, Bernie,’ called Thurkettle.
‘Give my regards to Count Zeppelin,’ I said. I still had the edge on him. I knew where he was but he hadn’t located me. I clambered down to the ground and estimated how many paces I would need to get to the other side of the van. If Thurkettle started shooting I’d have the van as cover.
I waited for a few minutes so that Thurkettle would start looking round to see if I’d got away. Then I ran across to the van. A heavy truck came crawling round the curve and caught me in its headlight beams. I kept running and threw myself down into the mud just as I reached the rear of the van. I stayed there for a moment to catch my breath. No shots came. I moved to the front and put a hand to the glass to get Fiona’s attention. ‘Can you see him?’ I whispered.
‘He’s behind the Wartburg.’
‘Is he one of yours?’
‘I know nothing about him.’
‘Didn’t he come with you?’ I asked her.
‘No. He’s on a motorcycle.’
‘Are you fit to drive?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, her voice was firm and determined.
‘We’ll get out of here and leave him to it. Slide down low in the seat, in case he shoots. I’m going to climb in. When I say “Go” start driving. Not too fast in case you stall.’
I slid my hand around the door seating until I found the light switch and then I pushed it to keep the light off. I opened the door and scrambled inside. ‘Go!’ I said softly. Fiona revved the engine and we went bumping forward over the rough ground. There were no shots.
In the darkness the van bumped over some planks of wood and then we rolled up over a high ledge and on to the Autobahn. It was very dark: no traffic in sight either way. We started westwards. We were about half a mile down the road when there was a great red ball of light behind us.
‘My God!’ said Fiona. ‘Whatever’s that?’
‘Your Wartburg going up in flames, unless I miss my guess.’
‘In flames?’
‘Someone is destroying the evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’ she said.
‘Let’s not go back and ask.’
The flames were fierce. We could still see them from miles away. Then as we went over the brow of a hill the
light on the horizon vanished suddenly. Very little forensic evidence would be salvaged from such a blaze.
I asked Fiona if she wanted me to drive. She shook her head without answering. I tried in other ways to start a conversation but her replies were monosyllabic. Driving along the Autobahn that night gave her something to concentrate upon. She was determined not to think about what she’d done, and in no mood to talk about what we’d have to do.
My arm began to throb. I touched it and found my sleeve was sticky with blood. One of the bullets had come closer than I’d realized. It was not a real wound, just a bad extended graze and an enormous bruise, of the sort that bullets make when they brush the flesh. I wadded a handkerchief and held it pressed against my arm to stanch the dribbling blood. It was nothing that would put me in hospital, but more than enough to ruin my suit.
‘Are you all right?’ There was no tenderness in her voice. It was as much admonitory as concerned, the voice of a schoolteacher herding a class of kids across a busy street.
‘I’m all right.’ We should have been talking and embracing and laughing and loving. We were together again and she was coming home to me and the children. But it wasn’t like that. We weren’t the same carefree couple who’d honeymooned on a bank overdraft and got hysterically drunk in the registry office on one half bottle of champagne shared amongst four people. We sat silent in the darkness. We watched the traffic crawling to Berlin, and saw the Porsches scream past us. And I dribbled blood and the unspoken dreams that keep marriages going bled away too.
The rain stopped or perhaps we drove out of it. I switched on the car radio. There was a babble of Arabic, Radio Moscow’s news in German and then that powerful German transmitter that during the night effectively overwhelms all opposition throughout Central Europe. A big schmaltzy band: Only make-believe I love you. Only make-believe that you love me. Others find peace of mind in pretending, couldn’t you, couldn’t I, couldn’t we?