by Len Deighton
‘I’m stating a fact.’
‘You don’t have to be defensive, honey.’
‘You said you were a Marxist,’ she reminded him. It was unfair to remind him of something he’d said only once, and that in a heated argument.
‘Yes. I said I was a Marxist. I was a Marxist a long time ago.’ The sail began drumming.
‘But no longer?’
He pulled the mainsheet to adjust the sail before turning his head to answer. He was a good sailor, quick and expert in handling the boat and everything else he did. ‘I asked myself a question,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘That’s all. Marxism is not a creed for those who question.’
‘No matter what the answer? Is that true?’
‘Yes. Whatever the answer: one question gives birth to another. A thousand questions follow. Nothing can sustain a thousand questions.’
‘Nothing? Not even love?’
‘Don’t mock me.’ They were near the shore now: all forest, no sign of people anywhere. ‘Ready about!’ said Harry in the flat voice he used when commanding the boat.
Stepping carefully she went forward, released the front sail and watched him as he swung the tiller. The boom crashed across the boat as they passed through the wind and instinctively he ducked his head to avoid it. She pulled in the jib and set the front sail before going back to sit down.
‘Do you ever play let’s pretend?’ he said as he settled back on the seat. It was another aspect of his childishness. Flying planes was childish too: perhaps he’d joined the Communist Party as some silly adventure.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I do. Sitting here, just the two of us in the boat, cruising across the Müggelsee, I pretend that you are an alluring Mata Hari and that I am the heroic young fellow in your spell who has come to rescue you.’
She said nothing. She didn’t like the drift of this conversation but it was better to see what came of it.
‘Pursued by black-hearted villains, the other shore is safety: a place where we’ll live happily ever after, and raise our family.’
‘Sounds like A Farewell to Arms,’ said Fiona without putting too much enthusiasm into the idea. ‘Did you ever read that?’
‘The journey across the lake to Switzerland. Hemingway. Yes, I did it for my high school English. Perhaps that was where I got it.’
‘The woman dies,’ said Fiona. ‘They get to Switzerland but the woman dies in hospital.’ She turned to look at him and he seemed so utterly miserable that she almost laughed.
‘Don’t make jokes,’ he said. ‘Everything is perfect.’ She hugged him in reassurance.
Yes, everything had been perfect for Harry. It was easy for him. But Fiona was coming near to the end of her resources. She was desperately depressed, even out here on the lake with a man who loved her. Depression, she’d found, was no respecter of logical truth; it was some dark chemical cloud that descended upon her at random and reduced her to jelly.
It was no good telling herself that it was nonsense. She’d given up her children and her marriage. Was she being paranoid to think that Bernard would have completely poisoned the children’s minds against her by now? She had run away, why wouldn’t they be hurt by such rejection? How could she hope to become wife and mother again?
The children were the most terrible sacrifice she had made, but there were other wounds too. She had lost friends and family who now despised her as a traitor. And what was it all for? She had no way to judge the results, or the contribution she’d made. She’d begun to suspect that she was the lamb slaughtered at the altar of Bret Rensselaer’s ambition. Bret’s wounds were corporeal: his reputation intact. Bret Rensselaer was the winner. So were Silas and the D-G. Three old men had sent her here: and those three would be the victors. What did they care about her? She was expendable: as useful and as readily discarded as a Kleenex tissue.
Fiona was the loser: Fiona, her husband and her children. They would never recover from what she had done. Was any political – or as Bret so liked to have it: economic – victory worth it? The answer was no.
Sometimes she felt like salvaging what little she had left. She felt like grabbing a chance of happiness with Harry, of severing her contact with London and just settling down in East Berlin as a Hausfrau. But that would be no more than a temporary salve. The real loss was Bernard and the children: she wanted them to love her and need her.
‘A penny for them?’ said Harry.
‘I was thinking about my hair,’ she said. ‘About having it cut shorter.’ Men were always ready to believe that women were thinking about their hair.
He smiled and nodded. She was looking much older lately: they both were. A vacation in the Danube Delta would be good for both of them.
That evening she had a meeting with Werner Volkmann. She waited there alone in her old-fashioned apartment looking out over the Frankfurter Allee, the wide main road that led eventually to Moscow and, perhaps for that reason, was once called Stalin Allee. It was a part of the procedure that agents running back and forth did not come up to the office. They met privately. She looked at her watch: Werner was late.
She tried to read but was too jittery to concentrate. She found herself trying not to look at Pariser Platz, which was hanging over her bed. It was in a neat black ebony frame. One evening she had taken it down and opened the frame in order to replace Kirchner’s kitsch gaiety with an abstract print more to her taste. Behind the street scene she had been horrified to come across a coloured print of Lochner’s The Last Judgement. As such medieval paintings go, it was a mild example of the violent horrors waiting for sinners in the next world, but Fiona, alone and tired and troubled, had been thunderstruck by the demented and distorted figures and terrifying demons. It was as if she was meant to find it lurking under the cosiness of the Berlin street scene. With trembling hands she’d replaced The Last Judgment back under the Kirchner and fixed it into its frame, but from that time onwards she was never unaware of the presence of that tormented world that lurked under the frolicsome Pariser Platz.
Werner apologized for being late. He was rainswept and weary. He said it was the strain of winding down his banking business and trying to run Lisl Hennig’s hotel at the same time, but Fiona wondered if it was the stress of being a double agent. Werner was a West German national. If the security services became convinced that he was betraying them he would simply disappear without trace or, worse still, become a patient in the Pankow clinic.
They chatted for ten minutes, the sort of unimportant talk they might have had if Werner was what he purported to be. Only then did Fiona disconnect the voice-actuated microphone which she had discovered on the first day she got here. Senior staff had their conversations recorded only by random checks, but it was better to be safe.
‘Did you see the children?’ Before answering he went and sat in the only comfortable chair with his overcoat still on. He wasn’t feeling cold: Werner often kept his overcoat on. It was as if he wanted to be ready to leave at short notice. He’d even kept hold of his hat, and now he was fidgeting with it, holding it in both hands like the steering wheel of a heavy truck that he was negotiating along a busy road.
‘I will see them next week,’ said Werner. He saw the disappointment in her face. ‘It’s not easy to arrange it without Bernard asking awkward questions. But they are fit and well, I can assure you of that. Bernard is a good father.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Fiona, and Werner realized that she had taken it as a reproach. He found it difficult to have a conversation with Fiona these days. She could be damned touchy. She was worn out. He’d told the D-G that over and over again. She said, ‘It might be easier if I were in Moscow or China, but it is impossible to forget that everything I love is so near at hand.’
‘Soon you’ll be home. Here everything is changing,’ said Werner. ‘I even see diehard communists beginning to discover that man does not live by bread alone.’
‘Nothing will ever change,’ said Fiona. ‘
You can’t build a capitalist paradise upon a Leninist boneyard.’
‘Why so glum, Fiona?’ She seldom revealed her personal views.
‘Even if you waved a magic wand and declared Eastern Europe totally free, it would not stir. Bret’s sanguine ideas about the economy don’t take into account the human factor or the immense difficulties of change evident to anyone who comes and looks for themselves. He talks about “the market” but all Eastern Bloc economies are going to remain dominated by the public sector for many many years to come. How will they fix market prices? Who is likely to buy decrepit steel works, ancient textile plants or loss-making factories? Bret says the East will revive its private sector. How? Eastern Europeans have spent their whole working lives slacking off in over-manned jobs. No one here takes risks. Even in the KGB/Stasi office I find people are reluctant to take on new responsibility or make a decision. Forty years of socialism has produced a population incapable of decision-making. People here don’t want to think for themselves. Capitalism will not appear just because there is no longer any law against it.’ She stopped. It was an unusual outburst. ‘I’m sorry, Werner. Sometimes I think I’ve been here too long.’
‘London think so too. The D-G is going to pull you out,’ said Werner.
She closed her eyes. ‘How soon?’
‘Very soon. You should start to tidy things up.’ He waited for a stronger reaction and then said, ‘You’ll be with Bernard and the children again.’
She nodded and smiled bleakly.
‘Are you frightened?’ he asked, without really believing it was true.
‘No.’
‘There is nothing to be frightened of, Fiona. They love you, they want you back.’
For a moment she gave no sign of having heard him, then she said, ‘Suppose I forget?’
‘Forget what?’
She became flustered. ‘Things about them. I do forget things, Werner. What will they think of me?’ She gave him no chance to answer, and moved on to other things. ‘How will it be done, Werner?’
‘It might be changed, but at present the plan is to leave a car parked in the street outside. The keys will be under the seat. With the keys there will be an identity card. Use it only as far as the Autobahn then throw it into a ditch somewhere where it won’t be found. You’ll drive down the Autobahn, dump the car at the roadside and get into one with British plates. The driver will have a UK diplomatic passport for you.’
‘You make it sound simple, Werner.’ London always made things sound simple. They believed it gave agents confidence.
He smiled and twirled the hat on the finger of one hand. ‘London want you to list your contacts here, Fiona.’ For years she’d thought of Werner as some soft woolly creature, hen-pecked by his awful wife. Since using him as her contact with London Central she’d discovered that the real Werner was as hard as nails and far more ruthless than Bernard.
‘I have none,’ she said.
‘Contacts: good and bad. I’d give the bad ones careful consideration, Fiona. Office staff? Janitor? Has anyone said anything to you, even in jest?’ He pinched his nose between finger and thumb, looking up at her mournfully while he did it.
‘What sort of anything?’
‘Jokes about you working for the British…Jokes about you being a spy.’
‘Nothing to be taken seriously.’
‘This is not something to gamble with, Fiona. You’d better tell me.’ He placed his hat on the floor so that he could wrap the skirt of his overcoat over his knees.
‘Harry Kennedy…He’s a doctor who visits Berlin sometimes.’
‘I know.’
‘You know?’
‘London has had him under surveillance since the day you first came here.’
‘My God, Werner! Why did you never tell me?’
‘I had nothing to tell.’
‘I was with him today. Do you know that too?’
‘Yes. London tells me of his movements. Working in the hospital means he has to make his plans well in advance.’
‘I’m sure he’s not…’
‘There to monitor you? But of course he is. He must be KGB and assigned to you. Kennedy arranged that first meeting with you in London; Bret is certain of it.’
‘Have you talked to Bret? I thought Bret was in California.’
‘California is served by scheduled flights, phones and fax.’
‘Who else knows?’ she asked anxiously.
He didn’t answer that one. ‘Kennedy is a party member from way back. Don’t say you haven’t checked him out, Fiona?’
She looked at Werner. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Of course you have. I told Bret that you would be sure to. What woman could resist an opportunity like that?’
‘That sounds very patronizing, Werner.’
‘Does it? I’m sorry. But why not tell me the truth right from the start?’
‘Today he said how wonderful it would be if I were Mata Hari escaping to the West with him. Or some tosh of that kind.’
Werner tugged at his nose, got up and went to the window. It was night and, under floodlamps, workmen were decorating the Frankfurter Allee with the colourful banners and flags of some African state. All visiting dignitaries were paraded along this boulevard to see their colours thus displayed. It was a mandatory part of the Foreign Ministry’s schedule.
In the other direction, the whole sky was pink with the neon and glitter of the West. How near it was, as near and as available as the moon. Werner turned back to her. Fiona was still as beautiful as she had ever been, but she had aged prematurely. Her face was pale and strained, as if she was trying to see into a bright light.
Werner said, ‘If Kennedy happened to be here at the time you were pulled out, he’d have to be neutralized, Fiona.’
‘Why would he be here at the time I am pulled out?’
‘Why indeed?’ said Werner. He picked up his hat, flicked at the brim of it and put it on his head. Fiona climbed up on the chair to connect the microphone again.
25
Berlin. June 1987.
It was his wavy hair that made ‘Deuce’ Thurkettle look younger than his true age. He was sixty-one years old but regular exercise, and careful attention to what he ate, kept him in good physical condition. He put on his bifocals to read the menu but he could manage most things without them, including shooting people, which was what he did for a living. ‘Steak and salad,’ he said. ‘Rare.’
‘The Tafelspitz is on today,’ said Werner.
‘No thanks; too fattening,’ said Thurkettle. He knew what it was, a local version of a New England dinner: boiled beef, boiled potatoes and boiled root vegetables. He never wanted to see that concoction again. It was what he’d eaten in prison. Just the sight or smell of a plate of boiled beef and cabbage was enough to remind him of those years he’d spent cooped up on death row, waiting for the executioner, in a high-security prison along with a lot of other men found guilty of multiple murders.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t eat Tafelspitz either,’ said Werner regretfully. ‘Rare steak and salad: twice,’ he told the waiter.
It was Sunday morning. They were in West Berlin: Leuschner’s, a popular barn-like café, with gilt-framed mirrors on the whole of one wall and a long counter behind which one of the Leuschner brothers served. Coming from the jukebox there was a Beatles tune played by the Band of the Irish Guards. The jukebox used to have hard rock records but one of the Leuschners had decided to refill it with music of his own taste. Werner looked round at the familiar faces. On such Sunday mornings, this otherwise unfashionable place attracted a noisy crowd of off-duty gamblers, musicians, touts, cabbies, pimps and hookers who gathered at the bar. It was not a group much depleted by church-going.
Thurkettle nodded his head to the music. With his bow tie, neatly trimmed beard and suit of distinctly American style, he looked like a tourist. But Thurkettle was here to commit a murder on the orders of London Central. He wondered how much Werner had been told.
Werner’s task was to show him some identity photos and offer him any help and assistance he might require. After the job was done Werner was to meet him on the Autobahn, in the small hours of the morning, and pay him his fee in cash. ‘You have transport arranged?’ asked Werner.
‘A motor bike: it’s quick and nicely inconspicuous for this sort of caper.’
Werner looked out of the window. People in the street were bent under shiny umbrellas. ‘You’ll get wet,’ said Werner. ‘The forecast says storms.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Thurkettle. ‘This hit on the Autobahn is just a routine job for me. Rain is the least of my problems.’
It had been a sudden last-minute decision and a rush to get it all arranged. A message from Erich Stinnes had come announcing that a consignment of heroin had arrived at East Berlin’s airport. He would bring it through tonight. Once he knew this, Thurkettle sent a signal to London that Fiona Samson could be brought out of East Berlin tonight. Werner had sent affirmation that Fiona was ready.
‘These are the people you will see at the rendezvous.’ Werner produced photos from his pocket and passed them across the table. What exactly was going to happen, who was to be murdered and why, Werner had not been told.
His presence at the rendezvous was not required. It was just as well, for tonight he was committed to a big celebration at Tante Lisl’s: a fancy-dress party with all the trimmings. Just about everyone he knew in West Berlin would be there. But now the evening would be spoiled for him: he’d spend all the night worrying about Fiona Samson’s escape.
Thurkettle pretended to study the passport-style pictures, but he had seen all these people before at some time or other. Thurkettle prepared carefully for each job, that’s why he was highly paid, and that’s why he was so successful. After a minute or two he passed the pictures back.
Werner tapped the photo of Stinnes. ‘This is your drug peddling contact. Right?’
Thurkettle grunted assent.
‘Stinnes will arrive with this woman.’ Werner indicated Fiona Samson’s photo. ‘She will depart with this man.’ He indicated the photo of Bernard Samson. ‘Probably this man will also be there.’ He showed him a photo of Harry Kennedy.