by Len Deighton
There had been few changes made in this ‘salon’ since Lisl was a child in a house with five servants. There were photos on every side: sepia family groups in ebony frames, faded celebrities of the thirties. Actresses with long cigarette holders, writers under big-brimmed hats, glossy film stars from the UFA studios, carefully retouched prima donnas of the State Opera, artists of the Dada movement, trapeze performers from the Wintergarten and nightclub singers from longvanished clip joints. All of them signed with the sort of florid guarantees of enduring love that are the ephemera of show business.
Lisl’s late husband was there, dressed in the white-tie outfit he wore to play Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic the night the Führer was in the audience. There were no photos of the bent little cripple who ended his days playing for Trinkgeld in a broken-down bar in Rankestrasse.
Some of these photos were of family friends; those who came to Lisl’s salon in the thirties and the forties when it was a place to meet the rich and famous, and those who came in the fifties to meet men with tinned food and work permits. There were modern pictures too, of long-term residents who endured the trials and tribulations: uncertain hot water and the noise of the central heating, and the phone messages that were forgotten and letters that were never delivered, and the bathroom lights that did not work. Such loyal clients were invited into Lisl’s cramped little office for a glass of sherry when they settled the bill. And their photos were enshrined there over the cash box.
‘You look terrible, darling,’ she said.
‘I’m fine, Tante Lisl,’ I said. ‘Can you find a room for me?’
She switched on another light. A large plant in an art-nouveau pot cast a sudden spiky shadow on the ugly brown wallpaper. She turned to see me better, and part of her pearl necklace disappeared into a roll of fatty muscle. ‘There will always be a room for you, Liebchen. Give me a kiss.’
But I had already leaned over to give her a kiss. It was a necessary ritual. She had been calling me Liebchen and demanding kisses since before I could walk. ‘So nothing changes, Lisl,’ I said.
‘Nothing changes! Everything changes, you mean. Look at me. Look at my ugly face and this infirm body. Life is cruel, Bernd, my sweetheart,’ she said, using the name I’d been known by as a boy. ‘You will discover it too: life is cruel.’ Only Berliners can mock their own self-pity to produce a laugh. Lisl was one of life’s most successful survivors and we both knew it. She roared with laughter and I had to laugh too.
She let her Stuttgarter Zeitung slide onto the carpet. She spent her life reading newspapers and talking about what she discovered in them. ‘What has brought you to our wonderful city?’ she asked. She rubbed her knee and sighed. Now that arthritis had affected her legs, she seldom went out except to the bank.
‘Still selling tablets?’ she asked. I’d always said that I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer that exported medicines to East and West. She didn’t wait for a reply; in any case she’d never believed my story. ‘And did you bring photos of your lovely wife and those beautiful children? Is everything all right at home?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is the top room empty?’
‘Of course it is,’ she said. ‘Who else but you would want to sleep there when I have rooms with balcony and bathroom en suite?’
‘I’ll go up and have a wash,’ I said. The attic room had been my room when my father, a Major in the Intelligence Corps, was billeted here. The place was full of memories.
‘I hope you’re not going over to the other side,’ Lisl said. ‘They have all the medicine they need over there in the East. They are getting very rough with medicine sellers.’
I smiled dutifully at her little joke. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Lisl,’ I said. ‘This is just a holiday.’
‘Is everything all right at home, darling? It’s not that sort of holiday, is it?’
Frank Harrington, head of Berlin Station, arrived at Lisl’s exactly on the dot of four. ‘You got fed up with sleeping on that sofa at Werner’s place, did you?’
I looked at him without replying.
‘We are slow,’ said Frank, ‘but eventually we hear all the news.’
‘You brought it?’
‘I brought everything.’ He put an expensive-looking black leather document case on the table and opened it. ‘I even brought that A to Z street guide I borrowed from you in London. Sorry to have had it so long.’
‘That’s okay, Frank,’ I said, throwing the London street guide into my open suitcase so that I wouldn’t forget it. ‘And where is the man who delivered the stuff?’
‘He went back.’
‘I thought he was staying so I could debrief him. That’s what London wanted.’
Harrington sighed. ‘He’s gone back,’ he said. ‘You know how people are in situations like this. He got nervous yesterday and finally slipped off back over there.’
‘That’s a pity,’ I said.
‘I saw a lovely-looking girl downstairs talking to Lisl. Blonde. Couldn’t have been more than about eighteen. Is she staying here?’
Frank Harrington was a thin sixty-year-old. His face was pale, with grey eyes and a bony nose and the sort of black blunt-ended stubble moustache that soldiers affect. His question was an attempt to change the subject, but Frank had always had an eye for the ladies.
‘I couldn’t tell you, Frank,’ I said.
I began to sort through the papers he’d brought. Some of them were verbatim accounts of meetings that had taken place at the Foreign Office when our Secret Intelligence Service people went over there for special briefings. None of the material was of vital importance, but that it had got back to East German intelligence was worrying. Very worrying.
Frank Harrington sat by the tiny garret window from which I used to launch my paper aeroplanes, and smoked his foul-smelling pipe. ‘You don’t remember the time your father organized a birthday party for Frau Hennig?’ Frank Harrington was the only person I knew who called Lisl Frau Hennig. ‘He had a six-piece dance band downstairs in the salon and every black marketeer in Potsdamerplatz contributed food. I’ve never seen such a spread.’
I looked up from the papers.
He waved his pipe at me in a gesture of placation. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Bernard. Your father had no dealings with the black market. The contributors were all Frau Hennig’s friends.’ He laughed at some thought passing through his mind. ‘Your father was the last man to have dealings with the black market. Your father was a prude, so prim and proper that he made lesser mortals, like me, sometimes feel inadequate. He was a self-made man, your father. They are all like that – a bit unforgiving, unyielding and inclined to go by the book.’ He waved his pipe again. ‘Don’t take offence, Bernard. Your dad and I were very close. You know that.’
‘Yes, I know, Frank.’
‘No proper education, your father. Left school when he was fourteen. Spent his evenings in the public library. Retired a Colonel, and ended up running the Berlin office, didn’t he? Damned good going for a self-educated man.’
I turned over the next lot of papers to get to the memo on cipher machines. ‘Is that what I’m like?’ I asked him. ‘Unforgiving, unyielding and inclined to go by the book?’
‘Oh, come along, Bernard. You’re not going to tell me you wish you’d been to university. You’re berlinerisch, Bernard. You grew up in this funny old town. You were cycling through the streets and alleys before they built the Wall. You speak Berlin German as well as anyone I’ve ever met here. You go to ground like a native. That’s why we can’t bloody well find you when you decide you can’t be bothered with us.’
‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.
‘You think your father should have sent you back to England so that you could read politics and modern languages? You think it would have been better to have listened to Oxford a
cademics telling you where Bismarck went wrong, and some young tutor explaining which prepositions govern the dative case?’
I said nothing. The truth was I didn’t know the answer.
‘Bloody hell, laddie, you know more about this part of the world than any Oxbridge graduate can learn in a lifetime.’
‘Would you put that in writing, Frank?’
‘You’re still annoyed about young Dicky Cruyer getting the desk? Well, why wouldn’t you be angry? I made my position clear from this end. That you can be sure of.’
‘I know you did, Frank,’ I said as I tapped the papers together to make them fit back into the brown paper envelope. ‘But the fact is that you don’t just learn about history and grammar at Oxford and Cambridge, you learn about the people you meet there. And in later life you depend upon those judgements. Knowing the streets and alleys of this dirty old town doesn’t count for much when there is a desk falling vacant.’
Frank Harrington puffed at his pipe. ‘And Cruyer was junior to you in service as well as younger.’
‘Don’t rub it in, Frank,’ I said.
He laughed. I felt guilty about describing him as an old woman, but it would make no difference to his career whatever I said about him, because Frank was due to retire any time, and being pulled out of Berlin would be no hardship for him. He hated Berlin and made no secret of it. ‘Let me write to the D-G,’ said Frank as if suddenly inspired with a brilliant idea. ‘The old man was a trainee with me back in the war.’
‘For God’s sake, no!’ That was the trouble with Frank; just like Lisl, he always wanted to treat me as if I were a nineteen-year-old going after his first job. He wasn’t so much an old woman as a well-meaning old auntie.
‘So what do you make of all that wastepaper?’ he said, poking a match into the bowl of his pipe as if searching for something.
‘Garbage,’ I said. ‘It’s just a lot of guesswork someone in Moscow has dreamed up to get us worried.’
Frank nodded without looking up at me. ‘I thought you’d say that. You’d have to say that, Bernard. Whatever it was like, you’d have to say it was rubbish.’
‘Can I buy you a drink?’ I said.
‘I’d better get back to the office and put that stuff into the shredder.’
‘Okay,’ I said. He’d guessed that London wanted it destroyed. Frank knew how their minds worked. Maybe he’d been here too long.
‘You’ll be wanting to go round town and see some of your playmates, I suppose.’
‘Not me, Frank.’
He smiled and puffed his pipe. ‘You were always like that, Bernard. You never could bear letting anyone know what you were up to.’ It was just the sort of thing I remember him saying to me when I was a child. ‘Well, I’ll look forward to seeing you for dinner tomorrow night. Just wear anything, it’s only potluck.’
After he’d left, I went to my suitcase to get a fresh shirt. A folded piece of envelope, used as a bookmark, had fallen out of the street guide Frank had returned to me. It was addressed to Frau Harrington, but the address was no more than a postbox number followed by a post code. It was a damned weird way to get a letter to Frank’s wife. I put it into my wallet.
The Russians got the State Opera, the Royal Palace, the government buildings and some of the worst slums; the Western Powers got the Zoo, the parks, the department stores, the nightclubs and the villas of the rich in Grunewald. And spiked through both sectors, like a skewer through a shish kebab, there is the East–West Axis.
The Bendlerblock, from where the High Command sent the German Army to conquer Europe, has now been converted to offices for a cosmetic manufacturer. The Bendlerstrasse has been renamed. Nothing here is what it seems, and that appeals to me. The Anhalter Bahnhof, a yellow brick façade with three great doors, was once the station for the luxury express trains to Vienna and all of southeast Germany. It is no longer a busy terminus. The great edifice stands upon a piece of waste ground long since abandoned to weeds and wild flowers. Werner Volkmann chose it as a meeting place as he had sometimes done before. It was usually a sign that he was feeling especially paranoid. He was carrying a small document case and wearing a big black overcoat with an astrakhan collar. On someone else it might have suggested an impresario or a nobleman, but it simply made Werner look like someone who bought his clothes at the flea market in the disused S-Bahn station on Tauentzienstrasse.
It was getting dark. Werner stopped and looked up the street. From over the high graffito-covered wall there was the reflected glare of bluish-green light that in any other city would have marked the position of a large stadium lit for an evening’s football. But beyond this wall there was the large open space of the Potsdamerplatz. Once the busiest traffic intersection in Europe, it had now become a brightly lit Todesstreifen, a death strip, silent and still, with a maze of barbed wire, mines and fixed guns.
Werner loitered on the corner for a moment, turning to watch a dozen or more youngsters as they passed him and continued towards Hallesches Tor. They were attired in a weird combination of clothes: tight leotards, high boots and Afghan coats on the girls; studded leather sleeveless jackets and Afrika Korps caps on the men. Some of them had their hair dyed in streaks of primary colours. Werner was no more surprised by this sample of Berlin youth than I was. Berlin residents are exempt from military service, and there is a tendency among the young to celebrate it. But Werner continued to watch them, and waited, still staring, until a yellow double-decker bus stopped and took aboard everyone waiting at the bus stop. Only then did he feel safe. He turned abruptly and crossed the street at the traffic lights. I followed as if to catch the green.
He went into Café Leuschner and, after putting his hat on the rack, chose a seat at the rear. His document case he placed carefully on the seat next to him. I waved as if catching sight of him for the first time and went over to his table. Werner called to the waiter for two coffees. I sat down with a sigh. Werner had arrived late, an unforgivable sin in my business.
‘It was one of Frank Harrington’s people,’ said Werner. ‘I had to be sure I’d got rid of him.’
‘Why would Frank have someone following you?’
‘London has been kicking Frank’s ass,’ said Werner. ‘There is talk of replacing him immediately.’
‘What have you got to do with that? Why follow you?’
‘Is there some kind of leak in London?’ said Werner. Knowing it was unlikely that I’d answer him, he said, ‘It’s only fair you tell me. You ask me to go over the wire for you, it’s only fair you tell me what’s going on in London.’
‘No leak,’ I said. I might have added that no one had yet asked him to go ‘over the wire’ and that his regular visits to the East were a damned good reason for him knowing as little as possible about what was happening in London.
‘And the money? Will London help me with the bank?’
‘No money either,’ I said.
Werner hunched low over the table and nodded sorrowfully. I looked round the café. It was a roomy place, its gilt-framed mirrors supported by plaster cherubs and its plastic-topped tables fashioned to look like marble. There was a fine old counter that ran the whole length of the room. I’d known it when the Leuschners’ father was serving behind it. Berlin kids could get the genuine American ice cream here until Leuschner’s daughter married her soldier and went to live in Arkansas.
The coffee arrived: two small electroplated pots, together with tiny jugs of cream, sugar wrapped in coloured paper advertising tea, and the usual floral cups and saucers. Floral-patterned cups and saucers: they reminded me of my childhood breakfasts when my father used to correct my mother’s inadequate German. ‘“Es geht um die Wurst”, “It depends on the sausage”, means “Everything depends on it”. But “Mir ist alles Wurst”, or “It’s all sausage to me”, means “I really don’t care”.’ My mother just smiled and poured more coffee into the floral-patterned cups. She had intended to say that there might not be enough sausage for all of us that evening. But my f
ather was inclined to make everything more complicated than it need be. That too was a characteristic of the self-made man.
I said, ‘Why did we go through all that business of meeting without being observed? I could have just met you in here.’
‘And then we would have both been sitting here with Frank’s watcher.’
‘Have it your way, Werner,’ I said.
‘Frank Harrington is worried,’ said Werner.
‘What about?’ I said, no longer entirely concealing my irritation. ‘I thought Frank wouldn’t let you near his office.’
Werner smiled one of the special oriental smiles that he thought made him appear inscrutable. ‘I don’t have to go into the office to hear the latest news from there. Frank is getting a lot of trouble from London. Rumours say there’s a leak. Frank is frightened he’ll be the scapegoat. He’s frightened they’ll get rid of him and find some way of not paying his pension.’
‘Balls!’
‘If Frank was recalled, do you think the Berlin office would start to use me again?’
‘There is no leak of information.’
‘Good,’ said Werner, looking at me and nodding. There was nothing quite so disconcerting as Werner trying to be sincere. ‘Max Binder went back. He had a wife and three kids, and he couldn’t get a job. Finally he went back to the East.’
Max Binder was at school with us, a studious kid who sang the solo part in ‘Silent Night’ every Christmas and had a secret hoard of forbidden Nazi badges that we all coveted. I’d always liked him. ‘Max is one of the best,’ I said. ‘His wife was from the East, wasn’t she?’
‘They got one of those “wedding cake” apartments on Stalinallee.’ Werner still called the street by its old name. ‘Nowadays people realize that those apartments are not so bad. At least they have high ceilings and lots of cupboards and storage space. The new places out at Marzahn are really jammed tight together. They’ve got families of four living in the space of Max’s broom cupboard.’