Berlin Game

by Len Deighton

  They were all dressed up to the nines, of course. The ladies wore long dresses and the mezzo-soprano had jewellery in her hair. The wife of the man from the central bank had diversified into gold and the lady museum director wore Pucci. The men were in dark suits with the sort of buttonhole ribbons and striped ties that provided all the information needed, to anyone entitled to know.

  Over dinner the talk was of money and culture.

  ‘There’s seldom any friction between Frankfurt and Bonn,’ said the man from the Bundesbank.

  ‘Not while you are pouring your profits back to the government. Ten billion Deutschemark – is that what you’re giving to the politicians again this year?’ said Frank. Of course they must have guessed who Frank Harrington was, or had some idea of what he did for a living.

  The Bundesbank smiled but didn’t confirm it.

  The lady museum director joined in and said, ‘Suppose you and Bonn both run short of money at the same time?’

  ‘It’s not the role of the Bundesbank to support the government, or to help with the economy, get back to full employment or balance trade. The Bundesbank’s primary role is to keep monetary stability.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the way you see it,’ said the mezzo-soprano, ‘but it only requires a parliamentary majority in Bonn to make the role of the central bank anything the politicians want it to be.’

  The Bundesbank official cut himself another chunk of the very smelly double-cream Limburger, and took a slice of black bread before answering. ‘We’re convinced that the independence of the Bundesbank is now regarded as a constitutional necessity. No government would affront public opinion by attempting to take us over by means of a parliamentary majority.’

  Frank Harrington’s son, who’d read history at Cambridge, said, ‘Reichsbank officials were no doubt saying the same thing right up to the time that Hitler changed the law to let him print as much paper money as he needed.’

  ‘As you do in Britain?’ said the Bundesbank official politely.

  Mrs Harrington hurriedly returned to the mezzo-soprano and said, ‘What have you heard about the new Parsifal production?’

  ‘Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.’ These words – ‘You see, my son, time here turns into space’ – provided Mrs Harrington, the mezzo-soprano and the ancient-pottery expert with an opportunity to pick the plot of Parsifal over for philosophical allusions and symbols. It was a rich source of material for after-dinner conversation, but I wearied of listening to it and found it more amusing to argue with Poppy about the relative merits of alcool blanc and whether poire, framboise, quetsche or mirabelle was the most delicious. It was an argument that dedicated experiment with Frank Harrington’s sideboard array had left unresolved by the time Poppy got to her feet and said, ‘The ladies are withdrawing. Come with me.’

  The desire to flirt with her was all part of the doubts and fears I had about Fiona. I wanted to prove to myself that I could play the field too, and Poppy would have been an ideal conquest. But I was sober enough to realize that this was not the right time, and Frank Harrington’s house was certainly not the place.

  ‘Poppy dearest,’ I said, my veins fired by a surfeit of mixed eaux de vie, ‘you can’t leave me now. I will never get to my feet unaided.’ I pretended to be very drunk. The truth was that, like all field agents who’d survived, I’d forgotten what it was like to be truly drunk.

  ‘Poire is the best,’ she said, picking up the bottle. ‘And a raspberry for you, my friend.’ She banged the bottle of framboise onto the table in front of me.

  She departed clutching the half-full bottle of pear spirit, her empty glass and discarded shoes to her bosom. I watched her regretfully. Poppy was my sort of woman. I drank two cups of black coffee and went across the room to corner Frank. ‘I saw Werner last night,’ I told him.

  ‘Poor you,’ said Frank. ‘Let me top up your brandy if you are going to start on that one.’ He stepped away far enough to get the brandy, but I put a hand over my glass. ‘What an idiot I am,’ said Frank. ‘You’re drinking that stuff the ladies are having.’

  I ignored this barb and said, ‘He thinks you’ve got it in for him.’

  Frank poured some brandy for himself and furrowed his brow as if thinking hard. He put the bottle down on a side table before he answered. ‘We have an instruction on his file. You know, Bernard, you’ve seen it.’

  ‘Yes, I checked it out,’ I said. ‘It’s been there five years. Isn’t it time we let him try again?’

  ‘Something not very sensitive, you mean. Umm.’

  ‘He feels out of things.’

  ‘And so he might,’ said Frank. ‘The Americans don’t use him and he’s never done anything much for anyone else here.’

  I looked at Frank and nodded to let him know what a stupid answer that was: the Americans got copies of the sheet that said we were not using Werner. They would not use him without some very good reason. ‘He thinks you have a personal grudge against him.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘He said he can’t understand why.’

  Frank looked round the room. The police official was talking to Poppy; he caught Frank’s eye and smiled. Frank’s son was listening to the mezzo-soprano, and Mrs Harrington was telling the maid – uniformed in the sort of white cap and apron that I’d seen otherwise only in old photos – to bring the semi-sweet champagne that would be so refreshing. Frank turned back to me as if regretting that nothing else demanded his immediate attention. ‘Perhaps I should have told you about Werner before this,’ he said. ‘But I try to keep these things on a “need to know” basis.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. Poppy was laughing at something the policeman told her. How could she find him so amusing?

  ‘I put Werner in charge of the communications room security one night back in September 1978. There was a lot of signals traffic. The Baader-Meinhof gang had hijacked a Lufthansa Boeing, and Bonn was convinced they were flying it to Prague…You ask your wife about it, she’ll remember that night. No one got a wink of sleep.’ He sipped some of his brandy. ‘About three o’clock in the morning, a cipher clerk came in with an intercept from the Russian Army transmitter at Karlshorst. It was a message from the commanding general requesting that some military airfield in southwest Czechoslovakia be kept operational on a twenty-four-hour basis until further notice. I knew what that message referred to because of other signals I’d seen, and I knew it wasn’t anything to do with the Baader-Meinhof people, so I put a hold on that message. My interception unit was the only one to file that signal that night, and I’ve checked that one through NATO.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Frank,’ I said.

  ‘That damned message went back through Karlshorst with “intercepted traffic” warnings on it. Werner was the only person who knew about it.’

  ‘Not the only person, Frank. What about the cipher clerk, the operator, the clerk who filed the signal after you’d stopped it, your secretary, your assistant…lots of people.’

  Artfully, Frank steered the conversation another way. ‘So you were talking to dear old Werner last night. Where did this reunion take place – Anhalter station?’

  The surprise showed on my face.

  Frank said, ‘Come along, Bernard. You used that old military identification card I let you have, and you were too damned idle to hand it back when it expired. You know those bogus cards have numbers that ensure we get a phone call when one turns up in a police report. I okayed it, of course. I guessed it was you. Who else would be in Leuschner’s café at that time of night except drug pushers, pimps, whores and vagabonds, and that incurable romantic Bernard Samson?’

  Joe Brody, the American ‘from Siemen’s’ drifted over to us. ‘What kind of caper are you two hatching up?’ he said.

  ‘We were talking about Anhalter station,’ said Frank.

  Joe Brody sighed. ‘Before the war, that was the centre of the universe. Even now old-time Berliners walk out there to look at that slab of
broken masonry and fancy they can hear the trains.’

  ‘Joe was here in ‘39 and ‘40,’ said Frank. ‘He saw Berlin when the Nazis were riding high.’

  ‘And came back with the US Army. And shall I tell you something else about Anhalter Bahnhof? When we got copies of Stalin’s order to his Belorussian Front and his Ukraine Front for a converging attack that would take Berlin and end the war, the point at which those great armies would meet was specified as Anhalter Bahnhof.’

  Frank nodded and said, ‘Joe, tell Bernard what we did about that Karlshorst signal…the one about the airfield remaining open for the Russian commanding general. Do you remember?’

  Joe Brody was a bright-eyed bald American who held his nose while he was thinking, like a man about to jump into deep water. ‘What do you want to know, Mr Samson?’

  Frank Harrington answered on my behalf. ‘Tell him how we discovered who had divulged that interception.’

  ‘You’ve got to realize that this wasn’t a big deal,’ Brody said slowly. ‘But Frank thought it was important enough to suspend the clearance of everyone on duty that night until we got a lead on it.’

  ‘We checked everyone who handled the message,’ said Frank. ‘I had nothing against Werner. I suspected the cipher clerk, as a matter of fact, but he came out clean.’

  ‘Was Giles Trent handling signals traffic at that time?’

  ‘Giles Trent? Yes, he was here then.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Brody. ‘No chance you can pin this on Giles Trent. The way I understand it, he had no access to signals traffic.’

  ‘Can you remember so well?’ I said.

  Brody’s gold-rimmed glasses flashed as he turned his head to be sure he wasn’t overheard. ‘Frank gave me a free hand. He told me to dig as deep as I wanted. I guess Frank wanted me to go back to my people and tell them you Brits weren’t about to paper over the cracks in the future.’ Frank wet his lips and smiled to show he was still listening even if he had heard the story before. ‘So I dug,’ said Joe Brody. ‘It was your guy Werner something…’

  ‘Werner Volkmann,’ I supplied.

  ‘Volkmann. That’s right!’ said Brody. ‘We eliminated the others, one by one. This other guy – Trent, Giles Trent – took a little extra time because London got sticky about letting us read his file. But he was in the clear.’ He grabbed his nose again. ‘Volkmann was the leak, believe me. I’ve done hundreds of these investigations.’

  ‘And never made a mistake?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that kind of mistake,’ said Brody. ‘I don’t go around ripping away a security clearance just to make myself feel six feet tall. This was Volkmann. Not Trent, nor any of the others – unless everyone was telling me lies. So you can tell your people in London the file is closed on that one.’

  ‘Suppose I told you Trent is now an orange file?’ I said.

  ‘Holy cow!’ said Brody without too much emotion. ‘Is this going to become another one of those?’

  ‘It looks as if it’s nipped in the bud,’ I said. ‘But I would take a lot of convincing that Trent wasn’t in on your problem too.’

  ‘I know the feeling, young man,’ said Brody. ‘Research and investigation are no damn use if they don’t support those prejudiced judgements we’ve already worked so hard on.’

  ‘Anyone except Werner – that’s it, isn’t it?’ said Frank.

  ‘No!’ I said too loudly. ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Bernard was at school with Werner,’ Frank explained to Brody.

  ‘Your loyalty does you credit, kid,’ said Brody. ‘Jesus, I know guys in your position who’d be trying to pin it on their wife.’

  Frank Harrington laughed and so did Brody.

  The next morning, I had breakfast with Lisl. We sat in the room she called her study. It had a tiny balcony that looked out on the traffic on Kantstrasse.

  It was a wonderful room and I remembered it from the time I was small, and permitted inside when my father came to settle his monthly account. Apart from the walls covered with small framed photos, there were a thousand other wonders for a child’s eye. There were small tables littered with ivory snuffboxes, a brass ashtray fashioned from a section of World War I shell-casing, the words A PRESENT FROM LEMBURG hammered into the brass, and Russian buttons soldered round its edge. There were two fans, open to reveal Japanese landscapes; a small china zeppelin with BERLINSTAAKEN on its side; opera glasses made of yellowing ivory; and a silver carriage clock that didn’t work. Most dazzling of all to the small boy I once was, a Prussian medal awarded to Lisl’s grandfather, a magnificent piece of military jewellery suitably mounted on faded red velvet in a silver frame which Lisl’s maids kept gleaming bright.

  Breakfast was set on a small table against the window, which was open enough to move the lace curtain but not enough to move the starched linen table cloth. Lisl was seated in the high dining chair from which she could get up without assistance. I arrived exactly on time; I knew that nothing dooms a meeting with a German more completely than tardiness. ‘Mein Liebchen,’ said Lisl. ‘Give me a kiss. I can’t jump up and down – it’s this damned arthritis.’

  I bent over and kissed her, careful to avoid the heavily applied rouge, powder and lipstick. I wondered how early she must have risen to have prepared her hair and makeup. ‘Don’t ever change it,’ I said. ‘Your glamorous room is still as enchanting as ever.’

  She smiled. ‘Nein, nein.’ That unmistakable Berlin accent: ny-yen, ny-yen. I knew I was home when I heard it.

  ‘It’s still the same as when my father was alive,’ I said.

  She liked to be complimented on the room. ‘It’s still exactly as it was when my father was alive,’ she said. She looked round to be sure she was telling the truth. ‘For a few years, we had a photo of the Führer over the fireplace – a signed photo – but it was a relief to put Kaiser Wilhelm back there.’

  ‘Even if it’s not signed,’ I said.

  ‘Naughty!’ Lisl admonished, but she permitted herself a small smile. ‘So, your work is complete and now you go home to your gorgeous wife and your dear children. When are you going to bring them to see me, darling?’

  ‘Soon,’ I said, helping myself to coffee.

  ‘It had better be,’ she said, and chuckled. ‘Or your Tante Lisl will be pushing up the daisies.’ She tore a piece from her bread roll and said, ‘Werner says we Germans have too many words for death. Is that true?’

  ‘In English we say “dead shot”, “dead letter”, a “dead fire”, “dead calm”, and so on. German is more precise, and has a different word for each meaning.’

  ‘Werner says the Germans have a thousand different words for death, just as the Eskimos are said to have so many different words for snow. And the Jews have so many different words for idiot.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘“Schmo”, “schlemiel”, “schnook”, “schmuck”.’ She laughed.

  ‘Do you see a lot of Werner?’

  ‘He’s a good boy. I get lonely now I’m unable to get about on my feet and Werner pops in to see me whenever he’s passing. He’s about the same age as you, you know.’

  ‘He’s a bit older, but we were in the same class at school.’

  ‘I remember the night he was born. It was the 1st of March 1943. It was a bad air raid – fires in Bachstrasse and the Sigismundhof. Unter den Linden suffered and the passage through to the Friedrichstrasse was ruined. There were unexploded bombs in the grounds of the Italian Embassy and the house of the Richthofen family. A bomb stopped the church clock on Ku-Damm and it’s stayed at seven-thirty ever since. Sometimes I say to him, “You stopped that clock the night you were born.” Werner’s mother was the cook for us. She lived with her husband in an attic just four doors along from here. I went and got her just before her contractions began. Werner was born in this house, did you know that? Of course you did. I must have told you a thousand times.’

  ‘Werner,’ I said. ‘What kind of name is that for a nice Jewish boy?’

  �
�One name for the world, another name for the family,’ said Lisl. ‘That’s always the way it is for them.’

  ‘Did you hide all the family, Lisl? What about his father?’

  ‘His father was a big strong man – Werner inherited his build – and he worked as a gravedigger at the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee all through the war.’

  ‘And was never arrested?’

  She smiled the sort of smile I’d seen on other German faces, a look reserved for those who would never understand. ‘So that the Nazis would have to assign Aryans to look after Jewish graves and bury Jewish dead? No, the workers at Weissensee cemetery were never arrested. When the Russians got here in ‘45 there was still a rabbi walking free. He was working there as a gravedigger with Werner’s papa.’ She laughed but I didn’t. Only people who’d been here when the Russians arrived were permitted to laugh about it.

  ‘It was after the war that Werner’s father died. He died of not getting enough to eat for year after year.’

  ‘Werner was lucky,’ I said. ‘Five-year-old orphans did not have much chance.’

  ‘Is he in some sort of trouble?’ said Lisl. She’d caught some careless inflection of my voice.

  I hesitated. ‘Werner can be headstrong,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve given him half my savings, Liebchen.’

  ‘He wouldn’t swindle you, Lisl.’

  Her mascaraed eyes fluttered. ‘I can’t afford to lose it,’ she said. ‘I had it invested, but Werner said he could make more for me. I have it all in writing. I’m easy to handle, Werner knows that.’ It was typical of her that she used the fashionable word ‘pflegeleicht’, usually applied to non-iron clothes. But Lisl was not pflegeleicht: she was old-fashioned linen, with lots of starch.