Berlin Game

by Len Deighton

  21

  It was very very dark and Frank Harrington was being ultra cautious, using the electric lamp only to show me a safety well into which I might fall, or large puddles, or the rails when we had to get across to the other side of the railway track.

  There is a curious smell in Berlin’s underground railway system. It brings to mind the stories about engineers blasting the locks of the canal between Schöneberger and Möckern bridges in those final hours of the war, so that the tunnels flooded to drown civilians, German soldiers and Russians alike. Some say there was no flooding – just leaks and water that came through the damaged bulkhead that guards the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn station from the cold waters of the Spree. But don’t deny those nightmares to anyone who has picked his way over the cross-ties in the darkness after the trains have stopped, for he will tell you about the ghosts down there. And the curious smell remains.

  Frank moved forward very slowly, talking softly all the while so that I would know where he was. ‘Half the passengers on the underground trains going from Moritzplatz to Voltastrasse don’t even realize that they actually go under East Berlin and back into the West again.’

  ‘Are we under the East Sector yet?’ I asked.

  ‘On this section of line, they do know of course. The trains stop at Friedrichstrasse station and the passengers are checked.’ He stopped and listened, but there was only the sound of dripping water and the distant hum of the electric generators. ‘You’ll see the marks on the tunnel wall when we get that far. There’s red paint on the wall to mark the boundary.’ He flashed his light on the side of the tunnel to show me where the marks would be. There was nothing there except bundles of wires sagging from support to support and blackened with decades of filth. As he switched off his lamp, Frank stumbled into a piece of broken drain and cursed. It was all right for him; he had rubber boots on, and wore old clothes under his railway-engineer’s overalls. The clothes I wore under my overalls were all I had for my time in East Berlin. And we’d both decided that carrying a case or a parcel in the small hours was asking to be stopped and searched.

  We walked slowly along the track for what seemed like hours. Sometimes Frank stopped to listen, but there was only the sudden scratching sounds of rats and the ceaseless hum of electricity.

  ‘We’ll wait here for a bit,’ said Frank. He held his wristwatch close to his face. ‘Some nights there are East Berlin railway engineers going down the track to check the apparatus at the terminal – what used to be Kaiserhof station. Thälmannplatz, they call it nowadays. The Communists like to name the streets and stations after heroes, don’t they?’ Frank switched on his lamp long enough to show a recessed space in the wall of the tunnel, containing a yellow-painted metal box with a telephone in it. This was one of the places the drivers had to come to if their train stopped between stations. There was a bench there too, and Frank sat down. We were not far below street level and I could feel a cold draught coming down the air shaft.

  ‘Ever wonder why the Berlin Wall follows that absurd line?’ said Frank. ‘It was decided at a conference at Lancaster House in London while the war was still being fought. They were dividing the city up the way the Allied armies would share it once they got here. Clerks were sent out hotfoot for a map of Berlin but the only thing Whitehall could provide was a 1928 city directory, so they had to use that. They drew their lines along the administrative borough boundaries as they were in 1928. It was only for the purposes of that temporary wartime agreement, so it didn’t seem to matter too much where it cut through gas pipes, sewers and S-Bahn or these underground trains either. That was in 1944. Now we’re still stuck with it.’ We were sitting in the dark. I knew Frank was dying for a puff at that damned pipe, but he didn’t succumb to the temptation. He talked instead.

  Frank said, ‘Years back, when the Communists started building that incredible great satellite city at Marzahn, they wanted it to have its own administration and become a Stadtbezirk, a city borough in its own right. But the Communist lawyers sat down with the men from Moscow and went through those old wartime agreements. The outcome was that they were told on no account to create a new Bezirk. By breaking the old agreement, they would open the way for the Western Powers to make changes too.’

  ‘Lawyers run the world,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to let you out into the street at Stadtmitte station,’ Frank said. He’d told me all about it, shown me a map and photos, but I didn’t interrupt him when he told me everything all over again. ‘Stadtmitte is an intersection. East German trains and West German trains both pass through. On different levels, of course.’

  ‘How long now, Frank?’

  ‘Relax. We must wait until we’re sure the East Germans are not repairing their track. They’re not armed but they sometimes have radios to talk to the men who switch off the juice. They have to be sure the lengthmen won’t be electrocuted when they start work.’

  We waited in the darkness for what seemed an age. Then we walked slowly along the tunnel again. ‘In 1945, the Red Army – fighting their way into the city – were held up at Stadtmitte U-Bahn station,’ said Frank. ‘The station was being used as headquarters by the SS Division Nordland. They were the last German regulars holding out, and they weren’t very German. Nordland had become a collection of foreign volunteers, including three hundred Frenchmen who’d been sent from another unit. The Germans were shooting from about where we are standing now and the Russians couldn’t get down on to the track. You know that old saying about one man can hold off an army if he fights his battle in a tunnel. Well, the Germans were fighting their final battle and it was in a tunnel.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The Russians manhandled a field-artillery piece down the entrance steps, along the platform, and on to the tracks. Then they fired along the tunnel here, and that was the end of the story.’ Frank stopped suddenly and held his hand outstretched as a warning to be silent.

  He must have had superhuman hearing, for it was only after we’d stood there for a moment or two that I could hear the sounds of voices and a muffled hammering. Frank put his head close to mine and whispered, ‘Sounds travel a long way in these old tunnels. Those men are probably no nearer than the old disused platform at Französischestrasse.’ He looked round. ‘This is where you leave me.’ He pointed up to another air shaft. At the top there was the faintest glimmer of grey light seen through a grating. ‘But move quietly.’

  I stripped off the overalls and passed them to Frank; then I climbed up the narrow air shaft. There were iron rungs set into the brickwork. Some of them were rusted and broken, but I had nothing to carry and I got to the top easily enough. The grating was held in place with rusting bars. It looked immovable.

  ‘Lift it,’ said Frank from below me. ‘Lift it until you can see the street is clear. Then choose your moment and go.’

  I put my hand to the grating and it moved easily enough. It hadn’t been cleaned and oiled – Frank was too subtle for anything so obvious – but it had been removed recently and made ready for me to push aside.

  ‘Good luck, Bernard.’

  I tossed my working gloves back down the shaft, and then went through the manhole as quickly as I could, but I need not have worried. The Friedrichstadt – the governmental centre of old Berlin – is empty and silent by Western standards, even during the working day. Now there was no one in sight, just the distant sounds of traffic somewhere to the east of the city. For Stadtbezirk Mitte is a Communist fist punched into the West. It is bordered on three sides by the ‘anti-Fascist protection barrier’, or what the rest of the world calls the Wall. It was close by. Endless batteries of glaring lights kept the open strip of borderland as bright as day, and the scattered light made the darkness overhead grey, like the mist that creeps inland from an ice-cold sea.

  Frank had chosen my route with care. The entrance to the air shaft was hidden from passersby. There was a pile of sand and big heaps of rubble, some building equipment and a small generator trailer be
longing to the Electricity Authority. Berlin’s cast-iron manhole covers are very heavy, and by the time this one was back in place I was red-faced and out of breath. I paused for a moment before walking up Charlottenstrasse, intending to cut along the back of the State Opera House parallel to Unter den Linden. I would have to cross the Spree. There was no way of avoiding those bridges, for just as the Wall enclosed this part of Mitte on two sides, the River Spree made up the other two sides of what is virtually a box.

  As I got nearer to the State Opera, I saw lights and people. Doors at the back of the building were open and men were carrying huge scenery flats and the statue of a horseman that was recognizably from the last act of Don Giovanni. I crossed the street to keep in the shadows but two policemen walking towards me from the direction of the old Reichsbank building – now the offices of the Central Committee – made me change my mind quickly. If only we hadn’t had to wait until the underground trains stopped, I could have mingled with the tourists and those groups of Western visitors who go through Checkpoint Charlie just to visit the theatres or the opera houses for the evening. Some of them were dressed in dinner suits and stiff-fronted shirts, or the flamboyant mess kit of a garrisoned regiment. With them came women in long evening dresses and expensive hairdos. Such visitors provided a glimpse of Western decadence for the bored locals. None of those visitors ever gets asked for papers on the street, but such dress would be rather conspicuous amongst the workers where I was going.

  There were very few people to be seen anywhere. I walked north and stopped under the arch at Friedrichstrasse station. There were a couple of noisy men arguing about the satirical cabaret across the road, some railway workers waiting for their shift to begin and some silent African tourists staring at everything. The Weidendamm bridge would be my best bet. It was darker there than on the bridges that went over to the island; too many government buildings being guarded on that side of the city.

  There were memories everywhere I looked, and there was no getting away from the war. The last escapers from the Führerbunker had come this way, crossing the river by the footbridge when all else failed, and leaving Martin Bormann dead by the river.

  The Charité Hospital. In the mortuary of that grim building, the Red Army found the bodies of the men who had tried to overthrow Hitler in the July 1944 plot. Their bodies had been kept in the cold room there on Hitler’s personal orders.

  A policeman came walking up from the old Brecht theatre beside the Spree. He hurried his pace as he saw me. My papers were in order but I realized too late that I didn’t know how to talk to a policeman. ‘Hey, you,’ the policeman called.

  How did East Berliners address a policeman nowadays? This wasn’t the USA. Being too familiar would be just as suspicious as being too respectful. I decided to be a little drunk, a shift-worker who’d had a couple of vodkas before heading home. But how many vodkas could a man have these days before he risked being taken to the police station?

  ‘What are you doing here?’ The policeman’s voice was shrill, and his accent revealed his home to be somewhere in the north: Rostock, Stralsund or Rügen Island, perhaps. On this side of the Wall there was a theory that out-of-town recruits were more reliable than Berliners.

  I kept walking. ‘Get up,’ the policeman said. I stopped and turned round. He was talking to a couple of men sitting on the ground in the shadow of the bridge. They didn’t get up. The cop said, ‘Where are you from?’

  The elder of the two, a bearded man wearing overalls and a battered leather jacket, said, ‘And where are you from, sonny?’

  ‘Let’s get you home,’ said the cop.

  ‘Get me home,’ said the bearded man. ‘That’s right. You get me home to Schöneberg.’ He laughed. ‘Yorckstrasse, please, right near the railway.’

  The younger man got to his feet unsteadily. ‘Come on,’ he said to his companion.

  ‘Yorckstrasse, Schöneberg,’ said the bearded man again. ‘Only two stops from here on the S-Bahn. But you’ve never heard of it and I’ll never see it again.’ He began to sing tunelessly. ‘Das war in Schöneberg im Monat Mai.’ His singing voice revealed the extent of his drunkenness in a way that his speech did not.

  The policeman was less conciliatory now. ‘You’ll have to get off the street,’ he said. ‘Stand up. Show me your papers.’

  The drunk gave an artful little laugh. His companion said, ‘Leave him alone – can’t you see he’s not well,’ in a voice so slurred that his words were almost incomprehensible.

  ‘If you’re not on your way home in two minutes, I’ll run you along to the police station.’

  ‘Er ist polizeiwidrig dumm,’ said the bearded man, and laughed. It meant criminally stupid, and it was a joke that every German policeman had heard.

  ‘Come along with me,’ said the cop.

  The man began singing again, louder this time: ‘Das war in Schöneberg im Monat Mai…’

  I hurried on lest the policeman call for help with his two difficult drunks. Even when I was a hundred metres or more down the road, I could still hear the drunken old man singing about the little girl who had so often and gladly kissed the boys as they did in Schöneberg so long ago.

  At Oranienburger Tor, where the Chausseestrasse leads up to the football stadium, I turned into the dark labyrinth of side streets. I’d forgotten what it was like to be a newly ‘deposited’ field agent with false papers and a not very convincing cover story. I was too old for it; once I was safely back behind my desk in London, I wouldn’t fret to move again.

  More than a century old, these grim-looking apartment blocks, five and six storeys high, had been built to shelter peasants who came to the city looking for jobs in the factories. They had changed very little. Rolf Mauser lived on the second floor in a rambling, tumbledown apartment building in Prenzlauer Berg. He was bleary-eyed and barefoot when he opened the door, a red silk dressing gown over his pyjamas.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said as he took the chain off the door. It was his turn to be surprised in the middle of the night, and I rather relished it.

  He motioned me into the sitting room and I sank down on a soft chair without removing either coat or hat. ‘A change of plan, Rolf,’ I said. ‘I had a feeling that it wasn’t good on the street tonight.’

  ‘It’s never good on the street,’ he said. ‘Do you want a bed?’

  ‘Is there room for me?’

  ‘Rooms are all I have in abundance. You can take your choice of three different ones.’ He put a bottle of Polish vodka on the table alongside me and then opened the white porcelain stove to poke the ashes over. ‘The rents over this side of the Wall are more or less the same, whether you’ve got a two-room flat or a huge house. So why move?’ The acrid smell of burning coal filled the room.

  ‘I wondered whether you’d be here, Rolf.’

  ‘And why not? After what happened in London, this is the safest place, isn’t it?’

  ‘How do you figure that, Rolf?’ I said.

  ‘The evidence will be in London. That’s where they’ll be looking for the culprit.’

  ‘I hope so, Rolf,’ I said.

  ‘I had to do it, Bernd. I had to bring him round the corner, you know. That man in London was going to blow the whole network.’

  ‘Let’s forget it,’ I said, but Mauser was determined to have my approval for his deed.

  ‘He’d already told Berlin KGB to have personnel and solitary prison accommodation ready for up to fifty arrests. The Brahms network would have been kaputtgemacht. And several other networks too. Now do you understand why I had to do what I did?’

  ‘I understand it, Rolf. I understand it even better than you do.’ I poured myself a shot of Rolf’s fruit-flavoured vodka and drank it down. It was too fiery for the fruit flavouring to soften it much.

  ‘I had to execute him, Bernd.’

  ‘Um die Ecke bringen – that’s gangster talk, Rolf. Let’s face the truth. You murdered him.’

  ‘I assassinated him.’


  ‘Only public officials can be assassinated; and even then the victims have to be tyrants. Executions are part of a process of law. Face it: you murdered him.’

  ‘You play with words. It’s easy to be clever now that the danger has been removed.’

  ‘He was a weak and foolish man, riven by guilt and fear. He knew nothing of importance. He’d never heard of Berlin System until last week.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rolf. ‘Berlin System – that’s what he promised them. I asked Werner about it. He said that it was a complete breakdown of all networks and contacts, including emergency contacts and interservice contacts, for the whole Berlin area. We were very worried, Bernd.’

  ‘Where did you get Trent’s name and address?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘From Werner. Who got it from that bloody Zena. Right?’

  ‘You were asking Frank Harrington questions about some mix-up in 1978. Frank guessed that this man Trent was being investigated.’

  ‘And he told Zena?’

  ‘You know Zena. She got it out of him.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you that Werner is not employed by the Department. Why didn’t you get in touch with Olympia Stadion?’

  ‘Not enough time, Bernd. And Werner is more reliable than your people at Olympia. That’s why you use him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do that night in London?’

  ‘We didn’t want London Central to know,’ said Rolf. He poured himself a shot of vodka. He was beginning to sweat, and it wasn’t with the heat from the stove.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘So where was this man Trent getting his Berlin System from? Answer me that. He was going to get it from someone in London, Bernd.’

  ‘Damn right,’ I said angrily. ‘He was going to get it from me.’ I looked at him, wondering how much to confide to him.

  ‘From you, Bernd? Never.’