by Len Deighton
‘We are,’ said the policeman. He still smiled but didn’t move.
She leaned close to him. ‘What are you doing?’ she whispered loudly. ‘Is it wife swoppers you are after? Or have the whores moved in here again?’
He grinned and stood aside. ‘You’re too young to know about that kind of thing, Mutti,’ he said. He turned round and watched us as we staggered along with the boxes of plants. ‘Make way for the busy gardeners,’ he called to the policemen behind him. And they stood aside too. The man in the back of the Volvo stared at his papers and said nothing. He probably thought our papers had been checked.
27
My box of carnation plants was heavy enough to make me sweat by the time we got to the church at Buchholz, but Mrs Munte was not complaining. Perhaps she was much stronger than she looked. Or perhaps she’d chosen a lighter one for herself.
Buchholz marks the end of the number 49 tram route. In the cobbled village square were the bicycles of commuters who lived beyond the terminus. There were hundreds of them, racked, stacked, hanging and piled; the narrow pathways that gave access to them made an intricate maze. Within this maze a man was standing. He had a newspaper in his hands and he was reading from it in a preoccupied way that permitted him to glance round him, and to look down the street as if waiting for the tram to arrive. It was Werner Volkmann; there was no mistaking the big bearlike torso and short legs, and the hat that was planted right on top of his large head.
He gave no sign of seeing me, but I knew he’d chosen that spot so he could keep the car in his line of vision. I unlocked the doors and put the plants in the boot and Mrs Munte in the back seat. Only then – when Mrs Munte was shut in the car and couldn’t hear us – did Werner cross the road to talk to me.
‘I thought you’d be across the other side of town,’ I said quietly, stifling the impulse to scream at him.
‘It’s probably okay,’ said Werner. He turned to look up the street. There was a police car outside the post office, but the driver was showing no interest in us. He was talking to a cop in one of the long white coats that only traffic police wear. ‘Four plainclothes cops visited your man’s office this morning. It was nothing more than a few polite inquiries, but it scared hell out of him.’
‘The same team who arrested Rolf Mauser are now raking through the Lauben and asking if anyone knows him.’
‘I know. I saw them arrive.’
‘Thanks, Werner.’
‘No sense in me rushing in there to get arrested with you,’ said Werner defensively. ‘I can be more help to you free.’
‘So where is he?’
‘Brahms Four? He left his office soon after arriving at work. He came into the street holding a small attaché case and wearing a pained look. I didn’t know what to do – no phone here to reach you. So I had one of my people grab him. I stayed clear. He doesn’t know me. I didn’t want him to see the warehouse, so I had someone drive him out to Müggelsee. The truck will go separately. Then I came up here to ask you whether we should still go ahead.’
‘At least let’s make the kind of attempt that will look good on the report,’ I said. ‘Let’s take this old lady over to Müggelsee and put her in the truck.’
‘You kept your man well wrapped up,’ said Werner. ‘Twenty years at least he’s been operating in this town, and I’d never seen him until today.’
‘Deep cover,’ I said, imitating the voice of Frank Harrington at his most ponderous.
Werner smiled. He enjoyed any joke against Frank.
Werner got in the driver’s side and took the wheel. He started up and turned the car south for Berlinerstrasse and the city centre. ‘For Müggelsee the autobahn will be quicker, Werner,’ I said.
‘That would take us out of the East Sector and into the Zone,’ said Werner. ‘I don’t like crossing the city boundaries.’
‘I came that way to get here. It’s quicker.’
‘This is Himmelfahrt – Ascension Day. A lot of people will be taking the day off to swim and sun. It’s not an official holiday, but there’s a lot of absenteeism. That’s the only kind of “ism” that’s really popular here. There will be cops on the roads that lead out of town. They’ll be taking names and arresting drunks and generally trying to discourage people from having a holiday whenever they feel like goofing off.’
‘You talked me out of it, Werner.’
Mrs Munte leaned forward between the seats. ‘Did you say we’re going to Müggelsee? That will be crowded. It’s popular at this time of year.’
‘Me and Bernie used to swim out there when we were kids,’ said Werner. ‘The Grosser Müggelsee is always the first to warm up in summer and the first to freeze for ice skating. It’s shallow water. But you’re right, gnädige Frau, it will be crowded out there today. I could kick myself for forgetting about the holiday.’
‘My husband will be there?’
I answered her: ‘Your husband is there already. We’ll join him and you’ll be across the border by nightfall.’
It was not long before we saw the first revellers. There were a dozen or more men in a brewer’s dray. Such horse-drawn vehicles, with pneumatic tyres, are still common in Eastern Europe. But this one was garlanded with bunches of leaves and flowers and coloured paper. And the fine dapplegrey horses were specially groomed with brightly beribboned manes. The men in the dray wore funny hats – many of them black toppers – and short-sleeved shirts. Some wore the favourite status symbol of Eastern Europe: blue jeans. And inevitably there were Western T-shirts, one blazoned ‘I love Daytona Beach, Florida’ and another ‘Der Tag geht…Johnnie Walker kommt’. The horses were going very slowly and the men were singing very loudly between swigging beer and shouting to people in the street and catcalling after girls. They gave a loud cheer as our car went past them.
There were more such parties as we got to Köpenick. Groups of men stood under the trees at the edge of the road, smoking and drinking in silence with a dedication that is unmistakably German. Other men were laughing and singing; some slept soundly, neatly arranged like logs, while others were being violently ill.
Werner stopped the car well down the Müggelheimer Damm. There were no other vehicles in sight. Plantations of tall fir trees darkened the road. This extensive forest continued to the lakes on each side of the road and far beyond. There was no sign of Werner’s big articulated truck, but he’d spotted its driver standing at the roadside. He was near one of the turnoffs, narrow tracks that led to the edge of the Müggelsee.
‘What is it?’ Werner asked him anxiously.
‘Everything is in order,’ said the man. He was a big beefy red-necked man, wearing bib-and-brace overalls and a red and white woollen hat of the sort worn by British football supporters. ‘I had the truck here, as we arranged, but a crowd of these lunatics…’ He indicated some small groups of men standing in a car park across the road. ‘They began climbing all over it. I had to move it.’ He had the strongest Berlin accent I’d ever heard. He sounded like one of the old-style comedians, who can still be heard telling Berliner jokes in unlicensed cabarets in the back streets of Charlottenburg.
‘Where are you now?’ said Werner.
‘I pulled off the road into one of these firebreaks,’ said the driver. ‘The earth’s not so firm – all that bloody rain last week. I’m heavy, you know. Get stuck and we’re in trouble.’
‘This is the other one,’ said Werner, moving his head to indicate Mrs Munte in the back seat.
‘She doesn’t look too heavy,’ said the driver. ‘What do you weigh, Fräulein? About fifty kilos?’ He grinned at her. Mrs Munte, who obviously weighed twice that, didn’t answer. ‘Don’t be shy,’ said the driver.
‘And the man?’ said Werner.
‘Ah,’ said the driver, ‘the Herr Professor.’ He was the sort of German who called any elderly well-dressed fellow-countryman ‘Professor’. ‘I sent him up to that lakeside restaurant to get a cup of coffee. I told him someone would come for him when we are ready.’
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br /> While he was saying that, I saw the black Volvo and the minibus coming down the road from the direction of Müggelheim. They would have made good time on the autobahn, flashing their lights to get priority in the traffic or using their siren to clear the fast lane.
‘Get the professor,’ said Werner to me. ‘I’ll drive the old lady down to where the truck is parked, and come back to meet you here.’
As I hurried along the woodland path towards the lake, I could hear a curious noise. It was the regular roaring sound that waves make as they are sucked back through the pebbles on a long stony beach. It got louder as I approached the open-air restaurant, but that did not prepare me for the scene I found there.
The indoor restaurant was closed on weekdays, but there were hundreds of men milling around the lakeside Biergarten in inebriated confusion. They were mostly young workers dressed in bright shirts and denim pants, but some wore pyjamas and some had Arab headdress, and many of them had brought the black top hat that is traditional for Himmelfahrt. I could see no women, just men. There were long lines of them waiting at a serving hatch marked ‘Getränke’ and an equally long line at a hatch marked ‘Kaffee’, where only beer, in half-litre plastic cups, was being served. Tables were crammed with dozens and dozens of empty plastic cups stacked together, and there were more empties scattered in the flower beds and lined up along the low dividing walls.
‘Heiliger bim-bam!’ said a drunk behind me, as surprised as I was at the sight.
The roars of sound were coming from the throats of the men as they watched a rubber ball being kicked high into the air. It went up over their heads and cut an arc in the blue sky before coming down to meet yet another skilfully placed boot that sent it back up again.
It took me a few minutes to spot Munte. By some miracle he’d found a chair and was sitting at a table at the edge of the lake where it was a little less crowded. He seemed to be the only person drinking coffee. I sat down on the low wall next to him. There were no other chairs in sight; prudent staff had no doubt removed them from the danger zone. ‘Time to go,’ I said. ‘Your wife is here. Everything is okay.’
‘I got it for you,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I knew you would.’
‘Half the clerks in my department have taken the day off too. I had no trouble walking into the chief’s office, finding the file and helping myself.’
‘I’m told you had a visit from the police.’
‘The office had a visit from the police,’ he corrected me. ‘I left before they found me.’
‘They came out to Buchholz,’ I said.
‘I was trying to think of some way of warning you when a man came up to me in the street and brought me here.’ He reached into his pocket and produced a brown envelope. He put it on the table. I left it there for a moment. ‘Aren’t you going to open it and look inside?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. Not far away from us, a six-piece wind band had assembled. Now they were making all those sounds musicians have to make before playing music.
‘You want to see the writing. You want to see who is the traitor in London Central.’
‘I know who it is,’ I said.
‘You’ve guessed, you mean.’
‘I know. I’ve always known.’
‘I risked my freedom to get it this morning,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I picked up the envelope and toyed with it as I reasoned out what to do. Finally I handed it back to him. ‘Take it to London,’ I said. ‘Give it to Richard Cruyer – he’s a slim fellow with curly hair and chewed fingernails – make sure no one else gets it. Now we must go. The police seem to have traced us here. They’re the same ones who went to Buchholz.’
‘My wife – is she safe?’ He got to his feet in alarm. As he did so, the wind band began playing a drinking song.
‘Yes, I told you. But we must hurry.’ I could see them arriving now. I could see Lenin, with his long brown leather overcoat and his little beard. He was wearing a brown leather cap too, and metal-rimmed eyeglasses. His face was hard and his eyes were hidden behind the bright reflections of his lenses. Alongside him was the young Saxon conscript, white-faced and anxious, like a child lost in a big crowd. It was unusual to have a conscript in such a team. His father’s influence must be considerable, I thought. The four policemen had stopped suddenly at the end of the path, surprised, just as I had been upon first catching sight of the multitude.
The band music was loud. Too loud to make conversation easy. I grabbed Munte’s arm and moved him hurriedly into a crowd of men who had linked arms and were trying to dance together. One of them – a muscular fellow with a curly moustache – was wearing striped pyjamas over his clothes. He grabbed Munte and said, ‘Komm, Vater. Tanzen.’
‘I’m not your father,’ I heard Munte say as I stood on tiptoe to see the policemen. They had not moved. They remained on the far side of the beer garden, bewildered at the task of finding anyone in such a crowd. Lenin tapped one of the older men and sent him down the line of men waiting to buy beer. He sent the fourth man back along the path; no doubt he was going to bring more men from the minibus.
For the second time, Munte disengaged his arm from that of the man in pyjamas. ‘Ich bin vaterlos,’ said the man sorrowfully. The ‘fatherless’ man pretended to cry. His friends laughed and swayed in time with the om-pah-pah music. I grabbed Munte and pushed through the dancers. Looking back, I caught sight of the leather-capped Lenin, who was clambering onto a tub of flowers to see over the heads of the crowd. Around him the dancing had stopped and the football went rolling down the steps unheeded.
‘Walk that way, through the trees,’ I told Munte. ‘You’ll meet a broad-shouldered man, about my age, wearing a coat with an astrakhan collar. In any case, keep going along the road until you see a very big truck with a bright yellow tarpaulin marked “Underberg”. Stop the truck and get in. Your wife will be there already.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll try to delay the police.’
‘That’s dangerous, Bernd.’
‘Get going.’
‘Thank you, Bernd,’ said the old man soberly. We both knew that, after Weimar, it was what I had to do for him.
‘Walk, not run,’ I called as he ambled away. His dark suit ensured that he would soon be swallowed up by the gloom of the forest.
I pushed my way along to the edge of the lake. A number of men had walked out on the little pier and climbed into a small sailing boat. Now someone was trying to untie the mooring ropes, but it was proving difficult for the maladroit drunk. One of the restaurant staff was shouting at the men, but they paid no heed.
A very loud cheer brought my attention round to the beer garden again. Three young drunks were walking along the top of a low wall. Each carried a pitcher of beer and wore a black top hat, and each was otherwise naked. Every few paces they stopped, bowed deeply to acknowledge the applause, and then drank from the jugs.
Lenin had his three cohorts at his side as he elbowed his way through the muttering crowd of holiday makers, their exuberance stifled by his presence. Thinking the policemen were there to check absentees from work, and were about to arrest the streakers, the onlookers were resentful. Intoxication emboldened them enough to show their resentment. There were catcalls. The four policemen were jostled and pushed. They were confronted by a particularly big opponent, a bearded man in sweat shirt and jeans, who seemed determined to bar their way. But they were trained to deal with such situations. Like all cops, they knew that quick action, with a nicely judged degree of violence, is what crowd control depends upon. One of the uniformed cops felled the bearded man with a blow of his truncheon. Lenin blew three blasts on his whistle – to suggest that many more policemen were on call – and they plunged on through a crowd which parted to make way for them.
By now Munte was a hundred yards or more into the forest and out of sight, but Lenin had obviously spotted him for, once through the thickest part of the crush of men, he began
running.
I ran, too, choosing a path that would converge on the policemen’s. I ran alongside them through the springy undergrowth of the dark forest. Lenin looked round to see who was chasing him, saw me, and looked to his front again. ‘This way!’ I shouted, and headed down a path that led back to the lakeside.
For a moment Lenin and his three subordinates continued going the way that Munte had gone. Surely the old man had heard them coming after him by now. ‘You four!’ I shouted with the sort of arrogance that was calculated to convince them of my seniority. ‘This way, you bloody fools. He’s heading for the boat!’
Still the men raced after Lenin, while I continued on the path. This was my last chance. ‘Do you hear me, you idiots?’ I shouted breathlessly. ‘This way, I say!’
My desperation must have been the convincing factor, for Lenin changed direction and came thumping across the forest floor, his ammunition boots shaking the earth, his eyeballs dilated and his face bright red with exertion. ‘The boat is hidden,’ I shouted to account for what I guessed would be the complete absence of any boat when they reached the water. I waved the uniformed cops past me and then went back up the path as if expecting more policemen who might need guidance.
But by the time I was fifty yards up the track, Lenin had got to the waterfront and found no boats or places along the lake’s edge where any could be hidden. He’d sent the young Saxon conscript back to find me.
‘Stop, sir,’ said the cop in that unmistakable accent.
‘This way!’ I shouted, bluffing to the end.
‘Stop, sir,’ said the cop again. ‘Stop or I shoot.’ He had his pistol in his hand. I reasoned that a conscript lad who argued with the leader of his arrest team might well be the type who would pull the trigger. I stopped. ‘Your identification, please, sir,’ said the cop.