by Len Deighton
I could see Lenin plodding back up the path, breathing heavily and wriggling his fingers in anger. The game was up. ‘I was just trying to help,’ I said. ‘I saw him come this way.’
‘Search him,’ said Lenin to the Saxon boy. He paused to catch his breath. ‘Then take him back and lock him up.’ To the other cop he said, ‘We’ll go to the Müggelheimer Damm, but we’ve probably lost them. They must have had a car waiting there.’ He came very close to me and stared me in the eyes. ‘We’ll find out all about it from this one.’
28
They locked me in an office of the police barracks. It had a barred window and a mortice lock; they figured I wasn’t dangerous enough to need a prison cell. In a perverse way I resented that. And I resented the fact that Lenin sent the Saxon kid in to do the first interrogation. ‘What’s your name and who employs you?’ – all that sort of crap. And always that accent. I kept trying to guess the exact location of his hometown, but it was a game he wouldn’t join. I think he was from some little town in the German backwoods where Poland meets Czechoslovakia. But I got him off guard by talking about his accent and his family. And when I suddenly switched the topic of conversation to the fiasco at Müggelsee, he let slip that the Muntes had got away. I nodded and asked him for something to eat so quickly afterwards that I don’t think he even noticed what he’d said.
After the Saxon kid had finished, they left a blank-faced young cop sitting in the office with me, but he wouldn’t respond to my conversation. He didn’t say anything, or even watch me, when I went to look out the window. We were on the top floor of what the international intelligence community calls ‘Normannenstrasse’, East Germany’s State Security Service block in Berlin-Lichtenberg.
From this side of the building I could look down on Frankfurterallee. This wide road is Berlin’s main highway eastwards and there was a steady stream of heavy traffic. The weather had turned colder now, and the only people on the street were clerical staff from the State Security Ministry filing down the steps into Magdalenenstrasse U-Bahn at the end of the working day.
Lenin joined in the fun about midnight. They’d taken my wristwatch, of course, along with my money, a packet of French cigarettes, and my Swiss Army knife, but I could hear a church or a municipal clock striking each hour. Lenin was amiable. He even laughed at a joke I made about the coffee. He was older than I had estimated: my age perhaps. No wonder that chase through the forest had made him puff. He wore a brown corduroy suit with button-down top pocket and braided edges to the lapels. I wondered if he’d designed it himself or had picked it up from some old village tailor in a remote part of Hungary or Rumania. He liked travelling; he told me that. Then he talked about old American films, the time he’d spent seconded to the security police in Cuba, and his love for English detective stories.
He brought out his tiny cheroots and offered me one; I declined. It was the standard interrogator’s ploy.
‘I can’t smoke them,’ I told him. ‘They give me a sore throat.’
‘Then I suggest that we both smoke the French cigarettes we took from you. Permit?’
I was in no position to object. ‘Okay,’ I said. He produced my half-empty packet of Gauloises from his coat and took one before sliding the packet across to me.
‘I found those Western cigarettes on the U-Bahn train,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘That’s what I wrote in the arrest report. You think I don’t listen to what you say?’ He threw his cigarette lighter to me. It was of Western origin, an expendable one with visible fuel supply. It was very low but it worked. ‘Now we destroy the evidence by burning, you and me. Right?’ He winked conspiratorially.
Lenin, who said his real name was Erich Stinnes, had an encyclopedic memory; he was able to recite endlessly the names of his favourite authors – for they were many and varied – and he seemed to know in bewildering detail every plot they’d written. But he spoke of the fictional characters as if they were alive. ‘Do you think,’ he asked me, ‘that Sherlock Holmes, coming across a criminal of some foreign culture, would find detection more difficult? Is it perhaps true that he is effective only when working against a criminal who shares the creed of the English gentleman?’
‘They’re just stories,’ I said. ‘No one takes them seriously.’
‘I take them seriously,’ said Lenin. ‘Holmes is my mentor.’
‘Holmes doesn’t exist. Holmes never did exist. It’s just twaddle.’
‘How can you be such a philistine,’ said Lenin. ‘In The Sign of Four, Holmes said that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Such perception cannot be dismissed lightly.’
‘But in A Study in Scarlet he said almost the opposite,’ I argued. ‘He said that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.’
‘Ah, so you are a believer,’ said Lenin. He puffed on the Gauloise. ‘Anyway, I don’t call that a contradiction.’
‘Look, Erich,’ I said. ‘All I know about Sherlock bloody Holmes is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’
Lenin waved a hand to silence me, sat back with hands placed fingertips together, and said, ‘Yes, “Silver Blaze”.’ A frown came as he tried to remember the exact words: ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time. That was the curious incident.’
‘Exactly, Erich, old pal,’ I said. ‘And, as one Sherlock Holmes fan to another, would you mind explaining to me the equally curious absence of any proper bloody attempt to interrogate me.’
Lenin smiled a tight-lipped little smile, like a parson hearing a risqué joke from a bishop. ‘And that’s just what I would say in your position, Englishman. I told my superior that a senior security man from London will wonder why we are not following the normal procedure. He will begin to hope that he’ll get special treatment, I said. He’ll think we don’t want him to know our interrogation procedure. And he’ll think that’s because he’s going home very soon. And once a prisoner starts thinking along those lines, he closes his mouth very tight. After that it can take weeks to get anything out of him.’
‘And what did your superior say?’ I asked.
‘His exact words I am not permitted to reveal.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘But as you can see for yourself, he paid no heed to my advice.’
‘That I should be interrogated while still warm?’
He half closed his eyes and nodded; again it was the mannerism of a churchman. ‘It’s what should have been done, isn’t it? But you can’t tell these desk people anything.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Yes. You know what it’s like, and so do I,’ he said. ‘Both of us work the tough side of the business. I’ve been West a few times, just as you’ve come here. But who gets the promotions and the big wages – desk-bound Party bastards. How lucky you are not having the Party system working against you all the time.’
‘We have got it,’ I said. ‘It’s called Eton and Oxbridge.’
But Lenin was not to be stopped. ‘Last year my son got marks that qualified him to go to university, but he lost the place to some kid with lower marks. When I complained, I was told that it was official policy to favour the children of working-class parents against those from the professional classes, in which they include me. Shit, I said, you victimize my son because his father was clever enough to pass his exams? What kind of workers’ state is that?’
‘Are you recording this conversation?’
‘So they can put me into prison with you? Do you think I’m crazy?’
‘I still want to know why I’m not being interrogated.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, suddenly leaning forward, drawing on his cigarette, and blowing smoke reflectively as he formed the question in his mind. ‘How much per diem do you get?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m not asking you what you do for a living,’ he said. ‘All I want to know is how much do they p
ay you for daily expenses when you are away from home.’
‘One hundred and twelve pounds sterling per day for food and lodging. Then we get extra expenses, plus travel expenses.’
Lenin blew a jet of smoke in a gesture that displayed his indignation. ‘And they won’t even pay us a daily rate. The cashier’s office insists upon us writing everything down. We have to account for every penny we’ve handled.’
‘That’s the sort of little black book I wouldn’t like to keep,’ I said.
‘Incriminating. Right. That’s it exactly. I wish I could get that fact into the heads of the idiots who run this bureau.’
‘You’re not recording any of this?’
‘Let me tell you something in confidence,’ said Lenin. ‘I was on the phone to Moscow an hour ago. I pleaded with them to let me interrogate you my way. No, they said. The KGB Colonel is on his way now, Moscow says – they keep saying that, but he never arrives – you are ordered not to do anything but hold the prisoner in custody. Stupid bastards. That’s Moscow for you.’ He inhaled and blew smoke angrily. ‘Quite honestly, if you broke down and gave me a complete confession about having an agent in Moscow Central Committee, I’d yawn.’
‘Let’s try you,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘What would you do in my place? This KGB Colonel will take over your file when he gets here tomorrow morning. Do you think he’ll give me any credit for work done before he arrives? Like hell he will. No, sir, I’m not going to dig anything out of you for those Party bigshots.’
I nodded but I was not beguiled by his behaviour. I’d long ago learned that it is only the very devout who toy with heresy. It’s only the Jesuit who complains of the Pope, only the devoted parent who ridicules his child, only the super rich who pick up pennies from the gutter. And in East Berlin it is only the truly faithful who speak treason with such self-assurance.
They took me downstairs at seven o’clock the next morning. I’d heard cars arriving shortly before, and men shouting in the way that guard commanders shout when they want to impress some visiting hotshot.
It was a plush office by East European standards: modern-design Finnish desk and chairs and a sheepskin rug on the floor. A faint aroma of disinfectant mingled with the cheap perfume of the floor polish. This was the smell of Moscow.
Fiona was not sitting behind the desk; she was standing at the side of the room. My friend Lenin was standing stiffly at her side. He’d obviously been briefing her, but Fiona’s authority was established by the imperious way in which she dismissed him. ‘Go to your office and get on with it. I’ll call if I want you,’ she said in that brisk Russian that I’d always admired. So the so-called Erich Stinnes was a Russian – a KGB officer no doubt. Well, he spoke bloody good Berlin German. Probably he’d grown up here, the son of an occupier, as I was.
Fiona straightened her back as she looked at me. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘Hello, Fiona,’ I said.
‘You guessed?’ She looked different; harder perhaps, but confident and relaxed. It must have been a relief to be her real self after a lifetime of deception. ‘Sometimes I was sure you’d guessed the truth.’
‘What guessing was needed? It was obvious, or should have been.’
‘So why did you do nothing about it?’ Her voice was steel. It was as if she were pushing herself to be as robotic as a weighing machine.
‘You know how it is,’ I said vaguely. ‘I kept thinking of other explanations. I repressed it. I didn’t want to believe it. You didn’t make any mistakes, if that’s what you mean.’ It wasn’t true, of course, and she knew it.
‘I should never have handwritten that damned submission. I knew those fools would leave it in the file. They promised…’
‘Is there anything to drink in this office?’ I asked. Now that I had to face the truth, I found it easier than dealing with the dread of it. Perhaps all fear is worse than reality, just as all hope is better than fulfilment.
‘Maybe.’ She opened the drawers in the desk and found an almost full bottle of vodka. ‘Will this do?’
‘Anything will do,’ I said, getting a teacup from a shelf and pouring myself a measure of it.
‘You should cut down on the drinking,’ she said impassively.
‘You don’t make it easy to do,’ I said. I gulped some and poured more.
She gave me the briefest of smiles. ‘I wish it hadn’t ended like this.’
‘That sounds like a line from Hollywood,’ I said.
‘You make it hard on yourself.’
‘That’s not the way I like it.’
‘I always made it a condition that nothing would happen to you. Every mission you did after that business at Gdynia I kept you safe.’
‘You betrayed every mission I did, that’s the truth of it.’ That was the humiliating part of it, the way she’d protected me.
‘You’ll go free. You’ll go free this morning. It made no difference that Werner demanded it.’
‘Werner?’
‘He met me with a car at Berlin-Tegel when my plane landed. He held me at pistol point. He threatened me and made me promise to release you. Werner is a schoolboy,’ she said. ‘He plays schoolboy games and has the same schoolboy loyalties you had when I first met you.’
‘Maybe that was my loss,’ I said.
‘But not my gain.’ She came closer to me, for one last look. ‘It was a good trick to say you’d cross first. It made me think I might get here in time to catch Brahms Four; your precious von Munte.’
‘Instead you caught me,’ I said.
‘Yes, that was clever, darling. But suppose I hang on to you?’
‘You won’t do that,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t suit you to have me around. In a Soviet prison I’d be an impediment to you. And an imprisoned husband wouldn’t suit that social conscience you care so much about.’
‘You’re right.’
‘At least you’re trying to find excuses,’ I said.
‘Why should I bother? You wouldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘You just talk about the class system and make jokes about the way it works. I do something about it.’
‘Don’t explain,’ I said. ‘Leave me something to be mystified about.’
‘You’ll always be the same arrogant swine I met at Freddy Springfield’s party.’
‘I’d like to think I was just a little smarter than the man you made a fool of then.’
‘You’ve got nothing to regret. You’ll go back to London and get Dicky Cruyer’s desk. By the end of the year you’ll be running Bret Rensselaer out of his job.’
‘Will I?’
‘I’ve made you a hero,’ she said bitterly. ‘You made me run for cover, and at a time when no one else suspected the truth. Until you phoned about the handwritten report, I thought I could keep going for ever and ever.’
I didn’t answer. I kicked myself for not acknowledging the truth years before – that I had been Fiona’s greatest asset. Who would believe that Bernard Samson would be married to a foreign agent and not realize it? Her marriage to me had made her life more complicated, but it had kept her safe.
‘And you rescued your precious agent. You got Brahms Four home safely enough to make all your other agents breathe more easily once more.’
I still said nothing. She might be leading me on. Until I was sure that the Muntes were safe, I preferred to play dumb on the subject.
‘Oh, yes. You’re a professional success story, my darling. It’s only your domestic life that is a disaster. No wife, no home, no children.’
She was gloating. I knew she wanted to provoke me into an outburst of bad temper. I recognized that tone of voice from other times, other places and other arguments. It was the tone of voice she sometimes used to criticize Werner, my grammar, my accent, my suits, my old girlfriends.
‘Can I go now?’
‘The arresting officer – Major Erich Stinnes – is taking you to Checkpoint Charlie at nine o’clock. The arrangements are all made. You’ll be all right.’ She smil
ed. She was enjoying the chance to show me how much authority she had. She was a KGB Colonel; they would treat her well. The KGB look after their own, they always have done. It’s only the rest of the world they treat like dirt.
I turned to go, but women won’t let anything end like that. They always have to sit you down at the table for a lecture, or write you a long letter, or make sure they have not just the last word but the last thought too.
‘The children will go to the best school in Moscow. It was part of the arrangements I made. I might be able to arrange that you have a safe passage to see them now and again, but I can’t promise.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘And I can’t send them to England on visits, darling. I just couldn’t trust you to send them back, could I?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t. Now can I go?’
‘I paid off the overdraft and put six hundred into your account to pay off Nanny. And one hundred for some outstanding bills. I wrote it all down and left the letter with Mr Moore, the bank manager.’
‘Okay.’
‘The D-G will send for you, of course. You can tell him that the official policy at this end will be one of no publicity about my defection. I imagine that will suit him all right, after all the scandals the service has suffered in the past year.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ I promised.
‘Goodbye then, darling. Do I get one final kiss?’
‘No,’ I said. I opened the door; Lenin was waiting on the landing, leather cap in hand. He saw Fiona standing behind me. He didn’t smile in the presence of a senior officer. I wondered if he knew she was my wife. She’d probably be working out of Berlin. Poor Erich Stinnes.
When we got to the ground floor, I walked past him and he hurried to catch up with me as I marched to the front door to get out of that foul building. ‘Is there anything else?’ Lenin asked as he signalled for the car.
‘For instance?’ I said.
I sat in the black Volvo and looked out at the sunny streets: Stalinallee that had become Karl-Marx-Allee one night when all the street signs were changed before daybreak. The Alex, left onto Unter den Linden, and then left again so that Checkpoint Charlie was to be seen at the bottom of Friedrichstrasse.