by Len Deighton
‘I’ll take you right through the checkpoint,’ said Stinnes. The driver touched the horn. The frontier police recognized the car, put the booms up and we drove through without stopping.
The American soldier in the glass-sided hut on the Western side gave us no more than a glance. ‘Far enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll get one of these cabs.’ But in fact I’d already caught sight of Werner. He was seated in the car over the road where we always parked when we waited at Checkpoint Charlie. The Volvo turned and stopped. I got out and took a deep breath of that famous Berliner Luft. I wanted to run down to the canal and follow it to Lützowplatz and then to Dad’s office on Tauentzienstrasse. I would open his desk and take the chocolate bar that was his ration. I’d climb up the mountain of rubble that filled half the street, and slide down the other side in a cloud of dust. I’d run through the carefully swept ruins of the clinic, where cleaned bottles, dusted bricks and salvaged pieces of charred timber were arranged so proudly. At the shop on the corner I’d ask Mr Mauser if Axel could come out to play. And we’d go and find Werner and maybe go swimming. It was that sort of day…
‘Did it go all right, Werner?’
‘I phoned England an hour ago,’ said Werner. ‘I knew it would be the first thing you’d ask. There’s an armed police guard around your mother’s house. Anything the Russians try won’t work. The children are safe.’
‘Thanks Werner,’ I said. Thinking about the children made it easier not to think about Fiona. Better still would be not having to think at all.
About the Author
Berlin Game
Len Deighton was born in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.
After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin’s School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. His mother was a professional cook and he grew up with an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.
Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962, the book was an immediate success.
Since then his work has gone from strength to strength, varying from espionage novels to war, general fiction and non-fiction. The BBC made Bomber into a day-long radio drama in ‘real time’. Deighton’s history of World War Two, Blood, Tears and Folly, was published to wide acclaim – Jack Higgins called it ‘an absolute landmark’.
As Max Hastings observed, Deighton captured a time and a mood – ‘To those of us who were in our twenties in the 1960s, his books seemed the coolest, funkiest, most sophisticated things we’d ever read’ – and his books have now deservedly become classics.
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By Len Deighton
FICTION
The Ipcress File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Declarations of War
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye Mickey Mouse
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
THE SAMSON SERIES
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter: The Tragic Story of a Berlin Family 1899–1945
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
Faith
Hope
Charity
NON-FICTION
Action Cook Book
Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain
Airshipwreck
French Cooking for Men
Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk
ABC of French Food
Blood, Tears and Folly
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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This paperback edition 2010
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by
Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1983
Copyright © Len Deighton 1983
Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010
Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010
Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-38718-2
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