Mexico Set

by Len Deighton

  Near the river there was a battered enamel notice: ‘Halt. Zonengrenze.’ It was an old sign that should have been replaced a long time ago. The Soviet Union’s military-occupation zone of Germany was now fancifully called the German Democratic Republic. But like Werner I could not stop calling it the Russian Zone. Perhaps we should have been replaced a long time ago too.

  I walked on through grass so high that it soaked the legs of my trousers right up to the knees. I knew I would be no nearer to Werner out on the river bank but I could not stay cooped up in the Golden Bear. The Elbe is very wide here, meandering as great rivers do on such featureless terrain. And on both banks there are marshy fields, bright green with the tall, sharp-bladed grass that flourishes in such water meadows. And, although the far bank of the river had been kept clear of all obstruction, on this side there were young willow and alder, trees which are always thirsty. From across the river there came a sudden noise: the fierce rattle of a heron taking to the air. Something had flushed it out – the movement of some hidden sentry, perhaps. It flew over me with leisurely beats of its great wings, its legs trailing in the soft air as a child might trail its fingers from a boat.

  A light wind cut into me but did not disperse the grey mist that followed the river. The sort of morning when border guards get jumpy and desperate men get reckless. Only working men were abroad, and working boats too. Barges, long strings of them, brown phantoms gliding silently on the almost colourless water. They slid past, following the dredged channel that took them on a winding course, sometimes near to the east bank and sometimes near the west one. All communist claims to half the river had faltered on the known difficulties of the deep water channel. Even the East German patrol boats, specially built with shallow-draught hulls, could not keep to the half of the river their masters claimed. There were West German boats too; a police cruiser and a high-speed Customs boat puttering along this deserted stretch of river bank.

  I spotted another heron, standing in the shallow water staring down. It was absolutely still, except that it swayed slightly as the reeds and rushes moved in the wind. ‘The patient killer of the marshland’ my schoolbook had called it – waiting for a fish to swim into range of that spearlike beak. Now and again the wind along the water gusted enough to make the the mist open like curtains. On the far bank a watchtower was suddenly visible. An opened window – mirrored to prevent a clear view of the gunmen – flashed as the daylight was reflected in its copper-coloured glass. And then, as suddenly, the mist closed and the tower, the windows, the man, everything vanished.

  When I reached the remains of the long-disused ferry pier I saw activity on the far side of the river. Four East German workmen were repairing the fencing. The supports were tilting forwards, their foundations in the marshy river bank softened further by the heavy rain. While the four men worked, two guards – kasernierte Volkspolizei – stood by with their machine-pistols ready, and looked anxiously at the changing visibility lest their charges escaped into the mist. Such ‘barracks police’ were considered more trustworthy than men who went home each night to their wives and families.

  More barges passed. Czech ones this time, heading down to where the river crossed the border into Czechoslovakia. Sitting on the hatch cover there was a bearded man drinking from a mug. He had a dog with him. The dog barked at a patch of undergrowth on the far side of the river, and ran along the boat to continue its protest.

  As I got to the place at which the dog had barked I saw what had attracted its attention. There were East German soldiers, three of them, dressed in battle order complete with camouflaged helmets, trying to conceal themselves in the tall grass. They were Aufklärer, specially trained East German soldiers, who patrolled the furthermost edge of the frontier zone, and sometimes well beyond it. They had a camera, they always had cameras, to keep the capitalists observed and recorded. I waved at their blank faces and pulled my collar up across my face.

  I walked for nearly two hours, looking at the river and thinking about Stinnes and Werner and Fiona, to say nothing of George and Tessa. Until ahead of me I saw a dark green VW Passat station wagon parked. Whether it was Oberstabsmeister Nagel or one of his associates I did not want to find out. I cut back across the field where the car could not follow and from there back to the village.

  It was lunchtime when I arrived at the Golden Bear. I changed out of my wet shoes and trousers and put on a tie. As I was polishing the rain spots from my glasses there was a knock at my door. ‘Herr Samson? Konrad here.’

  ‘Come in, Konrad.’

  ‘My father asks if you are having lunch.’

  ‘Are you expecting a rush on tables?’

  Konrad smiled and rubbed his chin. I suppose his unshaven face itched. ‘Papa likes to know.’

  ‘I’ll eat the Pinkel and kale if that’s on the menu today.’

  ‘It’s always on the menu; Papa eats it. A man in this village makes the Pinkel sausage. He makes Brägenwurst and Kochwurst too. Pinkel is a Lüneburg sausage. But people come from Lüneburg, even from Hamburg, to buy them in the village. My mother prepares it with the kale. Papa says cook can’t do it properly.’ Having heard my lunch order he didn’t depart. He was looking at me, the expression on his face a mixture of curiosity and nervousness. ‘I think your friend is coming,’ he said.

  I draped my wet trousers over the central-heating radiator. ‘And some smoked eel too; a small portion as a starter. Why do you think my friend is coming?’

  ‘Mother will press the wet trousers if you wish.’ I gave them to him. ‘Because there was a phone call from Schwanheide. A taxi is bringing someone here.’

  ‘A taxi?’

  ‘It is a frontier crossing point,’ explained Konrad, in case I didn’t know.

  ‘My friend would not phone to say he was coming.’

  Konrad smiled. ‘The taxi drivers phone. If they bring someone here, and a room is rented, they get money from my father.’

  Schwanheide was a road crossing point not far away, where the frontier runs due north, away from the river Elbe. I gave the boy my trousers. ‘You’d better make that two lots of Pinkel and kale,’ I said.

  Werner arrived in time for lunch. The dining room was a comfortable place to be on such a damp, chilly day. There was a log fire, smoke-blackened beams, polished brass and red-checked tablecloths. I felt at home there because I’d found the same bogus interior everywhere from Dublin to Warsaw and a thousand places in between, with unashamed copies in Tokyo and Los Angeles. They came from the sort of artistic designer who paints robins on Christmas cards.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked. Werner shrugged. He would tell me in his own good time. He always had to get his thoughts organized. He ordered a tankard of Pilsener. Werner never seemed to require a strong drink no matter what happened to him, and he still hadn’t finished his beer by the time the smoked eel and black bread arrived. ‘Was there any trouble?’

  ‘No real trouble,’ said Werner. ‘The rain helped.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It rained all night,’ said Werner. ‘It was about three o’clock in the morning when I came through Potsdam…’

  ‘What the hell were you doing in Potsdam, Werner? That’s to hell and gone.’

  ‘There were road repairs. I was diverted. When I came through Potsdam it was pouring with rain. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere; not one car. Not even a police car or an army truck until I got to the centre of town; Friedrich Ebert Strasse…Do you know Potsdam?’

  ‘I know where Friedrich Ebert Strasse is,’ I said. ‘The intelligence report I showed you said that there has lately been a traffic checkpoint at the Nauener Tor after dark.’

  ‘You read all that stuff, do you?’ said Werner admiringly. ‘I don’t know how you find time enough.’

  ‘I hope you read it too.’

  ‘I did. But I remembered too late. There was a checkpoint there last night. At least there was an army truck and two men inside it. They were smoking. I only saw them because of the glow
of their cigarettes.’

  ‘Were your papers okay? How did you account for being over there? That’s a different jurisdiction.’

  ‘Yes, it’s Bezirk Potsdam,’ said Werner. ‘But I would have talked my way out of trouble. The diversion signs are not illuminated. I should think a lot of people get lost trying to find their way back to the autobahn. But the rain was very heavy and those policemen decided not to get wet. I slowed down and almost stopped, to show I was law-abiding. The driver just wound down the window of the truck and waved me through.’

  ‘It didn’t use to be like that, did it, Werner? There was a time when everyone over there did everything by the book. No more, no less; always by the book. Even in hotels the staff would refuse tips or gifts. Now it’s all changed. Now no one believes in the socialist revolution, they just believe in Westmarks.’

  ‘These were probably conscripts,’ said Werner, ‘counting out their eighteen months of compulsory service. Maybe even Kampfgruppen.’

  ‘Kampfgruppen are keen,’ I said. ‘Unpaid volunteers, they would have been all over you.’

  ‘Not any longer,’ said Werner. ‘They can’t get enough volunteers. The factories pressure people to join nowadays. They make it a condition of being promoted to foreman or supervisor. The Kampfgruppen have gone very slack.’

  ‘Well, that suits me,’ I said. ‘And when you were coming through Potsdam with papers that say you have limited movement in the immediate vicinity of Berlin, I suppose that’s all right with you too.’

  ‘It’s not just the East,’ said Werner defensively. He regarded any criticism of Germans and Germany as a personal attack upon him. Sometimes I wondered how he reconciled this patriotism with wanting to work for London Central. ‘It’s the same everywhere: bribery and corruption. Twenty or more years ago, when we first got involved in this business, people stole secrets because they were politically committed or patriotic. Moscow’s payments out were always piddling little amounts, paid to give Moscow a tighter grip on agents who would willingly have worked for nothing. How many people are like that nowadays? Not many. Now both sides have to pay dearly for their espionage. Half the people who bring us material would sell to the highest bidder.’

  ‘That’s what capitalism is all about, Werner.’ I said it to needle him.

  ‘I’d hate to be like you,’ said Werner. ‘If I really believed that I wouldn’t want to work for London.’

  ‘Have you ever thought about your obsession with working for the department?’ I asked him. ‘You’re making enough money; you’ve got Zena. What the hell are you doing schlepping around in Potsdam in the middle of the night?’

  ‘It’s what I’ve done since I was a kid. I’m good at it, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re better at it than I am; that’s what you want to prove, isn’t it, Werner?’ He shrugged as if he’d never thought about it before. I said, ‘You want to prove that you could do my job without tarnishing yourself the way that I tarnish myself.’

  ‘If you’re talking about the hippies on the beach…’

  ‘Okay, Werner. Here we go. Tell me about the hippies on the beach. I knew we’d have to talk about it sooner or later.’

  ‘You should have reported your suspicions to the police,’ said Werner primly.

  ‘I was in the middle of doing a job, Werner. I was in a foreign country. The job I do is not strictly legal. I can’t afford the luxury of a clear conscience.’

  ‘Then what about the house in Bosham?’ said Werner.

  ‘I do things my way, Werner.’

  ‘You started this argument,’ said Werner. ‘I have never criticized you. It’s your conscience that’s troubling you.’

  ‘There are times when I could kill you, Werner,’ I said.

  Werner smiled smugly, then we both looked round at the sound of laughter. A party of people were coming into the dining room for lunch. It was a birthday lunch given for a bucolic sixty-year-old. He’d been celebrating before their arrival, to judge by the way he blundered against the table and knocked over a chair before getting settled. There were a dozen people in the party, all of them over fifty and some nearer seventy. The men were in Sunday suits and the women had tightly waved hair and old-fashioned hats. Twelve lunches: I suppose that’s why the kitchen wanted my order in advance. ‘Two more Pilsener,’ Werner called to Konrad. ‘And my friend will have a schnapps with his.’

  ‘Just to clean the fish from my fingers,’ I said. The boy smiled. It was an old German custom to offer schnapps with the eel and use the final drain of it to clean the fingers. But like lots of old German customs it was now conveniently discontinued.

  The birthday party occupied a long table by the window but they were too close for Werner to continue his account. So we chatted about things of no importance and watched the celebration.

  Konrad brought our Pinkel and kale, a casserole dish of sausage and greens, with its wonderful smell of smoked bacon and onions. And, having decided that I was a connoisseur of fine sausage, his mother sent a small extra plate with a sample of the Kochwurst and Brägenwurst.

  The birthday party were eating a special order of Schlesisches Himmelreich. This particular ‘Silesian paradise’ was a pork stew flavoured with dried fruit and hot spices. There was a cheer when the stew, in its big brown pot, first arrived. And another cheer for the bread dumplings that followed soon after. The portions were piled high. The ladies were tackling it delicately, but the men, despite their years, were shovelling it down with gusto, and their beer was served in one-litre-size tankards which Konrad replaced as fast as they were emptied.

  Manfred, the red-faced farmer whose birthday was being celebrated, kept proposing joke toasts to ‘celibacy’ and ‘sweethearts and wives – and may they never meet’ and then, more seriously, a toast for Konrad’s mother who every year cooked this fine meal of Silesian favourites.

  But the party did not become more high-spirited as the celebration progressed. On the contrary, everyone became more dejected, starting from the time that Manfred proposed a toast to ‘absent friends’. For these elderly Germans were all from Breslau. Their beloved Silesia was now a part of Poland and they would never see it again. I’d caught their accents when they first entered the room, but now that memories occupied their minds, and alcohol loosened their tongues, the Silesian accents became far stronger. There were quick asides and rejoinders that used local words and phrases I didn’t know.

  ‘Our Germany has become little more than a gathering place for refugees,’ said Werner. ‘Zena’s family are just like them. They have these big family reunions and talk about the old times. They talk about the farm as if they left only yesterday. They remember the furniture in every room of those vast houses, which fields never yielded winter barley and which had the earliest crop of sugar-beet, and they can name every horse they’ve ever ridden. And they do what these people at the next table are doing: they eat the old dishes, talk about long dead friends and relatives. Eventually they will probably sing the old songs. It’s another world, Bernie. We’re big-city kids. People from the country are different from us, and these Germans from the eastern lands knew a life we can’t even guess at.’

  ‘It was good while it lasted.’

  ‘But when it ended it ended for ever,’ said Werner. ‘Her family got out just ahead of the Red Army. The house was hit by artillery fire before they would face the reality of it and actually start moving westwards. And they came out with virtually only what they stood up in – a handful of cash, some jewellery and a pocketful of family photos.’

  ‘But Zena is young. She never saw the family estates in East Prussia, did she?’

  ‘Everything was blown to hell. Someone told them that there’s a fertilizer factory built over it now. But she grew up listening to these fairy stories, Bernie. You know how many kids have fantasies about really being born aristocrats or film stars.’

  ‘Do they?’ I said.

  ‘Certainly they do. I grew up wondering whether I might really be the son o
f Tante Lisl.’

  ‘And who does Zena grow up thinking her mother might be?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Bernie. Zena hears all these stories about her family having dozens of servants, horses and carriages…and about the Christmas balls, hunting breakfasts, ceremonial banquets and wonderful parties with military bands playing and titled guests dancing outside under the stars…Zena is still very young, Bernard. She doesn’t want to believe that it’s all gone for ever.’

  ‘You’d better persuade her it is, Werner. For her sake, and for your own sake too.’

  ‘She’s a child, Bernie. That’s why I love her so much. It’s because she believes in all kinds of fairy stories that I love her.’

  ‘She doesn’t really think of going back, does she?’

  ‘Going back in time, yes. But not going back to East Prussia.’

  ‘But she has the accent,’ I said.

  Werner looked at me as if I’d mentioned some intimate aspect of his wife that I should not have known about. ‘Yes, she’s picked it up from her parents. It’s strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not very strange,’ I said. ‘You’ve more or less told me why. She’s determined to hang on to her dreams.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Werner, who’d gone through the usual teenage dalliance with Freud, Adler and Jung. ‘The desire is in her subconscious but the fact that she chooses speech as the characteristic to imitate shows that she wants that secret desire to be known.’

  Oh my God, I thought. I’ve started him off now. Werner lecturing on psychology was among the most mind-numbing experiences known to science.

  I looked across to where the birthday party was having the dessert dishes cleared away, and ordering the coffee and brandy that would be served to them in the bar. But Manfred was not to be hurried. He had his glass raised and was proposing yet another toast. He nodded impatiently at Konrad’s suggestion that they retire to the next room. ‘The words of our immortal Goethe,’ said Manfred, ‘speak to every German soul when he says, “Gebraucht der Zeit. Sie geht so schnell von hinnen; doch Ordnung lehrt euch Zeit gewinnen.”’