by Len Deighton
The LDC senior administration staff were all there when we arrived. Their presence was no doubt due to the fact that Bret had now taken over liaison duties. On my previous visits to Berwick House I’d wandered in and out with only a perfunctory hello and scribbled signature, but Bret was important enough for both the Governor and Deputy Governor to be in their offices.
The Governor, still in his middle thirties, was a huge man with heavy jowls, black hair brushed tight against his skull, and a carefully manicured hairline moustache, the sort of thing Valentino wore when being a rotter. To complete the effect, he was smoking a cigarette in an amber cigarette holder. Like his Deputy, he was dressed in black pants, white shirt and plain black tie. I had the feeling that they would both have preferred the whole staff to be in uniform, preferably one with plenty of gold braid.
The Governor’s office was in fact a large panelled room with comfortable armchairs and an impressive fireplace. The only justification for calling it an office was a small desk in the corner together with two metal filing cabinets and a box of small file cards on the windowsill. He offered us a drink and wanted us to sit down and chat about nothing in particular, but Bret declined.
‘Let me see,’ said the Governor, reaching for his little file cards and walking his fingertips along the edges of them as if Stinnes wasn’t the only person they were holding. ‘Sadoff…ah, here we are: Sadoff, Nikolai.’ From the box he plucked a photo of Erich Stinnes and slapped it on the desk top with the air of a man winning a poker game. The photo showed Stinnes staring into the camera and holding across his chest a small board with a number.
‘He usually calls himself Stinnes,’ I said.
The Governor looked up as if seeing me for the first time. ‘We don’t let people indulge their fantasies here at the Debriefing Centre. Let them use a pseudonym and you invite them to invent the rest of it.’ He put down his cigarette and pulled a card out of the box far enough to read the handwriting on it, but he’d kept his little finger in position so that he hadn’t lost the place. I suppose you learn little tricks like that when you spend a lifetime counting paper clips.
‘When was he last interviewed?’ Bret asked.
‘We are letting him stew for a few days,’ said the Governor. He smiled. ‘He began to be very tiresome.’
‘What did he do?’ Bret asked.
The Governor looked at his bearded Deputy who said, ‘He shouted at me when I took some books away from him. A childish display of temper, no more than that. But you have to let him see who’s the boss.’
‘Is he locked up?’ I said.
‘He’s confined to his room,’ said the Governor.
‘We’re trying to get information from him,’ I explained patiently. ‘We’re in a hurry.’
‘Life and death, is it?’ the Governor asked with a not quite hidden edge of sarcasm in his tone.
‘That’s right,’ I said, responding in the same manner.
He was smoking the cigarette in the amber holder again. ‘It always is with you chaps,’ said the Governor, smiling like an adult playing along with a children’s game. ‘But you can’t hurry these things. The first thing is to establish the relationship between the staff and the prisoner. Only then can you get down to the real nub of the intelligence.’ He sat down in a chair that was far too small for him and crossed his legs.
‘I’ll try and remember that,’ I said.
He didn’t look at me; he looked at Bret and said, ‘If you want to see him, you can, but I prefer him not to be permitted out of his room.’
‘And there was the medical,’ the bearded Deputy reminded his boss.
‘Ah, yes.’ The Governor’s voice was sad as he put the cards and photo away. ‘He twice refused to let the doctor examine him. We can’t have that. If anything happened to him, there’d be hell to pay, and you chaps would put the blame on me.’ Big smile. ‘And you’d be right to do so.’
‘So what’s the position now?’ Bret asked.
‘The doctor refused to attempt an examination unless Sadoff was willing and cooperative. So we’ve deferred it until next week. But meanwhile we don’t even have a note of his height and weight and so on.’ He looked up at us. I suppose both Bret and I were looking worried. The Governor said, ‘It’s nothing new to us. We’ve seen all this before. By next week he’ll be willing enough, have no fear.’
Bret said, ‘It sounds as if it’s developed into a contest of wills.’
‘I don’t enter into contests,’ said the Governor with a closed-mouth smile. ‘I’m in charge here. The detainees do as I say. And certainly I won’t allow any one of them to avoid a physical examination.’
‘We’ll have a word with him,’ said Bret.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said the Governor. He heaved himself to his feet.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Bret.
‘I’m afraid it will,’ said the Governor.
I could see that Bret was becoming more and more angry, so I said to him, ‘I’m not sure the Governor’s security clearance would be sufficient, considering the subject to be discussed.’
There was of course no particular subject on the agenda, but Bret got the idea quickly enough. ‘That’s quite true,’ said Bret. He turned to the Governor and said, ‘Better we keep to the regulations, Governor. From what you say, Stinnes might well make a written complaint about something or other. If that happens, I’d like to make sure you’re completely in the clear.’
‘In the clear?’ said the Governor indignantly. But when Bret made no supplementary explanation, he sat down heavily, moved some papers around, and said, ‘I’ve got a great deal of work to get through here. If you’re quite sure you can manage on your own, by all means carry on.’
I went in alone. Erich Stinnes looked content – as much as anyone locked up in Berwick House and left to the mercies of the Governor and his Deputy could have looked content. I knew which room they’d choose for him. It was up on the second floor; cream-painted walls and a plain metalframe bed, with a print of a naval battle on the wall. That was the room that had the microphones. And the mirror over the sink could be changed so that a TV camera in the next room could film through it.
They’d replaced the light cotton suit he’d worn in Mexico with a heavier English one. It wasn’t a perfect fit but it looked good enough. His spectacles flashed with the light from the window as he turned round to see me. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, with no emotion to reveal whether he was happy or disappointed to see me. He’d been standing near the window sketching.
Stinnes was forty years old, a thin bony figure with Slavic features and circular gold-rimmed glasses behind which quick intelligent eyes glittered, and made an otherwise nondescript face hard. He might have been taken for an absent-minded professor, but Sadoff – who preferred his operational name of Stinnes – had been until a few weeks ago a KGB major. Married twice, with a grown-up son who was trying to get into Moscow University, he’d defected and thus got rid of a troublesome wife and been paid a quarter of a million dollars for his services. For such a man, time was not pressing; he was youngish and he was Russian. It was imbecilic to think that ‘letting him stew for a few days’ would have any effect upon him. I’d never seen him looking more relaxed.
I went to look at his drawing. He must have spent most of the daylight hours at the window. There was a copy of the Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds with scraps of paper to mark some of the pages. A school notebook was crammed with his spiky writing. He’d diligently recorded the birds he’d sighted.
A bird identification book was the first thing he’d asked for when he arrived at Berwick House. He’d also asked for a pair of binoculars, a request that was denied. There had been a discussion about whether Erich’s birdwatching was genuine or whether he had some other reason for wanting the binoculars. If it was a pretence, he’d certainly devoted a lot of time and energy to it. There were sketches of the birds too, and notes about their songs.
But his observations w
ere not confined to ornithology. He’d pinned a piece of paper to a removable shelf, that was propped against the window frame. It made a crude easel so that he could draw the landscape as seen from his room. The paper was some sort of brown wrapping paper, and to draw he was using the stub end of an old pencil and a fountain pen.
‘I didn’t know you were an artist, Erich…the perspective looks spot on. Your trees are a bit shaky though.’
‘Trees are always difficult for me,’ he confessed. ‘The bare ones are easy enough, but the evergreens are difficult to draw.’ Thoughtfully he added a couple of extra touches to the line of trees that surmounted the hill beyond the village. ‘Do you like it?’ he asked, indicating the drawing with his hand and not looking up from it.
‘I love it,’ I said. ‘But they won’t like it downstairs.’
‘No?’
‘They’ll think you’re compromising security by making a drawing of the moat and grounds and the walls and what’s beyond them.’
‘Then why put me on the second floor? If you don’t want me to see over the wall, why put me here?’
‘I don’t know, Erich. It’s not my idea to hold you here at all.’
‘You’d put me into a four-star hotel, I suppose?’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
He shrugged to show that he didn’t believe me. ‘This is good enough. The food is good, the room is warm, and I can have as many hot baths as I wish. It is what I expected…better than I feared it might be.’ This was not in line with what Bret had said about Stinnes and his complaints.
Without preamble I said, ‘They released the male secretary. It was political: Bonn. We had enough evidence, but it was a political decision to let him go. We picked up the courier too. I thought we’d got a case officer at first, but it was just the courier.’
‘What name?’ said Stinnes. He was still looking at his landscape drawing.
‘Müller – a woman. Do you know her?’
‘I met her once. A Party member, a fanatic. I don’t like using people like that.’ He held up the pencil to show me. ‘Do you have a penknife?’
‘Radio operator,’ I prompted him. I wondered if he liked holding some bits of information back so that I would feel clever at getting them out of him. Certainly he gave no sign of reticence at telling me the rest of what he knew.
‘Correct. She came over to Potsdam for the course. That was when I met her. She didn’t know I was from the Command Staff, needless to say.’
‘She was working out of London, probably handling my wife’s material,’ I said.
‘Are you sure?’ He took my Swiss Army knife from me and sharpened his pencil very carefully. ‘If I use my razor blade, it’s no good for shaving. They only give one blade per week and always take the old one away.’
‘It’s a guess,’ I admitted. ‘Grow a beard.’
‘It’s probably a good guess. In our system we keep Communications completely separated from Operations, so I can’t tell you for sure.’ He passed the knife back to me and tried out the pencil on the edge of his picture. He made a lot of little scribbles, wearing it down to give the pencil an especially sharp point. Then he had another go at the trees.
‘With two code names?’ I said. ‘One agent with two codes? Is that likely?’
Stinnes stopped toying with his drawing and looked at me, frowning, as if trying to understand what I was getting at. ‘Of course, Communications staff are a law unto themselves. They have all sorts of crazy ideas, but I have never heard of such a thing.’
‘And material kept coming after my wife defected,’ I said.
He smiled. It was a grim smile that didn’t extend to his cold eyes. ‘The Müller woman is telling you this?’
‘Yes, she is.’ I kept it in the present tense. I didn’t want him to know that the woman was lost to us.
‘She is mad.’ He looked at his drawing again. I said nothing. I knew he was reflecting on it all. ‘Oh, she might have had more material, but operators never know the difference between top-rate material and day-to-day rubbish. The Müller woman is fooling you. What is it she is trying to get from you?’ He made the trees a little taller. It looked better. Then he shaded the wall darker.
‘Think, Erich. It’s important.’
He looked at me. ‘Important? Are you trying to persuade yourself that there is another one of our people deeply embedded in London Central?’
‘I want to know,’ I said.
‘You want to make a name for yourself. Is that what you mean?’ He looked into my eyes and smoothed his thinning hair against the top of his head. It was wispy hair and the light from the window made it into a halo.
‘That would be a part of it,’ I admitted.
‘I would have been told.’ He pricked the sharp pencil point against the palm of his hand, not once but again and again like a sapper cautiously feeling for buried mines. ‘If there was another well-placed agent in London Central, I would have been told.’
‘Suppose the Müller woman had regular traffic direct with Moscow.’
‘That’s quite possible. But they would have told me. I was the senior man in Berlin. I would have known.’ He stopped fidgeting with the pencil and put it into his top pocket. ‘The Müller woman is trying to make you go round and round in circles. I’d advise you to disregard any suggestions about another KGB agent in London. It’s the sort of thing that Moscow would like to start you wondering about.’
‘Do you have enough to read?’
‘I have the Bible,’ he said. ‘They gave me a Bible.’
‘Is that what you’re reading, the Bible?’
‘It’s always interested me, and reading it in English helps me learn. I am beginning to think that Christianity has a lot in common with Marxist-Leninism.’
‘For instance?’
‘God is dialectical materialism; Christ is Karl Marx; the Church is the Party, the elect is the proletariat, and the Second Coming is the Revolution.’ He looked at me and smiled.
‘How do heaven and hell fit into all that?’ I asked.
He thought for a moment. ‘Heaven is the socialist millenium, of course. I think hell must be the punishment of capitalists.’
‘Bravo, Erich,’ I said.
‘You know I used to be with Section 44?’
Section 44 was the KGB’s Religious Affairs Bureau. ‘It was in your file,’ I said. ‘You left at the wrong time, Erich.’
‘Because of Poland, you mean? Yes, the man running Section 44 these days is a general. But I would never have got that sort of promotion. They would have slotted less expert people in above me. Had I stayed there, I would still be a lieutenant. It’s the way things are done in Russia.’
‘It’s the way things are done everywhere,’ I said. ‘So the Bible is enough for you?’
‘A few books would be welcome.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. ‘And I’ll see if I can get you moved to somewhere more comfortable, but it might take time.’ I took from my pocket five small packets of cheroots. They were evil smelling and I didn’t want to give him a chance to light up before I left the room.
‘What is time?’ He displayed the palms of both hands. There was no humour in his gesture: just contemptuous mockery.
‘Did you have to tell him that Bonn ordered the release of that guy?’ said Bret. He was standing in the surveillance room with a set of headphones in his hands. ‘That’s lousy security, Bernard. We took a lot of trouble keeping that out of the newspapers.’ It was a tiny dimly lit room with just enough space for the radio and TV equipment, although today there was nothing in use but the bugging equipment wired here from the second floor.
‘Maybe you did, but every reporter in town knows about it, so don’t think Moscow is puzzling. It’s a twoway traffic, Bret. Stinnes has got to feel he’s a part of what’s going on.’
‘You should be pushing harder. That’s what I wanted you for, to help push the interrogation along faster.’
‘I will, but
I’m not the interrogator and I can’t undo weeks of stupidity in one short interview, Bret,’ I said. ‘Easy does it. Let me move him out of here and establish a working relationship.’
‘Hardly worth the journey down here,’ Bret complained, putting the headphones on the shelf and switching off the light, ‘I could have got a lot done this afternoon.’
‘That’s what I told you, but you insisted on coming with me.’
‘I never know what you’re likely to get up to when you’re on your own.’ The only light came from a small grimy skylight and Bret’s face was completely in shadow. He put his hands into his trouser pockets so that his dark melton overcoat was held open. This aggressive stance, the clothes, and the lighting made him look like a still photo from some old gangster film.
‘That makes me wonder why you chose me to work with you on this one,’ I said. That much was true, very true.
He looked at me as if deciding whether to bother with a proper reply. Then he said, ‘There’s no one in the German Section with field experience comparable to yours. You’re bright as hell, despite your lack of proper schooling and the chip you have on your shoulder about it. For most things concerning the German Section, you’ve got your own unofficial sources of information, and often you dig out material that no one else can get. You are straight. You make up your own mind, and you write your reports without giving a damn what anyone wants to hear. I like that.’ He paused and just slightly flexed his leg as if his bad knee was troubling him. ‘On the other hand, you put yourself and your personal problems before the Department. You’re damned rude and I don’t find your sarcastic remarks as amusing as some of the others do. You’re insubordinate to the point of arrogance. You’re selfish, reckless, and you never stop complaining.’
‘You must have been reading my mail, Bret,’ I said. It was interesting to see that Bret made no comment about what Stinnes had said about the Müller woman or about the suggestion that the KGB had another agent working inside London Central. Perhaps he thought it was just my way of drawing Stinnes out.