by Len Deighton
‘You have enough seniority, and you’re the only one who has the right experience. They can’t pass you over again, Bernie. It would be absurd.’
‘The way I hear it, I’m not even going to be shortlisted.’
‘See the D-G,’ suggested Werner. ‘Get his support.’
‘He doesn’t even remember my name, Werner.’
‘What about Frank Harrington? You can count on him, can’t you?’
‘They won’t listen to what Frank says about who should take over. They’ll want a new broom in there. A strong recommendation from Frank would probably be counterproductive.’ I smiled; ‘counterproductive’ was one of Dicky’s words, the sort of jargon I used to despise. I was going soft behind that desk.
Werner said, ‘Did Frank Harrington oppose the idea of letting MI5 people sit on the Stinnes committee?’
‘I was there, Werner. Frank just said, “Yes, sir”, without discussion or argument. He said it was “an admirable solution”. He’s close to the D-G. The D-G must have told Frank what he intended and got his support beforehand.’
‘Frank Harrington said okay? Why? It’s all a mystery to me,’ said Werner. He stopped pinching his nose and looked at me, hoping for a solution.
‘The D-G wants Bret out of the Department. There’s a lot of discussion about Bret right now. Hysterical discussion.’
Werner looked at me for a long time. He was wearing his plastic inscrutable mask and trying not to look smug. ‘This is a new development,’ he said, unable to keep the note of triumph out of his voice. ‘I seem to remember a Christmas party when you’d come back from Lange – your head was filled with suspicions of Bret Rensselaer.’ He was grinning. Only with effort was he able to keep his voice level now, as though he wasn’t poking fun at me, just retelling the story.
‘I only said that all the leads should be investigated.’
Werner nodded. He knew I was retreating from my former position as prosecutor and it amused him. ‘And now you don’t think that?’
‘Of course I do. But I hate to see the way it’s being done. Bret is being railroaded. And I especially don’t like the way he’s being isolated. I know how it feels, Werner. Not so long ago I was the one whose friends were crossing the street to avoid me.’
‘Did you take it any further? Did you report your suspicions?’
‘I was with Uncle Silas for the weekend…this is some time back…before Christmas. Brahms Four was there. I asked him about the receiving end of the intelligence over there.’
‘You told me all that. But what does he know about it?’ said Werner scornfully.
‘Not much, but as I told you, it was enough to convince me that the Miller woman was running two agents.’
‘In London Central? Make up your mind, Bernie. Are you still trying to prove that Bret is a KGB man or not?’
‘I don’t know. I go round and round in circles. But there were two agents: Fiona was coded, PIG IRON, the other was JAKE. Brahms Four confirmed that, Werner.’
‘No, no, no. If Bret was feeding material back to Moscow…it doesn’t bear thinking about. It would mean they knew about all the Brahms Four material as soon as we got it…’
‘So we have to find out if Moscow was monitoring the Brahms Four material all the time we were getting it.’
‘How would you discover that?’
‘I just don’t know if we could. It would be the hell of a task to go through the archives, and I’m not sure how the D-G would react to a suggestion that we do it.’
‘It would look damned funny if they forbade you going to the archives, wouldn’t it?’
‘They wouldn’t have to say they didn’t trust me,’ I said. ‘They could simply point out how difficult it would be to ascertain that from the archive material. They’d also point out that if the KGB had a good source, they wouldn’t compromise it by acting on every damned thing they got. And they’d be right, Werner.’
‘I can’t believe that Moscow knew what Brahms Four was telling us all those years and let him get away with it. Even if Bret was monitoring the stuff for them.’
‘Finally they let Brahms Four escape,’ I said.
‘They didn’t exactly let him escape,’ said Werner. ‘You rescued him.’
‘We rescued him, Werner, you and me together.’
‘If Bret was reporting to Moscow, Brahms Four would still be in East Berlin.’
‘They had no warning, Werner. I made sure Bret didn’t know what I was going to do. And until the last minute when you came to London and told Dicky, no one at London Central knew I was going to pull Brahms Four out.’
‘Your wife knew; she ran. She could have told Bret.’
‘Not enough time,’ I said. ‘I thought of that, but there wasn’t enough time for Bret to find out and get a message to Moscow.’
‘So Bret is suspect and the D-G has put him on ice while he decides what to do about it?’
‘It looks that way,’ I said.
‘Only the Miller woman knows the truth, I suppose,’ said Werner. There was some unusual expression in his face that made me look at him closely.
‘And she’s in the Havel,’ I said.
‘Suppose I told you that I’d seen the Miller woman?’
‘In the morgue? Did she come out at Spandau locks?’
‘She’s not dead,’ said Werner smugly. ‘I saw her looking fit and well. She’s a clerk. She works in the Rote Rathaus.’
The Red Town Hall was the municipal centre for East Berlin, a massive red-brick building near Alexanderplatz, which, unlike so much around it, had survived for well over a century. ‘Alive and well? You’re sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘What’s it all about then? Who is she? Was it all a stunt?’
‘I found out a little about her – I have a friend who works there. Everything she said about her father living in England and about being married and so on seems to be true. I couldn’t actually check her out, of course, but the story she gave you was true, as far as her identity is concerned.’
‘She just forgot to mention that she was a resident of the Democratic Republic and worked for the government.’
‘Right,’ said Werner.
‘What luck that you spotted her! I suppose they thought she was tucked well away from us in that place. There wasn’t much likelihood of anyone who’d seen her on this side going into an office in the East Berlin town hall.’
‘It was a million to one chance that I had to go there again. I remembered her because she once helped me with a tricky problem. An East German truck I use broke down in the West on a delivery trip. I went round in circles trying to find someone who had the necessary permissions to tow it from West to East. That was a year or more ago. Then, last week, I was in there again getting my ration cards.’
‘And she didn’t recognize you? She must have seen you that night they arrested her and I got her to give me a statement.’
‘You did the interrogation. I waited outside. I only caught sight of her very briefly. I knew I’d seen her somewhere before, but I couldn’t think where. I mean, it’s not the sort of face you never forget. Then, after I’d given up and stopped thinking about her, I walked into the Rathaus and saw her sitting at her desk. This time I took a close look at her.’
‘She was no amateur, Werner. She made her suicide attempt convincing enough to get herself slammed into the Steglitz Clinic.’
‘Suicides in police cells – cops get very nervous about such things, Bernie. I looked into it. He was a young cop on duty at night. He played it safe and sent for an ambulance.’
‘And then they covered their tracks by taking her from the Steglitz Clinic and running the ambulance into the water.’
‘It must have been a diversion while another car took her across to the East.’
‘It worked all right,’ I said. ‘When I remember spending my Christmas Eve standing on that freezing cold wharf, waiting for them to lift that bloody vehicle…’
‘I hope
you’re not going to suggest trying to get hold of her again. We couldn’t grab her, Bernie, not there in the Mitte. They’d have us in the bag before we even got her to the car.’
‘It would be difficult, wouldn’t it?’
‘It wouldn’t be difficult,’ said Werner. ‘It would be impossible. Don’t even think about it.’
‘You’d better put all this in writing, Werner.’
‘I’ve got it drafted out. I thought I’d wait until I came to London so I could check with you first.’
‘I appreciate that, Werner. Thanks.’
We sat for a few minutes drinking the coffee and not saying anything. I was fully occupied in trying out all the configurations that this new piece of the jigsaw puzzle presented.
Then Werner said, ‘How does this affect Bret?’
‘You didn’t tell the committee anything about this Miller woman being alive, did you?’
‘You said not to tell them departmental secrets. This seemed like a departmental secret.’
‘So secret that only you and I know of it,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ said Werner.
‘Why, Werner? What the hell was it all about? Why did they use the Miller woman to pick up the material?’
‘Suppose everything she told you was exactly true. Suppose she had been a radio operator handling the material from Bret Rensselaer and the stuff from your wife. Suppose Fiona pulled her out when she went over to them. The Miller woman decides she’s getting too old for espionage and tells Moscow that she wants to get out of the business – she wants to retire. Fiona encourages her because the Miller woman knows too much. So they find her an easy little job issuing licences in the town hall. It happens all the time, Bernie. Probably she has a small pension and card for the Valuta shops so that she can buy Western goods. Everything is lovely, everyone is happy. Then one day, at short notice, they need someone to go to Wannsee and pick up the package. They need someone who has the right sort of papers for coming over to the West side of the city. It seems like a routine task. Little likelihood of danger. She’ll only be in the West for a couple of hours, and she won’t be searched by anyone on the West side when she goes through with the package.’ He fiddled with his coffee spoon, pushing it backwards and forwards. ‘Or perhaps it’s not a one-off. Perhaps she does a lot of little jobs like that to eke out her salary. Either way, I have no trouble believing it. There’s nothing that doesn’t fit together.’
‘Maybe not. But that’s not the way I’d treat someone like her. Imagine that we had been running a truly remarkable source in the KGB offices in Moscow. Would we let a case officer or radio operator for that agent go back over there for ten minutes, let alone a couple of hours? You know we wouldn’t.’
‘The KGB are different,’ said Werner. He drove the spoon around the table, cornering recklessly when it came to the fruit bowl.
‘Maybe they are, but my supposition isn’t complete yet. What if they not only had one remarkable source but two remarkable sources? And one of them is still in place, Werner – a source right in London Central still going strong. Are the KGB so different that they’d still let the Miller woman go and put her head in a noose? Would they take a chance on her being arrested and telling us enough to blow their other agent?’
‘It’s no good trying to think the way they think. That’s the first thing I had to learn when I started dealing with them. They don’t think like us. And you’re being wise after the event. They had no idea that we were going to move in on that party at Wannsee. To them it must have seemed like the most routine and safe assignment possible.’ Werner tried to drink from the cup he’d already emptied. Even when he knew it was empty, he tipped his head right back to get the final drips. He hadn’t touched his brandy.
‘I still find it difficult to believe they’d take the risk,’ I said.
‘What risk? Our people risk everything when they go through the Wall. They risk the detailed inspection of documents, the guards watching every move they make and listening to everything they say. There are the secret marks made on the passports and travelling papers. Everyone going East is scrutinized under a microscope no matter who they are. But what do their people risk when they come to spy on the West? No one crossing to our side is inspected very closely. Being a KGB agent is one of the safest jobs going. We’re a walkover, Bernie. That woman’s job was a sinecure. It was a million-to-one chance that she was swept up by the arrest team.’
‘And even then she got away with it.’
‘Exactly. All she had to do was make some gesture at suicide and she’s conveniently moved to the Steglitz Clinic, all ready for the rescue. Damn it, Bernie, why are we so soft?’
‘If you are right, Werner, it means that the KGB don’t know what she divulged to us about the radio codes.’
Werner turned the cup in the saucer and thought about that and didn’t answer.
I pressed him. ‘Would they have put her right back into that job at the Rathaus if she’d admitted to giving us a confession?’
‘Probably not.’
‘She didn’t tell them, Werner. I’d bet on that. Perhaps they were impressed by their own efficiency. Maybe they were so pleased at themselves for rescuing her so swiftly and smoothly that it never occurred to them that they were already too late.’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Werner.
‘What am I thinking?’
‘That she can be turned. You think we should blackmail her, threaten to tell the KGB that she confessed…’
‘And get her to work for us? A tired old woman like that? What would she tell us…all the latest dope on the rationcard issues? All the town hall gossip? No, Werner, I wasn’t thinking of turning her.’
‘What then?’
‘I don’t know.’
Werner changed the subject. ‘Do you remember that terrible place under the rubble in Koch Strasse, where the old man made the model planes?’
‘The bearded one who built a workshop out of bits of packing cases?’ I remembered it well. We were kids; the ‘old man’ was probably no more than thirty, but there were lots of very elderly thirty-years-olds in Berlin at that time. He’d been a combat engineer in an armoured division, a skilled fitter who scraped a living by selling model aircraft to the conquerors. Even as a child I’d seen the irony of him sitting in the bombed rubble of central Berlin and making so lovingly the model B-17 bombers that the American airmen bought as souvenirs. He was a fierce-looking man with a crippled arm. We called him ‘Black Peter’ and when we went to watch him working he’d sometimes let us help him with sandpapering or boiling up the smelly animal glue.
‘Did you know that the cellar he lived in was part of the prison cells under Prinz-Albrecht Strasse?’ Prinz-Albrecht Strasse was the guarded way in which German adults of that time referred to Gestapo headquarters.
‘I thought the Gestapo building was on the Eastern side.’
‘I was there last week with a friend of mine, a photographer who’s doing a magazine article – photos of the graffiti on the Wall. Some of it’s very funny.’
‘Only from this side,’ I said. ‘Drink your brandy, Werner. It was a Christmas present from Uncle Silas.’
‘Anyway, I walked back to look at the place where we used to visit Black Peter. It’s all been levelled. They’re building there. I found a big billboard that had fallen on its face. I picked it up and it was a notice – in four languages, so it must be old – saying YOU ARE NOW STANDING ON THE SITE OF THE GESTAPO PRISON WHERE MANY PATRIOTS DIED.
‘Is Black Peter’s cellar still there?’
‘No, the bulldozers went over it. But there in the middle of the rubble someone had placed a small bunch of flowers, Bernie.’
‘Near the sign?’
‘The sign was face down. Someone had gone out to that desolate place and put an expensive bunch of flowers on the ground. No one walks across that empty site from one year to the next. How many Berliners know that that heap of rubble is the old Gestapo pr
ison. Can you imagine someone taking flowers out there to remember someone…? After all these years. Fancy someone still doing that, Bernie. Like a secret little ritual. It made me shiver.’
‘I suppose it would,’ I said. I was slightly embarrassed by the depth of Werner’s feelings. ‘It’s a strange city.’
‘Don’t you ever miss it?’
‘Berlin? Yes, sometimes I do,’ I admitted.
‘It’s an amazing town. I’ve lived there all my life and yet I still discover things that astound me. I wish my father had lived a little longer…I couldn’t live anywhere else,’ said Werner. For him and for me, Berlin represented some part of our fathers’ lives that we still hoped to discover.
I said, ‘And you’re the one who keeps talking about retiring to live in the sun.’
‘Because Zena would love it, Bernie. She’s always talking about living somewhere warm and sunny. I suppose we will one day. If it made Zena happy, I could put up with it.’
‘Talking of bouquets, do you remember that day we trailed Black Peter to see where he was going?’
‘I don’t know who was more frightened, him or us,’ said Werner.
‘Us,’ I said. ‘Remember how he kept getting off his bicycle and looking back?’
‘I wonder how much he paid for that big bunch of flowers.’
‘A week’s work at least,’ I said. ‘Did you know it was the Jewish cemetery?’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘Not at the time,’ I said.
‘Every Jew knows it.’ For a moment I had forgotten how Werner’s Jewish father had survived the Nazi regime by digging graves in a Jewish cemetery, a job no ‘Aryan’ was permitted to do. ‘The Jewish school and the Jewish old-age home were there too. Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse was the heart of Berlin’s old Jewish quarter, dating back hundreds of years.’
‘Yes, I knew the Jewish old-age home. That was where Berlin Jews were taken and held, prior to being transported to the East.’
‘It’s strange that they chose such a very public place,’ said Werner. ‘In other cities the Jews were assembled at railway sidings or empty factory sites. But here they were right in the city centre, a short step from Unter den Linden. From the neighbouring apartment blocks and office buildings the roll calls and loading could be seen by hundreds of local people.’