London Match

by Len Deighton

‘I should have been told.’

  ‘You’re not wrestling only with Stinnes,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the whole of Moscow Centre to contend with, and they’ve spent a lot of time working on it.’

  He drank a tiny sip of whisky as if he didn’t trust himself any longer. He didn’t ask what it was all about or anything like that. He’d had a lot of time to think what it was all about. He must have known by that time that his chances of getting out of it and becoming Mr Clean again were very slim. The sea was rough. Bret was going down for the third time and there was every chance he’d take me with him. ‘So what do I do, Bernard?’

  ‘Suppose I said, “Turn yourself in”?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Suppose I turned you in?’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ said Bret. He looked away from me, as if meeting my eyes would increase the chances of my saying I would turn him in.

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ I said.

  ‘Because you’re an egomaniac. You’re cynical and intractable. You’re the only son of a bitch in that Department who’d take the rest of them on single-handed.’

  It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear, but it was sincere enough and that would have to do. ‘We don’t have a lot of time. They’ll trace you right to this room. Getting into Berlin without leaving a track is almost impossible, unless you come in from the East, in which case no records are kept.’

  ‘I never thought of it like that,’ said Bret. ‘That’s crazy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is, but we don’t have time to write to Ripley about it. We don’t have time to do anything very much. I’d say that London Central will trace you to Berlin, and maybe to me at this hotel, within two or three days.’

  ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes. We’ll have to talk to Frank. The only other course is for you to leave town very quickly. Why did you come here, Bret?’

  ‘I decided that you were the only person who could help.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Bret,’ I said.

  ‘And I have money here,’ he said. I continued to stare at him. ‘And a gun.’

  ‘Honesty is the best policy, Bret,’ I said.

  ‘You knew, did you?’

  ‘Not about the money. But when a senior officer does anything unusual in Berlin I like to know, and there are people who know I like to know.’

  ‘Who the hell told you about the gun?’

  ‘Buying a gun is very unusual, Bret,’ I said. ‘Especially for a man who can sign a docket and get one across the counter from Frank Harrington.’

  ‘So Frank knows too?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him.’

  ‘Will Frank turn me in?’

  ‘Let’s not tempt him too much. Suppose I go along and talk to him while you stay out of sight?’

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  ‘Frank could defy the Department for weeks, and if Five sent anyone here, Frank has authority enough to have them refused entry at the airport. If we got Frank on our side…’

  ‘It would start looking good,’ said Bret appreciatively.

  ‘Not good, Bret, but a bit less bloody doomy.’

  ‘So you’ll see Frank in the morning?’

  ‘I’ll see Frank now. We haven’t got enough time for luxuries like night and day. And at night we won’t have his secretarial staff to get an eyeful of you and me talking to him. If we see him on his own and he says “No deal”, we might persuade him to forget he ever saw us. But once his secretary enters it in the appointment diary, it will be more difficult to deny.’

  ‘He’ll be asleep.’ Bret obviously thought it would prejudice our chances of success to wake Frank from a deep dreamless slumber.

  ‘Frank never sleeps.’

  ‘He’ll be with a girl? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Now you’re getting warmer.’

  26

  Frank Harrington, Berlin Resident and head of Berlin Field Unit, was not asleep. He was sitting on the floor of the large drawing room of his magnificent house at Grunewald surrounded by records. On every side of him there were piles of Duke Ellington records while music played on his hi-fi. ‘Frenesi’ – it was a lush orchestral arrangement into which the vocalist sang: ‘A long time ago I wandered down into old Mexico…’ Or was it something quite different? Was it just that I still felt bad about the way in which I’d contrived that the Stinnes enrolment had taken place in Mexico, rather than in Berlin where Frank would have got a measure of the credit? Whatever the music, I still felt guilty at having deprived Frank of that ‘mention’ and self-conscious about asking him for help in matters arising from that same event. ‘…Stars were shining bright and I could hear romantic voices in the night…’

  Frank’s valet, the inscrutable Tarrant, showed me in. He was wearing his dressing gown and his hair was slightly disarranged, but he gave no sign of being surprised by this visit in the small hours of the morning. I suppose Frank’s frequent love affairs had provided Tarrant with enough surprises to last a lifetime.

  ‘Bernard,’ said Frank very calmly, as if I often visited him in the small hours. ‘What about a drink?’ He had a record in his hand. Like all the other records it was in a pristine plain-white jacket with a number written in the corner. He hesitated before placing it on one of the piles, then he looked up at me. ‘Whisky and water?’

  ‘Yes, please. Shall I help myself?’

  There was a cut-glass tumbler on the drinks trolley, some ice cubes in it not yet melted, and traces of bright lipstick on its rim. I picked it up and sniffed at it. ‘Campari and orange juice,’ said Frank as he watched me. ‘Still playing detectives, Bernard?’

  There had been another visitor – obviously female – but Frank did not supply her name. ‘Force of habit,’ I said. Campari and orange juice was one of Zena Volkmann’s favourite drinks.

  ‘It must be urgent.’ He didn’t get up from where he was sitting in the middle of the carpet. He reached for his pipe and tobacco pouch and for the big ashtray that was already half filled with ash and unburned tobacco.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was good of you to let me come right away.’

  ‘You didn’t give me much chance to decline.’ He said it ruefully. Had he sent her away on my account or was she waiting for him upstairs in the bedroom? Was it Zena Volkmann or just some girl he’d met at a frantic Berlin party as he met so many of the females with whom he got entangled?

  ‘The Stinnes committee have gone mad,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t sit there!’ It was a shout, almost a cry of pain. ‘They’re my very earliest ones. I’d die if one of those was damaged.’

  ‘This is your Ellington collection, is it?’ I asked, looking at the records everywhere.

  ‘The only chance I get is at night. I’m shipping them to England. I have to have them valued for the insurance. It’s not easy to put a price on the rare ones.’

  I paused politely and then said again, ‘The Stinnes committee have gone crazy, Frank.’

  ‘It happens,’ said Frank. He was still sitting the way he’d been when I came into the room. Now he charged his pipe, packing the bowl with the shreds of tobacco and pushing them down with his fingertip. He did it very very carefully as if to show me that it was a difficult thing to do.

  I said, ‘Stinnes seems to have convinced them that Bret Rensselaer is some kind of KGB mole. They put him under house arrest.’

  ‘And what do you want me to do?’ said Frank. He didn’t light his pipe. He rested it against the ashtray while he read the label on another record, entered details of it into a looseleaf notebook, and placed it on the appropriate pile.

  ‘Did you know that was going to happen?’

  ‘No, but I should have guessed that something like it was in the wind. I’ve been against that damned committee right from the start.’ He sipped at his drink. ‘We should have turned Stinnes over to Five and let it go at that. These combined committees always end in a power struggle. I n
ever saw one that didn’t.’

  ‘Stinnes is driving the wedge in deep, Frank.’ I didn’t remind him that he’d showed no sign of being against the committee when I’d seen him with the D-G.

  Frank picked up his pipe while he thought about it. ‘House arrest? Bret? Are you quite sure? There was talk of an enquiry, but arrest…?’ He lit the pipe with a match, holding the bowl inverted so that the flame could get to the tightly packed tobacco.

  ‘A witch-hunt has started, Frank. It could cause permanent damage to the Department. Bret has a lot of friends, but he has implacable enemies too.’

  ‘Lange?’ Was that a gibe at me? He puffed at the pipe as he looked at me, but he didn’t smile.

  ‘Some more influential than Lange,’ I said. ‘And even worse is the way that people – even senior staff – are trying to find evidence to confirm Bret’s guilt.’

  ‘Are they?’ He didn’t believe that.

  ‘Dicky dug up some half-baked story about being in Kiel with Bret when a KGB man recognized him.’

  ‘And it wasn’t true?’

  ‘It was entirely true. But if Dicky had taken the trouble to look up Bret’s report on the incident, he would have found it completely and adequately explained by Bret. People are jittery, Frank, and that brings out the worst in them.’

  ‘People are jittery since your wife went over. It was the enormity of that that shook the Department to its foundations.’

  ‘If you…’

  ‘Don’t get angry, Bernard.’ He held up a hand and ducked his head as if warding off a blow. It was Frank’s pleasure to play the role of vulnerable ancient to my role of bellicose son. ‘I’m not putting any blame on you, but I am stating a fact.’

  ‘Bret is here. He’s here in Berlin,’ I said. ‘And he’s in bad shape.’

  ‘I rather thought he might be,’ said Frank. He puffed his pipe again. He’d lost interest in sorting his record collection now. Even when the Ellington music stopped, he didn’t put another one on the player. ‘I don’t mean in bad shape; I mean I thought he might be in Berlin.’

  ‘How?’ If Frank knew officially about Bret’s arrival, the report would go through regular channels and be in London by noon the following day.

  ‘Why else would you be here in the middle of the night? It’s surely not in response to a phone call from Bret in London. Bret must be here: there’s no other explanation.’

  ‘He thinks they’ll put out a departmental alert for him.’

  ‘Surely it hasn’t come to that,’ said Frank calmly.

  ‘I think it might have done, Frank. The old man was not available when Bret was put under house arrest.’

  ‘And you think that’s a bad sign?’

  ‘You know the D-G better than anyone, Frank.’ Frank puffed his pipe and didn’t comment on his possible knowledge of the Director-General’s way of going to ground when his senior staff were to be arrested.

  Eventually Frank said, ‘What could I do for Bret? Supposing I wanted to do anything.’

  ‘We should neutralize Stinnes. Without him the whole action against Bret will collapse.’

  ‘Neutralize him? What do you mean by that?’

  ‘We thought Stinnes was a mediocre agent in a dead-end job. All our records and enquiries pointed to that. But I think that was all cover. I think Stinnes is one of their most reliable people. They might have been grooming him for this one for ages.’

  ‘Or it might be that your wife’s arrival over there gave them the necessary extra information that made his job possible.’

  ‘It would be foolish to deny that possibility,’ I said without getting angry. ‘The timing points to Fiona. She might have been the trigger, but the background must have been started long ago.’

  ‘Neutralize him?’

  ‘How we do it doesn’t really matter, but we must persuade Moscow that Stinnes is no longer their man and in place.’

  ‘You’re not leading up to an XPD? Because I won’t go along with that.’

  ‘I don’t want him killed. The best solution would be to make Moscow believe that Stinnes is really turned, and working for us.’

  ‘That might take some time,’ said Frank.

  ‘Exactly. So let’s not try that. Let’s tell them we know about Stinnes, that we have him under lock and key and are giving him a bad time.’

  ‘What sort of bad time?’

  ‘A damned bad sort of bad time,’ I said.

  ‘Would they care?’

  ‘How would we feel if it was one of ours?’ I said.

  ‘If they were roughing him up, we’d do everything we could to get him out.’

  ‘And that’s what they’ll want to do,’ I said. ‘Everything suggests that Stinnes is a sick man. He sits around holding himself as if he’s in pain, he resists all attempts to make him have a physical examination, and he’s stopped smoking…Of course, that could all be an act.’

  ‘What is it you’re expecting me to do?’

  ‘There’s something else you should know, Frank,’ I said. ‘The Miller woman is alive and well and working across the city in the Red Town Hall.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Werner spoke with her.’

  ‘He should have reported it.’

  ‘He went back to take another look.’

  ‘So that was it,’ said Frank half to himself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s something you’d better know. They’re holding Werner Volkmann. He was arrested last night in East Berlin and taken to Babelsberg.’

  ‘Babelsberg?’

  ‘It’s a part of the old film studios. The Stasis use it when they want to be beyond any possible Protecting Powers jurisdiction that might apply to the inner parts of the city. We can’t send a military police patrol into Potsdam the way we can to the rest of Berlin.’

  ‘Poor Werner.’

  ‘You guessed it was Zena: the Campari and orange – that’s her drink. I sent for her as soon as I got the report.’

  ‘How is she taking it?’ I said.

  ‘The same way Zena takes everything,’ said Frank. ‘Very, very personally.’

  ‘Where did it happen?’

  ‘The Red Town Hall. He was talking to someone over there and asking too many questions. One of my people saw the van draw up outside the Town Hall and he recognized Volkmann being put in. Later it was confirmed by one of our inside people who saw the police report.’

  ‘Have they charged him?’

  ‘I know nothing except what I’ve told you. It only happened last evening.’

  ‘We’ll have to do something, Frank.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Bernard, but that’s impossible.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Exchanging Werner for Stinnes. London Central would never wear it.’

  ‘Is it better that we deliver Bret back to London and let Stinnes send Five to trample all over him?’ I said.

  ‘Bret is innocent. Very well; I believe Bret is innocent too. But let us not overreact. You’re not really telling me you think he’ll be tried and found guilty and sent to prison?’

  ‘Moscow has produced fake evidence. God knows how much of it there is.’

  ‘Fake evidence or no fake evidence, it won’t send Bret to jail and you know it.’

  ‘They won’t even send him for trial,’ I said. ‘They never do send senior staff for trial, no matter what the evidence against them. But Bret will be retired and discredited. Bret has a very exaggerated sense of loyalty – you know what he’s like. Bret couldn’t live with that.’

  ‘And what if I bring Stinnes here without authority? What will happen to me?’

  Well, at least Frank had reached the necessary conclusion without my drawing him a coloured diagram. Frank’s authority was confined to Berlin. The only way we could do anything to help Bret in the short term was by bringing Stinnes here. ‘You’re close to retirement, Frank. If you overstep the mark, they’ll get angry but they won’t take it out on you. Especially when
they realize that you’ve saved them from a fiasco.’

  ‘I’m not going to lose my bloody pension for some harebrained scheme of yours,’ said Frank. ‘It’s not within my power.’

  ‘See Bret,’ I said. ‘He’s waiting outside in the car. See Bret and you might change your mind.’

  ‘I’ll see Bret. But I won’t change my mind.’

  I wouldn’t have convinced him without Bret Rensselaer. It was the mangled patrician figure that moved Frank Harrington to throw the rule book out the window and send two of his heavies to England to get Stinnes. There was paperwork too. Stinnes hadn’t yet been given any sort of travel document other than the stateless person’s identity card. That was valid for travelling, but it required some hastily done backup with scribbled signatures.

  Just to create a smoke screen Frank left a message with the D-G’s personal secretary and sent a telex to London that said Stinnes was to be questioned in connection with the detention of a departmental employee in East Berlin. The name of Werner Volkmann was not mentioned and the proposed venue of the Stinnes questioning was left vague.

  The other half of the procedure was more straightforward. I found Posh Harry in Frankfurt. When he heard that there was a well-paid job for him he got the next plane for Berlin.

  I met him in the Café Leuschner, a big barn of a place near the remains of the Anhalter Bahnhof, that weed-bedecked chunk of railway terminal that has been left standing in the middle of the city like a rich man’s folly in some Old-World garden.

  The big café was made to look even larger by the row of gilt-framed mirrors. They lined the wall so that the marble countertop with all the glinting bottles and glasses were tilted by the reflections.

  As a kid I’d always liked to sit at the counter rather than at the tables. In those days the chairs were old bentwood ones, painted olive green, the only colour of paint that one could get in the city. The furniture at Leuschner’s café – like so many other painted things of that time – exactly matched the trucks of the US Army.

  Leuschner’s used to be my Saturday treat. It was the high-point of my week. I’d meet my father at his office, and with him in his best uniform we’d walk to Leuschner’s for one of Herr Leuschner’s ice creams that only kids were allowed to buy. Then one day my father discovered through an informer that the ice cream came from US Army supplies. He was going to report it, but my mother dissuaded him on account of the way old Herr Leuschner was always feeding hungry kids for nothing. But my father wouldn’t take me there after that.