by Len Deighton
‘You should work out,’ he said solemnly. ‘The older you get the more you need exercise.’
I nodded. Thanks, kid, I’ll make a note of it. Well that was great. While I was nursemaiding this kid he was going to be second-guessing everything I did because he thought I was out of condition and past it.
The bathroom was in chaos. I’d almost forgotten what the habitat of the young single male looked like: on a chair there was draped a dirty tee-shirt, a heavy sweater and a torn denim jacket – he’d obviously donned his one and only suit in my honour. Three kinds of shampoo, two flavours of expensive after-shaves and an illuminated magnifying mirror to examine spots.
I went to the bathroom window, an old-fashioned double-glazed contraption, the brass handles tightly closed and tarnished with a green mottle as if it had not been opened in decades. Along the bottom ledge, between the dusty sheets of glass, lay dozens of dead moths and shrivelled flies of all shapes and sizes. How did they get inside, if they couldn’t get out alive? Maybe there was a message there for me if only I could work it out.
The view from the window brought mixed feelings. I had grown up here; it was the only place I could think of as home. Not so long ago, in California, I had continually ached to be back in Berlin. I had been homesick for this town in a way I had never thought possible. Now that I was here there were no feelings of happiness or satisfaction. Something inexplicable had happened, unless of course I was frightened of going once more to the other side, which once I’d regarded as no more demanding than walking to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. The kid thought I was nervous and he was right. If he knew what he was doing, he’d be nervous too.
Down in the street there was not much movement. The few pedestrians were wrapped in heavy coats, scarfs and fur hats and walking head-bent and hunched against the cold east wind that blew steadily from Russia’s vast icy hinterland. Both sides of the street were lined with cars and vans. They were dirty: caked with the mud and grime of a European winter, a condition unknown in southern California. On the glasswork of the parked cars, frost and ice had formed elaborate swirling patterns. Any one of these vehicles would provide a secure hiding place for a surveillance team watching the building. I regretted letting the kid bring me here. It was stupid and careless. He was sure to be known to the opposition, and too tall to be inconspicuous; that’s why he’d never last as a field agent.
After I’d cleaned up and shaved and changed into a suit, he spread a map across the table and showed me the route he proposed. He suggested that we drive through Charlie into the Eastern Sector of Berlin and then drive south and avoid the main roads and Autobahnen all the time. It was a circuitous route but the kid quoted all London’s official advisories to me and insisted that it was the best way to do it. I yielded to him. I could see he was one of those fastidious preparation fanatics, and that was a good way to be when going on a venture of this sort.
‘What do you think?’ the kid asked.
‘Tell me seriously: did London Central really say I might want restraints to drag this bruiser out even against his will?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have any whisky?’
As is so often the case with frontier crossings that inspire a nervous premonition of disaster, passing through Checkpoint Charlie went smoothly. Before driving out of the city I asked the kid to make a small detour to call at a quiet little bar in Oranienburger Strasse so I could get cigarettes and a tall glass of Saxony’s famous beer.
‘You must have a throat like leather to actually crave East German cigarettes,’ said the kid. He was staring at the only other people in the bar: two youngish women in fur coats. They looked up at him expectantly, but one glance was enough to tell them that he was no proposition and they went back to their whispered conversation.
‘What do you know about it?’ I said. ‘You don’t smoke.’
‘If I did smoke, it wouldn’t be those coffin nails.’
‘Drink your beer and shut up,’ I said.
Behind the counter Andi Krohn had followed our exchange. He looked at the girls in the corner and stared at me as if about to smile. Andi’s had always been a place to find available women for a price: they say it was notorious even as far back as before the war. I don’t know how his predecessors had got away with it for all these years, except that the Krohn family had always known the right people to cultivate. Andi and I had been friends since we were both schoolboys and he was the school’s most cherished athlete. In those days there was talk of him becoming an Olympic miler. But it never happened. Now he was greying and portly with bifocal glasses and he took several minutes to recognize me after we came through the door.
Andi’s grandparents had been members of Germany’s tiny ethnic minority of Sorbs, Slavs who from medieval times had retained their own culture and language. Nowadays they were mostly to be found in the extreme southeast corner of the DDR where Poland and Czechoslovakia meet. It is one of several places called the Dreiländereck – three-nation corner – a locality where they brew some of the finest beers in the world. Strangers came a long way to seek out Andi’s bar, and they weren’t all looking for women.
We exchanged banalities as if I’d never been away. His son Frank had married a pharmacist from Dresden, and I had little alternative but to go through an album of wedding photos and make appreciative noises, and drink beer, and a few schnapps chasers, while the kid looked at his watch and fretted. I didn’t show Andi pictures of my wife and family and he didn’t ask to see any. Andi was quick on the uptake, the way all barmen become. He knew that whatever kind of job I did nowadays it wasn’t one you did with a pocketful of identification material.
Once back on the road we made good time. ‘Smoke if you want to,’ the kid offered.
‘Not right now.’
‘I thought you were desperate for one of those East German nails?’
‘The feeling passed.’ I looked out at the landscape. I knew the area. Forests helped to conceal the military encampments, row upon row of huts complete with chain-link fences and coils of barbed-wire and tall watch-towers manned by men with guns and field-glasses. So big were these military camps, and so numerous, that it was not always possible to be sure where one ended and another began. Almost as abundant in the first fifty miles of our journey were the open-cast lignite mines where East Germany obtained the fuel to make electricity and to burn in a million household stoves and create the most polluted air in Europe. Winter had proved capricious this year, tightening and then loosening its grip on the landscape. The last few days had seen a premature thaw and had left snow patches to shine in the moonlight, marking the edges of the fields and higher ground. The back roads we’d chosen were icy in places and the kid kept to a sensible moderate speed. We were within fifteen miles of Magdeburg when we encountered the road-block.
We came upon it suddenly as we rounded a bend. The kid braked in response to an agitated waving of a lighted baton of the sort used by German police on both sides of the frontier.
‘Papers?’ said the soldier. He was a burly old fellow in camouflage fatigues and steel helmet. ‘Switch off the engine and the main beams.’ His country accent was perfect: something to put into the archives now that all East Germany’s kids were talking like TV announcers.
The kid switched off the car headlights, and in the sudden quiet I could hear the wind in the bare trees and subdued pop music coming from the guard hut. The man who’d spoken handed our papers over to another soldier with Leutnant’s tabs on his camouflage outfit. He examined them by means of a flashlight. It was the very hell of a place for a lengthy delay. A bleak landscape of turnip fields until, right across the horizon, like tall-stacked cruisers of the Kaiser’s coal-burning battle fleet, there stood a long line of factory chimneys, puffing out clouds of multicoloured smoke.
‘Get out,’ said the officer, a short slim man with a neatly trimmed moustache and steel-rimmed glasses. We got out. It was not a good sign. ‘Open the trunk.’
; When it was open the Leutnant used his flashlight and groped around the oily rags and spare wheel. He found a bottle of Swedish vodka there. It was still in a colourful fancy box they use for overpriced booze in airport duty-free shops.
‘You can keep it,’ the kid told him. The Leutnant gave no sign of hearing the kid’s offer. ‘A present from Sweden.’ But it was no use. The Leutnant was deaf to such bribes. He looked at our papers again, holding them close to his face so that the light reflected on to his face and made his spectacle lenses gleam. I shivered in the cold. For some reason the Leutnant didn’t seem interested in me. Maybe it was my rumpled suit with its unmistakable East German cut, or the pungent smell of Andi Krohn’s rot-gut apple-schnapps that had been repeating on me for the last half hour and was no doubt evident on my breath. But the kid was using a Swedish passport, and the identification that accompanied it described him as a Swedish engineer working for a construction company that was about to build a luxury hotel in Magdeburg. It was plausible, and anyway the kid’s German was not good enough to pass him off as a German national. The Swedes had made a corner for themselves building hotels to which only foreigners with hard currency were admitted, so it was a reasonable enough cover. But I wondered what would happen if someone started questioning him in Swedish.
I stamped around to keep my circulation moving. The trees were tormented by the wind and the skies had cleared enough to bring the temperature drop that always accompanies a sight of the stars. I didn’t envy these men their job. As we stood there on the country road the wind had that cruel bite that dampness brings. It was more than enough excuse for becoming bad-tempered.
The two soldiers circled the old dented Volvo, looking at it with that mixture of contempt and envy that Western luxuries so often produced in the Party faithful. Then, with the boot open, the two soldiers went back to their hut, leaving us standing there in the cold. I’d seen it all before: they were hoping we would get back into the car so that they could come back and scream at us. Or that we would close the trunk or even drive away, so that they could phone the back-up team at the next checkpoint and tell them to open fire at us. It wasn’t anything to take personally. All soldiers are inclined to get like that after too much guard duty.
Eventually they seemed to grow weary of their game. They returned and examined the car again, wondering perhaps if it would be diverting to tear the upholstery out of its interior and then make sure there was no contraband hidden inside the tyres. The Leutnant stayed close to us, still brandishing our papers, while the old man climbed into the back seat and prodded everything proddable. When he’d completed his examination he got out and looked again at the back. There was a loud bang as he slammed the trunk. When he returned he was carrying the vodka. The Leutnant gave us our papers. ‘You can go,’ he said. The older man hugged the fancy box to his chest and watched our reaction.
We got in the car and the kid started up the engine and switched on the lights. I turned my head. Just visible in the darkness the two men stood watching us depart. ‘We’ll be late,’ said the kid.
‘Take it very slowly,’ I said. ‘And if they shout “Stop”, stop.’
‘You bet,’ said the kid.
‘Militia,’ I said as we pulled away.
‘Yes,’ he said, suddenly turning testy now that the danger seemed past. ‘The accountant and one of the men from the packing shed playing soldiers.’
‘They have to do it.’
‘Yes, they have to do it. They started tightening up on the factory militias eighteen months ago.’
‘We were lucky.’
‘It usually goes like that nowadays,’ said the kid.
‘I thought we’d be sitting there all night,’ I said. ‘They like company.’
‘Not lately. It’s beginning to change. Lately they just like vodka.’
We were in the outskirts of Magdeburg, and running twenty-five minutes late, by the time he spoke again. ‘I screwed up,’ he said suddenly, and with that knotted anger that we reserve for our own errors.
‘What?’
‘Do you think we’ll be back by tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully.
‘I forgot to leave the key for my girlfriend. She won’t be able to feed the cat.’
I felt like saying that Rumtopf had more than enough body fat to sustain itself over a few foodless days, but people can be very unpredictable about their pet animals, so I grunted amiably.
‘This colonel, this VERDI, says he knows you. Is he working for us?’
‘Because he has a cover name? No. They all have those if we deal with them on a regular basis, or mention them in messages. Even Stalin had a cover name.’
‘VERDI says he owes you a favour; a big favour.’
I looked at him. ‘What’s he supposed to say?’ I’d had enough of this crap from Bret without more from the kid. ‘Is he supposed to say that I owe him a big favour? That would really get their attention in London Central, wouldn’t it?’
‘I suppose it would.’
‘Of course he’s going to say that he owes me a big favour. That’s the way these things are done: the person making contact always says he’s trying to repay a favour: a big favour. That way no one in London is likely to suspect that I’m going over there to bend the rules and do all kinds of things that the boys behind the desks have inscribed in their big brass-bound no-no book.’
‘I didn’t think of it like that,’ said the kid.
‘He’s a bastard,’ I said.
‘VERDI? SO you do know him?’
‘He thinks I owe him a favour.’
‘But you don’t? Is that what you mean?’
I thought about it. ‘He tossed an arrest certificate into the shredder instead of putting it on the teleprinter.’
‘That’s a favour,’ said the kid.
‘He had other reasons. Anyway favours done for the opposition are like money in the bank,’ I said resentfully. And then, before he thought it was a currency I stocked up on, I added: ‘For guys like that, I mean. They like being able to call in a few.’
The kid shot a sudden glance at me. I’d gone too far. I had the feeling he’d heard in my voice that note that said that I was under some kind of obligation to the bastard. And that was something I’d not until then admitted even to myself. ‘What’s your guess?’ the kid said. ‘Do you think he wants to talk?’
‘We all talk,’ I said. ‘Opposing field agents all talk. You bump into these guys all the time; at airports, in bars and on the job. Sometimes we talk. It can be useful. It’s the way the job is done. But we never ask questions.’
‘But if VERDI wants to go on the payroll we can start asking him questions. Okay, I understand now. But will he know something we need to hear?’
‘There is usually something worth hearing if they want to be helpful. If he gives us a few good targets; that would be valuable.’
‘What are good ones?’
‘Cipher clerks who gamble or borrow money,’ I said. ‘Department chiefs who drink, analysts who are screwing their secretary, translators who sniff. Vulnerable people.’
‘This one knows you. He’ll talk only to someone he knows.’
‘Yes, you told me. But I’ll take a lot of convincing he’s on the level.’
The car had slowed and the kid was looking at the street signs. ‘I know the house,’ he said. ‘I delivered a package here last month. Money I think.’
‘You live dangerously,’ I told him.
‘All this won’t last much longer,’ he said. ‘I want to get a little excitement while I can. I want to be able to tell my kids about it.’
He must have been talking to Bret. ‘You can have my share,’ I told him, and smiled. But such highly motivated youngsters worried me: so did these people who thought it was so nearly all over. There was once an old chap at the training school who started the very first day’s lecture saying: our job here is to change gallant young gentlemen into nervous old ladies. This kid needed that lect
ure badly.
2
Magdeburg, where we were headed, is one of the most ancient German cities, a provincial capital tucked into the most westerly bend of the River Elbe at a place where the river divides into three waterways. Its commanding site at the edge of the North German plain has always made it a target for plundering armies. Devastated by the Thirty Years War, it was razed again by the Second World War and even more thoroughly by the Soviet-style city-planners and architects who came after it.
Magdeburg has been a home to men as choosy as Otto the Great and Archbishop Burchard HI and the more refined members of the house of Brandenburg. So great was the power vested here that when they came to build the railway joining Paris to Moscow they diverted the line through Magdeburg. More than a century later, in the postwar race for growth, the city was hastily transformed into one of the world’s most polluted industrial regions, where the proletariat choked on untreated chemical waste and more than half the children were suffering from bronchitis and eczema. Now, as the Marxist empire shrank and its privileged ruling class felt threatened from all sides, the Stasi, the Party’s Moscow-styled secret police and security service, had chosen Magdeburg to make a fortified compound where its most secret and highly treasured documents and artifacts could be guarded and hidden. Even the mortal remains of Hitler and Goebbels had been secreted away in the compound.
‘Do you know where the Smersh compound begins?’ I asked him as we drove through the centre of town.
I’d almost forgotten how dark and bleak East German towns became after dark. There was little traffic, fewer pedestrians and no advertising signs. Two cops standing under a street light watched us pass with interest.
The kid glanced at me and smiled. ‘So they really call it the Smersh compound? I thought that was just something invented by the newspapers.’