by Len Deighton
‘Stick to the plan,’ I said. ‘Assume the dead man wasn’t VERDI; assume VERDI is on the run.’
‘You’re crazy. We’re sticking our necks out for nothing.’
‘Maybe I am crazy. You’ve never been out there where we all go crazy, or maybe you’d be crazy too.’ I remembered so many times when things had gone wrong for me. The field agent always desperately hopes that the operation can be salvaged. You hope like hell that the men assigned to meet you won’t just cut their losses and run. ‘We’ll go to the safe house and wait for an hour until the Stasi alert teams have done their preliminary checks. Driving in these rural parts in the small hours of the morning makes me feel very conspicuous. Any time now they’ll have a chopper overhead.’
‘It’s a village church about eight miles from here. The pastor is one of our people; an experienced man.’
‘Let’s do it,’ I said. ‘Let’s get off the road and come back on it when the commuter traffic starts. We’re too bloody visible out here in the sticks in the night.’
Before the war this village had been neat and prosperous, a dazzling prospect of whitewashed walls, flowers and well-kept farms with the church its cherished heart. Now it was a miserable little huddle of houses. Its ancient church had been destroyed, along with half the village, by a jettisoned RAF bomb-load in 1944. After the war ended the Red Army garrison commander had permitted the villagers to build a hut on the same site and continue to hold services. The postwar German communist politicians were more actively hostile to the Church than the Russian troops had been, and now that temporary structure – patched and propped – was still the villagers’ only place of worship.
We parked the Volvo alongside a rusty tractor in the barn and the kid found some keys hidden in the bowels of the tractor’s engine. Under the temporary hut the crypt of the old church had been restored to use. He took me down a flight of stone steps and when he switched on the lights the whole crypt, an extensive vaulted subterranean area, was revealed. One section had been divided off and made into a chapel with a permanent altar and a strange assortment of chairs that had probably been collected over the years, donated by the congregation. A large austere altar and a candelabra looked as if they had been salvaged from the wreckage of the razed church, repaired and restored to become the centre-piece of this improvised sanctuary.
The pastor arrived five minutes after we got there. Jumping out of bed fully alert in the middle of the night is a part of the job for a good pastor just as it is for a field agent, fireman or cop.
The old pastor seemed strangely familiar: weathered face with wrinkles and old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses. I remembered having seen him a couple of times in Berlin, at the houses of mutual acquaintances. Now he displayed unlimited energy as he strode about switching on lights and tidying up misplaced coffee cups and pamphlets, prayer books and dried flowers with that dedication that neurotics display when they need time to think. A woman in a sleeveless floral-pattern house-coat arrived and without a word brewed a jug of foul-smelling coffee for us, while the pastor kept up small-talk about his village and masterfully restrained any temptation to ask us questions.
‘We lost contact,’ the kid told him as we drank our coffee. ‘Our man is unlikely to have revealed – or even been told – that this was our first stop, but I wanted to go through the motions.’ He turned to include me in his speech, as if I might otherwise contradict him and tell the pastor that our man was dead on a blood-soaked sofa in Magdeburg. And that we were fugitives who’d murdered a government official, probably bringing retribution hard on our heels.
‘Poor devil,’ said the pastor with convincing concern. He turned around fully now, as if the time had come to give us his full attention. ‘If he’s out there with a general alarm ringing in his ears, I hope God is watching over him.’ I wondered how much the pastor had been told. Draped upon a chair I noticed a dark suit and outer clothes, smelling strongly of moth-repellent. If these were intended to disguise our missing escapee the pastor might have been told quite a lot, right down to VERDI’s shoe size.
The kid said: ‘Someone was killed – it might have been our contact who was killed … And we had trouble on the road. You should be prepared for house-to-house searches.’
‘It’s not often that things go according to plan,’ the pastor said, remaining almost unnaturally calm in the circumstances. The only sign of anxiety came in the way he took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one with that steady determination that is the mark of the addict. He blew smoke. ‘It’s in the nature of undercover work that the unexpected so often happens. You plan for three different eventualities but the fourth occurs.’ He grinned and reached for the coffee jug. ‘Moltke said it: he said it about war.’
‘No more coffee for me.’ I put my hand across the top of the china mug.
‘This is a war that is going on here,’ he said. ‘It’s no use denying it. Men are always at war. We are always at war because every man is at war with himself.’
‘Is that another of Moltke’s sayings?’ I asked him.
He’d been looking at me quizzically and now – jug in hand – he ventured: ‘We met. Remember? Some sort of celebration in a private house in Köpenick … No; wait: a hotel off the Ku-Damm and a fancy-dress party. I know your wife?’
It was framed as a question. ‘It’s possible,’ I said warily.
‘Yes, I worked with her. She is a great woman.’ He said it with a depth of reverence and awe that startled me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Perhaps my subdued response prompted him to tell me more: ‘She started us on our first steps to freedom. We have a long way to go of course, but it was your wife who taught us that we must fight. We had never fought. It was a hard lesson to learn.’
I must have looked puzzled. It was no longer a secret that my wife had defected to the East in an elaborate and successful scheme that had encouraged widespread grassroots opposition to the communist rulers. I’d heard other people speak of my wife’s profound achievements and I’d always nodded it through. This time I didn’t. ‘What did she do?’ I asked him.
He smiled. He had one of those rubber-mask faces that relax naturally into a grin. It was an old-fashioned face: the sort Hollywood used to cast as a priest who plays the harmonica and says wise things to Bing Crosby.
‘You’ve got to understand how it has always been for the Church in Germany,’ he said. ‘Countless small principalities, the religion of each of them decided by its ruling prince or bishop. That ensured that the Church and State were indivisible. Even in Nazi times, the State’s tax-gathering officers collected Church dues from every citizen and paid them to the Church. Little wonder that we churchmen found it so difficult to confront the Nazis, and then after the war even more difficult to resist the institutionalized anti-Christ of communism. We became dependants of the State. But your wife told the Churches of all denominations that if this monstrous regime under which we suffer is ever to be resisted and overthrown, the rallying places must be sanctuaries offered by the Church: the German churches.’ He sipped his coffee. The kid and I were silenced by this display of emotion. The pastor added: ‘Lenin said “Whoever controls Germany, possesses Europe.” This will be the last place the communists yield.’
His passionate speech had made me uneasy, but such deeply held feelings were needed by anyone confronting the communists in their police-State. For lately the politicians here had seen what was happening to their fellows – the communist crooks who were running the neighbouring countries – and were beginning to identify the Churches as their most dangerous enemy.
‘I say a prayer for her,’ said the pastor. ‘All my flock say a prayer for her. Cherish her.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It will be getting light,’ said the kid. He’d been shuffling about as if made uncomfortable by this high-flown talk.
‘You are too young to understand,’ said the pastor gently. ‘Only old men know enough to cry.’
Suddenly I re
membered where I’d last seen the pastor. He’d been at a big fancy-dress party at Lisl Hennig’s hotel in West Berlin. It was the night when everything seemed to go wrong. My wife was brought out of the East that night. We were involved in a stupid gun battle on the Autobahn and I saw Tessa my sister-in-law murdered. That night I left Germany and solemnly vowed I would never come back here. Never. ‘Yes, I remember you now,’ I told the pastor. ‘That party in the hotel near the Ku-Damm.’ Amid that frantic collection of revellers, in his dark clerical suit and dog-collar, I had taken the pastor for just another guest in fancy dress. Perhaps his presence there that night supplied one of the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was still far from complete.
‘Yes, I was there that night,’ he admitted. He’d been about to add something else but now he stopped suddenly as we heard the sound of vehicles coming along the road. Several of them. They slowed and turned into the cobbled churchyard where we had left the Volvo in the barn. I hoped they wouldn’t search the premises, for the Volvo with its West licence plates would make them start tearing everything apart.
‘Pray!’ said the pastor and dropped to his knees. I heard them more clearly now. Two vehicles: one heavy diesel and one petrol. There were loud squeaks and the hiss of hydraulic brakes. A car door opened and slammed. That meant one person. It was a bad sign. I had no doubt that the heavy truck contained an armed assault team of barrack-police who were now sitting silent and alert and waiting for orders. ‘Pray!’ said the pastor again, and I sank down on my knees before him, as did the kid and the woman who’d made the coffee.
The pastor began a droning litany of prayers as metal boot studs sounded on the stone steps. With a stifled groan of pain the woman got to her feet, rubbed her arthritic knee, and went to receive the visitor with a soft and deferential greeting on her lips and a cup of hot coffee in her hand. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked him.
‘Yes,’ said the cop without explaining further. He sipped the coffee.
‘A night of continuous prayer,’ she said, and explained our presence as bereaved parishioners from a neighbouring town. She had a strong local accent and as the explanation continued I could follow it only with difficulty.
Out of my half-closed eyes I could see the policeman standing feet apart staring at us. His uniform revealed him as a local cop, sent no doubt to lead a team of outsiders from Magdeburg – draftees perhaps – who didn’t know the country districts. Impatient toots of a car horn made the cop look at his watch. Then there was the sound of another car door and the hurried clatter of boots. ‘You haven’t got time for cups of coffee,’ came a shout from the top of the stone steps. The unseen commander – disconcertingly accurate in his guess about the coffee – had a voice that was hard and Berlinerisch, the accent that educated urbane men use to command those they regard as country bumpkins.
Jolted by the accusation the cop pushed the coffee cup back into the woman’s hand. ‘All is in order here, Captain,’ the policeman shouted, and started back up to join his commander. The German Democratic Republic – more realistically an undemocratic dictatorship run by the Soviets – was changing. Out here in the country districts some of the more cautious officials had begun hedging their bets against the day when the unthinkable happened, and their beat became part of a truly democratic republic with all the dangerous consequences such a turn-round could bring to those in rural isolation.
‘You need not pretend to pray any more,’ said the pastor when the sound of the two vehicles had dwindled to nothing.
‘I wasn’t pretending,’ I said. The old man looked at me and rose to his feet.
There was just a thin line of purple along the skyline as we got back on the road. The kid was driving: I wanted to look around.
‘The pastor is a decent old man. His family had a big estate here. They were landowners since goodness knows when. He volunteered for the U-boats,’ said the kid. ‘After the war, when he was released from the POW camp in England he came back and found that the family estate had been confiscated without compensation. It was rotten luck. The Russians only seized farms larger than 250 acres and theirs was only a few acres larger than that.’
‘Then he found God,’ I said.
‘No, that’s the funny thing. He became a fervent communist at first. It was only afterwards that he went back to the Church and then started working against the regime.’
‘It happens.’
‘He said he used to think that Karl Marx was an economist. It was when he realized that Marx was a moralist that he began to see how deeply the theories were flawed.’ When I made no response to this he said: ‘Have you read Marx?’
‘Karl Marx was a nut,’ I said. ‘He should have kept his mouth shut like Harpo.’
‘We’ll be in Berlin early. Do you want to return the gun to your friend?’
‘Didn’t I tell you to forget about the gun?’
I’d let my anger show. ‘Sorry, boss.’
‘I must get rid of it. I’m glad you reminded me.’
‘Is it the shooting you’re worried about?’
‘Who said I was worried?’
‘You did everything exactly right,’ he said, with an exuberance calculated to cheer me up. ‘It was terrific.’
‘But it smells all wrong,’ I said. ‘Who were those bruisers?’
‘In a shiny new 500 SEL Merc? They were Stasis or left-behind KGB or something. They weren’t innocent peasants on their way to church, if that’s what’s worrying you.’
‘They did nothing except drive along a public road. I shot holes in them.’
‘You can’t be serious?’
‘They didn’t shoot back, that’s what’s worrying me. This is their territory. In a car like that they always stow all manner of weapons … and heavies like that get their shots in first.’
‘But …?’
‘I have a feeling we were set up. I have a nasty feeling that – apart from my shooting that driver – we did everything the other side wanted us to do, right from the moment we were stopped at that militia checkpoint.’
‘Well if you are right, we sure put a spanner in the works.’ He was not to be deprived of his gleeful satisfaction.
‘And don’t mention Krohn’s bar or that damned handgun in your report.’
‘You can rely on me, old-timer.’
‘And you can leave out the old-timer, Kinkypoo.’
3
‘I have your report,’ said Frank Harrington. ‘I read it very carefully.’ Frank Harrington was Head of the Berlin Field Unit. Because the Russians call their equivalent outfits rezidentura he was usually called the Berlin Rezident, and that had passed into official use. Frank, although no longer young, had a soldier’s bearing, a pale face and blunt-ended stubbly moustache, so that he was frequently mistaken for an officer of the British garrison. He’d been one of my father’s best friends.
I didn’t respond. Dicky Cruyer, Controller of German Stations and temporarily in charge of Operations in London, had come hurrying to Berlin. Presumably he wanted to be here when VERDI arrived. Now he stood by the window peering through the louvred window shutters to see down into Frank Harrington’s extensive back garden, sucking on the end of his Mont Blanc fountain-pen and trying not to interrupt. Although these days it was growing more and more difficult to distinguish soldiers from anyone else, a soldier was not the first guess one would make about Dicky Cruyer’s occupation. His curly hair was too bushy and he favoured faded designer denim, and the sort of tall elaborately decorated cowboy boots that he was wearing today.
In another part of the city, the Berlin offices were temporarily hidden behind a cocoon of scaffolding, and enjoying a long-overdue redecoration. To get away from the mating cries of construction workers, the regular clang and jangle of metal rods dropped from a height upon pavement and the pungent smell of paint, Frank was staying home and using the office he’d established in one of the upstairs rooms of his grand old Berlin mansion in Grunewald. None of the room lights were lit, and on
ly a thin melancholy daylight filtered through the window shutters. The sombre light in the domestic surroundings, the stillness, and the silence into which the two men had fallen, produced a feeling that they shared some almost overwhelming sorrow into which I found it difficult to break. And now I waited for one or the other of them to speak.
I looked around. This was the mansion provided to Frank in his capacity of Rezident, and I had known this room since my father occupied that coveted post. There was the same buttoned leather bench, scarred, whitened and worn but as familiar as an old friend. The wall was adorned with the horned heads of various fleet-footed quadrupeds. It was difficult to believe that Frank had actually shot any of these mournful beasts, for Frank – despite his wistful attitude to the profession of arms – had always showed a curious antipathy for guns. Getting him to issue any sort of handgun was such a struggle that most of the field agents found it simpler to provide their own. Amid the trophies of the hunt there was a formal sepia-coloured portrait photo of the Queen. It hung immediately above a camphor-wood military chest upon which Frank Harrington’s ancient typewriter was enshrined; a totem of the ascendant role of paperwork in service to the Crown.
Unforgettably, it was also the day that the heating of Frank’s mansion suffered a failure that defied all the efforts of three determined heating engineers and now caused all three of us to be wearing our overcoats. The antique stove, six feet tall, standing in the corner clad with lovely old blue pattern tiles, had been coaxed into use for the first time in many decades. The comfort it gave was entirely illusory. Despite the efforts of Frank’s servants with bundles of kindling and screwed-up pages from Der Spiegel followed by the more inflammatory sheets of Die Welt, there was no sign of flame through its dull and discoloured mica door, but the distinctive aroma of burned paper made my nostrils twitch.