by Len Deighton
On Wednesday night, after five days in custody, a soldier came for me in the middle of the night. I recognized him as one of the PT instructors. He was a wiry fellow with the inscrutable face that seems to go with gymnasts, as if prolonged exercise encourages the contemplative condition. He led me down the back stairs and through a part of the building I’d not seen before. We passed through the muggy kitchens and a succession of storerooms that had once been cellars. Finally he indicated that I should precede him.
As I bent my head under the low doorway, he hit me in the small of the back. He followed that with another punch that found the kidneys and sent a jolt of pain though my body from heel to head. It was like an electric shock and my mind blanked out as I contended with the intense pain. I fell like a tree.
It was dark, but there was another man in the darkness. He came from the shadows and caught me, giving me a couple of hard jabs in the belly that brought my supper up into my mouth. I tucked my head down and tried to cover myself from their blows but they weren’t deterred, nor inconvenienced. These two were experts. They worked on me systematically as if I was a side of beef being readied for the stewpot. After a few minutes one of them was taking my whole weight, holding me up to be punched. When he let go of me I crashed to the stone floor only half-conscious. I couldn’t think straight. Every part of my body was singing with pain. Under me I could feel coarse matting, and, reaching beyond its edge, smooth pavement. I moved enough to press my face against the cold stone. I vomited and tasted blood in my mouth.
The two men stood over me watching; I could see a glint of light, and their shoes. Then they went away, satisfied no doubt with the job they’d done. I heard their footsteps fade but I didn’t try to get up. I pressed my head against a bag of onions. At the bottom of the sack, rotten onions had fermented to become a foul-smelling liquid that oozed through the sacking. I blacked out and then came conscious several times. Despite the stench I remained there full-length for a long time before very very slowly rolling and snaking across the floor, slowly getting my back against the wall and inch by inch sitting up. No bones were broken; no bruises or permanent marks on my face. Theirs was not a spontaneous act of brutality or spite. They had been assigned to hurt me, but not permanently cripple me, and they’d done their job nicely. No hard feelings, chaps, it’s all in a day’s work for a soldier serving in a land ruled by generals. Lucky me that they hadn’t been told to tear me limb from limb, for I’m confident they would have done it with the same inscrutable proficiency. Having decided that, I lost consciousness again.
Someone must have carried me up to the room in the tower. I don’t remember anything of it but I certainly didn’t get there unassisted. But why, after a week of Mister Nice-guy, suddenly take me out of my bed and beat the daylights out of me without interrogation or promises? There was only one explanation and it slowly became clear to me. Some higher authority had ordered my release. This was Mr Reynolds’s tacit way of protesting that decision, and saying farewell to me.
Higher authority was satisfied, I suppose. The generals in Warsaw were not trying to provoke World War Three. They just wanted to show their opposite numbers in London that they didn’t like nosy strangers coming into their territory and doing the sort of things I’d done last Christmas at Rastenburg. They didn’t want me demonstrating short-take-off-and-landing aircraft after dark, and kidnapping useful Polish spies. They didn’t like me torching shiny new government-owned Volvo motor-cars which were in short supply in Poland in 1987. And they didn’t like the way I’d shot and wounded Polish security men who, having failed to stop me, had made sure that arrest-and-detain notices were posted throughout the land.
Well, that was my mistake; I should have killed the bastards.
Reynolds put me on the train the next night. He took me to the station in a car, talking all the time about his sister in America and pretending not to notice that his men had almost beaten the life out of me. It was the same Moscow-to-Paris express train, on the same day of the week. They even put me back into a compartment with the same number. My overcoat – which I’d not seen during my incarceration – was folded and stowed on the rack. Pointedly my passport was balanced on the small basket the railway provides for rubbish. Everything was the same, except that Jim and his nurse were not there.
The train compartment was warm. Outside it was snowing again. Wet dollops of it were sliding down the window glass. I slumped on the berth and stretched out. The pain of my beating had not abated and my clothes still had the sickening odour of putrid onions. My bruises and grazes were at that stage of development when the pain is at its most acute. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t even raise enough strength to get up and slide the door closed. From the compartment next door I heard the raised voices of a young American couple arguing with a soldier. They say it’s a political magazine,’ said the woman. She had a nice voice, with the sort of musical Boston accent that the Kennedy family made patrician.
‘I never saw it before,’ said the man. Then he repeated his denial loudly and in German.
There was a moment of silence, then the woman coughed and the man gave a short angry laugh.
I heard my door slide open. I half-opened my eyes and a Polish officer stepped inside to stare down at me. Then the sergeant joined him and the two of them moved on along the corridor. I suppose the American couple had picked up the local traditions without my assistance.
Some extra railway coaches were shunted and coupled to our train with a rattle and a jarring that shook me to the core. Then, after a great deal of whistling and shouted orders, the train clattered forward. I pulled the pillow over my ears.
2
The SIS residence, Berlin
‘That bloody man Kohl,’ said Frank Harrington, speaking with uncustomary bitterness about the German Federal Republic’s Chancellor. ‘It’s all his doing. Inviting that bastard Honecker to visit the Republic has completely demoralized all decent Germans – on both sides of the Wall.’
I nodded. Frank was probably right, and even if he hadn’t been right I would have nodded just as sagely; Frank was my boss. And everywhere I went in Berlin I found despondency about any chance of reforming the East German State, or replacing the stubbornly unyielding apparatchiki who ran it. Just a few months before – in September 1987 – Erich Honecker, Chairman of East Germany’s Council of State, Chairman of its National Defence Council and omnipotent General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, had been invited on a State visit to West Germany. Few Germans – East or West – had believed that such a shameless tyrant could ever be granted such recognition.
‘Kohl’s a snake in the grass,’ said Frank. ‘He knows what everyone here thinks about that monster Honecker but he’ll do anything to get re-elected.’
Kohl had certainly played his cards with skill. Inviting Honecker to visit the West had been a political bombshell that Kohl’s rivals found difficult to handle. The Saarland premier – Oskar Lafontaine – had been misguided enough to pose with the despised Honecker for a newspaper photo. The resulting outcry dealt Lafontaine’s Social Democrats a political setback. This, plus some clever equivocations, patriotic declarations and vague promises, revived the seemingly dead Chancellor Kohl and reaffirmed him in power.
Those who still hoped that Honecker’s visit to the West would be marked by some reduction of tyranny at home asked him to issue orders to stop his border guards shooting dead anyone who tried to escape from his bleak domain. ‘Fireside dreams are far from our minds,’ he said. ‘We take the existence of two sovereign states on German soil for granted.’
‘Kohl and his cronies have taken them all for a ride,’ I said. The ‘Wessies’ viewed Kohl’s political manipulation of the Honecker visit with that mixture of bitter contempt and ardent fidelity that Germans have always given to their leaders. On the other side of the Wall the ‘Ossies’, confined in the joyless DDR, were frustrated and angry. Grouped around TV sets, they had watched Kohl, and other West German politicians, being unctuous a
nd accommodating to their ruthless dictator, and blithely proclaiming that partition was a permanent aspect of Germany’s future.
‘It aged Strauss ten years, that visit,’ said Frank. I could never tell when he was joking; Frank was not noted for his humour but his jokes were apt to be cruel and dark ones. From his powerbase in Munich, Franz Josef Strauss had proclaimed something he’d said many times before: ‘The German Reich of 1945 has legally never been abolished; the German question remains open.’ It was not what Honecker wanted to hear. He might have won Kohl over, but Strauss remained Honecker’s most effective long-term critic.
We were downstairs in Frank’s house in Grunewald, the home that came with the post of Head of Station in Berlin. It was late afternoon, and the dull cloudy sky did little to make the large drawing-room less sombre. Yellow patches of light from electric table-lamps fell upon a ferocious carpet of bright red and green flowers. A Bechstein grand piano glinted in one corner. Upon its polished top, rank upon rank of family photos paraded in expensive frames. Playing centre-forward for this team stood a silver-framed photo of Frank’s son, a one-time airline pilot who had found a second career as a publisher of technical aviation books. Behind the serried relatives there was a cut-glass vase of long-stem roses imported from some foreign climate to help forget that Berlin’s gardens were buried deep under dirt-encrusted snow. All around the room there were Victorian paintings of a sooty and hazy London: Primrose Hill, the Crystal Palace and Westminster Abbey all in heavy gilt frames and disappearing behind cracked and darkening coach varnish. Arranged around a polished mahogany coffee table there were two big uncomfortable sofas in blue damask, and three wing armchairs with matching upholstery. One of these Frank kept positioned exactly facing the massive speakers of his elaborate hi-fisystem, its working parts concealed inside a birchwood Biedermeier tallboy that had been disembowelled to accommodate it. Sometimes Frank felt bound to explain that the tallboy had been badly damaged before suffering this terminal surgery.
Frank was relaxed in his lumpy chair. Thin elegant legs crossed, a drink at his elbow and a chewed old Dunhill pipe in his mouth. From time to time he disappeared from view behind a sombre haze, not unlike the coach varnish that obscured the views of London, except for its pungent smell. After a period of denial, which had caused him – and indeed everyone who worked with him – mental and physical stress, he’d now surrendered to his nicotine addiction with vigour and delight.
‘I read the report,’ said Frank, removing the pipe from his mouth and prodding into its bowl with the blade of a Swiss army penknife. Seen like this, in his natural habitat, Frank Harrington was the model Englishman. Educated but not intellectual, a drinker who was never drunk, his hair greying and his bony face lined without him looking aged, his impeccably tailored pinstripe suit not new, and everything worn with a hint of neglect: the appearance and manner which knowing foreigners so often admire and rash ones imitate.
I sipped my whisky and waited. I had been summoned to this meeting in Frank’s home by means of a handwritten memo left on my desk by Frank in person. Only he would have fastened it to my morning Berliner doughnut by means of a push-pin. Such formal orders were infrequent, and I knew I’d not been brought here to hear Frank’s views on the more Byzantine stratagems of Germany’s political adventurers. I wondered what was really in his mind. So far there had been little official reaction to my delayed return to Berlin, and the detention in Poland that caused it. When I arrived I reported to Frank and told him I’d been arrested and released without charges. He was on the phone when I went into his office. He capped the phone, mumbled something about my preparing a report for London, and waved me absent. I resumed my duties as his deputy, as if I’d not been away. The written report I had submitted was brief and formal, with an underlying inference that it was a matter of mistaken identity.
I was sitting on one of the sofas in an attempt to keep my distance from the polluting product of Frank’s combustion. Before me there was a silver tray with a crystal ice bucket, tongs, and a cut-glass tumbler into which a double measure of Laphroaig whisky had been precisely measured by Tarrant. He’d put the whisky bottle away again, but left on the table a bottle of Apollinaris water from which I was helping myself. Shell-shaped silver dishes contained calculated amounts of salted nuts and potato chips and there was a large silver box that I knew contained a selection of cigarettes. Tarrant, Frank’s butler, had arranged a similar array on Frank’s side of the coffee table. Apart from Frank’s expensive hi-fi, Tarrant had ensured that the household and its routines were not modified by advances in science or fashion. As far as I could see, Frank did the same thing for the Department.
On an inlaid tripod table, booklets and files were arranged in fans, like periodicals in a dentist’s waiting-room. From the table Frank took the West German passport I’d been using when detained in Poland. He flipped its pages distastefully and looked from the identity photo to me and then at the photo again. ‘This photograph,’ he said finally. ‘Is it really you?’
‘It was all done in a bit of a hurry,’ I explained.
‘Going across there with a smudgy picture of someone else in your passport is a damned stupid way of doing things. Why not an authentic picture?’
‘An identity picture is like ethnic food,’ I said. ‘The less authentic it is the better.’
‘Can you elaborate on that a little?’ said Frank, playing the innocent.
‘Because the UB photocopy, and file away, every passport that goes through their hands,’ I said.
‘Ahhh,’ said Frank, sounding unconvinced. He slid the passport across the table to me. It was a sign that he wasn’t going to take the matter any further. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
‘Don’t use it again,’ said Frank. ‘Put it away with your Beatles records and that Nehru jacket.’
‘I won’t use it again, Frank,’ I said. I’d never worn a Nehru jacket or anything styled remotely like one, but I would always remain the teenager he’d once known. There was no way of escaping that.
‘You are senior staff now. The time for all those shenanigans is over.’ He picked up my report and shook it as if something might fall from the pages. ‘London will read this. There is no way I can sit on it for ever.’
I nodded.
‘And you know what they will say?’
I waited for him to say that London would suspect that I’d gone to Moscow only in order to see Gloria. But he said: ‘You were browbeating Jim Prettyman. That’s what they will say. What did you get out of him? You may as well tell me, so that I can cover my arse.’
‘Jim Prettyman?’
‘Don’t do that, Bernard,’ said Frank with just a touch of aggravation.
If it was a chess move, it was an accomplished one. To avoid the accusation that I was grilling Prettyman I would have to say that I was there to see Gloria. ‘Prettyman was more or less unconscious. There was little chance of my doing anything beyond tucking him into bed and changing his bedpans, and there was a nurse to do that. What would I be grilling Prettyman about, anyway?’
‘Come along, Bernard. Have you forgotten all those times you told me that Prettyman was the man behind those who wanted your sister-in-law killed?’
‘I said that? When did I say it?’
‘Not in as many words,’ said Frank, retreating a fraction. ‘But that was the gist of it. You thought London had plotted the death of Fiona’s sister so that her body could be left over there. Planted so that our KGB friends would be reassured that Fiona was dead, and not telling us all their secrets.’
Fortified by the way Frank had put my suspicions of London in the past tense, I put down my drink and stared at him impassively. I suppose I must have done a good job on the facial expression, for Frank shifted uncomfortably and said: ‘You’re not going to deny it now, are you, Bernard?’
‘I certainly am,’ I said, without adding any further explanation.
‘If you are leading me up the garden path, I’ll have your g
uts for garters.’ Frank’s vocabulary was liberally provided with schoolboy expressions of the nineteen thirties.
‘I’m trying to put all that behind me,’ I said. ‘It was getting me down.’
‘That’s good,’ said Frank who, along with the Director-General and his Deputy, Bret Rensselaer, had frequently advised me to put it all behind me. ‘Some field agents are able to do their job and combine it with a more or less normal family life. It’s not easy, but some do it.’
I nodded and wondered what was coming. I could see Frank was in one of his philosophical moods and they usually ended up with a softly delivered critical summary that helped me sort it all out.
‘You are one of the best field agents we ever had working out of this office,’ said Frank, sugaring the pill. ‘But perhaps that’s because you live the job night and day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’
‘Do I, Frank? It’s nice of you to say that.’
He could hear the irony in my voice but he ignored it. ‘You never tell anyone the whole truth, Bernard. No one. Every thought is locked up in that brain of yours and marked secret. I’m locked out; your colleagues are locked out. I suppose it’s the same with your wife and children; I suppose you tell them only what they should know.’
‘Sometimes not even that,’ I said.
‘I saw Fiona the day before yesterday. She annihilated some poor befuddled Ministry fogey, she made the chairman apologize for inaccurate minutes of the previous meeting and, using the ensuing awkward silence, carried the vote for some training project they were trying to kill. She’s dynamite, that wife of yours. They are all frightened of her; the FO people I mean.’