by Len Deighton
Dawlish touched his finger-tips together and looked at me sardonically.
‘You think I am too old for this job, don’t you?’
I said nothing.
‘If we decide not to continue with Vulkan’s contract there is no question of leaving him available for the highest bidder.’
I didn’t think old Dawlish could make me shiver.
* * *
1 Foreign Office Intelligence Unit.
2 West Berlin HQ. MI6 use the offices.
Chapter 4
The Berlin Defence is a classic defence by
means of counter-attack.
Sunday, October 6th
The parade ground of Europe has always been that vast area of scrub and lonely villages that stretches eastward from the Elbe—some say as far as the Urals. But halfway between the Elbe and the Oder, sitting at attention upon Brandenburg, is Prussia’s major town—Berlin.
From two thousand feet the Soviet Army War Memorial in Treptower Park is the first thing you notice. It’s in the Russian sector. In a space like a dozen football pitches a cast of a Red Army soldier makes the Statue of Liberty look like it’s standing in a hole. Over Marx-Engels Platz the plane banked steeply south towards Tempelhof and the thin veins of water shone in the bright sunshine. The Spree flows through Berlin as a spilt pail of water flows through a building site. The river and its canals are lean and hungry and they slink furtively under roads that do not acknowledge them by even the smallest hump. Nowhere does a grand bridge and a wide flow of water divide the city into two halves. Instead it is brickedup buildings and sections of breeze block that bisect the city, ending suddenly and unpredictably like the lava flow of a cold-water Pompeii.
Johnnie Vulkan brought a friend and a black Cadillac to meet me at Tempelhof.
‘Major Bailis, US Army,’ said Johnnie. I shook hands with a tall leathery American who was buttoned deep into a white Aquascutum trench coat. He offered me a cigar while the baggage was being checked.
‘It’s good to have you with us,’ said the major and Johnnie said the same.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘This is a town where one needs friends.’
‘We’ve put you into the Frühling,’ the major said. ‘It’s small, comfortable, unobtrusive and very, very Berlin.’
‘Fine,’ I said; it sounded OK.
Johnnie moved quickly through the traffic in the sleek Cadillac. Cutting across the city from west to east is a ten-lane highway that successive generations have named ‘Unter den Linden’ and ‘Strasse des 17. Juni’ and once was a gigantic path leading through the Brandenburger Tor to the royal palace.
‘We just call it Big Street,’ said the American as Johnnie moved into the fast lane. In the distance the statue on the Tor glinted gold in the afternoon sun, beyond it in the Soviet sector a flat concrete plain named Marx-Engels Platz stood where communist demolition teams had razed the Schloss Hohenzollern.
We turned towards the Hilton.
Just a little way down the street beyond the shell of the Gedächtniskirche with its slick modern tower—like a tricky sort of hi-fi speaker cabinet—apeing the old broken one is Kranzlers, a cafe that spreads itself across the Kurfürstendamm pavement. We ordered coffee and the US army major sat on the far side of the table and spent ten minutes tying the laces of his shoes. Across in the ‘Quick Cafe’ two girls with silver hair were eating Bockwurst.
I looked at Johnnie Vulkan. Growing older seemed to agree with him. He didn’t look a day over forty, his hair was like a tailored Brillo pad and his face tanned. He wore a well-cut Berlin suit of English pinhead worsted. He leaned back in his chair and pointed a finger lazily towards me. His hand was so sunburned that his nails seemed pale pink. He said, ‘Before we start, let’s get one thing clear. No one here needs help; you are superfluous to requirements as far as I am concerned. Just remember that; stay out of the way and everything will be OK. Get in the way and…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘This is a dangerous town.’ He kept his hand pointing into my face and gave a flash of a smile.
I looked at him for a moment. I looked at his smile and at his hand.
‘Next time you point a finger at someone, Johnnie,’ I said, ‘remember that three of your fingers are pointing back at you.’ He lowered his hand as though it had become heavy.
‘Stok is our contact,’ he said quietly.
I was surprised. Stok was a Red Army colonel in State Security.1
‘It’s official then?’ I asked. ‘An official exchange.’
Vulkan chuckled and glanced at the major.
‘It’s more what you might call extra-curricular. Official but extra-curricular,’ he said again, loud enough for the American to hear. The American laughed and went back to his shoelace.
‘The way we hear it, there is a lot of extracurricular activity here in Berlin.’
‘Dawlish been complaining?’ Vulkan asked, captiously.
‘Hinting.’
‘Well, you tell him I’ll have to have more than my present lousy two thousand a month if it’s exclusive service he’s after.’
‘You tell him,’ I said. ‘He’s on the phone.’
‘Look,’ said Vulkan, his solid gold wristwatch peeping out from the pristine cuff. ‘Dawlish has no idea of the situation here. My contact with Stok is…’ Vulkan made a movement with his cupped hand to indicate a superlative.
‘Stok is one thousand times brighter than Dawlish and he runs his show from on the spot, not from an office desk hundreds of miles away. If I can bring Semitsa over the wire it will be because I personally know some important people in this town. People I can rely on and who can rely on me. All Dawlish has to do is collect the kudos and leave me alone.’
‘What I think Dawlish needs to know,’ I said, ‘is what Colonel Stok will require in return if he delivers Semitsa—what you call—over the wire.’
‘Almost certainly cash.’
‘I had a premonition it would be.’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Vulkan, loud enough to bring the American out of his reverie. ‘Major Bailis is the official US Army observer for this transaction. I don’t have to put up with dirty talk like that.’
The American took off his sunglasses and said, ‘Yes, siree. That’s the size of it.’ Then he put his glasses back on again.
I said, ‘Just to make quite sure that you don’t promise anything we wouldn’t like: make sure I’m there at your next meeting with comrade Colonel Stok, eh?’
‘Difficult,’ said Johnnie.
‘But you’ll manage it,’ I said, ‘because that’s what we pay you for.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Vulkan.
* * *
1 KGB (see Appendix 4).
Chapter 5
When a player offers a piece for exchange or
sacrifice then surely he has in mind a
subsequent manœuvre which will
end to his advantage.
Monday, October 7th
Brassieres and beer; whiskies and worsteds; great words carved out of coloured electricity and plastered along the walls of the Ku-damm. This was the theatre-in-the-round of western prosperity: a great, gobbling, yelling, laughing stage crowded with fat ladies and dwarfs, marionettes on strings, fireeaters, strong men and lots of escapologists. ‘Today I joined the cast,’ I thought. ‘Now they’ve got an illusionist.’ Beneath me the city lay in huge patches of light and vast pools of darkness where rubble and grass fought gently for control of the universe.
Inside my room the phone rang. Vulkan’s voice was calm and unhurried.
‘Do you know the Warschau restaurant?’
‘Stalin Allee,’ I said; it was a well-known bourse for information pedlars.
‘They call it Karl Marx Allee now,’ said Vulkan sardonically. ‘Have your car facing west in the car park across the Allee. Don’t get out of your car, flash your lights. I’ll be ready to go at 9.20. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said.
I followed the line of the canal from the B
erlin Hilton to Hallesches Tor U-Bahnstation, then turned north on to Friedrichstrasse. The control point is a few blocks north. I flipped a passport to the American soldier and an insurance card to the West German policeman, then in bottom gear I moved across the tram tracks of Zimmerstrasse that bump you into a world where ‘communist’ is not a dirty word.
It was a warm evening and a couple of dozen transients sat under the blue neon light in the checkpoint hut; stacked neatly on tables were piles of booklets and leaflets with titles like ‘Science of the GDR in the service of Peace’, ‘Art for the People’ and ‘Historic Task of the GDR and the future of Germany’.
‘Herr Dorf.’ A very young frontier policeman held my passport and riffed the corners. ‘How much money are you carrying?’
I spread the few Westmarks and English pounds on the desk. He counted them and endorsed my papers.
‘Cameras or transistor radio?’
At the other end of the corridor a boy in a leather jacket with ‘Rhodesia’ painted on it shouted, ‘How much longer do we have to wait here?’
I heard a Grepo say to him, ‘You’ll have to take your turn, sir—we didn’t send for you, you know.’
‘Just the car radio,’ I said.
The Grepo nodded.
He said, ‘The only thing we don’t allow is East German currency.’ He gave me my passport,1 smiled and saluted. I walked down the long hut. The Rhodesian was saying, ‘I know my rights,’ and rapping on the counter but everyone else was staring straight ahead.
I walked across to the parking bay. I drove around the concrete blocks, a Vopo gave a perfunctory glance at my passport and a soldier swung the red-and-white striped barrier skywards. I drove forward into East Berlin. There were crowds of people at Friedrichstrasse station. People coming home from work, going to work or just hanging around waiting for something to happen. I turned right at Unter den Linden—where the lime trees had been early victims of Nazidom; the old Bismarck Chancellery was a cobweb of rusty ruins facing the memorial building where two green-clad sentries with white gloves were goose-stepping like Bismarck was expected back. I drove around the white plain of Marx-Engels Platz and, at the large slab-sided department store at Alexanderplatz, took the road that leads to Karl Marx Allee.
I recognized the car park and pulled into it. Karl Marx Allee was still the same as when it had been Stalin Allee. Miles of workers’ flats and state shops housed in seven-storey Russian-style architecture, thirty-foot-wide pavements and huge grassy spaces and cycle tracks like the M1.
In the open-air cafe across the road, lights winked under the trees and a few people danced between the striped parasols while a small combo walked their baby back home with lots of percussion. ‘Warschau’, the lights spelled out and under them I saw Vulkan get to his feet. He waited patiently until the traffic lights were in his favour before walking towards the car park. A careful man, Johnnie; this was no time to collect a jaywalking ticket. He got into a Wartburg, pulled away eastward down Karl Marx Allee. I followed keeping one or two cars between us.
Johnnie parked outside a large granite house in Köpenick. I edged past his car and parked under a gas lamp around the corner. It was not a pretty house but it had that mood of comfort and complacency that middle-class owners breathe into the structure of a house along with dinner-gong echoes and cigar smoke. There was a large garden at the back and here near the forests and the waters of Müggelsee the air smelled clean.
There was just one name-plate on the door. It was of neat black plastic: ‘Professor Eberhard Lebowitz’, engraved in ornate Gothic lettering. Johnnie rang and a maid let us into the hall.
‘Herr Stok?’ said Johnnie.
He gave her his card and she tiptoed away into the interior.
In the dimly lit hall there stood a vast hallstand with some tricky inlaid ivory, two clothes-brushes and a Soviet officer’s peaked hat. The ceiling was a complex pattern of intaglio leaves and the floral wallpaper looked prehensile.
The maid said, ‘Will you please come this way?’ and led us into Stok’s drawing-room. The wallpaper was predominantly gold and silver but there were plenty of things hiding the wallpaper. There were aspidistras, fussy lace curtains, shelves full of antique Meissen and a cocktail cabinet like a small wooden version of the Kremlin. Stok looked up from the 21-inch baroque TV. He was a big-boned man, his hair was cropped to the skull and his complexion was like something the dog had been playing with. When he stood up to greet us his huge hands poked out of a bright red silk smoking-jacket with gold-braid frogging.
Vulkan said, ‘Herr Stok; Herr Dorf,’ and then he said, ‘Herr Dorf; Herr Stok,’ and we all nodded at each other, then Vulkan put a paper bag down on the coffee table and Stok drew an eight-ounce tin of Nescafé out of it, nodded, and put it back again.
‘What will you drink?’ Stok asked. He had a musical basso voice.
‘Just before we move into the chat,’ I said, ‘can I see your identity card?’
Stok pulled his wallet out of a hip pocket, smiled archly at me and then peeled loose the stiff white card with a photo and two rubber stamps that Soviet citizens carry when abroad.
‘It says that you are Captain Maylev here,’ I protested as I laboriously pronounced the Cyrillic script.
The servant girl brought a tray of tiny glasses and a frosted bottle of vodka. She set the tray down. Stok paused while she withdrew.
‘And your passport says that you are Edmond Dorf,’ said Stok, ‘but we are both victims of circumstance.’
Behind him the East German news commentator was saying in his usual slow voice, ‘…sentenced to three years for assisting in the attempt to move his family to the West.’ Stok walked across to the set and clicked the switch to the West Berlin channel where a cast of fifty Teutonic minstrels sang ‘See them shuffle along’ in German. ‘It’s never a good night, Thursday,’ Stok said apologetically. He switched the set off. We broke the wax on the fruitflavoured vodka and Stok and Vulkan began discussing whether twenty-four bottles of Scotch whisky were worth a couple of cameras. I sat around and drank vodka until they had ironed out some sort of agreement. Then Stok said, ‘Has Dorf got power to negotiate?’—just like I wasn’t in the room.
‘He’s a big shot in London,’ said Vulkan. ‘Anything he promises will be honoured. I’ll guarantee it.’
‘I want lieutenant-colonel’s pay,’ Stok said, turning to me, ‘for life.’
‘Don’t we all?’ I said.
Vulkan was looking at the evening paper; he looked up and said, ‘No, he means that he’d want the UK Government to pay him that as a salary if he comes over the wire. You could promise that, couldn’t you?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘We’ll say you’ve been in a few years, that’s five pounds four shillings a day basic. Then there’s ration allowance, six and eight a day, marriage allowance, one pound three and something a day, qualification pay five shillings a day if you get through Staff College, overseas pay fourteen and three and…you would want overseas pay?’
‘You are not taking me seriously,’ Stok said, a big smile across his white moon of a face. Vulkan was shifting about on his seat, tightening his tie against his Adam’s apple and cracking his finger joints.
‘All systems go,’ I said.
‘Colonel Stok puts up a very convincing case,’ said Vulkan.
‘So does the “find the lady” mob in Charing Cross Road,’ I said, ‘but they never come through with the QED.’
Stok threw back two vodkas in quick succession and stared at me earnestly. He said, ‘Look, I don’t favour the capitalist system. I don’t ask you to believe that I do. In fact I hate your system.
‘Great,’ I said. ‘And you are in a job where you can really do something about it.’
Stok and Vulkan exchanged glances.
‘I wish you would try to understand,’ said Stok. ‘I am really sincere about giving you my allegiance.’
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I bet you say that to all the great power
s.’
Vulkan said, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time and money in setting this up. If you are so damn clever why did you bother to come to Berlin?’
‘OK,’ I told them. ‘Act out the charade. I’ll be thinking of words.’
Stok and Vulkan looked at each other and we drank and then Stok gave me one of his goldrimmed oval cigarettes and lit it with a nickelsilver sputnik.
‘For a long time I have been thinking of moving west,’ said Stok. ‘It’s not a matter of politics. I am just as avid a communist now as I have ever been, but a man gets old. He looks for comfort, for security in possessions.’ Stok cupped his big boxing-glove hand and looked down at it. ‘A man wants to scoop up a handful of black dirt and know it’s his own land, to live on, die on and give to his sons. We peasants are a weak insecure segment of socialism, Mr Dorf.’ He smiled with his big brown teeth, trimmed here and there with an edge of gold. ‘These comforts that you take for granted will not be a part of life in the East until long after I am dead.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We have decadence now—while we are young enough to enjoy it.’
‘Semitsa,’ said Stok. He waited to see what effect it would have on me. It had none.
‘That’s what you are really interested in. Not me. Semitsa.’
‘Is he here in Berlin?’ I asked.
‘Slowly, Mr Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Things move very slowly.’
‘How do you know he wants to come west?’ I asked.
‘I know,’ said Stok.
Vulkan interrupted, ‘I told the colonel that Semitsa would be worth about forty thousand pounds to us.’
‘Did you?’ I said in as flat a monotone as I could manage.