by Len Deighton
I wasn’t exactly a welcome visitor but I represented a section of the Gehlen Organization income; they gave me coffee.
One of the identical men slid into steel-rimmed spectacles and said, ‘You need us to help you out.’ It had a discreet layer of insult. I sipped the Nescafé.
‘Whatever you need—the answer is, yes we can do it,’ the spectacled one said. He passed me a small jug of cream. ‘What is it that you need done first?’
‘I’m trying to decide between having Dover encircled and Stalingrad subjugated.’
Steel Spectacles and the other two men smiled, perhaps for the first time.
I fed them some Gauloises and then we got down to business.
‘I need something moved,’ I said.
‘Very well,’ said Steel Spectacles. He produced a small tape machine.
‘Place of consignment’s origin?’
‘I’d try to arrange that to your convenience,’ I said.
‘Excellent.’ He clicked the switch on the mike. ‘Origin nul,’ he said.
‘To?’ he asked me.
‘Channel ports,’ I said.
‘Which one?’
‘Any,’ I said. He nodded again and repeated my answer into the tape recorder. We were getting on fine together.
‘Size?’
‘One human,’ I said. No one batted an eyelid; he immediately said, ‘Willing or unwilling?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said.
‘Conscious or unconscious?’
‘Conscious willing or unconscious unwilling.’
‘We prefer conscious,’ said Spectacles before relaying it on to the tape.
The phone rang. Spectacles spoke into the mouthpiece in a rapid series of orders, then two of the Gehlen boys slipped into dark raincoats and hurried for the door.
‘A shooting at the wall,’ Spectacles said to me.
‘No kidding,’ I said.
‘Right at Checkpoint Charlie,’ said Spectacles.
‘One of your boys?’ I asked.
‘Yes, just a courier,’ said Spectacles. He uncupped the phone; the caller was to wait there and phone back if he wasn’t contacted in thirty minutes. He hung up.
‘We are the only people who get anything done here in Berlin,’ Spectacles said. The other man, blond with a large signet ring said, ‘Ja’. Then Spectacles and he nodded to each other.
‘Since Hitler?’ I almost said, but I swallowed the words with a second cup of hot coffee. Spectacles produced a street map and clipped a piece of transparent acetate across the face of it. He began marking circles here and there across the east side of the city.
‘These are the sort of places we favour as jumping-off places,’ he said.
‘Not too near the Sektor boundary and within a mile of the Soviet Zone. Things can heat up very quickly in this burg, especially if you grab someone hot. Sometimes we prefer to put our cargo on ice in the zone somewhere. Anywhere from Lübeck to Leipzig.’ Spectacles had a smooth American accent and here and there it came through his lucid Rhineland German.
‘We will need at least forty-eight hours’ notice,’ said Spectacles. ‘But after that we will be responsible even if we take longer to actually do the movement. Do you have any questions?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What’s the procedure if I want to contact your people and I am in the East?’
‘You phone a Dresden number and they will give you an East Berlin number. It changes every week. The Dresden number changes sometimes too. Check with us before you go over.’
‘OK but does anyone have phones going across the city of Berlin?’
‘Officially one. It connects the Russian Command in Karlshorst with the Allied Command in the Stadion here in West Berlin.’
‘Unofficially?’
‘There have to be lines. The water, electricity, sewage and gas authorities all have lines to speak to their opposite number in the other half of the city. There could be an emergency but they are not officially recognized.’
‘And you don’t ever use these lines?’
‘Very seldom.’ There was a buzz. He flipped a switch on his desk. I heard the voice of the calm young man say, ‘Yes. Good evening,’ and another voice. ‘I’m the man you were expecting from Dresden.’ Spectacles clicked another switch and the TV screen flashed blue. I could see the waiting room as a short man entered it and I saw him enter the brightly lit cupboard. Spectacles swung the TV receiver around so that I couldn’t see it.
‘Security,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t give you much confidence if we let you penetrate another operation, would it?’
‘You’re damn right it wouldn’t,’ I said.
‘So if that’s all,’ said Spectacles, closing a big ledger with a snap.
‘Yes,’ I said. I could take a hint.
He said, ‘You will act as Vulkan’s case officer4 for this operation. His code name is “King”. Your code name will be…’ he looked down at his desk. ‘…Kadaver.’
‘Corpse,’ I said. ‘That’s very chummy.’
Spectacles smiled.
I thought about ‘King’ Vulkan when I got back to the Frühling. I was surprised that he was one of the best chess players in Berlin but he was full of surprises. I thought about my code name—Kadaver—and about Kadavergehorsam, which is the sort of discipline which makes a corpse jump up and salute. I poured a Teacher’s and stared down at the screaming shining lights. I had begun to get the feel of the town; both sides of the wall had wide well-lit streets separated by inky lakes of darkness. Perhaps this was the only city in the world where you were safer in the dark.
* * *
1 Feldherrnhügel: the mound upon which the commanding generals stood to direct the battle.
2 Later the BND or Federal German Intelligence Service, but still generally referred to as the ‘Gehlen Bureau’. See Appendix 2.
3 Deutsche Demokratische Republik.
4 Case officer: In the American system of espionage (from which the Gehlen Bureau had borrowed the term) the case officer is the go-between connecting Washington to the agent in the field. He is generally empowered to vary slightly the aims and objects of the operation and always controls payment. In the case of the above operation I did not act as Vulkan’s case officer in the strict sense of the term, since a case officer keeps well concealed and does not reveal himself to other units.
Chapter 8
Skilful use of knights is the mark of the
professional player.
Tuesday, October 8th
Examine closely the eyes of certain bold young men and you’ll see a frightened little man staring anxiously out. Sometimes I saw him in Vulkan’s eyes and at other times I wasn’t so sure about it. He carried himself like an advert for hormone pills; his muscles rippled under well-cut lightweight wool suits. His socks were silk and his shoes were made on a personal last by a shop in Jermyn Street. Vulkan was the new breed of European man: he spoke like an American, ate like a German, dressed like an Italian and paid tax like a Frenchman.
He used all the Anglo-Saxon idioms with consummate skill and when he swore did it with calm and considered timing and never with frustration or rage. His Cadillac Eldorado was a part of him; it was black with real leather upholstery, and the wooden steering wheel, map-reading lights, hi-fi, air conditioning and radio phone were unobtrusive, but not so unobtrusive that you could fail to notice them. There were no woolly tigers or plastic skeletons, no pennants or leopard-skin seat-covers in Vulkan’s car. You could scrape the surface of Johnnie Vulkan however you liked; he was gold as deep as you cared to go.
The commissionaire at the Hilton saluted and said, ‘Shall I park the Strassenkreuzer, sir?’ He spoke English and, although the term street-cruiser is an uncomplimentary word for American cars, Johnnie liked it. He flipped him the car keys with a practised movement of the fingers. Johnnie walked ahead of me. The tiny metal studs that he affected in his shoes made a rhythm of clicks across the marble. The discreetly shaded light fell across the carefully oi
led rubber-plants and shone on the Trinkgeld of the girl in the newspaper stand where they sold yesterday’s Daily Mail and Playboy and coloured postcards of the wall that you could send to friends and say, ‘Wish you were here’. I followed Vulkan into the bar where it was too dark to read the price-list and the piano player felt his way among the black and white keys like someone had changed them all around.
‘Glad you came?’ Vulkan said.
I wasn’t sure I was. Vulkan had changed almost as much as the city itself. Both found themselves in a permanent state of emergency and had discovered a way of living with it.
‘It’s great,’ I said.
Johnnie sniffed at his bourbon and downed it like it was medicine. ‘But you thought it would be different by now,’ he said. ‘You thought it would all be peacetime, eh?’
‘It’s too damn peacetime for my liking,’ I said. ‘It’s too damn “sundowners on the veranda” and “those infernal drums, Carruthers”. There are too many soldiers being Brahmins.’
‘And too many German civilians being untouchables.’
‘I was in the Lighthouse cinema in Calcutta once,’ I said. ‘They were showing Four Feathers. When the film came to that section when the beleaguered garrison could hold out no longer, across the horizon came a few dozen topees piping “Over the seas to Skye”, some short-muzzle Lee Enfields saying, “Cor blimey”, and some gay young sahibs with punkah wallahs in attendance.’
‘They put the tribesmen to flight,’ said Vulkan.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but in the cinema the Indian audience cheered as they did it.’
‘You think we are cheering on our Allied masters?’
‘You tell me,’ I said and I looked around and listened to English speech and drank the sherry that cost twice the price it would fetch anywhere else this side of the wall.
‘You English,’ said Vulkan. ‘You live out there in the middle of that cold sea surrounded by herring. How will we ever get you to understand?
June the sixth, 1944, was D-Day; up till then you British had lost more people in wartime traffic accidents than you had lost in battle,1 while we Germans had already suffered six and half million casualties on the Eastern front alone. Germany was the only occupied country that failed to produce a resistance organization. It failed to produce one because there was nothing left; in 1945 we had thirteen-year-old kids standing where you are standing now, pointing a bazooka down the Ku-damm waiting for a Joseph Stalin tank to clank out of the Grunewald. So we fraternized and we collaborated. We saluted your private soldiers, gave our houses to your non-coms and our wives to your officers. We cleared the rubble with our bare hands and didn’t mind that empty lorries passed us coming back from your official brothels.’
Vulkan ordered two more drinks. A girl with too much make-up and a gold lamé dress tried to catch Vulkan’s eye, but when she saw me looking took a tiny mirror from a chainmail bag and gave her eyebrows a working over.
As Vulkan turned to me he spilled his bourbon over the back of his hand.
‘We Germans didn’t understand our role,’ he said. He licked the whisky from his hand. ‘As a defeated nation we were to be forever relegated to being customers—supplied by the Anglo-American factories—but we didn’t understand that. We began to build factories of our own, and we did it well because we are professionals, we Germans, we like to do everything well—even losing wars. We became prosperous and you English and Americans don’t like it. There has to be a reason that lets you keep your nice cosy feeling of superiority. It’s because we Germans are toadies, weaklings, automatons, masochists, collaborators or——lickers that we are doing so well.’
‘You are breaking my heart,’ I said.
‘Drink,’ said Vulkan and downed his most recent one with lightning speed. ‘You aren’t the one I should be shouting at. You understand better than most, even though you hardly understand at all.’
‘You are too kind,’ I said.
At about 10 P.M. a bright-eyed boy that I had seen at the Gehlen Bureau flashed his cuffs at the bartender and ordered a Beefeater martini. He sipped at it and turned slowly to survey the room. He caught a sight of us and gulped at his drink.
‘King,’ he said quietly. ‘Here’s a surprise.’
It was like finding a cherry in a sweet martini; a big surprise but you raise hell if it’s not there.
‘I’m Helmut,’ said the bright-eyed boy.
‘I’m Edmond Dorf,’ I said; two can play at that game.
‘Do you want to speak in private?’ Vulkan said.
‘No,’ said Helmut politely and offered his English cigarettes. ‘Our latest employee is, alas, in a traffic accident.’
Vulkan produced a gold lighter.
‘Fatal?’ asked Vulkan.
Helmut nodded.
‘When?’ said Vulkan.
‘Next week,’ said Helmut. ‘We bring him around the corner2 next week.’ I noticed Vulkan’s hand flinch as he lit the cigarette.
Helmut noticed it too, he smiled. To me he said, ‘The Russians are bringing your boy into the city in two weeks from next Saturday.’
‘My boy?’ I said.
‘The scientist from the Academy of Sciences Biology Division; he will probably stay at the Adlon. Isn’t that the man you want us to move?’
‘No comment,’ I said. It was very annoying and this boy was making the most of it. He flashed me a big smile before giving his teeth a rebore with the Beefeater martini.
‘We are arranging the pipeline now,’ he added. ‘It would help us if you supply these documents from your own sources. You will find all the data there.’ He handed me a folded slip of paper, shot his cuffs a couple of times to show me his cufflinks, then finished his martini and vanished.
Vulkan and I looked across the rubber-plants.
‘Gehlens Wunderkinder,’ said Vulkan. ‘They’re all like him.’
* * *
1 In the first four years of war British casualties (including POWs and missing) were 387,966. The number killed and injured in traffic accidents was 588,742.
2 Helmut used the expression ‘Um die Ecke bringen’, which in German means to kill.
Chapter 9
In certain circumstances pawns can be converted
into the most powerful unit on the board.
Tuesday, October 8th
I put the Gehlen request for documents on the teleprinter to London and marked it urgent.
The paper said:
Name: Louis Paul BROUM
National Status: British
Nationality of Father: French
Profession: Agricultural Biologist
Date of birth: August 3rd, 1920
Place of birth: Prague, Czechoslovakia
Residence: England
Height: 5 ft 9 ins Weight: 11 st 12 lb
Colour of eyes: brown Colour of hair: black
Scars: 4-inch scar inside of right ankle
Documents required.
1. British Passport issued not before beginning of current year.
2. British Driving Licence.
3. International Driving Permit.
4. Current Insurance Policy on a motor vehicle in British Isles.
5. Motor Vehicle Registration Book (for same vehicle).
6. Diners’ Club credit card (current).
Chapter 10
JOHN AUGUST VULKAN
Wednesday, October 9th
‘Oh boy,’ thought Johnnie Vulkan Edelfresswelle—a great calorific abundance of everything but faith—and quite frankly it was great. There were times when he saw himself as an untidy recluse in some village in the Bavarian woods, with ash down his waistcoat and his head full of genius, but tonight he was glad he had become what he had become. Johnnie Vulkan, wealthy, attractive and a personification of Knallhärte—the tough, almost violent quality that post-war Germany rewarded with admiring glances. The health cures at Worishofen had tempered him to a supple resilience and that’s what you needed to stay on top in this town—this wa
s no place for an intellectual today, whatever it may have been in the ‘thirties.
He was glad the Englishman had gone. One could have too much of the English. They ate fish for breakfast and always wanted to know where they gave the best rate of exchange. The whole place was reflected in the coloured mirror. The women were dressed in sleek shiny gowns and the men were wearing 1,000-mark suits. It looked like those advertisements for bourbon that one saw in Life magazine. He sipped his whisky and eased his foot on to the foot-rail of the bar. Anyone coming in would take him for an American. Not one of those crummy stringers who hung around writing groundless rumours with ‘Our special correspondent in Berlin’ on the dateline, but one of the Embassy people or one of the businessmen like the one sitting against the wall with the blonde. Johnny looked at the blonde again. Boy, oh boy! he could see what type of suspender belt she was wearing. He flashed her a smile. She smiled back. A fifty-mark lay, he thought, and lost interest. He called the barman and ordered another bourbon. It was a new barman.
‘Bourbon,’ he said. He liked to hear himself saying that. ‘Plenty of ice this time,’ he said. The barman brought it and said, ‘The right money, please, I am short of change.’ The barman said it in German. It made Vulkan annoyed.
Vulkan tapped a Philip Morris on his thumbnail and noticed how brown his skin was against the white cigarette. He put the cigarette in his mouth and snapped his fingers. The bloody fool must have been half-asleep.
Along the bar, there were a couple of tourists and a newspaper writer named Poetsch from Ohio. One of the tourists asked if Poetsch went across to the ‘other side’ very much.
‘Not much,’ Poetsch said. ‘The Commies have me marked down on their black list.’ He laughed modestly. Johnnie Vulkan said an obscene word loud enough for the barman to look up. The barman grinned at Johnnie and said, ‘Mir kann keener.’1