by Len Deighton
Poetsch didn’t speak German so he didn’t notice.
There were lots of radio men here tonight: Americans with the blunt accents of their fathers who spoke strange Slav dialects over the jammed night air. One of them waved to Vulkan but didn’t beckon him across there. That was because they considered themselves the cultural set of the city. Really they were mental lightweights equipped with a few thousand items of cocktail-time small talk. They wouldn’t know a string quartet from a string vest.
The barman lit his cigarette for him.
‘Thanks,’ said Johnnie. He made a mental note to cultivate the barman in the near future, not for the purpose of getting information—he hadn’t sunk to that peanut circuit yet—but because it made life easier in a town like this. He sipped his bourbon and tried to think of a way to appease London. Vulkan felt glad that Dawlish’s boy was heading back to London. He was all right as the English go, but you never knew where you were with him. That’s because the English were amateurs—and proud of it. There were some days when Johnnie wished that he was working for the Americans. He had more in common with them, he felt.
All around there was a rumble of courteous conversation. The man with nose, moustache and spectacles that looked like a one-piece novelty was an English MP. He had the managerial voice that the English upper class used for hailing taxis and foreigners.
‘But here in the actual city of Berlin,’ the Englishman was saying, ‘taxes are twenty per cent below your West German taxes and what’s more your chaps at Bonn waive the four per cent on transactions. With a bit of wangling they will insure your freight free and if you bring in steel you have it carted virtually without charge. No businessman can afford to overlook it, old chap. What line of business you in?’ The Englishman brushed both ends of his moustache and sniffed loudly.
Vulkan smiled to a man from the Jewish Documentation Section. That was a job Vulkan would enjoy, but the pay was very small, he heard. The Jewish Documentation Section in Vienna collected material about war crimes to bring ex-SS men to trial. There was plenty of work about, Vulkan thought. He looked through the tobacco smoke; he could count at least five ex-SS officers in here at this moment.
‘Best thing that ever happened to the British motor car industry.’ The Englishman’s loud voice cut the air again.
‘Your Volkswagen people felt the draught in no time. Ha ha. Lost a source of cheap labour and found the trade union johnnies dunning them for money. What happened? Up went the price of the Volkswagen. Gave our chaps a chance. Say what you like, best thing that ever happened to the British motor car industry, that wall.’
Johnnie fingered the British passport in his pocket. Well, the wall didn’t make much difference to him. He preferred it in fact. If the communists hadn’t stopped all their riff-raff streaming across here in search of jobs, then where would they have got people to work in the factories? Johnnie knew where they would have got them: from the East. Who wanted to go swimming out on the Müggelsee and have it full of Mongolians and Ukrainians? Lot of chance there would be then of restoring East Prussia. Pomerania and Silesia to Germany. Not that Vulkan gave a damn about the ‘lost territories’ but some of these loudmouths, who did, shouldn’t shout about the wall so much.
There was a girl from Wedding. He wondered whether it was true what they said about her chauffeur. It was a strange place for a girl like her to live, horrible low-class district. That tiny house with the TV set over the bed. He had put the Scots colonel on to her. What was it he had said afterwards about her wanting a 21-inch model with colour and remote control? Vulkan remembered how the whole bar had laughed at the time. Vulkan blew her a kiss and wrinkled his eyes in greeting. She waved a small gold-mesh evening bag at him. She was still sexy, Vulkan thought, and in spite of all his resolution found himself sending the barman across to her with a champagne cocktail. He wrote a little note to go with it. He wrote the note with a small gold propelling pencil on the back of an engraved visiting card.
‘Take dinner with me,’ he wrote. He debated whether to add a query but decided that women hate indecision. Domination was the secret of success with women.
‘Will join you later,’ he added, before giving it to the barman.
Two more people had joined Poetsch down at the far end of the bar; a man and a girl. The man looked English. Poetsch said, ‘You saw it, did you? We call it the “wall of shame”, as you know. I’d like to show it to every living person in the world.’
A man called ‘Colonel Wilson’ winked at Vulkan. To do this, ‘Colonel Wilson’ had to remove a large pair of dark glasses. Around his left eye and upper cheek there was a mesh of scars. Wilson slid a cigar along the bar to Vulkan.
‘Thanks, Colonel,’ Vulkan called. Wilson was an ex-corporal cook who had got his scars from spluttering fat in a mess hall in Omaha. It was a good cigar. ‘Colonel’ wouldn’t be such a fool as to give him a cheap one. Vulkan smelled it, rolled it and then decapitated it scientifically with a small flat gold cigar-cutter that he kept in his top pocket. A gold guillotine. An amalgam of sharp steel and burnished gold. The barman lit the cigar for him.
‘Always with a match,’ Vulkan told him. ‘A match held a quarter of an inch away from the leaf. Gas lighters never.’ The barman nodded. Before Vulkan had the cigar properly alight, ‘Colonel’ had moved alongside him at the bar. ‘Colonel Wilson’ was six feet one-and-a-half inches of leathery skin encasing meaty sinew, packed dense like a well-made Bockwurst. His face was grey and lined: his hair trimmed to the skull. He could have made a living in Hollywood playing in the sort of film where the villains have thick lips. He ordered two bourbons.
Vulkan could hear Poetsch saying, ‘Truth—I’m fond of saying—is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of freedom.’ Poetsch was fond of saying that, Vulkan thought. He knew that ‘Colonel Wilson’ wanted something. He drank the bourbon quickly. ‘Colonel Wilson’ ordered two more. Vulkan looked at the barman and tipped his head a millimetre towards the girl from Wedding. The barman lowered his eyelids. It was one of the great things about this town, thought Vulkan, this sensitivity to signs and innuendo. He heard the English MP’s voice, ‘Good heavens, no. We have a few tricks left up our sleeve I can tell you.’ The English MP chortled.
The British were deadly, Vulkan decided. He remembered his last visit there. The big hotel in Cromwell Road, and the rain that never stopped for a week. A nation of inventive geniuses where there are forty different types of electrical plug, none of which works efficiently. Milk is safe on the street but young girls in danger, sex indecent but homosexuality acceptable, a land as far north as Labrador with unheated houses, where hospitality is so rare that ‘landlady’ is a pejorative word, where the most boastful natives in the world tell foreigners that the only British shortcoming is modesty.
Vulkan winked to the girl from Wedding. She smoothed her dress slowly and touched the nape of her neck. Vulkan turned to ‘Colonel Wilson’ and said, ‘OK, what’s on your mind?’
‘I want thirty-nine Praktika cameras; with the f/2 lens.’
Vulkan reached for a piece of ice from the canister on the bar. The piano-player did a fancy cadenza and stopped playing. Vulkan put his cigar in his mouth and clapped his hands. His face scowled at the ribbon of smoke. Several people joined in the applause. Vulkan said, ‘Do you?’ still looking at the piano-player.
‘Good price and in dollars,’ said Colonel Wilson. There was no reply from Vulkan.
Wilson said, ‘I know that you don’t do that kind of thing for a living; but this is a special favour for a friend of mine. It’s more of a memento—you know, a camera smuggled out of the East—these guys like that kind of thing.’
‘What guys?’ said Vulkan.
‘Trade delegation,’ said Wilson.
‘Thirty-nine,’ said Vulkan reflectively.
‘It would be no trouble to you,’ said Wilson. ‘Just bring them with you when you come back with a Russian. You are the only guy I know who ever rides through Checkpoint Charlie wi
th a Russian.’ He laughed nervously.
‘Thirty-nine must be the delegation of American radio and TV producers. Poetsch is running that, isn’t he?’
‘Aw,’ said Wilson, ‘don’t go yelling it around. I told you in strict confidence. If you can deliver them before…’
‘You told me nothing,’ said Vulkan. ‘I told you. I’m not a camera dealer, tell Poetsch that.’
‘Leave P’s name out of this.’
Vulkan gently blew smoke at Wilson, saying nothing.
‘Don’t cross me, Vulkan,’ Colonel Wilson said. ‘You don’t want me spilling it to your British pal that I’m no longer a US Army major.’
‘No longer,’ said Vulkan gleefully, almost choking on his drink.
‘I can make plenty of trouble,’ said Wilson.
‘And you can make a one-way trip through the wire,’ said Vulkan quietly.
They stared at each other. Wilson swallowed to moisten his throat and turned back to his drink.
‘OK Johnnie,’ Wilson said over his shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, eh, pal?’
Johnnie pretended not to hear and moved along the bar calling for another bourbon.
‘Two?’ said the barman.
‘One will be enough,’ said Johnnie.
He could see Wilson’s face in the mirror; it was very pale. He could see the girl from Wedding too, touching the hair at the nape of her neck like she didn’t know she was straining her brassiere. She crossed her legs and smiled at his reflection.
‘Poetsch,’ Johnnie thought.
He had wanted to get something on Poetsch, if only to cut down his ranting at the bar. He could hear his voice now. Poetsch was saying, ‘The very same people who made the great little TV film about the tunnel. The whole thing was paid for by the TV company, NBC. And what I’m saying, folks, is that those fifty-nine people who escaped owe their very freedom to our American system of unshackled enterprise and bold corporate drive…’ There were a couple of favours Poetsch could do for Johnnie Vulkan. Johnnie relished the idea of telling Poetsch about them; even the girl from Wedding wasn’t a better prospect than that.
The lounge was beginning to fill up now. Vulkan leaned back against the bar, tensed his muscles and relaxed. It was good to feel he knew them all and that even Americans like ‘Colonel Wilson’ couldn’t take advantage of him. Johnnie Vulkan could pick out the tarts and the queens, the hustlers and the fairies. He knew all the heavies waiting assignment: from the nailers-up of notices to the nailers up of Christs. He saw the girl from Wedding trying to catch his eye. Poetsch’s crowd had grown too. There was that elderly English queer with the dyed hair, and a stupid little Dresdener who thought he was going to infiltrate the Gehlen Bureau—except that Johnnie had told them all about him last week. He wondered whether Helmut had been serious about having the Dresdener killed in a traffic accident. It was possible. King was right as a code name Vulkan decided; they acknowledged his stature by alloting it to him. Freudian. King Vulkan of Berlin.
He supposed the red-haired girl talking to Poetsch now was the one Poetsch had mentioned to him; the girl from Israeli Intelligence.
‘Boy, oh boy!’ thought Vulkan. ‘What a town this is!’ and he eased his way down the bar towards them, smiling at Poetsch.
* * *
1 Mir kann keener: you can’t fool me (a typical Berliner comment).
Chapter 11
Zugzwang: to move a chess piece under duress.
London, Thursday, October 10th
I moved into top as I passed Parliament Square. The night was young and it had nothing much to do. Tiny moons moved across St James’s Park playing tiddly-winks with the shiny leaves, and the speedometer moved up to nudge sixty. The radiotelephone called me back to earth. It was the Charlotte Street Control Room: ‘Message for you oboe ten from Northern Car Hire.1 Do you read me? Over.’
‘Loud and clear. Let’s have it.’
‘Message from Mr D. You are to contact Mr Hallam at Betty’s Club. Is that roger? Oboe ten. Over.’
‘Only too roger.’
‘Observe your r/t procedure, oboe ten. Your customer will ask you for change of ten shillings. You will have four half-crowns ready for him. Is that roger? Over.’
‘What are you talking about? What’s Hallam want ten bob for?’
‘Oboe ten. Observe procedure please. I am giving you your introduction formality for this customer. Is that roger? Over.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I said. ‘Phone me at home later on. On the landline. OK?’
The Scots operator’s nerve broke before I got to Hyde Park Corner.
‘For Christ’s sake. Oboe ten. You know what the Home Office people are like. He wants you to give him four half-dollars so that he knows who you are.’
‘What do you mean “so that he knows who I am”? I saw Hallam only the other day. Who the hell is he going to think I am if I don’t give him four half-crowns—James Bond?’
‘Please just give him the half-crowns, oboe ten.’
‘I don’t know how many make ten bob,’ I said, but the operator didn’t come back on the air again. Inside the car the radio shone with a faint green spot of light. I turned the volume and filled the car with big band sound as a volley of raindrops spattered across the windscreen.
Betty’s was one of the small set of London clubs that have been going over twenty years on a mixed membership, face up to the financial crisis of imminent closure once a year but never get around to pasting the corners of the wallpaper back into place. Next to the magazine rack, a brown-haired man was slugging shillings into a one-armed bandit without letting go of his Tuborg lager. The crash of the machine punctuated some gentle Sinatra. Without looking at me he sensed my approach, but he continued to watch the spinning oranges and pineapples.
‘Got change of ten bob?’ he said. Before I could reply, the fruit machine gave three neat clicks and then a shudder as shillings showered into the metal tray.
‘Looks like you won’t be needing change now,’ I said.
He turned suddenly and grasped my cuff. His watery brown eyes stared into mine for a long time before he said, ‘Don’t you believe it, dear. I still do.’ It was Hallam, the man from Bina Gardens, but his hair was now a rich brown colour. He scooped up the shillings and showered them into his already sagging pockets.
‘First-rate for the gas meter,’ he said. I held four half-crowns extended towards him while he spent five minutes trying to pry apart two ten-shilling notes that were only one. Reluctantly he gave it to me. Then he took his time fitting the base of a Player’s No 3 into a four-inch holder. I flicked a Swan Vesta alight with my thumbnail and he nosed his fag down into the fire and flame. He was well alight before he spoke.
‘Stok and the Gehlen boys are both being helpful?’
‘Both being very helpful,’ I said. ‘Did you ever find Confucius?’
‘Yes,’ said Hallam. ‘The fickle creature came back to me Tuesday morning, very early. So dirty; heaven knows where he had been. So independent the Siamese. I really should buy a collar for him but it seems so cruel.’ Somehow he got four syllables into ‘cruel’.
‘Yes,’ I said.
I had a street map of Berlin in my pocket. I moved a couple of ashtrays and a vase of plastic tulips and spread it across the table.
‘Stok will bring Semitsa into East Berlin somewhere within this rectangle.’ I drew a very light pencil mark just north of Alexanderplatz.
‘He will tell me where later. If I don’t like it, I can fix somewhere else in the same district.’ Hallam had his Tuborg wrapped around his face but I knew he was taking in every word.
‘Why don’t you make the Russkies bring him down to Marienborn and hand him over the West German frontier?’ he asked.
‘Not possible,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Outside Stok’s district. How foolish of me. Very well then. You have Semitsa—or you think you have him—here.’ He stabbed the street map.
�
�Now,’ I said, ‘from there the Gehlen boys will post him special delivery to West Berlin.’
‘Then what?’ asked Hallam.
‘If I know anything about the Gehlen boys they will delay the transfer at least twenty-four hours so that they can pump Semitsa for anything that might be useful to them. Then using the documents that your Home Office people are going to provide we bring him to London as a naturalized British subject returning home.’
‘How will the Gehlen people move him across the wall?’ said Hallam.
‘You know better than to ask that and so do I,’ I said. ‘If I ask, they’ll just tell me a lot of reasonably creative lies.’
‘Did you give me my change?’ he said.
‘Yes I did,’ I said, ‘four half-crowns.’
Hallam opened his wallet and counted his paper money.
‘The Home Office won’t release the documents until one of our own people actually sees Semitsa in the flesh in West Berlin.’ I could see the slack red lining of his watery eyes. He swung his chin from side to side to emphasize the negative and the jaw opened to repeat the decision.
‘You see why…’ he began.
I reached out and with my finger-tips gently closed Hallam’s mouth. ‘You wouldn’t want to see Semitsa’s flesh,’ I said. ‘You don’t like flesh, do you, Hallam? It isn’t nice.’
His face flushed like dipped litmus. I went across to the bar, bought two XO brandies and set one in front of Hallam. His face was still red.
‘Just have the papers ready, love,’ I said. ‘I’ll manage.’
Hallam poured the brandy down his throat and his eyes watered more than ever as he nodded agreement.
* * *
1 Our radio procedure is designed to make an eavesdropper think we are a taxi service. For this same reason our car pool uses radio-equipped taxi-cabs with the flags always set at ‘hired’.
Chapter 12
Every piece has its mode of attack but only a