These pictures flicker across the television and newsreel screens of the world as men and machines erect a wall of concrete and steel which is topped by barbed wire, flanked by minefields, illuminated by searchlights and guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot to kill. Overnight, East Berlin has become a prison.
2
‘What we are looking at,’ Pountney says to the camera, ‘are the unmistakable images of confrontation. The Soviet Union is deliberately testing the collective nerve of the Western Allies as Berlin becomes once more the focal point of international tension. Suddenly the Cold War is in serious danger of overheating. It is frightening to think,’ he adds, ‘that when we went to bed last night we had no idea that a few hours later we would wake to a crisis that could lead the world to the brink of war.’
A studio panel has been assembled to discuss the implications of this dangerous development. Pountney turns first to Simon Watson-Jones, the Minister of Defence. What, he asks, does the Government make of these events?
‘Building a wall to imprison your own people is an act of desperation from a discredited regime which has proved itself bankrupt of ideas.’ Watson-Jones is contemptuously dismissive. The communists are no longer trying to conceal the failure of their social and economic policies, he says. The East German government and its Soviet masters are openly trapping their people behind a wall because they have no other way of stopping the migration to the West which threatens the economic existence of the East German state. He warns the communists that they should tread carefully. The world will hold them responsible for ‘whatever happens in the future’.
‘Crispin Thursley, do you agree that the building of this wall is the desperate act of a bankrupt regime?’
The Liberal spokesman on foreign affairs is a former geography lecturer at Liverpool University, a thin, pale man whose rimless glasses glint in the studio lights. He blinks repeatedly as he speaks.
‘This is a public admission of defeat before the court of world opinion,’ he says. ‘The East German regime must be condemned by the international community for ignoring the fundamental right of the individual to free movement. Building a wall to keep families apart is a barbaric idea dragged up from the moral pit of the dark ages to which the Soviet Union clearly wishes to return.’
‘It’s damned dangerous,’ Ken Oates, a Labour MP, comments angrily. His face is flushed and a lock of white hair has fallen across his forehead. ‘The Government is going to have to move fast if it is to prevent this situation from running out of control.’
‘What can the Allies do?’ Pountney asks. ‘How can we stop this wall rising any higher? That’s the question in the public’s mind.’
The Government is firm in its condemnation of this Soviet-inspired action against the citizens of both East and West Berlin, the Minister says. ‘Make no mistake, this wall has Moscow written all over it.’ He makes assertive noises about NATO’s commitment to maintain the status quo in Berlin, but he refuses to yield to any direct questions from Pountney about the use of force.
‘It’s quite inappropriate to talk at this stage about military action,’ Watson-Jones declares. ‘Indeed, your opening comment that the world is sliding towards war is irresponsible scaremongering. We are facing a crisis that we must resolve. Our clear duty now is to sit round a table with the Soviets until we find a peaceful solution.’
‘Words have never made the Soviets change their minds in the past, so why should dialogue be successful now?’ The disdain in Oates’s voice is evident. ‘Talking to the deaf is a waste of time. Every hour spent round a table gives them another hour to build their wall. We’ve got to stop them now – before this monstrous monument is an inch higher.’
‘How can we do that except by military intervention?’ Pountney addresses his question to Thursley.
‘Military action is unthinkable,’ he replies. ‘This crisis calls for cool heads. Ken Oates has got it wrong. The Allies must sit round a table with the Soviets, and the sooner the better. We have no alternative.’
‘I’m glad that on an issue of such importance Crispin Thursley and I see eye to eye,’ Watson-Jones says soothingly. ‘Ken Oates, of course, is peddling his traditional response to any crisis: shoot first, ask questions later.’ He pauses for a moment, closing his eyes in apparent concentration, resting his chin on the points of his arched fingers in a public gesture of contemplation. ‘Force must be seen as a last resort,’ he declares solemnly, ‘only to be used when we have exhausted every other possible course of action. We are a very long way indeed from such a position.’
‘The truth is, this crisis has taken the Government by surprise,’ Oates says. ‘Neither the Minister nor the Government has the first idea what to do. The Soviet leader is a bully. By not standing up to his threats, the Government is giving him licence to go on bullying.’
Watson-Jones denies vehemently that he is acceding to Soviet pressure. He is doing what he has to do, examining all options before recommending a course of action to the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues.
‘By the time the Government has made up its mind,’ Oates says scornfully, ‘the wall will be built and the Soviets will have proved once again that we’re all bark and no bite.’ He leans aggressively towards the Minister. ‘The wall dividing Berlin will be a daily reminder to future generations of our failure to stand up to the Soviets. It’s not Moscow’s name you’ll find written all over it, but the name of this Tory Government.’
‘I am confident,’ Watson-Jones says, ‘that before long this wall will be reduced to nothing more than a brief memory, whether by diplomacy or other means.’
‘What other means, Minister? Are you contemplating a military response if the East Germans don’t agree to pull the wall down?’
Pountney’s intervention catches Watson-Jones by surprise. For a moment he looks hopelessly lost, as if he cannot remember what he has said. Oates laughs openly at his embarrassment. Thursley blinks frantically. The colour on the Minister’s cheeks deepens with anger as he tries to remedy his gaffe.
‘The Government is considering all options, as it must. But I can say right now that military action will get no support. We will do what every responsible government does in times of international tension. We will consult with our friends and allies and act in the best interests of this country and the Western Alliance.’
‘In other words,’ Oates replies, knowing that the programme is about to end, and that he must have the last word, ‘you’re going to let the Soviets get away with it again just as they have done in the past. Shameful. Quite shameful.’
3
Moscow disappeared under a layer of cloud and Koliakov was not sorry to see it go. In the last few days he had spent too many hours in stuffy rooms listening to men for whom he had little respect deny facts they knew to be true. Once propaganda had been a legitimate instrument of the Revolution. Now lies were proclaimed as truth, and no one believed in anything any more. The distance between the governors and the governed had never been so great. Koliakov shuddered. How he hated Moscow.
Then there was Medvedev. In some unspoken way he knew that the battle between them had been joined again. His behaviour was strange, even for a man of his self-importance, on occasions verging on the imperious, as if he had been given some secret command. ‘No,’ Koliakov corrected himself, ‘I’m allowing my dislike of him to colour my judgement.’
They had met as young recruits at KGB Training School 101. Even then, Koliakov had been aware of Medvedev’s ambition, and of the lengths he would go to to promote his own cause. On graduation they had gone their separate ways, Koliakov first to the embassy in Warsaw and then Helsinki. Medvedev had disappeared into some internal security department.
Years later, in 1947, Koliakov had returned unexpectedly to Moscow for his father’s funeral. The old man, he was told, had been killed in a fire that had consumed his block of flats following an explosion in a nearby laboratory. After the funeral, he had visited the apartment block, a scarr
ed, shattered relic of a building, with no roof, no windows and no doors. A few days before his return to Helsinki, Koliakov had bumped into Medvedev on a staircase in the KGB building. Medvedev had insisted that they have dinner together. Perplexed at this unexpected show of friendship, and assuming he wanted an audience to marvel at his exploits since leaving Training School, Koliakov had agreed. Medvedev had told him an extraordinary story and asked for his help.
He claimed he had discovered a traitor at the heart of the Kremlin who, under the code name of ‘Peter the Great’, was betraying Soviet secrets to British Intelligence. Recruited in the last months of the war by a member of the British Embassy – it was Bobby Martineau, whom Koliakov was to come across years later in Budapest – ‘Peter the Great’ was the creation of a group of members of the government and senior military who had become disillusioned by the lack of social and economic progress under Stalin. A secret Soviet source within Merton House, the centre of British Intelligence, had warned Moscow of the existence of ‘Peter the Great’. Tracking down the culprit had been difficult. A month after the war ended, a senior planner working closely with Marshal Zhukov had been arrested. He had confessed nothing before he died. Surprisingly, after his execution by firing squad, the flow of information to London and thence to Langley, Virginia, did not stop.
‘What we hadn’t realised,’ Medvedev said, ‘was that as one source was closed off, another stepped in to fill the gap.’ Consequently, more and more valuable information was passed to the West. For nearly two years British Intelligence was little more than a heartbeat away from the centre of power in Moscow. ‘They were listening in to all our decisions. For a time they knew everything about us.’
He had been appointed, Medvedev explained, to hunt down the traitors and close ‘Peter the Great’. None of those arrested so far had revealed any names before their execution. A number of arrests had led to suicide to avoid the perils of interrogation. But he had had a piece of luck and discovered that one of the links in the chain was none other than Koliakov’s former boss, Vladimir Serov. He now wanted Koliakov to support his evidence against Serov.
Koliakov was horrified. He had worked with Serov for three years, he replied. He was a good and loyal intelligence officer. Nothing in his behaviour suggested there was any truth in Medvedev’s story. It was impossible to imagine him as a traitor. He refused to betray a man he believed was innocent.
They had quarrelled violently, all the dislike that had built up in their training years finally coming out into the open. Koliakov had opposed Medvedev so vehemently because he saw his accusation against Serov as a crude device to allow the ambitious Medvedev to advance his career. That night he had tried to contact Serov to warn him but his telephone had been out of order. The following day, Koliakov learned later, Serov failed to appear at the office. By midday it was confirmed that he had been arrested at dawn that day. By the evening, he was dead, having confessed his role in ‘Peter the Great’ and betrayed others. More arrests, it was rumoured, would follow. ‘Peter the Great’ was now seen as an attempt at a coup d’état which had finally been uncovered.
Koliakov knew he had made a dangerous enemy. He was sure that in some malign way Medvedev had used Koliakov’s refusal to cooperate to damage his career. His mistake, he recognised, had been not to realise that Medvedev had a long memory for those who impeded his progress, and a patient character.
*
The plane had been three hours late leaving Moscow, and by the time he touched down in London, Koliakov was thoroughly tired and irritable. His diplomatic passport got him through immigration easily enough – though not without a harsh look from the officer at the kiosk – but he had to wait forty minutes for his luggage to appear. He cleared customs and looked for Smolensky. Officially, Smolensky was registered as an embassy driver; unofficially he was a fourth-floor man, a code specialist, while secretly he was a political commissar who watched for signs of deviation in the embassy staff. His meticulous devotion to the rule book of Marxist-Leninism provided him with a measure of correctness that even the Ambassador failed to meet. What he reported to his bosses in Moscow Koliakov didn’t dare imagine.
He was not at the meeting point. Koliakov waited for twenty minutes and then telephoned the embassy. No, he was told, Smolensky was not in his room. As far as they knew he was at the airport.
‘If he was, I wouldn’t be telephoning,’ Koliakov said sharply. It was pointless getting angry with the clerks. They’d only make trouble for him later, forgetting to give him his telephone messages, failing to deliver his mail, whispering lies about him to Smolensky.
He had two more coins. One more call, or should he wait? He looked round. As far as he could tell in the crowded hall, he was unobserved. He doubted the British would wire-tap a public telephone. He dialled another number.
‘Hello?’ A sleepy, smoky voice answered, and at once he felt his blood draining away and a giddiness overwhelming him. He was on the deck of a ship in a stormy sea. He held on to the side of the phone booth as the world moved around him, and looked down at his shoes.
‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘I’m back.’
‘Hello?’ the voice came again, this time more urgently. He’d forgotten to press the button to release the coins. They weren’t connected.
‘It’s me,’ he said again. ‘I’m back.’
He could think of nothing else to say. There was complete silence at the other end. The pips began to sound. He put down the telephone. Why hadn’t she spoken? Hadn’t she recognised his voice? The anticipation of this moment that had sustained him in Moscow now drained into despair. What a mistake. He should never have rung her. He had broken the power of his dream.
‘I had a tail on the way out here,’ a voice was saying to him, and he knew he should be listening. ‘I decided to lose it.’
It was neither an apology nor an excuse. Smolensky, a cigarette between his thin lips, was standing beside him. No smile of greeting, only the barely concealed contempt of a threadbare explanation. Smolensky lied because doing so let him demonstrate his superiority. He was answerable to no one at the embassy, and he was daring Koliakov to challenge his reason for why he was late. No point arguing or making accusations. He’d get nowhere. Best to get back to his flat, have a bath, go to bed and try to forget this endless, frustrating, depressing day. He slumped in the back as they drove in silence through a haze of rain into a wet and shining London.
How the hell had he got himself into this mess?
*
‘You boys must get lonely sometimes, don’t you? All on your own over here.’
Noel Kennedy was leaning heavily on the bar. He was neither drunk nor sober, but in the only state he could tolerate, floating alone and bemused, far from any recognisable shore. Any other condition, he claimed, was unendurable.
‘Lonely, Noel? Why?’
‘Far from home. No women. What a life.’
‘Sometimes.’
Koliakov was furious with himself. He’d not noticed that Kennedy was alone in the bar. It was too late now to think of escape. He ordered himself a glass of wine and another brandy for Kennedy.
‘Prison, eh? Like being in prison.’ Kennedy chuckled at the thought. ‘Life without a woman, eh? Drives you round the bend, doesn’t it? Christ, when I think back. The women I’ve had.’
Kennedy, he knew, was a man of social privilege and inherited wealth who had squandered his background and his money and every day was sliding deeper into the gutter. At night he lived in the bars and clubs of Soho, by day he would surface for lunch at his club, start drinking as soon as he arrived, and would grab anyone he knew as they appeared, especially if they arrived at the bar unaccompanied.
‘How do you boys survive?’
‘We have our beliefs to sustain us, Noel.’ He hoped Kennedy wasn’t too far gone to appreciate the irony.
‘What use is Marx when you want a shag, old son?’ Kennedy laughed too loudly. It didn’t matter. The bar remained deserted except for
the barman, and he was used to Kennedy. ‘Nothing like a good screw to put some colour in your cheeks. What you need is a woman.’
He was leaning towards Koliakov now, bringing his face too close. He must have fallen and cut himself earlier in the day. There was a dark wound on the side of his face. It was bad enough to need stitches, but Kennedy had put a piece of cotton wool over it and hoped for the best.
‘That would loosen you lot up, wouldn’t it?’
His eyes, Koliakov noticed, were floating pools of bloody water and his cheeks were an unnatural red, a maze of broken veins and raw skin. ‘Mate of mine’s got a real corker.’ His voice was hushed now, confidential. ‘Broke her in when she was sixteen. Taught her all she knows. Very superior merchandise, he says. Trained to fly.’
‘Broke her in, Noel? What does that mean?’
‘Took her cherry, Koli. Get it? He was her first screw. He likes them untouched, you see. She’s a year or two older now, so my old mate’s looking for pastures new. That’s why he gave me her number. Thought he was doing me a good turn but she’s no good for me. Can’t remember the last time I got a salute out of the old man.’ More hoarse laughter. ‘You can give her one for me, old boy. All right? How about it? Another drink? Your shout, old son.’
*
For two weeks the number burned in his pocket. Twice he threw it away, only to rescue it again before he left the office. Twice he went to a call box, only to replace the receiver without dialling. On the third occasion, he dialled the number and this time he waited until his call was answered.
*
The house was in a mews off the Cromwell Road. There were window boxes on the upper floor but the geraniums were languishing for want of care. He rang the doorbell and waited.
Dr Berlin Page 17