The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

“Only because you told him to stuff it before he could ask. And now you can’t wait to get back?”

  “It’s different.”

  “In what way different? I’ll tell you what’s different. You’re different. You’ve got a wife and two kids. And you’re not nineteen any more. Berlin isn’t different. It’s still bloody Berlin. In ’48 we got busted, you got shot, Frank buggered off, Yuri walked away with the cash and I damn near got nicked impersonating a cabinet minister! In ’63 you did stuff I don’t want to know about, but the rumours are still whizzing around two years later. Joe, Berlin has been a disaster area for you. It’s marked on the map with a big black cross and a sign saying ‘here be dragons.’ Joe, you’ve had two good years. Your life has never been so stable. And whether you know it or not, you’ve looked happier than I’ve ever seen you. Do you want to end up like Troy when you’re fifty? No wife, no kids, a string of ex-lovers he’s cast off or who’ve cast him off, no significant relationship in his life whatsobloodyever? Berlin? Berlin? Why would you ever want to go back to bloody Berlin?”

  “You want the job or not?”

  “When do I start?”

  “I fly out Tuesday. So, be there Monday morning.”

  “Don’t I even have to give notice?”

  “It’s a transfer, Ed, not a resignation. Burne-Jones will have someone deal with the paperwork. He’ll placate Commander Wildeve. You get a desk and a secretary. The delightful Alice Pettifer.”

  “Meaning she’s anything but?”

  “Meaning nothing of the sort.”

  Eddie mulled a moment.

  “Can I bring me coffee machine?”

  §111

  Berlin

  British Intelligence in West Berlin operated out of the back of a travel agent’s on Kantstraße. They even sold holidays and airline tickets and turned a profit. This did not fool the Russians, but then again it was not designed to fool the Russians, merely to tone down their own presence in the city to the point where the native Berliners did not think that every other foreigner was a spy—to foster the illusion that Berlin belonged to Berliners.

  Berliners called in to book travel. Russians parked outside whenever things were slack just to see what could be picked up in moments of sheer idleness. It might have been easy to “lose” anyone among the dozens of travellers who called in each day, but no agent not known to be an agent, no agent whose identity was concealed, ever called there. Wilderness was not such an agent.

  The British also owned the lease on an apartment building in Bleib­treustraße, around the corner from the shop. “Our man in Berlin,” lived in one, his assistant in another, and all but one of the rest were let to ordinary Berliners to maintain the illusion of ordinariness. The last apartment was kept for agents such as Wilderness, for those passing through on business far from secret. The functioning policy was “do not try to conceal the obvious.” As for the far-from-obvious . . . Wilderness had thought running Masefield out of Berlin a risk in the first place. It was little short of a miracle he’d not been busted in Berlin rather than Moscow. That they might get him back in Berlin was not ironic, it was merely practical.

  As well as being handy for the shop, the apartments had reserved parking. Out front, as Wilderness arrived, was Dickie Delves’s preposterous sports car in British racing green—flying the flag as he called it—and a rather tatty black 3-litre BMW 501. It was in this that Wilderness drove east, skirting the right-angled bulge in the wall that split the wasteland the Russians had made of Potsdamer Platz, over to Friedrichstraße and in through Checkpoint Charlie. There was nothing makeshift about Checkpoint Charlie any more.

  The Adlon Hotel had and had not survived the war. The front half, which had faced Unter den Linden, had been blown to buggery. The back not only survived, it never closed. It simply cauterized itself from the ruins at the front with rough, unplastered brick walls and carried on. Some 70 or so of the original 325 rooms still functioned. A restaurant, of sorts, still functioned. The bells did not. Ringing for room service was pointless. When the Allies finally carved up Berlin, several weeks after the Russians had taken it in an orgy of looting and raping, the Adlon found itself a hundred or so yards inside the Soviet Sector, and as such Soviet property—the private fiefdom of the conquering army. Portraits of the Hohenzollern emperors which had graced the lobby burned on bonfires, to be replaced by photographs of Ulbricht and Stalin.

  Bogusnik had taken a suite, several suites, on the fifth floor. No one raised an eyebrow when Wilderness asked for him by name. In a sector with no tourists, a KGB general might be a more typical guest than not—a sybarite too self-indulgent for the Russian Compound.

  The lift strained all the way to fifth floor, and the gates opened with a screech of metallic pain.

  A big Russian, as tall as Wilderness but more muscled, was waiting for him without pretence—shirtsleeves, shoulder holster—and the gun in his left hand.

  “Mr. Holderness?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Arkady Vasilievich Anakin. I am General Bogusnik’s man. Now, please excuse this, but hands against the wall while I pat you down.”

  Wilderness complied. The Russian pulled out the standard British-issue Baby Browning he’d carried for years now.

  “You’d expect me to have a gun,” Wilderness said.

  “And you’d expect me to take it off you. I understand. I would feel the same. It would be like going out without your trousers.”

  “How aptly you put it, Arkady Vasilievich.”

  The Russian holstered his own gun, and with the Browning he waved Wilderness towards a door on the other side of the corridor. Two sharp knocks, and he thrust the door open.

  “Please, I follow.”

  On the other side of the room a short, stout man in civvies stood with his back to them. He seemed to be rattling around at the drinks cabinet as though he hadn’t heard them enter.

  “Comrade General?”

  Nothing.

  “Comrade General?”

  The general turned, a glass of vodka in each hand. Smiled at Wilderness.

  “Arkady Vasilievich, give the man his gun and leave us alone. We’ll be fine.”

  Arkady handed the Browning back without a flicker of expression and left. Wilderness stood holding it, watched Bogusnik ease his arse into an armchair.

  “Eh, Joe. Put the gun away. Are we going to shoot one another after all this time?”

  “I don’t know, Yuri. It all depends. What’s with this Bogusnik nonsense?”

  “Sit, and I shall tell you.”

  Wilderness aimed the gun at Yuri’s head, held the shot for a few seconds, then stuck the gun back inside his jacket. Yuri knocked back half a vodka and smiled serenely. A fat, vodka-fuelled Buddha.

  “Take it, Joe. Join me in a drink for old times’ sake.”

  Seated, with a glass in his hand, Wilderness asked again.

  “What’s with this Bogusnik nonsense?”

  “It’s my real name. Myshkin was a . . . nom de guerre . . . pinched from a Dostoevsky novel. As I recall, you remarked several times that I bore no resemblance either physically or morally to Prince Myshkin. In the years before the revolution another name was often a necessity. Bronstein becomes Trotsky, Ulyanov becomes Lenin, and so on.”

  “Why change back?”

  “Oh . . . that was in ’56. After the Twentieth Congress. Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, and Myshkin was the name I’d used throughout the Stalin years. I had few ways to disassociate myself from Stalin and Beria, but changing my name was the most obvious. I was never much under suspicion, but Bogusnik was my Dzhugashvili so . . .”

  Yuri trailed off, one hand tracing waves in the air as though to finish a sentence he could not find words for. Wilderness studied him. He’d never had any real idea how old Yuri was when they’d met in 1947, perhaps forty, but now he looked more like
seventy. He was still stout, fat even, but the flesh beneath his chin hung jowly like a turkey, his face a blotchy combination of grey and red, the skin on the backs of his hands dotted with liver spots. Even his eyebrows looked old—grey-white twists spiralling out into space like the whiskers on a mangy tomcat. However much he’d prospered, time had not been kind to Yuri Myshkin.

  “Drink up, Joe. You would not leave an old friend to drink alone?”

  “An old friend who left me with a bullet in my gut and waltzed off with all my money.”

  “Hmmm. Who told you that?”

  “Well, I was there when you shot me!”

  “I wasn’t aiming at you, Joe. It was an accident. I knew you’d be OK. Larissa Tosca had a tail on me. Some clumsy kid, who made his presence all too obvious. He rescued you. If he hadn’t been there, I would have done so.”

  Wilderness said nothing. It might be plausible. It might be an outright lie.

  “No . . . I meant, who told you I took the money? Frank Spoleto?”

  Wilderness said nothing.

  “I thought as much. Joe, ask yourself this. Up until that night had I ever lied to you, robbed you or cheated you or proved unreliable? Since that night has Frank done anything else but lie to you, rob you, cheat you and prove himself unreliable?”

  Wilderness said nothing. This was beyond just plausible, it was absolutely true.

  “I kept an eye on you. Even in ’63, when you and Frank cooked up that mad scheme here in Berlin, I kept an eye on you.”

  Wilderness had seen Yuri several times in West Berlin in ’63, and with some reluctance had ascribed it to a surfeit of imagination.

  He downed his vodka and held out the glass for a refill.

  “Help yourself. Getting out of a chair feels like climbing Everest these days.”

  Wilderness topped them both up, said, “Let’s drop it, Yuri. I’m here on other business, and if I never see Frank again it’ll be too soon.”

  “Ah, at last, the unfortunate Mr. Masefield.”

  “Our Geoffrey. The perfect candidate for a honeytrap. You must have thought we’d sent you a Christmas present.”

  For a moment Wilderness did not know how to read the expression on Yuri’s face, but it seemed to be genuine bafflement—he’d no idea what Wilderness meant.

  “Honeytrap? What honeytrap? There was no honeytrap.”

  “The Tsitnikova sisters?”

  “We didn’t know about them until after we caught Masefield.”

  “Then how did you catch him?”

  “A routine search of his room. We’d searched it every visit he made and he came up clean. The last time he got lazy or clumsy and we found a Minox and three rolls of film showing the specifications for Chelyabinsk. We arrested that bastard Matsekpolyev at once. We gave him an academic inch and he took an academic mile. And then we felt like idiots that we’d underestimated Masefield and so we went over everything we could about his Moscow visits. We arrested Tanya Dmitrievna. She broke down on the first day and we arrested her twin sister, and felt twin stupid. We had thought Mr. Masefield too . . . too hapless, too guileless to be a spy.”

  “Under the radar.”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s what Burne-Jones said when he recruited Masefield. He would slip below your radar. I told him it was nonsense.”

  “All the same, he had a good run.”

  “And the sisters?”

  “Taken out to the forest and shot. A bullet to the back of the head. Buried where they fell. I would not have been so harsh, but it was not my case. I took over about a year later.”

  “No trial?”

  Yuri shook his head.

  “And Matsekpolyev?”

  “Too important to shoot. We . . . shall I say . . . we treated him as the Catholic Church treated Galileo. All we had to do was show him the instruments of torture—a metaphor you will understand—to be certain of his recanting. He saw himself as some kind of honest ­broker—evening up the balance of power in the interest of world peace. What an arse. Just like Fuchs. Spare me these self-appointed saints.”

  “He kept his job?”

  “Yes. No more travel, not even Poland or the DDR, no dacha, no medals . . . one foot out of line and his nuisance value will outweigh any importance he has in his field and he too might visit our forest.”

  “Is Masefield here?”

  “Yes. He has his own suite. You will find him a little the worse for wear, slimmer, greyer . . . but he has not been mistreated, indeed for the last ten days he has been ‘treated,’ the flunkies that pass for room service in this place, clean sheets, decent food, wine with his evening meal . . . everything but hookers.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Of course. It’s why we’re here. Don’t be too hard on him. He told us fuck all. The blandest of confessions. He’s a lot tougher than he looks.”

  §112

  Down the corridor Arkady Vasilievich thrust open a door for Wilderness.

  “Not locked?”

  “Where does he have to run to?”

  And then the door closed, and Wilderness found himself in a room as big as Yuri’s facing a small man who had his nose buried in a newspaper.

  The man looked up, as though expecting nothing but the routine, nothing that would distract him from whatever he was reading.

  He thrust the paper aside and was easing himself up off the sofa when Wilderness waved him back down.

  “Good Lord . . . Mr. Brown?”

  Wilderness took the armchair opposite Masefield.

  “This lot know all there is to know about me, Geoffrey, so we can drop the alias. I’m Joe Holderness.”

  “What . . . what . . . brings you to Berlin? Oh God, that sounds unbelievably stupid, doesn’t it?”

  “You mean you don’t know why you’re here?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Two weeks, now. They look after me rather well. Food’s a hell of a lot better than prison rations. Bogusnik even takes me out walking from time to time, although it’s pretty obvious he’d shoot me if I so much as stepped off the kerb.”

  Wilderness doubted that.

  “Got to know the old boy rather well, actually. Decent sort of chap.”

  Wilderness doubted both parts of that too.

  “Geoffrey, I’m here to get you out.”

  “Out?”

  “Out.”

  “Out . . . how, exactly?”

  “A swap. Bogusnik wants to exchange you for a Russian.”

  “Good Lord . . . not George Blake?”

  “No. Blake’s a Dutchman and you’re not worth a Blake. Leonid Liubimov. You probably remember him as Bernard Alleyn.”

  “Oh yes. I followed the trial in the papers. I felt rather sorry for Alleyn.”

  “Don’t. I’ve got to know Alleyn rather well. He has an abundance of self-pity, enough to need none from anyone else. He’s had six years in the prison library. He looks fit and healthy, which is more than I can say for you.”

  Masefield ran his hands down his torso, down to his thighs as though trying to assess the man Wilderness could see.

  “I suppose I have lost weight.”

  Yuri’s assessment had been wide of the mark, Wilderness thought. Masefield had lost about three stone, and wasn’t just a bit greyer, he was almost white. Four years in Russian custody had put fifteen on him.

  “Did they knock you about?”

  “You mean torture? No. Bit of a slap from time to time if they thought I was taking the mickey. The regular punishment was to take all my clothes and leave me standing in the shrivelling cold in front of one of the interpreters—and they were usually women . . . highly amused at the sight of an English willie in sub-zero temperatures. But I don’t think that was reall
y a punishment so much as a routine. No . . . I think I can honestly say I was more badly abused at school. I never left the Lubyanka. It was as if they kept me in Moscow because they always meant to exchange me, although I find that hard to believe. And I suppose there are worse places.”

  “There are. Vladimir, out on the road to Siberia. Mordovia in the south. Not many prisoners survive either.”

  “And please don’t worry. They asked lots of questions, of course they did. But they got no answers. I told them nothing they didn’t know already.”

  “Water under the bridge, Geoffrey. None of that matters now. I have no mandate and no wish to debrief you. I’m just here to get you out.”

  “A swap, you say. Do you know where and when?”

  “When? No. But unless something unforeseen crops up, about ten days. Where? Out at Staaken checkpoint, where the DDR meets the British Sector. Two cars pull up. Two doors open. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Will I get to meet Alleyn?”

  “In all probability you will pass like ships in the night. Why on earth would you want to meet Alleyn?”

  “No reason I suppose. Tying up a loose end. Meeting the man who is, as it were, my alter ego.”

  “Now that really is gilding the lily.”

  “But . . . speaking of loose ends. There are one or two things I need to—”

  Wilderness was shaking his head.

  “No, no there aren’t. Whatever it is, it’s over. There are no loose ends.”

  “Please, just ask General Bogusnik. If there are another ten days . . . I’d like to say goodbye to Tanya Dmitrievna. I need to say goodbye to Tanya Dmitrievna. I know she was KGB, I know she betrayed me, but really . . . I must see her one last time.”

  Oh bloody hell. Tell him or not tell him?

  “Geoffrey, she’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “The KGB had Tanya and her sister executed four years ago. They didn’t betray you.”

  “Oh God.”

  “If anything you betrayed them.”

  “Oh God. No. No no no no no no no no no no.”

  §113

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell him?”

  “What? And have him hysterical for the last two weeks? No, the question is why did you tell him? There was no need to tell him. You could have got him back to England without him knowing! This shit storm could have burst over Burne-Jones’s head not mine.”