The Quiet Dogs: 3 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

The main house is centred in ten acres of open country, dotted with a seemingly haphazard series of prefabricated huts, and an acre of woodland: the whole surrounded by high walls, studded with invisible electronic sniffers.

  Depending on their sense of nostalgia, or guilt, members of the Firm regard Warminster with either a feeling of warmth, or a shiver of fear. Dreadful things had happened there; as well as good.

  Tubby Fincher stood in the Commandant’s office, his emaciated frame silhouetted against the tall sash window, as he looked out across a stretch of lawn, towards the line of evergreens which hide the brick wall on the road side of the estate.

  From the open door, Tubby appeared—to Herbie Kruger—as a Giacometti figure.

  Fincher turned, smiled and put out a hand to the huge ungainly man as he entered. Searching for the right words, and not finding them, Tubby resorted to some banality about Herbie looking fit and well.

  “The weight comes back easy enough,” Big Herbie growled. “Life may not be as simple.”

  They stood facing each other; both ill at ease, until Herbie took the initiative, carefully lowering himself into a chair.

  “You come to give me the bullet, Tubby?” he asked; the lumpy porridge face set in a deceptively stupid expression, as though he did not care one way or another. It had been almost a year since they last met—in cold and grim circumstances.

  A little over a year before, Big Herbie—one of the Service’s most experienced men—had been granted permission to carry out an operation, codenamed Trepan, to save an old, and valued, network in East Berlin. His brief had been clear—he was not to go over the Wall himself: that was too dangerous to contemplate.

  But Herbie, whose field work had been mainly within the Eastern Bloc, had blatantly disobeyed orders—slipping into East Berlin, settling the problem, and getting himself neatly trapped into the bargain.

  For a good week, Eberhard Lukas Kruger was the prisoner of Jacob Vascovsky. His escape was ingenious and lucky, but left a nasty taste in the mouths of his colleagues. From the day of his return, Herbie had been kept at Warminster. The Firm’s trust in him was sadly uncertain.

  “The bullet?” Herbie repeated. “The sack, and a bag to put it in? That’s what young Tony Worboys told me—it’s an expression, he says; his mother uses it. You get the sack, and a bag to put it in. The bullet. Fired.”

  Tony Worboys had been Big Herbie’s assistant. Five years out of training but still known as young Worboys.

  Tubby held up a hand through which the bones appeared to show clearly like an X-Ray. They were as alike as chalk and cheese—Fincher and Kruger. Young Worboys’ mother would have said that also, Herbie thought. Alike as his last pair of confessors—the ones with the names like a firm of specialist leather workers: Fidge and Morray. Fidge with the warts, big hands and policeman’s feet; Morray like his name, slippery, with a sting in his voice. Neither had been as good as Crawford, the Firm’s old hand, brought out of retirement especially to deal with Herbie Kruger’s case. At the time, Big Herbie had thought he should feel honoured. Crawford was exceptional. Never had there been a confessor to touch him; except, possibly, Skardon. Yet even Skardon had failed to break Philby.

  Tubby Fincher found it difficult to look his former friend in the eyes. They had been close once, but that was over, and the thin senior officer had even fought hard to avoid this final scenario. Trust was a thing of the past.

  “You’re going home, Herbie,” he said quietly.

  “So where’s home?” A shrug of the massive shoulders.

  “The flat’s still waiting for you. St. John’s Wood. Just as you left it. I’ve a car to take you back. Tonight. You’ll have a weekend to settle in, then the DG wants to see you first thing on Monday. Giving you a job.”

  “Cleaning latrines, yes?” Herbie looked at him with vacant, peasant-ignorant eyes.

  What was going on behind the eyes, deep within that agile brain, Tubby wondered. He still felt a little guilty, not trusting the man, once such a close confidant. “Something like that.” He tried to sound cheerful. “Cleaning up a mess anyhow. Mopping up your own vomit, if you want to think of it like that.”

  Herbie remained silent, staring at a patch of carpet between Fincher’s shoes; an act which made the macilent Tubby even more uncomfortable. It was so simple to forget Herbie’s ability. The big man was using technique even now, just by staring at the carpet in silence: the technique of secrecy, intrigue, and misdirection. Herbie was from the old school; from the days when men on the ground, and agents in place, were of greater importance than the evaluation of data, or infra-red pictures taken from intelligence satellites. Nobody should ever underestimate Kruger’s mastery of technique, or his intellect.

  It was because of these things, and the climate within the intelligence community, Tubby presumed, that the Director General had obtained personal clearance from the Prime Minister to bring Kruger back and use him in an active capacity.

  “Tubby ... ?” Herbie began, but Fincher did not want to be drawn. He forced his voice to stay neutral, and not betray hostility as he told Kruger to go and pack the few things they allowed him in this place. “We must leave within the hour.”

  Big Herbie gave a small smile, indicating that he realised the boot was on the other foot now—after all the years, the fighting, operations, planning, and arcane action. His hands came up, palms flat, lifting six inches from the knees, then dropping again, with alarming gentleness, as the great head gave one quick nod. “I get ready, Tubby.” At the door he turned back. “You pay, my friend, believe me. In our business you pay in years, or months, or days. You pay in our own coinage—Trust. I’ll mop up my vomit; then, possibly you’ll trust again.”

  Tubby Fincher swung back towards the window, deeply disturbed.

  Tubby sat in the back of the car with Herbie, and considered the change that had overtaken the huge man. Big Herbie was docile, staring out of the window, like a child being taken to an unfamiliar house. Fincher wanted to talk, but could not; just as he would like to banish all thoughts of betrayal from his mind. There was no evidence against the big man—Crawford had said it a dozen times: only that single inexplicable deviation from a lifetime’s professional habit, discipline and caution. Tubby Fincher wondered what went on in the mind of a man who knew he was suspected of treachery: what thoughts would plague him if the suspicions were founded in truth? What anxieties? Or what bewilderment if he was, as the Director General believed, clean and free of guilt?

  Big Herbie had no wish to talk with Tubby Fincher. There was little desire to speak with any of them. He knew the suspicions, and he was conscious that they were unlikely to go away. Now he was simply puzzled by this new, and unexpected, move—taking him from the institutionalised life of Warminster, back to some kind of job which could only be another test, ‘mopping up his own vomit’: a jab at his loyalty.

  As he had done in the field for all those years, Herbie started to use his strongest mental weapon. He watched the road, fields, villages and copses rolling past, allowing his mind to play the music he knew so well. It was an escape, a method of retreat, and of putting the mind either in neutral, or setting a task for the subconscious—a problem that would finally emerge solved.

  The music in his mind was Mahler’s Second Symphony—‘The Resurrection’—for he knew the works of Mahler by heart, and had no need of orchestra, recording, or tape, to listen when he needed to use the facility.

  Crawford had understood his love for the composer. One of the other confessors—was it Morray?—had scoffed. An oaf, neither comprehending Herbie’s devotion to the composer, nor the works themselves. Pretentious, the boor had called them, signalling by one word that he had no understanding of either Herbie’s work, or Mahler’s stature.

  But Crawford was astute: a tweedy man who smelled of pipe tobacco, and some shaving lotion which Herbie could not identify. There was nothing of the bully, or inquisitor, about Crawford, who had put even Big Herbie—no stranger to the methods of in
terrogation—off guard.

  Crawford had gone, first, not for the horrors—the recent happenings and folly which had brought Herbie Kruger to Warminster—but back to the beginning: to childhood, and the trail of secret life which the large German had followed since his teens. It was as though Crawford realised Herbie Kruger was still in shock, drowned in night sweats and dreams of what had happened—the fact of love, the anxiety and sense of responsibility—those driving forces that had led him to the sin of disobedience, murder, deceit. No, he would never be free again; but in this profession you were not free, from the moment it embraced you. Freedom was another land, a different time. Possibly you could touch it for a moment in this life—but freedom was not the easy word of politicians.

  Having just come back from behind the Berlin Wall—when facing Crawford—it had been simple for Herbie to talk about the past: of life in Berlin in the late 1930s; his father and mother; his father’s death as a fighter pilot; and the young Herbie’s growing distaste for the regime, for the Party, and the Führer. Then the hell of Berlin as the Russians drew near; the death of his mother; his own flight into the arms of the Americans, and the strange life that was to become his profession.

  The work, as a lad of fourteen, undercover in the DP Camps of Europe, winkling out Nazis posing as refugees; then the change of pace when, in spite of pleas from his case officer, the American service refused him, rejecting all thoughts of taking Herbie into the fold of what was eventually to become the CIA. Yet, when one door closed, another opened—to the British, who saw his potential, and the great use to which they could put this mountain of a young man, who had an ideal deceptive air of stupidity. So, through those years when Big Herbie Kruger had become a legend in the British Service as an agent runner in the Eastern Zone, where his networks built him a reputation which had lasted until the previous year.

  Openly, he had spoken to Crawford of the secret battle, during those Cold War years: the feud with the then rising KGB officer called Vascovsky; and the river of gossip, hard fact, and superlative intelligence provided by his people in the East. Then the forming of that small and secret network, after the building of the Berlin Wall; and the final crash, when Herbie had seen his agents blown, killed, turned, and made suddenly invisible by Russian magic.

  It became a passionate, vital, even emotionally gripping, story. Crawford had listened as one captivated by what seemed, in retrospect, and in the telling, an adventure; yet was, at the time, a terrifying period, interspersed with long dull interludes: and a final capitulation, when Herbie Kruger got out by the skin of his teeth, leaving only a handful of watchers still untouched by Vascovsky.

  He told Crawford of the following years; of his work in Bonn: another blown cover, and the instructions that he was never to work in the field again. Then of the new cover—as a burnt-out case in London, with an office and facilities in the Whitehall Annexe, away from the tall, concrete, steel and glass building near Westminster Bridge which is the Firm’s headquarters.

  There Herbie spent his days, ostensibly involved in paperwork and vetting. In reality he had become one of the most knowledgeable Intelligence mandarins, with a special understanding of—and responsibility for—East Germany.

  From the quiet, neat office in the Annexe, Big Herbie enhanced his already brimming reputation—dealing with daily problems affecting the East, and slowly building a new servicing machinery for the few men and women on the ground in East Berlin. Because of this network; because of his old alliances; because of his reputation, and past success, the Director General had given permission for Operation Trepan—the job that was to cause Big Herbie’s fall from grace.

  So it was that Crawford finally led Herbie through his life, to those few days of horror, when the adroit Vascovsky had him close mew’d up on the wrong side of the Wall. Nightmare time.

  Sitting next to Tubby, now, in the back of the car speeding towards London, Herbie felt the same old swell of depression, aware of the one constant—that his life’s work, his reputation and loyalty, had been shattered into fragments through one act of folly.

  Slowly Herbie turned his head, conscious of Tubby Fincher’s eyes moving away from him. Not only his old enemies were hiding in the dark, but his old friends also.

  Tubby Fincher still wondered how it was for Herbie; though not a particle of his own senses felt compassion. The Director General could possibly allow the benefit of the doubt, but Fincher was unable to give way as easily. What had once shown the smallest chink remained unsafe for all time. He heard Big Herbie give a small sigh, and thought that it was all very well for Kruger to feel strain. Tubby Fincher still had a long session ahead, once Herbie was safely installed, back in the St. John’s Wood flat. The long session would, in the end, have a final effect on Kruger.

  They turned into the road Herbie knew so well. Yet now, he could hardly recognise it. Like a man returning to a childhood haunt, the street and buildings seemed smaller and more cramped. The year at Warminster had accustomed him to space.

  4

  ALONE ONCE MORE IN THE St. John’s Wood flat, Big Herbie again experienced that sense of isolation, known only to those who have lived the strange double life of deceit, under cover in a foreign land.

  It was as though he did not even know this place, with its large picture windows looking out across London; even the once-familiar, and comfortable, furnishings now seemed alien. The leather buttoned suite, metal and glass tables, expensive stereo equipment; the four oils of Berlin—executed by some unknown artist in the days before the Third Reich. All were at odds with the experiences of the past year.

  He wandered through the rooms, conscious that all appeared to be as he had left it—except that it was clean; spotless, and polished; as it would be, for Herbie was under no illusion that they had prepared carefully for his return. The cleaning would have been done after the electronics were installed, and he might just as well spit at the moon as try to locate whatever had gone in. Maybe, he thought, after a day or so he would try to do a small visual sweep. Both the telephones would be handled from outside, while the interior devices could range from high frequency sophisticated micro-ears, to those minute fibre-optic lenses leading either to cameras or VTR snoops.

  Even the book he had been reading still lay on the bedside table—Jordan’s Edward VI: The Threshold of Power. Herbie Kruger’s other passions, outside his work, were music and English history. Seeing the book triggered an even deeper trough in his depression. Since Herbie had last put down that book, his world had shifted on its axis; in spite of the care, and professional skill, with which he had planned his own private trip over the Berlin Wall—to do what he truly believed could be accomplished by himself alone.

  In honesty he now knew the folly, and its consequences: his own selfishness and indulgence. He also knew the cost of that action, and could even count the lives—trapped or ruined. All because he, Eberhard Lukas Kruger, had taken the law into his own hands, and come face to face with his enemy of the past, Jacob Vascovsky.

  Nightly in the tormented dreams, he saw the faces of those he had failed; and sometimes, like now, in broad daylight. Girren; Schnabeln; Anna Blatte; Mortiz Winter; the sensual Martha Adler; Otto Luntmann, the eternal scholar; poor little Peter Sensel; Monch; and Ursula. Christ, Ursula, his Achilles heel.

  Herbie shook his head, as though to clear the images from his mind, or blot out the echo of his own cry when Vascovsky had finally laid the news on him. Kruger gave a bitter smile. What madness. He had even thought that the few days’ inquisition—face to face with Vascovsky—had been simple. Those first questions had appeared to need no agile ducking or weaving. How wrong he had been.

  At the time, the interrogation in East Berlin was not intended to last. The real thing would have been set up in another part of the forest—probably in some dacha near the Black Sea, with young tough KGB watchers sealing off the outside world.

  Herbie had no doubts that it was pure chance which saved him from the whole, drawn out, b
usiness of confession by every possible means. Chance, and his own recklessness again: though, by this time, it was not courage that spurred him, but a need to get clear—even if it cost him his life. Even life did not matter, after Vascovsky had shown him the full picture: Herbie Kruger’s professional career and reputation was founded on a series of betrayals and treachery.

  Standing in his old bedroom, part of his mind computing where the musicians had their machines—in another flat? in this building? elsewhere?—Herbie wondered, with hindsight, which, in the end, would have been worse: the Black Sea or Warminster? Of one thing he was sure. Somehow, during those few days with Vascovsky, he had compounded the errors.

  When Crawford really got down to it, back at Warminster, and began to draw the teeth of fact—without the benefit of anaesthetic—something had touched a nerve in the heart of the Firm. Either Crawford recognised a tiny flaw, or it came to light when the patient men were sifting through the daily transcripts of those long conversations, between Herbie and his wise and experienced confessor.

  For all his personal guile, Big Herbie had let slip some diamond—which meant little to himself—placing it before Vascovsky, right there in East Berlin. Whatever it was, that small piece of information meant a great deal more to the senior men of Herbie’s Service than it did to Herbie. Therefore its value was probably even higher to the Russian Service.

  He had some idea that it was about Hallet and Birdseed; for Crawford kept going back to that one point, and those two names. Later, when the other confessors took over, they also retraced the same ground. Hallet and Birdseed? Why should such a piece of chaff mean anything?

  Slowly, Big Herbie began to unpack his case: hanging up the two suits; folding shirts; dumping dirty linen into the laundry basket, then carrying the beloved taped works of Gustav Mahler back into the main room: replacing them in the polished racks above the stereo machines. He traced the fingers of one hand along the ranks of taped music: Mahler, Bruckner, Shostakovitch, Britten, a little Mozart, some Bach, Richard Strauss, but no Rachmaninov.