‘He’d like to think so. Opinions differ.’
‘What was the man doing in Berlin after the war?’
‘Cyphers.’
‘Any problems?’
‘What exactly are you asking?’
‘I was wondering if we had anything on him.’
‘You mean, if the East Germans had anything on him.’
Tom knew what he meant.
‘He had Third Reich Intelligence files put on microfilm and flown back to London for decryption and archiving. Thousands of the bastards, tens of thousands. Brilliant idea. He made bonfires of the originals.’
Henderson turned back from the window.
‘Any idea why they picked you for this?’ he asked.
‘None whatsoever,’ Tom said.
‘I asked what your clearance was. London told me I didn’t have sufficient clearance to know.’ He shrugged. ‘Their idea of a joke, apparently. They did send your file though. Most of last year was missing.’
Tom realized that Henderson was waiting for him to explain. This was absurd, obviously. If he’d been allowed to explain it wouldn’t have been missing. What would he have said anyway? I helped thwart a coup against Gorbachev? Met a beggar who turned out to be Maya Milova, the missing wife of a Politburo grandee?
Not simply a grandee, but Marshal Milov himself, the power behind Gorbachev’s throne. ‘Passing swiftly on,’ Tom said.
Henderson’s sigh was theatrical.
‘As you know,’ he said, slightly tightly, ‘East Berlin and Moscow are having a bit of a scrap.’ Seeing Tom frown, he said, ‘I put this in your briefing.’
‘Which never reached me.’
Henderson scowled. ‘Think of it as Soviet mid-life crisis meets East German adolescent rebellion.’ His gaze, when he turned to Tom, was focused in a way it hadn’t been before. ‘Moscow’s Germans don’t want to be Moscow’s Germans any more. Don’t want to be our Germans either. More’s the pity.’
He paused to pour himself more wine.
‘For them, Gorbachev’s flirtation with democracy is as pitiful as discovering your father is bonking his secretary. Their great hope is that the USSR returns to the marital bed. Personally, I doubt it. The GDR has 180,000 unofficial collaborators, inoffizelle Mitarbeiter, reporting to the Stasi. The Stasi has 90,000 staff of its own. At its height, the Gestapo only had 40,000 to handle a population four times as big. These days the Ossi are more Soviet than the Soviets.’ Leaning forward, Henderson drained his glass. ‘I’m still trying to work out why they’d let Sir Cecil go.’
14
Pushing away his hotel breakfast, Tom picked up a Herald Tribune and skimmed its first page. He didn’t like that any better.
A British Cabinet minister dead in a car crash on the M1. Fallout from the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine had drifted as far north as Scandinavia and was poisoning the moss. There was a suggestion that reindeer herds would have to be slaughtered.
‘Bad business.’
Tom recognized Henderson’s voice, and if that wasn’t enough, there was the way he stood, legs slightly apart, as if balancing on deck. The words and his way of standing took Tom back to the Tair Bull, a pub in the shadow of Pen y Fan. Tom had been doing a combat refresher course at Sennybridge when he was told there was someone he needed to meet.
They’d discussed Belfast.
Henderson had used exactly the same words then. He’d been right, it was a bad business, and shortly after Tom arrived it was to get much worse.
‘May I?’ Henderson indicated a chair.
‘Of course.’ Tom moved his plate of sliced meat, tomatoes and cheese. It was mostly uneaten. He reached for his coffee instead.
‘They’ll do you a fry-up,’ Henderson said.
Without waiting for Tom’s agreement, he clicked his fingers for a waiter and fired off a rapid order, then indicated Tom’s coffee and said he’d have one too. The waiter brought a cafetière. Five minutes after that he brought Tom a huge plate of bacon and eggs and a side order of toast.
Henderson grinned as Tom cleared the plate. ‘That bad, eh?’
Tom looked up.
‘I mean. As morning-afters go …’
As mornings went it wasn’t even close. Tom kept that thought to himself.
‘Right,’ Henderson said, when the plate was clean. ‘Sir Cecil wants sight of you.’ He laughed. ‘Think he’s worried we might be sending an assassin.’
‘If we were going to do that we’d have done it years ago.’
‘Might be best not to say that out loud. Frederika’s meeting us at Café Adler opposite the checkpoint. She’ll have your transit papers.’
‘Who’s Frederika?’
‘Seriously, no one briefed you?’
‘I was on holiday in the Bahamas when Lord Eddington called me. Theoretically, I’m still on holiday …’
‘And his lordship is really your father-in-law?’ Henderson’s gaze was cool, almost appraising. ‘How much did you tell him about Belfast?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think we go and see Sir Cecil.’
Sitting in the back of a blue government-issue Jaguar, indistinguishable from the official-issue one he’d used in Moscow, Tom did his best not to feel sick as he boned up on Frederika Schmitt, East German gymnast and close personal friend of Sir Cecil Blackburn, a man old enough to be her grandfather.
She’d been identified as Olympic material at the age of six by the Deutscher Sportausschuss, the state committee for sport, and moved to a special school. In 1965, her parents had been relocated from Dresden to Berlin, her father promoted, and her family given a four-room apartment with its own kitchen. Frederika joined SCD, the Berlin flagship of Sport Club Dynamo, the training ground for most of the GDR’s Olympic champions.
She was eight.
Having won intercity competitions in 1967, 1968 and 1969, she took gold two years later at the GDR’s national games. A year after that, she took silver at the Munich Olympics. By then she was fifteen. The medal earned her the Patriotic Order of Merit, Second Class. In 1975 she took gold at the European Championships in Norway. A year later she made the Olympic team for a second time, taking bronze in Montreal. By the time of the 1980 Moscow Olympics she was training others. Most of the Soviet bloc boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics in retaliation for Reagan’s boycott of the Moscow Olympics four years earlier. While Ecaterina Szabo was taking gold for Romania in America, Frederika was training younger gymnasts for the Soviet-run alternative. She was sent home before the games started. Injury during training.
Twenty-seven in 1984. So, twenty-nine now.
‘When was this taken?’
Tom held a mugshot, more or less. A dark-haired girl in a sweatshirt staring at the camera. She wore clip earrings and a gold Snoopy on a chain. Glancing across to check it wasn’t from the games, Henderson said, ‘Last year? Maybe this …’
‘She looks about twelve.’
‘Tom …’
‘Fifteen then.’
‘More like twenty. Drugs probably slowed her puberty. You saw the bit saying she’s addicted to painkillers? Most GDR athletes are. I’m told her coach got her pregnant a few months before Munich, then had the team doctor abort her baby. The extra oxygen in her blood was what gave her an edge.’
‘Christ,’ Tom said. ‘That’s grim.’
‘We also believe that their Institute of Sports Medicine has developed performance-enhancers. We need to stand that up.’ Henderson shrugged at Tom’s surprise. ‘Inevitably they’ll find a military application. That makes them of legitimate Intelligence interest.’
‘How does she fit into Sir Cecil’s life?’
‘Are you always this prissy? How the fuck do you think she fits? She’s his gatekeeper, cum mistress. They’re shacked up in squalid splendour on the top floor of an apartment block in the Nicholas quarter. He doesn’t let anyone in to clean. She doesn’t do any cleaning herself. He plays with his cameras or works on his memoirs. She ope
ns factories and teaches hopefuls for the next Olympics. You can ask her yourself. Café Adler’s over there.’
‘Does she come with him?’
‘To England? Absolutely not.’
‘Do you think she knows that?’
‘Best not to make waves,’ Henderson said.
‘It won’t be his family he returns to, anyway. It’ll be prison.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ Henderson looked amused. ‘An old man, a distinguished old man, misled, misguided, repenting of his naivety … If his lawyer is half decent he’ll argue Sir Cecil’s time in East Berlin should count as sentence served. That would go down well with the judge and the press.’
‘Have you met him?’
‘I saw him lecture in Cambridge once. He’s a bit of an oddball. You know, unworldly. I could see how he might have been led astray.’
‘I thought he was meant to be brilliant?’
‘He certainly believes so.’
15
Café Adler occupied the ground floor of one of those grand yellow-stone European buildings that look like someone’s idea of how a very exclusive department store should look. Jewels, first floor. Silk dresses, second. Furs, third … The side windows had sharp pediments; the corner windows had pillars; the roof overhung as if someone was trying to put cornicing on the sky.
Caro would know what the style was called.
‘Welcome back, sir.’
Henderson shook the man’s hand and nodded towards a table near a window that was being cleared by a waitress in black uniform.
‘You wouldn’t like …?’
The man indicated a pavement table with its view of Checkpoint Charlie, which looked like nothing so much as a Brighton beach café, with a red and white barrier and slowly flapping flags. A green 2CV, a blue VW Beetle and a yellow campervan were queuing to enter East Berlin.
‘Let’s leave that for the tourists.’
Henderson led the way inside, settled himself facing the door and indicated that Tom should sit beside him.
‘The GDR changed the rules, you know. Births, marriages, deaths and family illnesses used to be the only reason that they let East Berliners visit the West. Now anyone can go if they leave collateral.’
‘Collateral?’
‘Husband, wife, child.’
Passing Tom a menu he obviously knew by heart, Henderson skimmed both sides and ordered what he probably always ordered. A cappuccino and a slice of chocolate cake. With a shrug, Tom did the same.
‘Before you leave for good you have to try the schnitzel. I suggested, given they’re directly opposite the checkpoint, they put up posters reading Schnitzel to Die For. They didn’t think it funny.’ He shrugged, thanked the girl delivering his coffee and sat back. ‘So, how did you and Caro Eddington meet?’
Beneath Henderson’s question was another.
How did someone like Lady Caroline Eddington – Roedean, King’s College, daughter of an earl – meet someone who’d spent half his childhood at something little better than a reform school?
Tom might pass these days, if he needed to, but Henderson had read the file. He knew where Tom came from. Civilians merely saw the version Caro created. There were other versions that not even Caro knew about, not really. One of them used to trawl Belfast’s backstreets with a cosh in his pocket, a gun in his belt and a list of those so dirty even hell would think twice about taking them. That version was no more. He’d been retired. At least Tom hoped he had.
Looking up, he found Henderson waiting for an answer.
‘Do you remember that big 1960s Vietnam rally?’ Tom said. ‘The one in front of the US embassy that turned nasty? Some lunatic from the Flying Squad was trying to open a girl’s head with a truncheon. So I hit him, grabbed the girl and ran. The girl turned out to be Caro. Things sort of went from there …’
‘I bet Lord Eddington loved that.’
‘She’d told him she was visiting the British Museum.’
Henderson laughed and clicked his fingers for a waitress who smiled and nodded. Tom wondered if he was the only one to notice her scowl as she turned away. Henderson didn’t. He’d gone back to his cake by then.
Tom saw Frederika before Henderson did.
She crossed with a group of off-duty US soldiers and returning tourists. She walked alone, head down, her eyes shielded behind dark glasses, her hair hidden under a silk scarf. She looked tiny. There was an elegance to her that had the soldiers staring. Her chin went up and she stood a little taller when she noticed.
Even at a distance it was obvious she limped.
Tom pushed back his chair.
‘Let her come to us,’ Henderson said.
She was ushered through with no fuss, a US sergeant turning to watch her walk away. Once through, she seemed to breathe more easily, stopping for a second to stare at a huge poster for Calvin Klein Obsession, before squaring her shoulders. She headed for Café Adler and Tom stood to greet her. But it was Henderson she shook hands with first.
‘You know each other?’ Tom asked.
‘We’ve met,’ Henderson said. ‘This is Major Fox. The man I told you about.’
‘He’s going to take us to London?’
Henderson’s smile was silky smooth. ‘Let me order you a coffee.’
‘Hot chocolate,’ Frederika said. ‘And Sachertorte. Real Sachertorte, not that fake stuff.’ She kept glancing at those who trickled in to fill the other tables. After a while, Tom realized she was waiting to be recognized.
‘I saw you take a medal in Montreal,’ he said.
She looked up, eyes suddenly alight. ‘You were there?’
‘No,’ Tom said. ‘I only saw it on television. It was on the news.’
‘They showed it on your news?’
Becca had liked floor routines. The preciseness of the movements and tight self-control probably attracted her. They’d certainly played their part in the rest of her life. ‘Yes. I watched it with my daughter.’
Frederika smiled.
She ate her chocolate cake, scraped the plate as clean as she could manage with her fork and excused herself, walking towards the Toilette.
‘You cynical bastard,’ Henderson said.
‘It was true.’
‘Of course it was. Every word of it.’
She came back wiping her mouth and stopped to pour herself a glass of water from an ice-filled jug used by waiters.
‘We should go,’ she said.
Henderson reached for his briefcase.
‘Not you,’ she said. There was a ghost of spite in her voice. ‘I only have papers for the major.’
‘This isn’t what we agreed.’
She shrugged.
‘Half an hour to cross,’ Henderson said tightly. ‘Half an hour to get to Nikolaiviertel, the Nicholas quarter. A couple of hours for you and Sir Cecil to get to know each other. An hour to get back. Technically, they shouldn’t search you in either direction. But they’re capable of asking if you mind and being difficult if you do. So, let’s allow an hour and a half for your return. I’ll meet you here at fifteen hundred.’
‘No,’ Frederika said. ‘That’s not right.’
She unfolded a form that gave Tom permission to enter East Berlin and return forty-eight hours later. It stated that he had two nights’ accommodation booked through Interhotel. He would be staying at the Palasthotel on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse …
‘Frederika.’
‘Sir Cecil insists.’
Henderson looked furious.
‘The GDR will pay,’ Frederika said, as if that was the problem. To Tom, she said, ‘The Palasthotel is where we put important foreigners.’
‘Six hundred beds,’ Henderson sneered, ‘A thousand rooms. A two-thousand-seat conference room. Meeting rooms. Bars, restaurants, its own cinema. A swimming pool, a gymnasium and hot and cold running Stasi …’
Frederika glared at him. ‘It does not.’
‘They even have their own entrance,’ Henderson told Tom. ‘Their
own offices. It’s said the clerks who listen in take up an entire floor. So, if a pretty girl in the bar offers you a good time, remember that she’s more interested in your secrets than your shekels or sexual technique.’
‘I don’t have secrets,’ Tom said.
‘Everyone has secrets,’ Henderson said flatly. He reached for the Interhotel form and turned it so he could see it better. ‘A suite,’ he said. ‘That probably means you get video cameras as well as microphones.’
He pushed back his chair. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’
Heading for the bar, he demanded something of the girl behind it and the manager appeared a few seconds later. He and Henderson did that little handshake where money changes hands and Henderson headed for the kitchens. Frederika grinned sourly, put on a croaky little voice and said. ‘Mr H. Phone home …’
Tom stared at her.
‘You’ve never seen ET?’
‘I think my wife took …’ Tom hesitated ‘… someone.’
It was the first time he hadn’t named Becca. It felt like a betrayal, but he didn’t want questions about her. He didn’t want to have to explain to this stranger that she was no longer alive, that, yes, he was getting over it.
‘Are you all right?’ Frederika asked.
‘I’m fine,’ Tom said. ‘Why?’
‘You look sad …’
‘And you look in pain.’
Her eyes widened and she nodded. Dipping into her pocket, she flipped open a pill box and extracted a pill. She reached for her water, hesitated, and extracted a second, swallowing both.
‘What are they?’ Tom asked.
Frederika shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
‘I was shot. I found getting off opiates hard.’
‘I fell,’ Frederika said. ‘I’ll be on these for life.’
The flatness of her voice said she liked discussing her accident even less than Tom liked talking about Becca. So they sat in silence, while those who’d simply come for coffee and cake paid their bills, vacated their tables and left to do whatever they needed to do. They were replaced by locals arriving for lunch.
‘He’ll be back soon,’ Frederika said.
‘You don’t like him?’
‘I have my reasons.’
Nightfall Berlin Page 6