‘He’s dead, Karl. He was shot and killed out on patrol in Guiné in Africa in 1968. He was a soldier…like Julius.’
For a moment he looked as if he’d breathed in pure frost, it stiffened him, froze his guts and weighed him down. He slumped on to the cement blocks, his head hanging from his shoulders, as if suddenly broken. He took her limp hand and put it to his good cheek, shook his head against it, not so cold now.
‘No wonder you don’t know yourself,’ he said.
‘And you?’
‘Living my son’s life in fifteen seconds…it’s not the same. Losing a child after a lifetime, that’s an unbearable thing.’
‘Like your parents did,’ she said, automatically because she’d thought that years ago, too.
‘Yes,’ he said, and stared into the concrete floor.
His head came up slowly. His eyes fixed on a thick crack in the plaster of the wall. He followed it up to the ceiling, where it parted into two thinner cracks, which eventually merged into nothingness.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘I’m thinking.’
‘You haven’t stopped thinking since you shone that torch in my face.’
‘Now I’m thinking what I was trying not to think earlier.’
‘And failed.’
‘Yes, I failed…I’ve been wondering why Jim Wallis would send you to contact me.’
‘Did Jim recruit you?’ she asked, a feint, a diversion.
‘I recruited him,’ said Schneider. ‘He came over to East Berlin on a trade delegation, soon after I got here. He was fat and bald, but I could still see that schoolboy’s face of his staring out. He was travelling under some name or other, but I knew it was him. I had him picked up, grilled him, had him with his claws stuck in the ceiling. Then I personally drove him back to the delegation and told him who I was. I proved it to him as well…using your names. Anne Ashworth, Andrea Aspinall. I’d already decided that the only way I could make myself feel better about what I’d become – this Stasi officer who spies on foreigners – was to work against the system from the inside, use my position to get defectors out and point the finger at East German undercovers in the West. I said I’d work for him on condition that he was the only person to know about me and that there would never be any link between me and British Intelligence. Complete anonymity. No money to be allocated to me so that I could never be traced. But he’s clever, Jim, because he remembered that there was a link. The original link. You.
‘And our arrangement was all working perfectly…until I came under investigation after the KGB shot General Stiller, which I can only think was a political assassination with top-level authority from Moscow, because since then I’ve been under some very heavy internal pressure. I needed help, Russian help but, as you can imagine, my KGB friends deserted me so…Jim comes up with a plan to give me support without compromising my conditions of service. Or to use the words of the contact agent, in a way that would leave me “cast iron with Lord Leonid Brezhnev”. And what does Jim do? He sends you to contact me. Which means…’ he said, looking not at her but into her, organ-deep.
‘What?’ she said, shuddering under that look.
‘You’re working for them, aren’t you? The Russians. And Jim knows it, too. You’re a double,’ he said. ‘It’s clever, isn’t it? And very sick, too. This is a cold war, they’re right on that. The level of absurdity is such that nothing can be believed, or is believed any more, except the old reliables. Wallis would never let me fall through the net because I am one of the few agents he’s got on this side of the Wall who delivers consistently good intelligence. He will do anything to protect me. He will use my only love, because he knows that she is the one person in this world who would never give me up.’
Silence.
‘Or is he wrong?’ he asked, raising a corner of his forehead where there should have been an eyebrow. ‘Did they scrub your brain, Andrea?’
‘He’s right,’ she said quietly.
‘My luck holds,’ he said. ‘But yours doesn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Jim’s decided to sacrifice you for me.’
‘How?’
‘You’ve been sent by the Russians to find me. The Snow Leopard. And now?’ he asked. ‘Now you’re not going to find the Snow Leopard because you won’t give me up to the Russians. So, as a double agent, what the hell are you going to do?’
‘I’ll say I never saw you.’
‘They won’t believe you. What have you been doing this last hour? They’ll check with the hotel. Everybody’s watching everybody else. This is wartime Lisbon cubed.’
‘I didn’t see your face.’
‘But what can you say you were actually doing for an hour?’
‘We were planning the Varlamov defection together.’
‘And that’s it? You never see me again? The Russians won’t accept that. There will have to be another meeting and they’ll want to know about it. If you don’t find the Snow Leopard…you might not be going back to London.’
‘Do your thinking, Karl.’
‘That’s all I can do.’
‘I’ll do anything, you know that.’
‘Anything?
‘Except give you up.’
‘Maybe you won’t have to give up the Snow Leopard, just a Snow Leopard,’ he said, and then to himself, ‘Whatever…Jim’s going to have to do without Varlamov.’
Chapter 37
17th January 1971, East Berlin.
She lay on the bed, not sleeping, always uncomfortable, always some part of her uncovered and cold because the cover was too small and she got cramped with her knees up to her chest. She writhed and rucked up the bottom sheet, which was too short as well. What’s the matter with this country, that they torture their guests with linen?
They had kissed, and she still felt the halfness of that kiss on her lips. The one half as she remembered it, the other smooth and hard like a beak, but not of a bird, more like a squid. Strange that it hadn’t repelled her when the idea of it was so unpleasant. His new imprint.
He’d asked her why she was working for the Russians and the lies queued up with amazing alacrity, ready to file out: In Portugal I grew to hate fascism. I became a communist out of resistance to fascism. I loathed the authoritarian imperialism of the Estado Novo. I lost a son and a husband in the maintenance of empire. It was all very impressive, but she used none of it. It was all unacceptable, more than a disgrace, to attempt to speak those words to his lashless, browless eye. Even the loyalty to João Ribeiro, which she’d used to beat Gromov, looked tarnished in the glow of that torch between their half-dark faces, their visible breath joining in the cold air. She’d started on that new line of thinking, her need for control, everyone’s need for control, but even without being able to see him clearly, she knew he wasn’t having any of it.
‘When I was in Lisbon, Richard Rose was always throwing lines of literature at me,’ he said. ‘He gave me a line once from a poet, who he told me afterwards was called Coleridge. I’d never heard of him. The line was “the secret ministry of frost”. How silently and stealthily frost transforms the world. We don’t know it’s happening until we wake up on a white, still morning with everything frozen in its moment. Perhaps this was supposed to be a vision of beauty, I don’t know. But one morning, before I’d made contact with Jim, when I was sitting in a car, out on surveillance, I saw the secret ministry of frost. It had been raining and then the temperature started to drop. It happened in front of me, no secrecy. The water hardened on the windows around me into clear slivers of ice at first, and then, as it grew colder, they crystallized, blurred and whitened until I couldn’t see out and nobody could see in. And it hit me, threw me into a blind panic, that this was what had become of me. I had disappeared under the secret ministry of frost, I was impenetrable, I was blank…except that it wasn’t frost. It was hate. I hated myself, what I’d become.’
She lay now, cold in her bed, thinking about her mother, because it was easier t
o think about her than to get personal. She remembered her mother’s remoteness, her white moon face, peering up the stairwell out of the dark hall, that hardness of her cheek, the coldness of her hands, the unreachable mother trapped behind her frosted windows. She’d come to see her hate of Longmartin clear enough, but had she ever taken it that one step further, as Voss had done? Father Harpur might know. She might have confessed to him that she was betraying her country and found salvation that way.
Andrea propped her head up, lit a cigarette, placed an ashtray on her chest. She already felt different, still too trussed up by fear, perhaps, to see it clearly but she was beginning to understand the simple beauty of the ‘white-washed walls’ in her father’s last letter to her mother. The cleanliness. She’d been lucky, or was it a different destiny for her, to find the one person to whom she could possibly admit her appalling weakness? In the drear light behind the curtain she saw how she’d been formed by that weakness. How she’d used her strengths to hide it. How that weakness had become her secret. That was an equation. Secrets equal weaknesses. She sucked on the cigarette and savoured the irony that it was her secrets, those weaknesses, that had made her unknowable. They gave her mystery and they made her attractive, too. Some men, like Louis Greig, knew it and used it to satisfy their own depraved needs. The others were hopelessly misinformed.
There was a knock on the door. She stubbed out the cigarette. Another knock, more urgent. He’d told her the Russians would come for her and that it would be in the night. She opened the door. A man stepped past her, another stayed in the corridor. The man stood at the window, told her he’d come to take her to General Yakubovsky and that she should get dressed.
The Snow Leopard had watched her leave. She hadn’t let him keep the photograph, more cautious this time around, and right, too. He kept his eye to the crack in the boarded window and counted her steps across the courtyard to where the taxi driver was waiting. That kiss. He touched the ruined half of his mouth. Had that kiss disgusted her? Something shuddered in his torso, a wrack of old pain. Seeing her, opening that black trunk, bringing back all those dark memories. His mother’s death, perhaps, in the firestorm of Dresden. Was that it? He braced himself against the window, eye still to the crack, as the taxi pulled out of the Mietskasern. Another shudder. Pain streaked across his chest. He coughed as if he was hiding and was desperate not to be heard. He dropped to his knees and sobbed into the back of his gloves, over the years of not knowing, over the years that he would never know, and that possibly he might never have known. Julius, his father and mother all staring into the camera, behind his son’s unbreakable smile.
He pulled himself together. He collected up the cigarette stubs, stamped the ash into oblivion. He took a different route out of the Mietskasern and crossed Wörtherstrasse into another. He went to the hinterhof and up to the third floor, trying to remember his Brecht, pulling the mask over his face and knocking on the door.
‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne,’ said the voice.
‘Und die trägt er im Gesicht,’ he replied.
This time the man offered him a drink, which meant that this was not going to be a smooth operation. Molle mit korn. Beer with schnapps. Not the time of day for it, but it seemed right. They knocked back the schnapps and sipped the beer.
‘Is it ready?’ asked the Snow Leopard.
‘Except for the entry date.’
‘I don’t need an entry date any more.’
‘It’s not going to make it any cheaper, Herr Kappa.’
‘It should.’
‘I know who this is,’ said the man. ‘I’ve been reading the newspapers.’
‘I’m amazed someone like you bothers with those rags.’
‘He’s Grigory Varlamov. The physicist. He’s going to give a couple of lectures. They’re going to present him with a medal at some dinner and then what? Hup, hup over the Wall. You’ve got to be crazy, Herr Kappa.’
‘I’m not asking you to go with him. Just to do your job.’
‘This is very, very cluttered, Herr Kappa.’
‘Did I ask you to sign your work? Nobody’s going to look at this and come knocking.’
‘If you take Varlamov over the Wall the heat’s going to come down hard on all of us. Nobody will move a muscle for months.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘I’m doing myself out of a job.’
‘You’re nearly there.’
‘I’ve got people I have to run. People who’ve collected their wolf’s ticket years ago…they rely on me.’
‘Keep going.’
‘Five thousand.’
‘And finally we have it. The price of freedom.’
‘Five thousand.’
‘I heard you the first time,’ he said, steeling up. ‘Let’s see the work.’
The man left the room and returned to find the Snow Leopard counting out the money. The man was relieved.
‘It’s the best bit of work I’ve done for a long time,’ he said.
Schneider looked at the passport, held it up to the light, sipped his beer, suddenly weighed down by sadness. He put the beer down, handed over the money, slipped the passport into his pocket.
‘Who’ve you spoken to about this?’ he asked.
‘I never speak to anyone.’
‘You’d better count that money.’
The man thumbed through the notes. Schneider hit him hard in the throat. The man went down and Schneider knelt on his chest and jammed his gloved fingers into the man’s windpipe and held him, looking up at the door so that he didn’t have to see the man’s face. The fist in the throat had taken everything out of the man. He died with barely a struggle. Schneider picked up the money, cleaned out his two glasses and stood over the body. He was angry at what the man had forced him into but he felt ruthless, too. He wasn’t going to leave a man like that out there, with Andrea taking her risks.
‘Stupid,’ he said, and left.
Andrea sat in the back of the car, the two men in front speaking in Russian, animated, talking about football, she gathered from the head movements. She smoked her dutyfree cigarettes and thought about his body. The body she had just held, had put her hands into his coat and grasped, was thin and hard as a rail. She knew from looking at his throat, the veins standing out of his neck, that he had not put on any weight and when she put her hands on him he seemed even thinner than she remembered. His big bones protruded, large hard knuckles around his shoulders, elbows, wrists. He’d told her that his two years in Krasnogorsk on bread and vegetable soup, with the odd piece of fish, had left him like this. He couldn’t flesh out however much he ate. It was as if there was something else inside him eating the food, a worm, or something bigger, a snake. Thin or not, she still wanted him. She still had the taste of his salt in her mouth, even after all these years.
The car turned off the main street and into another. A white expanse, which disappeared into greyer lines to black, flashed past in frames. The word ‘gulag’ formed in her brain, stuck in her throat, which was not a good sign.
She’d asked him about his wife. Elena. A Russian. He’d said he’d married her out of loneliness. He didn’t know her, but he thought that was because there was little to know. His girls. He loved his girls. His wife made him feel lonely still, but his girls filled him up.
This was how they’d been together a quarter of a century on. A generation between meetings, and yet no time at all.
They pulled up at the barrier to the St Antonius Hospital, the car’s exhaust crowding the foot of the guardhouse. Minutes later they were stomping up stairs and down corridors, through an office, into a living room where General Oleg Yakubovsky, the fat man with the eyebrows Schneider had told her about, was standing in front of the fire, warming his buttocks. She introduced herself. He offered coffee, or something stronger. She took both. He seemed pleased.
‘You have made contact with the Snow Leopard,’ said Yakubovsky. ‘We watched you get into the taxi in Ernst Thälmann Park but decided t
o let you have your first meeting alone.’
‘I’m not sure where we went. The driver took me on a tour. A park, a statue of Lenin.’
He asked her to describe where they’d met and what the Snow Leopard looked like.
‘I didn’t see his face because he was wearing a ski mask. He was taller than me by some inches. He wore gloves and a grey coat. He was broad, thickset but not fat. The only skin I saw was at his neck between the mask and the collar of his shirt. There was some dark hair and his skin colour was dark, too. The shape of his head was wide, square. It looked like a heavy head.’
‘What did you discuss?’
‘I gave him twenty thousand marks and an American passport in the name of Colonel Peter Taylor. He spent some time inspecting the passport, but he never removed his gloves.’
‘What colour were the gloves?’
‘Brown.’
‘What does he intend to use this passport for?’
‘To get Grigory Varlamov into the West.’
Yakubovsky didn’t react.
‘You were with him a long time,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Your taxi didn’t come back to the hotel for over an hour.’
‘I was building his trust. He was very nervous. I told him about myself. I wanted him to talk about himself, but he was cautious. I told him I was attending lectures at Humboldt University where Varlamov is due to perform. I wanted him to make use of me, but he was a very difficult man, General. He said he needed twenty-four hours to change the passport photo and then he would need to get the passport to Varlamov. I offered again and this time he accepted. We’ve agreed to meet again and finalize how I should approach Varlamov.’
Yakubovsky wrote out two numbers on a card, which she should ring when the Snow Leopard made contact again. He told her she would be followed from now on and she protested, saying that it was too dangerous, that she didn’t want to lose him when they were so close. Yakubovsky agreed, reluctantly. She finished her brandy. He held her coat.
The Company of Strangers Page 47