Berlin Game Read online

  ‘So that’s her,’ I said, although in fact I’d not noticed the photo. At least I’d changed the subject. I didn’t want Werner quizzing me about the office. He should have known better than that.

  Poor Werner. Why does the betrayed husband always cut such a ridiculous figure? Why isn’t the unfaithful partner the comical one? It was all so unfair; no wonder Werner pretended his wife was visiting relatives. He was staring ahead, his big black eyebrows lowered as he concentrated on the checkpoint. ‘I hope he wasn’t trying to come through with forged papers. They put everything under the ultraviolet lights nowadays, and they change the markings every week. Even the Americans have given up using forged papers – it’s suicide.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I told him. ‘My job is just to pick him up and debrief him before the office sends him to wherever he has to go.’

  Werner turned his head; the bushy black hair and dark skin made his white teeth flash like a toothpaste commercial. ‘London wouldn’t send you over here for that kind of circus, Bernie. For that kind of task they send office boys, people like me.’

  ‘We’ll go and get something to eat and drink, Werner,’ I said. ‘Do you know some quiet restaurant where they have sausage and potatoes and good Berlin beer?’

  ‘I know just the place, Bernie. Straight up Friedrichstrasse, under the railway bridge at the S-Bahn station and it’s on the left. On the bank of the Spree: Weinrestaurant Ganymed.’

  ‘Very funny,’ I said. Between us and the Ganymed there was a wall, machine guns, barbed wire, and two battalions of gun-toting bureaucrats. ‘Turn this jalopy round and let’s get out of here.’

  He switched on the ignition and started up. ‘I’m happier with her away,’ he said. ‘Who wants to have a woman waiting at home to ask you where you’ve been and why you’re back so late?’

  ‘You’re right, Werner,’ I said.

  ‘She’s too young for me. I should never have married her.’ He waited a moment while the heater cleared the glass a little. ‘Try again tomorrow, then?’

  ‘No further contact, Werner. This was the last try for him. I’m going back to London tomorrow. I’ll be sleeping in my own bed.’

  ‘Your wife…Fiona. She was nice to me that time when I had to work inside for a couple of months.’

  ‘I remember that,’ I said. Werner had been thrown out of a window by two East German agents he’d discovered in his apartment. His leg was broken in three places and it took ages for him to recover fully.

  ‘And you tell Mr Gaunt I remember him. He’s long ago retired, I know, but I suppose you still see him from time to time. You tell him any time he wants another bet on what the Ivans are up to, he calls me up first.’

  ‘I’ll see him next weekend,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell him that.’

  2

  ‘I thought you must have missed the plane,’ said my wife as she switched on the bedside light. She’d not yet got to sleep; her long hair was hardly disarranged and the frilly nightdress was not rumpled. She’d gone to bed early by the look of it. There was a lighted cigarette on the ashtray. She must have been lying there in the dark, smoking and thinking about her work. On the side table there were thick volumes from the office library and a thin blue Report from the Select Committee on Science and Technology, with notebook and pencil and the necessary supply of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, a considerable number of which were now only butts packed tightly in the big cut-glass ashtray she’d brought from the sitting room. She lived a different sort of life when I was away; now it was like going into a different house and a different bedroom, to a different woman.

  ‘Some bloody strike at the airport,’ I explained. There was a tumbler containing whisky balanced on the clock-radio. I sipped it; the ice cubes had long since melted to make a warm weak mixture. It was typical of her to prepare a treat so carefully – with linen napkin, stirrer and some cheese straws – and then forget about it.

  ‘London Airport?’ She noticed her half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out and waved away the smoke.

  ‘Where else do they go on strike every day?’ I said irritably.

  ‘There was nothing about it on the news.’

  ‘Strikes are not news any more,’ I said. She obviously thought that I had not come directly from the airport, and her failure to commiserate with me over three wasted hours there did not improve my bad temper.

  ‘Did it go all right?’

  ‘Werner sends his best wishes. He told me that story about your Uncle Silas betting him fifty marks about the building of the Wall.’

  ‘Not again,’ said Fiona. ‘Is he ever going to forget that bloody bet?’

  ‘He likes you,’ I said. ‘He sent his best wishes.’ It wasn’t exactly true, but I wanted her to like him as I did. ‘And his wife has left him.’

  ‘Poor Werner,’ she said. Fiona was very beautiful, especially when she smiled that sort of smile that women save for men who have lost their woman. ‘Did she go off with another man?’

  ‘No,’ I said untruthfully. ‘She couldn’t stand Werner’s endless affairs with other women.’

  ‘Werner!’ said my wife, and laughed. She didn’t believe that Werner had affairs with lots of other women. I wondered how she could guess so correctly. Werner seemed an attractive sort of guy to my masculine eyes. I suppose I will never understand women. The trouble is that they understand me; they understand me too damned well. I took off my coat and put it on a hanger. ‘Don’t put your overcoat in the wardrobe,’ said Fiona. ‘It needs cleaning. I’ll take it in tomorrow.’ As casually as she could, she added, ‘I tried to get you at the Steigerberger Hotel. Then I tried the duty officer at Olympia but no one knew where you were. Billy’s throat was swollen. I thought it might be mumps.’

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ I said.

  ‘You asked the office to book you there. You said it’s the best hotel in Berlin. You said I could leave a message there.’

  ‘I stayed with Werner. He’s got a spare room now that his wife’s gone.’

  ‘And shared all those women of his?’ said Fiona. She laughed again. ‘Is it all part of a plan to make me jealous?’

  I leaned over and kissed her. ‘I’ve missed you, darling. I really have. Is Billy okay?’

  ‘Billy’s fine. But that damned man at the garage gave me a bill for sixty pounds!’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘He’s written it all down. I told him you’d see about it.’

  ‘But he let you have the car?’

  ‘I had to collect Billy from school. He knew that before he did the service on it. So I shouted at him and he let me take it.’

  ‘You’re a wonderful wife,’ I said. I undressed and went into the bathroom to wash and to brush my teeth.

  ‘And it went well?’ she called.

  I looked at myself in the long mirror. It was just as well that I was tall, for I was getting fatter, and that Berlin beer hadn’t helped matters. ‘I did what I was told,’ I said, and finished brushing my teeth.

  ‘Not you, darling,’ said Fiona. I switched on the Water-Pik and above its chugging sound I heard her add, ‘You never do what you are told, you know that.’

  I went back into the bedroom. She’d combed her hair and smoothed the sheet on my side of the bed. She’d put my pyjamas on the pillow. They consisted of a plain red jacket and paisley-printed trousers. ‘Are these mine?’

  ‘The laundry didn’t come back this week. I phoned them. The driver is ill…so what can you say?’

  ‘I didn’t check into the Berlin office at all, if that’s what’s eating you,’ I admitted. ‘They’re all young kids in there, don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground. I feel safer with one of the old-timers like Werner.’

  ‘Suppose something happened? Suppose there was trouble and the duty officer didn’t even know you were in Berlin? Can’t you see how silly it is not to give them some sort of perfunctory call?’

  ‘I don’t know any of those Olympia Stadion people any more, d
arling. It’s all changed since Frank Harrington took over. They are youngsters, kids with no field experience and lots and lots of theories from the training school.’

  ‘But your man turned up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You spent three days there for nothing?’

  ‘I suppose I did.’

  ‘They’ll send you in to get him. You realize that, don’t you?’

  I got into bed. ‘Nonsense. They’ll use one of the West Berlin people.’

  ‘It’s the oldest trick in the book, darling. They send you over there to wait…for all you know, he wasn’t even in contact. Now you’ll go back and report a failed contact and you’ll be the one they send in to get him. My God, Bernie, you are a fool at times.’

  I hadn’t looked at it like that, but there was more than a grain of truth in Fiona’s cynical viewpoint. ‘Well, they can find someone else,’ I said angrily. ‘Let one of the local people go over to get him. My face is too well known there.’

  ‘They’ll say they’re all kids without experience, just what you yourself said.’

  ‘It’s Brahms Four,’ I told her.

  ‘Brahms – those network names sound so ridiculous. I liked it better when they had code-words like Trojan, Wellington and Claret.’

  The way she said it was annoying. ‘The postwar network names are specially chosen to have no identifiable nationality,’ I said. ‘And the number four man in the Brahms network once saved my life. He’s the one who got me out of Weimar.’

  ‘He’s the one who is kept so damned secret. Yes, I know. Why do you think they sent you? And now do you see why they are going to make you go in and get him?’ Beside the bed, my photo stared back at me from its silver frame. Bernard Samson, a serious young man with baby face, wavy hair and horn-rimmed glasses looked nothing like the wrinkled old fool I shaved every morning.

  ‘I was in a spot. He could have kept going. He didn’t have to come back all the way to Weimar.’ I settled into my pillow. ‘How long ago was that – eighteen years, maybe twenty?’

  ‘Go to sleep,’ said Fiona. ‘I’ll phone the office in the morning and say you are not well. It will give you time to think.’

  ‘You should see the pile of work on my desk.’

  ‘I took Billy and Sally to the Greek restaurant for his birthday. The waiters sang happy birthday and cheered him when he blew the candles out. It was sweet of them. I wish you’d been there.’

  ‘I won’t go. I’ll tell the old man in the morning. I can’t do that kind of thing any more.’

  ‘And there was a phone call from Mr Moore at the bank. He wants to talk with you. He said there’s no hurry.’

  ‘And we both know what that means,’ I said. ‘It means phone me back immediately or else!’ I was close to her now and I could smell perfume. Had she put it on just for me, I wondered.

  ‘Harry Moore isn’t like that. At Christmas we were nearly seven hundred overdrawn, and when we saw him at my sister’s party he said not to worry.’

  ‘Brahms Four took me to the house of a man named Busch – Karl Busch – who had this empty room in Weimar…’ It was all coming back to me. ‘We stayed there three days and afterwards Karl Busch went back there. They took Busch up to the security barracks in Leipzig. He was never seen again.’

  ‘You’re senior staff now, darling,’ she said sleepily. ‘You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.’

  ‘I phoned you last night,’ I said. ‘It was two o’clock in the morning but there was no reply.’

  ‘I was here, asleep,’ she said. She was awake and alert now. I could tell by the tone of her voice.

  ‘I let it ring for ages,’ I said. ‘I tried twice. Finally I got the operator to dial it.’

  ‘Then it must be the damned phone acting up again. I tried to phone here for Nanny yesterday afternoon and there was no reply. I’ll tell the engineers tomorrow.’

  3

  Richard Cruyer was the German Stations Controller, the man to whom I reported. He was younger than I was by two years and his apologies for this fact gave him opportunities for reminding himself of his fast promotion in a service that was not noted for its fast promotions.

  Dicky Cruyer had curly hair and liked to wear open-neck shirts and faded jeans, and be the Wunderkind amongst all the dark suits and Eton ties. But under all the trendy jargon and casual airs, he was the most pompous stuffed shirt in the whole Department.

  ‘They think it’s a cushy number in here, Bernard,’ he said while stirring his coffee. ‘They don’t realize the way I have the Deputy Controller (Europe) breathing down my neck and endless meetings with every damned committee in the building.’

  Even Cruyer’s complaints were contrived to show the world how important he was. But he smiled to let me know how well he endured his troubles. He had his coffee served in a fine Spode china cup and saucer, and he stirred it with a silver spoon. On the mahogany tray there was another Spode cup and saucer, a matching sugar bowl, and a silver creamer fashioned in the shape of a cow. It was a valuable antique – Dicky had told me that many times – and at night it was locked in the secure filing cabinet, together with the log and the current carbons of the mail. ‘They think it’s all lunches at the Mirabelle and a fine with the boss.’

  Dicky always said fine rather than brandy or cognac. Fiona told me he’d been saying it ever since he was president of the Oxford University Food and Wine Society as an undergraduate. Dicky’s image as a gourmet was not easy to reconcile with his figure, for he was a thin man, with thin arms, thin legs and thin bony hands and fingers, with one of which he continually touched his thin bloodless lips. It was a nervous gesture, provoked, said some people, by the hostility around him. This was nonsense of course, but I did dislike the little creep, I will admit that.

  He sipped his coffee and then tasted it carefully, moving his lips while staring at me as if I might have come to sell him the year’s crop. ‘It’s just a shade bitter, don’t you think, Bernard?’

  ‘Nescafé all tastes the same to me,’ I said.

  ‘This is pure chagga, ground just before it was brewed.’ He said it calmly but nodded to acknowledge my little attempt to annoy him.

  ‘Well, he didn’t turn up,’ I said. ‘We can sit here drinking chagga all morning and it won’t bring Brahms Four over the wire.’

  Dicky said nothing.

  ‘Has he re-established contact yet?’ I asked.

  Dicky put his coffee on the desk, while he riffled some papers in a file. ‘Yes. We received a routine report from him. He’s safe.’ Dicky chewed a fingernail.

  ‘Why didn’t he turn up?’

  ‘No details on that one.’ He smiled. He was handsome in the way that foreigners think bowler-hatted English stockbrokers are handsome. His face was hard and bony and the tan from his Christmas in the Bahamas had still not faded. ‘He’ll explain in his own good time. Don’t badger the field agents – that has always been my policy. Right, Bernard?’

  ‘It’s the only way, Dicky.’

  ‘Ye gods! How I’d love to get back into the field just once more! You people have the best of it.’

  ‘I’ve been off the field list for nearly five years, Dicky. I’m a desk man now, like you.’ Like you have always been is what I should have said, but I let it go. ‘Captain’ Cruyer he’d called himself when he returned from the Army. But he soon realized how ridiculous that title sounded to a Director-General who’d worn a General’s uniform. And he realized too that ‘Captain’ Cruyer would be an unlikely candidate for that illustrious post.

  He stood up, smoothed his shirt, and then sipped coffee, holding his free hand under the cup to guard against drips. He noticed that I hadn’t drunk my chagga. ‘Would you prefer tea?’

  ‘Is it too early for a gin and tonic?’

  He didn’t respond to this question. ‘I think you feel beholden to our friend Bee Four. You still feel grateful about his coming back to Weimar for you.’ He greeted my look of surprise with a knowing nod. ‘I re
ad the files, Bernard. I know what’s what.’

  ‘It was a decent thing to do,’ I said.

  ‘It was,’ said Dicky. ‘It was a truly decent thing to do, but that wasn’t why he did it. Not only that.’

  ‘You weren’t there, Dicky.’

  ‘Bee Four panicked, Bernard. He fled. He was near the border, at some godforsaken little place in Thüringerwald, by the time our people intercepted him and told him he wasn’t wanted for questioning by the KGB – or anyone else, for that matter.’

  ‘It’s ancient history,’ I said.

  ‘We turned him round,’ said Cruyer. It had become ‘we’ I noticed. ‘We gave him some chickenfeed and told him to go back and play the outraged innocent. We told him to cooperate with them.’

  ‘Chickenfeed?’

  ‘Names of people who’d already escaped, safe houses long since abandoned…bits and pieces that would make Brahms Four look good to the KGB.’

  ‘But they got Busch, the man who was sheltering me.’

  Unhurriedly, Cruyer finished his coffee and wiped his lips with a linen napkin from the tray. ‘We got two of you out. I’d say that’s not bad for that sort of crisis – two out of three. Busch went back to his house to get his stamp collection…Stamp collection! What can you do with a man like that? They put him in the bag of course.’

  ‘The stamp collection was probably his life savings,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps it was, and that’s how they put him in the bag, Bernard. No second chances with those swine. I know that, you know that, and he knew it too.’

  ‘So that’s why our field people don’t like Brahms Four.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why they don’t like him.’

  ‘They think he informed on that Erfurt network.’

  Cruyer shrugged. ‘What could we do? We could hardly spread the word that we’d invented that story to make the fellow persona grata with the KGB.’ Cruyer walked across to his drinks cabinet and poured some gin into a large Waterford glass tumbler.