Funeral in Berlin (11 page)

‘You sadist.’

‘You’ve got me all wrong,’ I said. ‘You’ve committed no crime against France. They are only going to treat you as an undesirable alien, stamp “nul” on your passport and heave you on to the first ship or plane pointing towards the North American continent. I could have had you picked up in London. They would give you a much tougher time.’

Samantha described me in one pithy indelicate word.

‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ I said. But Sam just repeated the same word in a paucity of invention.

‘Phone some friends—reversing the charges,’ I said. ‘You must have someone in the vicinity who will give you a helping hand.’ I leaned towards her and smiled gently. ‘But don’t put your pretty little head into this operation any more because Helena Rubinstein doesn’t make anything that will stick a head back on to shoulders.’

Samantha walked behind me to the car. I reached her baggage out of the rear seat and put it on the ground. The engine was still warm and the Bosch fuel injector forced me across the station yard in violent acceleration.

In the driving mirror I saw Samantha standing alone. Her big military-style greatcoat of olive mohair was buttoned high against the cold, and grey knitted socks came to just below the knee.

As I steered towards the Cours de la Marne two middle-aged men in belted raincoats came out of the Hotel Faisan and walked towards Samantha.

Corridor mate: when a king can only move
along an expected route, he can be trapped
by closing the corridor.

Tuesday, October 15th

She was an elderly woman dressed in the black dress that was obligatory in a French Government office. She wheeled an aged art-nouveau trolley in front of her. On the trolley were two dozen cups and saucers, metal filters, some spoons, an earthenware pot with a lid, a gas bottle and a huge stainless steel drum inside which the clear blue gas-flame could be glimpsed. As she carefully removed the lid from the earthenware jar, a strong smell of dark roasted coffee climbed out. She measured the expensive grains into the filters and placing one of each of our cups poured scalding water on to it. She placed two wrapped sugars alongside each cup and wheeled the tinkling clanking juggernaut through the door.

‘I don’t
know
that she works for West German Intelligence but what else can you suggest?’ I asked him.

Grenade opened the lid of his filter and grimaced at the pain. ‘Every day I burn my fingers.’ He dropped a sugar cube into his coffee, looked up and said, ‘I know your “plausible voice of the simple man” and I know that you are just using us for your own ends.’

‘So forget her,’ I said. ‘Forget I ever said anything about Vulkan, the girl or Louis Paul Broum.’

Grenade wrote something on his notepad.

‘And, as you well know, I can’t do that; no more than you could if we were sitting in
your
office with the roles reversed. Tell me.’ He lifted the lid again. ‘It’s ready now. Why did you take so much trouble with this girl and yet let the man go free?’

Through the French windows the sky was almost black. I looked around at Grenade’s office: the brown-stained wainscoting, the plaster walls discoloured in patches near the ceiling and the oldfashioned metal radiators under which a rash of cream-coloured pimples proclaimed the haste of a clumsy painter. On the wall a pendulum paced the glass confines of its cage.

‘We still need the man,’ I said. On Grenade’s desk was a wrought-metal device like a toy merry-go-round; the ‘riders’ were shiny bulbous rubber stamps. Grenade spun the merry-go-round. He laughed a soft little laugh. ‘Ask me,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear the suspense.’

‘Well naturally,’ I said, ‘we would like you to let him move freely at least for the next week or so, but I’d like you to take a look at him, tell me what he’s carrying, then let him go.’

Grenade shook his head and smiled; the first drops of rain smacked the window. ‘It’s not undeserved, you know, this reputation you Englishmen have gained.’

‘You can have the girl,’ I said indignantly. ‘She’ll show you the whole network if you play her right. All I want…’

Grenade waved a long bony hand at me. ‘It’s a bargain if you answer me one question.’ He didn’t wait to see if I agreed. ‘But the truth now, don’t try to deceive me or I shall be angry.’ It had begun to rain steadily and a complex rivulet of water was moving under the French window.

‘You’ll have the truth or silence,’ I said. The radiator made a noise like a machine gun. Grenade stretched out a long thin elegant leg and, steadying his hands on the desk, gave it a powerful kick. The noise stopped. Still looking at the painted metal radiator, Grenade said, ‘How did you know that we had Vulkan under surveillance?’

‘I knew that
STASI
¹
knew where the girl was. In fact, they deliberately leaked the information to us. It seemed probable that if they had had a consort watch
²
on this girl you would be watching
the watchers and the watched.’ Grenade gave me a deep bow of mock dignity and mock gratitude. A fierce gust of wind made the glass of the French window move in its frame.

‘If they had told me that the girl was in Paris, I wouldn’t have jumped to any such conclusion. But Hendaye; if you dropped an “h” in your paternoster they’d know out as far as the three-mile limit.’

Grenade kicked the central heating again and said, ‘Sounds all right.’

I polished my spectacles and tried to look like the respectable type of Englishman. I wondered how much of it Grenade swallowed. It wasn’t too far from the truth but then no lie worth the name ever was. I had got the tip from East Germany even though it was from Red Army Command Security and not from
STASI.
He had said that Hendaye was the place, although he had talked of the man, not the girl. What about the girl? Working for West German Security certainly made it hang together better as far as Grenade was concerned. As for the girl, she had to start looking out for herself one day.

Grenade got up from his desk and walked across to a roll-front cabinet. Out of it he slid a drawer of a card file index. He took one card back to his desk. He read the card through and flipped it to scan the back. ‘Right then,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that for you.’ Like a man promising delivery on a vacuum cleaner.

I stood up abruptly and resting the flat of my palm upon his desk I leaned my face close to him. I noticed a small scar on his forehead and the way hair grew from only one nostril. ‘You’ll be thanking me for doing you a favour the next time you are in London,’ I said softly.

Grenade languidly spun the merry-go-round, selected a rubber stamp and printed the word ‘Nul’ on the back of my hand. ‘Don’t press your luck,’ he said, then he offered his thin hand across the desk and shook my hand firmly. ‘Take care,’ he said, ‘it’s a nasty vicious city.’

‘I’ll only be in Berlin a few more days,’ I said.

‘I meant London,’ he said drily. He rang a small bell on his desk and a slight young man with a haircut
en brosse
and rimless spectacles opened the door.

‘Albert will take you down,’ said Grenade. ‘It will save all sorts of complications at the door. We have gone terribly secret since the last time you were here.’ Grenade smiled again.

I followed Albert down the staircase that curved around the inside of the huge stair-well. Halfway down I heard Grenade’s voice. I looked up the great vertical tunnel into the glare of an overhead skylight. Grenade was leaning over the balcony. He looked minute in this great stone building, full of carefully penned archives and aged bureaucrats scratching quietly in a silence broken only by the clink of nib against inkwell. Grenade called again, almost whispering the words, ‘As a liar, my friend,
you are incorrigible.’ The perspective of the great curves of balustrade repeated themselves as far as infinity, like the echoes of Grenade’s whisper. I saw his head prise a way through one of the smallest rings and smile.

‘The word,’ I said, ‘is professional.’ I started again down the staircase of this Caligarian cabinet. I knew that it would take ages to get that marking ink off my hand. I rubbed it self-consciously.

The skilled player memorizes and uses the classic
sequences of the games of masters.

Tuesday, October 15th

Bordeaux occupies a special semantic importance in the minds of all Frenchmen (as Munich does to Britons). In 1871, in 1914 and in 1940 Bordeaux was the city to which the French Government fled, yelling ‘Stand firm!’ over their shoulder. Each large hotel knew the influx of folding chairs and filing cabinets, typewriters and armed sentries. As I drove past them I remembered June 1940; Bordeaux was the halfway house between Verdun and Vichy.

I pressed the accelerator; at this stage of the game, speed had acquired an importance. I moved the Mercedes Benz 220 SE through the gear box. The steering was sensitive at high speeds and the hydraulic damper on it made the controls quietly accurate. Most of the traffic was slow stuff setting out from Bordeaux and after half an hour the
road was mine. I kept the speedometer at 150 kph for long stretches and told myself over and over it wasn’t a morning wasted.

I passed the Casino on Hendaye-plage and eased down the Boulevard de la Mer as unobtrusively as I knew how. I bumped up the kerb and parked in the exact position I had been before. Vulkan’s Cadillac Eldorado was in the same position too. There was no sign of movement anywhere even at 10.40
A.M.
I pushed open the front door. From the kitchen there was the noise of a kettle being filled. I went up to my room. The ‘Do not disturb’ notice was still on the door-knob. I turned the key and pushed the door gently open, standing a little behind the door-frame. I went through everything they taught me at Guildford but there was no need—Vulkan was still miles away. I poured myself a stiff whisky from a bottle in my case. I set the alarm mechanism on my wristwatch for dinner time and went to bed. There was nothing more I could do for the time being. It was just a matter of letting matters simmer. When something came to the boil I would hear the rising steam.

Any move that attacks a hostile king is known
as check.

Tuesday, October 15th

The hammering on my door came at 6.30
P.M.
Johnnie Vulkan was standing there looking angry and sad.

‘Come in,’ I said. I turned round to find him still glaring. I glared back but since my eyes were slits he didn’t detect it.

‘I’ve been to the police station,’ he said. His cashmere overcoat was slung over his shoulders and the sleeves hung limp like broken limbs.

‘Really?’ I said like a man trying to make polite conversation. ‘Why?’

‘I’ve been given the third degree,’ he said. He ran a hand through his grey hair and looked around my room for hidden policemen.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘You must have done something to irritate them.’ I began to dress.

‘Irritate them!’ he spoke loudly. ‘I work for your Government for one thing.’

‘Well, surely you didn’t tell them that,’ I yawned. ‘Are you sitting on my tie?’

‘Of course not,’ said Johnnie. ‘I didn’t tell them anything.’ He was getting angry. ‘They’ve been asking me all sorts of questions’—he looked at his huge gold wristwatch—‘for four hours.’

‘You must be gasping.’ I poured him a drink of whisky.

‘I’m not,’ he said, which was odd, because he downed the Scotch like a man dying of thirst. ‘I’m not hanging around here,’ he said. ‘I’m going back to Berlin.’

‘Just as you say,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to help.’

He gave me a spiteful look. I said, ‘Come along, Johnnie. Either tell me what it’s all about or don’t tell me at all, but you can’t expect me to believe that the police took you to the station because they didn’t like the way you parted your hair.’

Vulkan sat on the bed. I poured him another drink and my wristwatch alarm sounded. ‘I came down here to consult a man. I went to see him last night. He lives in Spain.’

I tried to look like a man who is just listening to someone else’s trouble to be polite. ‘This man,’ Johnnie went on, ‘I was in the army with him.’

‘In the concentration camp?’ I said.

‘Yes. He was the camp doctor. I’ve known him for years. The French have got their knife into him, I suppose. When he was driving me back
here, they refused him entry at the frontier and hauled me out of the car.’

‘Oh,’ I said like a man to whom it is suddenly made clear. ‘You have been across into Spain and they stopped you at the border.’

‘Yes,’ said Johnnie.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t worry about it. It’s just a routine check.’

They sounded a little bell downstairs to tell us that the dinner was cooked. I finished dressing hurriedly and Vulkan drank a lot of whisky. Dinner wasn’t any too jolly because Vulkan was miserable as sin. One of the policemen had told him that Samantha had been asked to leave the country because her papers weren’t in order. ‘What papers?’ Vulkan kept asking and I really couldn’t tell him.

‘Everything has gone wrong on this job,’ said Johnnie after the coffee had arrived. He stretched his legs and studied the toes of his expensive Oxford shoes. ‘I
try
to keep everyone happy…’ He made a surrender motion with the palms of his hands.

‘Try to make everyone happy,’ I said, ‘and you’ll wind up a rich mediocrity; but you’ll never get anything done that is worth doing.’

Johnnie stared at me for a long time, fixing me with his eyes until I began to think he had gone off his trolley.

‘You are right,’ he said finally. He went back to studying the toes of his shoes and he said, ‘You are right’ two or three more times. I poured him
coffee. He thanked me, still in this abstract mood, then he said, ‘London will be mad at me now?’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said. He moved his arm like he was trying to throw his hand away. ‘Messing about down here on my own affairs instead of being in Berlin when you needed to know about the name on the document. Sometimes I feel I’m not cut out for this life. I should be writing music, not having a one-man war with London. London could murder me.’

‘London has no personality,’ I said. ‘Believe me, I know them very well. They’re just like one big computing machine. Put a success story in one end; money and promotion come out the other.’

‘OK,’ Johnnie interrupted. He fixed me with that glare again. ‘They want this man, Semitsa—then, by God, I’ll get him.’

‘That’s the boy,’ I said, but I don’t know how I got any kind of enthusiasm into my voice.