Funeral in Berlin (25 page)

If a player is not in check but can only make
a move that will place him in check; this is
stalemate and is scored as a draw.

Wednesday, November 6th

‘Well, you had better not put any of that in the report,’ said Dawlish. ‘The Cabinet will go dotty if you’ve been mixed up with two nasty businesses in one week.’

‘How many am I allowed per week?’ I said.

Dawlish just sucked an empty pipe.

‘How many?’ I asked again.

‘As one man who hates violence to another,’ said Dawlish patiently, ‘you are developing an unfortunate habit of being near by when people commit suicide.’

‘You are damn right,’ I told him. ‘I’ve spent my whole adult life being near by, watching half the human race committing suicide, and from where I’m sitting the other half seem hell-bent on following suit.’

‘Don’t go on,’ said Dawlish. ‘You’ve made your point.’ There was a long silence with just the ticking of the clock. It was 2.30 in the middle of the night. We always seemed to be in Dawlish’s office in the middle of the night.

Dawlish fiddled around with some papers in the tiny light on his desk. Outside I could hear lorries laden with deliveries of milk roaring and clinking at breakneck speed into the city. I sat in front of the tiny coal fire that no one in the building except Dawlish could ever get to burn, sipped his best brandy and waited while Dawlish got ready to tell me something. By now I could recognize the signs. ‘It’s my fault,’ said Dawlish. ‘My fault that this happened.’ I said nothing. Dawlish came across to the fire and sat down in the biggest armchair.

‘You checked…’ Dawlish spoke to the mantelpiece rather than to me. ‘…that Hallam was to leave the Civil Service next week?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You know why?’ he asked.

I sipped my brandy and took my time about replying. I knew that Dawlish wouldn’t hurry me. ‘He was a bad security risk,’ I said.

‘My report said he was
not a good
security risk,’ said Dawlish emphasizing the difference. ‘
My
report,’ he repeated.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You knew.’

‘You kept telling me not to ill-treat him,’ I said.
Dawlish nodded. ‘That’s right, I did,’ he agreed. We both stared into the fire for a long time, me sipping brandy, Dawlish with both palms pressed flat together and the two index fingers rubbing the tip of his nose.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Dawlish. ‘You know my views.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I sent in a long supplementary attached to his file, and three memos about him in particular and homosexuals in general. Do you know what happened?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘A certain hooligan in the Cabinet’—I had never heard Dawlish describe his superiors in quite such terms—‘had Ross at the War Office check
me
to see whether
I
have homosexual tendencies.’ He leaned forward and prodded the fire gently with the poker. ‘Whether
I
have them.’

‘That’s the way your mind works if you are a politician,’ I said. I suppose I smiled. Dawlish said sadly, ‘It’s not funny.’ He poured me another brandy and decided to have one himself. ‘That’s what happens once you start moving along these sort of lines. Look at the Americans. They have invented some quality called un-Americanism just as though Americanism were a concept of an individual instead of a Government’s concept. There are strong resemblances between Americanism, communism and Aryanism: all are Government ideas and therefore will naturally
describe characteristics of the easily governed; other differences are minor.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Dawlish wasn’t talking to me, he was just thinking aloud. I wanted to know what would happen about the Hallam disaster but I would let Dawlish get to it in his own way.

Dawlish said, ‘That’s what one doesn’t like about this homosexual business. We may as well say that all women are a security risk because
they
can have illicit relations with men. Or vice versa.’

‘For those who like their vice versa,’ I said.

Dawlish nodded. ‘The only solution is to take the social pressures off the homosexuals. These damned security hunts just put more pressure on. If someone gets on to one of these johnnies before we do he’s got an extra threat for him—losing his job; if they weren’t going to lose their job, they might ask to have “homosexual” entered on their dossiers voluntarily. If they then had someone pressuring them, they could report to their security people and we’d have some sort of chance of dealing with it. This damned system, all that happens is that we make enemies.’ I nodded.

‘Don’t even report to me,’ said Dawlish, and I realized that part of his mind had been thinking of the Hallam situation all the time. ‘Just act as if you knew nothing whatsoever.’

‘That comes naturally to me,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Dawlish. He sucked his pipe and said, ‘Poor old Hallam, what a way to go,’
two or three times and then finally, ‘are you happy, that’s the main thing?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘An all-laughing, all-dancing, all-singing, Technicolor wide-screen massacre. Why wouldn’t I be happy?’

‘Desperate diseases require desperate remedies,’ said Dawlish.

‘Says who?’ I said.

‘Guy Fawkes, I believe,’ said Dawlish. He was just great at quoting people.

I said, ‘Why don’t you and me clear off to Zürich and claim the quarter of a million? We’ve got the proof.’ I tapped the envelope full of Broum.

‘For the department?’ said Dawlish, walking back to his desk.

‘Us,’ I said.

‘It would mean living with all those Swiss,’ said Dawlish. ‘They’d never let us grow weeds there.’ He opened a drawer, dropped the documents into it and locked it, before coming back to the fireside.

‘Shall we try and get that bastard Mohr?’ I said.

‘You are a callow youth,’ said Dawlish. ‘If we tell Bonn he is a war criminal, either they won’t claim him at all or else they will give him some nice fat government job. You know what always happens.’

‘You’re right,’ I said, and we both sat quietly staring into the fire. Every now and then Dawlish said how amazing it was that Vulkan never really existed, and poured me another drink. ‘I’ll tell Stok about Mohr,’ I said.

‘Do that,’ said Dawlish, ‘and we’ll watch what happens.’

‘If anything,’ I said.

‘So Vulkan never really existed?’

‘Vulkan existed all right,’ I said. ‘He was a concentration-camp guard until a wealthy prisoner (who had been an assassin for the Communist Parties) arranged to have him killed. This man was Broum, and an SS medical officer named Mohr…’

‘The one in Spain now. Our Mohr.’

I nodded. ‘…made a deal. The SS officer staged a death scene and made sure that Broum was believed dead by all the prisoners. Broum meanwhile dressed as a German soldier and disappeared. In 1945 even being a German soldier was better than being a murderer. What’s more Broum (or Vulkan) got along very well financially even without the £250,000, but it was nice to think it was there waiting. Perhaps he intended to leave it to someone. Perhaps on his death-bed, beyond the reach of the guillotine, he was going to say who he really was. No. It was this new law about unclaimed property that made him suddenly start to move. What he needed was a way of proving he was Broum and then of not being Broum just as quickly.

‘It’s astonishing,’ said Dawlish, ‘to think of a Jewish prisoner who had suffered so much going all through his life saying that he had been a Nazi guard in a concentration camp.’

‘He didn’t know whether he was up or down,’
I said. ‘He came to the conclusion that if you threw enough money around you don’t have enemies. Vulkan, Broum, whatever you want to call him, his final allegiance was to cash.’

‘Was it all worth it?’ said Dawlish.

I said, ‘We are talking about a quarter of a million pounds; it’s a hell of a lot of money.’

‘You misunderstand me,’ said Dawlish. ‘I meant, did he need to live in fear? After all, this was an old wartime political assassination…’

‘Carried out by order of the Communist Party,’ I finished. ‘Would you like to enter present-day France with a tag like that?’

Dawlish gave a sour smile. ‘Communist Party,’ he repeated. ‘Do you think that Stok knew everything all the time? Knew who Vulkan really was, and who he had been and whom he had killed? They could really have him in a cleft stick if they had all that on their war-time files, squeezing him until he cracked?’

‘I thought about that,’ I said.

‘You are sure about all this?’ said Dawlish anxiously. ‘It’s not just guesswork, the dead man was Broum?’

‘Positive,’ I said. ‘It was the scars that settled it. Grenade confirmed it yesterday. I sent Albert six bottles of whisky on expenses.’

‘Six bottles of whisky in exchange for losing one good operative doesn’t seem a good way to do business.’

‘No,’ I said. Alice brought the coffee in Dawlish’s
one-and-six penny cups from Portobello Road. Alice never went home.

‘I guessed in a way,’ I said, ‘when the old man said that a doctor in a concentration camp can even cure you. Cure, you see—to be released—or to die. It could be arranged by a doctor willing to fiddle a certificate of death. The extraordinary aspect of Broum’s situation was the way he
must
impersonate his victim—Vulkan the guard—because in doing so Vulkan was still alive and his first victim assassinated by someone else.’

‘And Hallam?’

‘As soon as he was offered money he co-operated with Vulkan to the utmost. He was the only person authorized to issue documents of that sort. Without his connivance it wouldn’t have been so easy for them.’

‘Hallam didn’t have much to lose, if he was getting the sack as a security risk.’

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘It all depended upon me getting panicky when they made Semitsa persona non grata right at the last minute. Their theory was that I’d clear out and leave Vulkan holding the baby.’

‘They trusted Stok to deliver Semitsa?’

‘Hilarious, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘They were so pleased with themselves that they couldn’t bear to consider that Stok might be smarter than them. That he might be just kidding around to see what he could find out.’

‘But it was obvious, you said.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘Stok and I are in the same business—we understand each other only too well.’

‘There were people,’ said Dawlish drily, ‘who thought you might end up as his assistant.’

‘You weren’t one of them, I trust?’

‘Gracious no,’ said Dawlish. ‘I said that
he
would end up as yours.’

Originally the piece we now call a queen was a
counsellor or Government adviser.

Thursday, November 7th

It was just like Hallam had said, there were so many accidents on November 5th that the ‘awful death of man on fireworks night’ didn’t get into the national press at all and the local paper only gave it a couple of paragraphs and that was mostly devoted to a spokesman from the RSPCA.

November 7th was the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Jean gave me four aspirins, which was her friendly overture, and Alice a coffee made with milk, which was her cure-all. I sent Colonel Stok an Eton tie from Bond Street, which was my revolutionary gesture.

The Mother-in-law’s Tongue was coming along nicely. Jean said that on the window-sill over the radiator was the best place for it and it certainly seemed to thrive there. Dawlish had decided that
he was going to spend a few days busy in the country, which I suppose was to make himself scarce. He had taken Chico with him so the office was quiet enough for me to finish
It pays to increase your word power.
My rating was ‘fair’.

They wouldn’t let us offer Harvey Newbegin a job partly because he was foreign, and partly because I wore woollen shirts and said ‘like’ instead of ‘as though’. This left us weaker in both Berlin and Prague.

‘Going to the Home Office on Sunday?’ Jean asked. ‘You have an invitation. It’s the Remembrance Service. I said I’d phone them back this morning. There are only twelve places in Hallam’s room.’

‘I promised to go,’ I said.

‘Is it true that Hallam is in hospital?’ said Jean.

‘Ask them,’ I said.

‘I heard…’

‘Ask them,’ I said.

‘I did,’ said Jean. ‘They were very short and rude.’

‘That’s OK then,’ I said. ‘HO are like London theatres: if they answer politely, you can be sure the show is a little shaky.’

‘Yes,’ said Jean. She gave me a memo from Dawlish that said that some of the Broum documents had been damaged by grease and would I please submit a full explanation in writing. There was another document that authorized the cashier’s department to pay me £1,000 subject to my signing
that it could be deducted from my pay over a twoyear period.

I said to Jean, ‘How would you like a spin in the country this weekend in a new car?’ ‘Perhaps,’ said Jean. ‘I’ve got every kind of eyebrow pencil.’ ‘In that case,’ said Jean, ‘how can I refuse?’ ‘Friday then,’ I said. ‘Back Sunday morning.’ ‘Without fail,’ said Jean. ‘I’m looking after Hallam’s cats.’

Repetition rule: it is a rule of chess that
when the same sequence recurs three times
the game can be terminated.

Sunday, November 10th

It is one of those misty London mornings when the British Travel and Holiday Association stock up with colour photos. Whitehall is a vast stadium of grey granite and thin white geometrical shapes have appeared on the black roadway overnight so that representatives of the whole nation can stand in their allotted places. Soldiers in black bearskins and grey overcoats are lined up to form three sides of a square and a cruel wind blows across the scene that so closely resembles a military execution. The pipes and drums are playing the
Skye Boat Song.
A general fidgets with a sword that the wind has wrapped into his greatcoat and the cocked hats flutter like frightened hens.

An aged civil servant beside me says, ‘Here
comes Her Majesty’, as the Queen steps out of the front door below us. Dominating the whole scene is the gleaming stone pillar of the Cenotaph like the freshly built leg of a new overpass. Beyond the memorial the Chapel Royal choirboys in their bright scarlet Tudor costumes are blowing on their blue hands.

Mrs Meynard is laying rows of coffee cups across the desk behind us. I hear her say, ‘Mr Hallam is not well, sir. He’s having a few days off.’ There is polite condolence. ‘Nothing serious,’ Mrs Meynard adds in a motherly voice. ‘Just been overdoing it.’ She didn’t say what he’d been overdoing.

‘Waaaaaahhhhhh.’ The throaty cry of a drill sergeant bounces down the lines of bearskins and bayonets. Senile statesmen stand pierced by the chilly damp November air that has called so many predecessors away.

‘Yip.’ Fleshy palms smack artfully loosened metal as a few hundred rifles click into rows.

There is a sudden cannonade of artillery rumbling across the low cloud as Big Ben tolls eleven. Blancoed webbing and polished metal shine in the dull wintry light and there is a sudden flash of brandished trumpets. The notes of the Last Post crawl dolefully up the still thoroughfare as a thousand stand tensely silent.

Across the silent, wet street, a newspaper tumbles gently like an urban tumbleweed. It floats just buoyant on the wind, kisses a traffic sign, lightly
dabs a slide trombone and plasters itself across army boots. The newspaper is rain-soaked to a dull yellow colour but the large headline is blunt and legible. ‘Berlin—a new crisis?’