Funeral in Berlin (3 page)

Where pieces are used to protect other
pieces, there will be high casualty rate.
Better by far to assign only pawns to
supporting roles.

Saturday, October 5th

‘Best enzyme man in the world,’ I said.

I heard Dawlish cough.

‘Best what?’ he said.

‘Enzyme man,’ I said, ‘and Hallam would just
love
him.’

‘Good,’ said Dawlish. I flipped the switch of my squawk box and turned back to the documents on my desk.

‘Edmond Dorf,’ I read.

I riffed through the battered British passport.

‘You are always saying that foreign names are more convincingly English,’ said my secretary.

‘But not Dorf,’ I said, ‘especially not
Edmond
Dorf. I don’t
feel
like an Edmond Dorf.’

‘Now don’t go metaphysical on me,’ said Jean, ‘Whom do you feel like?’

I liked that ‘whom’—you’ve got to pay real money these days to get a secretary that could say that.

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘What sort of name do you feel like?’ said Jean very slowly and patiently. It was a danger signal.

‘Flint McCrae,’ I said.

‘Act your age,’ said Jean and she picked up the Semitsa file and walked towards the door.

‘I’m not being horrible Edmond Dorf,’ I said a little louder.

‘You don’t have to shout,’ said Jean, ‘and I’m afraid the travel vouchers and tickets are ordered. Berlin has been told to expect Edmond Dorf. If you want it changed now you must do it yourself unless I leave the Semitsa work.’

Jean was my secretary, really it was her job to do as I told her.

‘OK,’ I said.

She said, ‘Let me be the first to congratulate you on a wise decision, Mr Dorf,’ and left the room quickly.

Dawlish was my boss. He was around fifty, slim and meticulous like a well-bred boa-constrictor. He moved with languid English grace across the room from his desk and stood staring out into the jungle of Charlotte Street.

‘They thought one wasn’t serious at first,’ he said to the window.

‘Uh huh,’ I said; I didn’t want to appear too interested.

‘They thought I was joking—even the wife thought I wouldn’t go through with it.’ He turned away from the window and fixed me with a mocking gaze. ‘But now I’ve done it and I don’t intend to kill them off.’

‘Is that what they want you to do?’ I said. I wished I had been listening more closely.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I’m not going to do it.’ He walked across to me in the big leather armchair like Perry Mason appealing to the jury. ‘I like weeds. It’s as simple as that. Some people like one sort of plants and some people like others. I like weeds.’

‘They are easy to cultivate,’ I said.

‘Not really,’ said Dawlish sharply. ‘The most powerful ones tend to strangle the others. I’ve got hedge parsley, comfrey, meadow cranesbill, primroses…it’s just like a country lane, not a damned by-pass. One has wild birds and butterflies. It’s something to walk in; not one of these things with flower-beds, laid out like a cemetery.’

‘I agree,’ I said. I agreed.

Dawlish sat down at his antique desk and arranged some typewritten sheets with file cards that his secretary had brought from the IBM machine. He aligned all the paperwork in geometrical patterns with his pencils and stapling machine and then began to polish his spectacles.

‘And thistles,’ said Dawlish.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘I’ve got a lot of thistles,’ said Dawlish, ‘because they attract butterflies. Later we’ll have tortoiseshells, red admirals, yellow brimstones, perhaps even commas. Fabulous. The weed-killers are destroying life in the country—it’s a disgrace.’ He picked up one of the folders and began to read it. He nodded once or twice and then put it down.

‘I rely on you to be discreet,’ he said.

‘That sounds like a change of policy,’ I said. Dawlish sprinkled a cold smile over me. He wore the sort of spectacles that customs men tap for hollow noises. He rested them on his large ears and then tucked a handkerchief as big as a bedsheet into his cuff. It was a signal that we were what Dawlish called ‘on parade’.

Dawlish said, ‘Johnnie Vulkan’. Then he rubbed the palms of his hands together.

I knew the sort of thing Dawlish was going to complain about now. We had other people in Berlin, of course, but Vulkan was the one we always used; he was efficient, understood what we needed, he knew the Berlin layout and, most important, he was noisy enough to draw attention away from our residential boys whom we preferred to let lie fallow as long as possible.

Dawlish was saying ‘…can’t expect any of our people to be saints…’ I remembered Vulkan. He could deliver a bomb or a baby and smile as he did it.

‘…no orthodox way of collecting information
and there never can be…’ Vulkan may have had a mixed political background but he knew Berlin. He knew every cellar, bandstand, bank account, brothel and abortionist from Potsdam to Pankow. Dawlish sniffed loudly and rubbed his hands again.

‘Even earning additional payments need not be out of the question but unless he gives us full details of these associations he will no longer enjoy the protection of this department.’

‘Protection,’ I said. ‘What sort of protection have we ever offered him? The only protection he ever had from us was old-fashioned money. People like Vulkan are in danger—physical danger—every moment of every day. The only weapon they have is money. If Vulkan is always asking for more, it’s worth considering the motives.’

‘Men like Vulkan don’t have motives,’ said Dawlish. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. Vulkan is working for us—however remotely—and one will work like the very deuce to see that he is looked after, but don’t move this discussion into the sublime world of philosophy. Our friend Vulkan changes his motive every time he comes through that East Berlin checkpoint. When men become double agents it’s just a matter of time before they lose their grip on reality. They begin to drown in a sea of confusion. Any piece of information they can snatch at will keep them afloat and alive for a few more hours.’

‘You want to write Vulkan off?’

‘Not at all,’ said Dawlish, ‘but one does want to keep him in a cul-de-sac. A fellow working
against us can be very useful if we have him in a nice sterile test-tube.’

‘You are being a bit complacent,’ I said. Dawlish raised an eyebrow.

‘Vulkan is good,’ I said. ‘Look at his record. 1948: his blockade prediction was with this department eleven weeks before FOIU
¹
and fifteen weeks before Ross had heard anything. He can’t do that if you are selecting his drinking companions.’

‘Wait now…’ said Dawlish.

‘Let me finish, sir,’ I insisted. ‘The point I’m making is, that the moment Vulkan feels we are putting him on ice he’ll shop around for another job. Ross at the War Office or O’Brien at the FO will whip him into the Olympia Stadion
²
and that’s the last we will see of him. Certainly they will all tut-tut and agree with you at the Combined Intelligence Meetings but they’ll go behind your back and employ him.’

Dawlish touched his finger-tips together and looked at me sardonically.

‘You think I am too old for this job, don’t you?’

I said nothing.

‘If we decide not to continue with Vulkan’s contract there is no question of leaving him available for the highest bidder.’

I didn’t think old Dawlish could make me shiver.

The Berlin Defence is a classic defence by
means of counter-attack.

Sunday, October 6th

The parade ground of Europe has always been that vast area of scrub and lonely villages that stretches eastward from the Elbe—some say as far as the Urals. But halfway between the Elbe and the Oder, sitting at attention upon Brandenburg, is Prussia’s major town—Berlin.

From two thousand feet the Soviet Army War Memorial in Treptower Park is the first thing you notice. It’s in the Russian sector. In a space like a dozen football pitches a cast of a Red Army soldier makes the Statue of Liberty look like it’s standing in a hole. Over Marx-Engels Platz the plane banked steeply south towards Tempelhof and the thin veins of water shone in the bright sunshine. The Spree flows through Berlin as a spilt pail of water flows through a building site. The
river and its canals are lean and hungry and they slink furtively under roads that do not acknowledge them by even the smallest hump. Nowhere does a grand bridge and a wide flow of water divide the city into two halves. Instead it is brickedup buildings and sections of breeze block that bisect the city, ending suddenly and unpredictably like the lava flow of a cold-water Pompeii.

Johnnie Vulkan brought a friend and a black Cadillac to meet me at Tempelhof.

‘Major Bailis, US Army,’ said Johnnie. I shook hands with a tall leathery American who was buttoned deep into a white Aquascutum trench coat. He offered me a cigar while the baggage was being checked.

‘It’s good to have you with us,’ said the major and Johnnie said the same.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘This is a town where one needs friends.’

‘We’ve put you into the Frühling,’ the major said. ‘It’s small, comfortable, unobtrusive and very, very Berlin.’

‘Fine,’ I said; it sounded OK.

Johnnie moved quickly through the traffic in the sleek Cadillac. Cutting across the city from west to east is a ten-lane highway that successive generations have named ‘Unter den Linden’ and ‘Strasse des 17. Juni’ and once was a gigantic path leading through the Brandenburger Tor to the royal palace.

‘We just call it Big Street,’ said the American as Johnnie moved into the fast lane. In the distance
the statue on the Tor glinted gold in the afternoon sun, beyond it in the Soviet sector a flat concrete plain named Marx-Engels Platz stood where communist demolition teams had razed the Schloss Hohenzollern.

We turned towards the Hilton.

Just a little way down the street beyond the shell of the Gedächtniskirche with its slick modern tower—like a tricky sort of hi-fi speaker cabinet—apeing the old broken one is Kranzlers, a cafe that spreads itself across the Kurfürstendamm pavement. We ordered coffee and the US army major sat on the far side of the table and spent ten minutes tying the laces of his shoes. Across in the ‘Quick Cafe’ two girls with silver hair were eating Bockwurst.

I looked at Johnnie Vulkan. Growing older seemed to agree with him. He didn’t look a day over forty, his hair was like a tailored Brillo pad and his face tanned. He wore a well-cut Berlin suit of English pinhead worsted. He leaned back in his chair and pointed a finger lazily towards me. His hand was so sunburned that his nails seemed pale pink. He said, ‘Before we start, let’s get one thing clear. No one here needs help; you are superfluous to requirements as far as I am concerned. Just remember that; stay out of the way and everything will be OK. Get in the way and…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘This is a dangerous town.’ He kept his hand pointing into my face and gave a flash of a smile.

I looked at him for a moment. I looked at his smile and at his hand.

‘Next time you point a finger at someone, Johnnie,’ I said, ‘remember that three of your fingers are pointing back at you.’ He lowered his hand as though it had become heavy.

‘Stok is our contact,’ he said quietly.

I was surprised. Stok was a Red Army colonel in State Security.
¹

‘It’s official then?’ I asked. ‘An official exchange.’

Vulkan chuckled and glanced at the major.

‘It’s more what you might call extra-curricular. Official but extra-curricular,’ he said again, loud enough for the American to hear. The American laughed and went back to his shoelace.

‘The way we hear it, there is a lot of extracurricular activity here in Berlin.’

‘Dawlish been complaining?’ Vulkan asked, captiously.

‘Hinting.’

‘Well, you tell him I’ll have to have more than my present lousy two thousand a month if it’s exclusive service he’s after.’

‘You tell him,’ I said. ‘He’s on the phone.’

‘Look,’ said Vulkan, his solid gold wristwatch peeping out from the pristine cuff. ‘Dawlish has no idea of the situation here. My contact with Stok is…’ Vulkan made a movement with his cupped hand to indicate a superlative.

‘Stok is one thousand times brighter than Dawlish and he runs
his
show from on the spot, not from an office desk hundreds of miles away. If I can bring Semitsa over the wire it will be because I personally know some important people in this town. People I can rely on and who can rely on me. All Dawlish has to do is collect the kudos and leave me alone.’

‘What I think Dawlish needs to know,’ I said, ‘is what Colonel Stok will require in return if he delivers Semitsa—what you call—over the wire.’

‘Almost certainly cash.’

‘I had a premonition it would be.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Vulkan, loud enough to bring the American out of his reverie. ‘Major Bailis is the official US Army observer for this transaction. I don’t have to put up with dirty talk like that.’

The American took off his sunglasses and said, ‘Yes, siree. That’s the size of it.’ Then he put his glasses back on again.

I said, ‘Just to make quite sure that you don’t promise anything we wouldn’t like: make sure I’m there at your next meeting with comrade Colonel Stok, eh?’

‘Difficult,’ said Johnnie.

‘But you’ll manage it,’ I said, ‘because that’s what we pay you for.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Vulkan.

When a player offers a piece for exchange or
sacrifice then surely he has in mind a
subsequent manœuvre which will
end to his advantage.

Monday, October 7th

Brassieres and beer; whiskies and worsteds; great words carved out of coloured electricity and plastered along the walls of the Ku-damm. This was the theatre-in-the-round of western prosperity: a great, gobbling, yelling, laughing stage crowded with fat ladies and dwarfs, marionettes on strings, fireeaters, strong men and lots of escapologists. ‘Today I joined the cast,’ I thought. ‘Now they’ve got an illusionist.’ Beneath me the city lay in huge patches of light and vast pools of darkness where rubble and grass fought gently for control of the universe.

Inside my room the phone rang. Vulkan’s voice was calm and unhurried.

‘Do you know the Warschau restaurant?’

‘Stalin Allee,’ I said; it was a well-known bourse for information pedlars.

‘They call it Karl Marx Allee now,’ said Vulkan sardonically. ‘Have your car facing west in the car park across the Allee. Don’t get out of your car, flash your lights. I’ll be ready to go at 9.20. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

I followed the line of the canal from the Berlin Hilton to Hallesches Tor U-Bahnstation, then turned north on to Friedrichstrasse. The control point is a few blocks north. I flipped a passport to the American soldier and an insurance card to the West German policeman, then in bottom gear I moved across the tram tracks of Zimmerstrasse that bump you into a world where ‘communist’ is not a dirty word.

It was a warm evening and a couple of dozen transients sat under the blue neon light in the checkpoint hut; stacked neatly on tables were piles of booklets and leaflets with titles like ‘Science of the GDR in the service of Peace’, ‘Art for the People’ and ‘Historic Task of the GDR and the future of Germany’.

‘Herr Dorf.’ A very young frontier policeman held my passport and riffed the corners. ‘How much money are you carrying?’

I spread the few Westmarks and English pounds on the desk. He counted them and endorsed my papers.

‘Cameras or transistor radio?’

At the other end of the corridor a boy in a leather jacket with ‘Rhodesia’ painted on it shouted, ‘How much longer do we have to wait here?’

I heard a Grepo say to him, ‘You’ll have to take your turn, sir—we didn’t send for you, you know.’

‘Just the car radio,’ I said.

The Grepo nodded.

He said, ‘The only thing we don’t allow is East German currency.’ He gave me my passport,
¹
smiled and saluted. I walked down the long hut. The Rhodesian was saying, ‘I know my rights,’ and rapping on the counter but everyone else was staring straight ahead.

I walked across to the parking bay. I drove around the concrete blocks, a Vopo gave a perfunctory glance at my passport and a soldier swung the red-and-white striped barrier skywards. I drove forward into East Berlin. There were crowds of people at Friedrichstrasse station. People coming home from work, going to work or just hanging around waiting for something to happen. I turned right at Unter den Linden—where the lime trees had been early victims of Nazidom; the old Bismarck Chancellery was a cobweb of rusty ruins facing the memorial building where two green-clad sentries with white gloves were goose-stepping like Bismarck was expected back. I drove around the white plain of Marx-Engels Platz and, at the large
slab-sided department store at Alexanderplatz, took the road that leads to Karl Marx Allee.

I recognized the car park and pulled into it. Karl Marx Allee was still the same as when it had been Stalin Allee. Miles of workers’ flats and state shops housed in seven-storey Russian-style architecture, thirty-foot-wide pavements and huge grassy spaces and cycle tracks like the M1.

In the open-air cafe across the road, lights winked under the trees and a few people danced between the striped parasols while a small combo walked their baby back home with lots of percussion. ‘Warschau’, the lights spelled out and under them I saw Vulkan get to his feet. He waited patiently until the traffic lights were in his favour before walking towards the car park. A careful man, Johnnie; this was no time to collect a jaywalking ticket. He got into a Wartburg, pulled away eastward down Karl Marx Allee. I followed keeping one or two cars between us.

Johnnie parked outside a large granite house in Köpenick. I edged past his car and parked under a gas lamp around the corner. It was not a pretty house but it had that mood of comfort and complacency that middle-class owners breathe into the structure of a house along with dinner-gong echoes and cigar smoke. There was a large garden at the back and here near the forests and the waters of Müggelsee the air smelled clean.

There was just one name-plate on the door. It was of neat black plastic: ‘Professor Eberhard
Lebowitz’, engraved in ornate Gothic lettering. Johnnie rang and a maid let us into the hall.

‘Herr Stok?’ said Johnnie.

He gave her his card and she tiptoed away into the interior.

In the dimly lit hall there stood a vast hallstand with some tricky inlaid ivory, two clothes-brushes and a Soviet officer’s peaked hat. The ceiling was a complex pattern of intaglio leaves and the floral wallpaper looked prehensile.

The maid said, ‘Will you please come this way?’ and led us into Stok’s drawing-room. The wallpaper was predominantly gold and silver but there were plenty of things hiding the wallpaper. There were aspidistras, fussy lace curtains, shelves full of antique Meissen and a cocktail cabinet like a small wooden version of the Kremlin. Stok looked up from the 21-inch baroque TV. He was a big-boned man, his hair was cropped to the skull and his complexion was like something the dog had been playing with. When he stood up to greet us his huge hands poked out of a bright red silk smoking-jacket with gold-braid frogging.

Vulkan said, ‘Herr Stok; Herr Dorf,’ and then he said, ‘Herr Dorf; Herr Stok,’ and we all nodded at each other, then Vulkan put a paper bag down on the coffee table and Stok drew an eight-ounce tin of Nescafé out of it, nodded, and put it back again.

‘What will you drink?’ Stok asked. He had a musical basso voice.

‘Just before we move into the chat,’ I said, ‘can I see your identity card?’

Stok pulled his wallet out of a hip pocket, smiled archly at me and then peeled loose the stiff white card with a photo and two rubber stamps that Soviet citizens carry when abroad.

‘It says that you are Captain Maylev here,’ I protested as I laboriously pronounced the Cyrillic script.

The servant girl brought a tray of tiny glasses and a frosted bottle of vodka. She set the tray down. Stok paused while she withdrew.

‘And your passport says that you are Edmond Dorf,’ said Stok, ‘but we are both victims of circumstance.’

Behind him the East German news commentator was saying in his usual slow voice, ‘…sentenced to three years for assisting in the attempt to move his family to the West.’ Stok walked across to the set and clicked the switch to the West Berlin channel where a cast of fifty Teutonic minstrels sang ‘See them shuffle along’ in German. ‘It’s never a good night, Thursday,’ Stok said apologetically. He switched the set off. We broke the wax on the fruitflavoured vodka and Stok and Vulkan began discussing whether twenty-four bottles of Scotch whisky were worth a couple of cameras. I sat around and drank vodka until they had ironed out some sort of agreement. Then Stok said, ‘Has Dorf got power to negotiate?’—just like I wasn’t in the room.

‘He’s a big shot in London,’ said Vulkan.
‘Anything he promises will be honoured. I’ll guarantee it.’

‘I want lieutenant-colonel’s pay,’ Stok said, turning to me, ‘for life.’

‘Don’t we all?’ I said.

Vulkan was looking at the evening paper; he looked up and said, ‘No, he means that he’d want the UK Government to pay him that as a salary if he comes over the wire. You could promise that, couldn’t you?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘We’ll say you’ve been in a few years, that’s five pounds four shillings a day basic. Then there’s ration allowance, six and eight a day, marriage allowance, one pound three and something a day, qualification pay five shillings a day if you get through Staff College, overseas pay fourteen and three and…you
would
want overseas pay?’

‘You are not taking me seriously,’ Stok said, a big smile across his white moon of a face. Vulkan was shifting about on his seat, tightening his tie against his Adam’s apple and cracking his finger joints.

‘All systems go,’ I said.

‘Colonel Stok puts up a very convincing case,’ said Vulkan.

‘So does the “find the lady” mob in Charing Cross Road,’ I said, ‘but they never come through with the QED.’

Stok threw back two vodkas in quick succession and stared at me earnestly. He said, ‘Look, I
don’t favour the capitalist system. I don’t ask you to believe that I do. In fact I hate your system.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘And you are in a job where you can really do something about it.’

Stok and Vulkan exchanged glances.

‘I wish you would try to understand,’ said Stok. ‘I am really sincere about giving you my allegiance.’

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I bet you say that to all the great powers.’

Vulkan said, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time and money in setting this up. If you are so damn clever why did you bother to come to Berlin?’

‘OK,’ I told them. ‘Act out the charade. I’ll be thinking of words.’

Stok and Vulkan looked at each other and we drank and then Stok gave me one of his goldrimmed oval cigarettes and lit it with a nickelsilver sputnik.

‘For a long time I have been thinking of moving west,’ said Stok. ‘It’s not a matter of politics. I am just as avid a communist now as I have ever been, but a man gets old. He looks for comfort, for security in possessions.’ Stok cupped his big boxing-glove hand and looked down at it. ‘A man wants to scoop up a handful of black dirt and know it’s his own land, to live on, die on and give to his sons. We peasants are a weak insecure segment of socialism, Mr Dorf.’ He smiled with his big brown teeth, trimmed here and there with an edge of gold. ‘These comforts that you take for granted will not be a part of life in the East until long after I am dead.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We have decadence now—while we are young enough to enjoy it.’

‘Semitsa,’ said Stok. He waited to see what effect it would have on me. It had none.

‘That’s what you are really interested in. Not me. Semitsa.’

‘Is he here in Berlin?’ I asked.

‘Slowly, Mr Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Things move very slowly.’

‘How do you know he wants to come west?’ I asked.

‘I know,’ said Stok.

Vulkan interrupted, ‘I told the colonel that Semitsa would be worth about forty thousand pounds to us.’

‘Did you?’ I said in as flat a monotone as I could manage.

Stok poured out his fruit vodka all round, downed his own and poured himself a replacement.

‘It’s been nice talking to you boys,’ I said. ‘I only wish you had something I could buy.’

‘I understand you, Mr Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘In my country we have a saying, “a man who trades a horse for a promise ends up with tired feet”.’ He walked across to the eighteenth-century mahogany bureau.

I said, ‘I don’t want you to deviate from a course of loyalty and integrity to the Soviet Government to which I remain a friend and ally.’

Stok turned and smiled at me.

‘You think I have live microphones planted here and that I might attempt to trick you.’

‘You might,’ I said. ‘You are in the business.’

‘I hope to persuade you otherwise,’ said Stok. ‘As to being in the business: when does a chef get ptomaine poisoning?’

‘When he eats out,’ I said.

Stok’s laugh made the antique plates rattle. He groped around inside the big writing-desk and produced a flat metal box, brought a vast bunch of tiny keys from his pocket and from inside the box reached a thick black file. He handed it to me. It was typed in Cyrillic capitals and contained photostats of letters and transcripts of tapped phone calls.

Stok reached for another oval cigarette and tapped it unlit against the white page of typing. ‘Mr Semitsa’s passport westward,’ he said putting a sarcastic emphasis on the ‘mister’.

‘Yes?’ I said doubtfully.

Vulkan leaned forward to me. ‘Colonel Stok is in charge of an investigation of the Minsk Biochemical labs.’

‘Where Semitsa used to be,’ I said. It was coming clear to me. ‘This is Semitsa’s file, then?’

‘Yes,’ said Stok, ‘and everything that I need to get Semitsa a ten-year sentence.’

‘Or have him do anything you say,’ I said. Perhaps Stok and Vulkan were serious.