Funeral in Berlin (8 page)

Every pawn is a potential queen.

Whitehall, Saturday, October 12th

‘Wonderful at coronations.’

‘I’ll bet,’ I said.

‘You can see them for miles. I was here for the Victory procession too. Quite lovely.’

‘We’d better start…’

‘Would you like to come up here on Armistice Sunday?’ Hallam asked. ‘It’s a most impressive sight.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Now about…’

‘A moment,’ said Hallam. He went across to the desk and spoke into his bright-green telephone.

‘We’d like a nice cup of creamy coffee, Phyllis. Will you tell Mrs Meynard? The nice china, Phyllis, I have a visitor.’

Hallam’s office was on the top floor. There was a great view along Whitehall, and under us the Cenotaph was dotted with lines of starlings. The office was well furnished, as Whitehall offices go;
it had rush matting over the Ministry of Works lino and there were blue curtains, two Cézanne prints and a basketwork chair that had gone to seed. Hallam sorted through his files to find two manilla dossiers and a booklet. The booklet was a Ministry of Agriculture publication called
Chemicals for the Gardener.
Hallam opened one of the dossiers. It said ‘Special Import Licences’ in a Roman typeface and under that, neatly biro’d, was the name ‘Mr Semitsa’.

‘We call all official requests for false documents “import licences”,’ Hallam explained. He tapped the other dossier with a sharp bony finger. ‘And this is a report from—’ he read, ‘Advisory Committee on Poisonous Substances.’

‘You are the most poisonous man I know,’ I said cheerfully.

‘You’re being naughty,’ said Hallam, ‘I thought we’d agreed to get along nicely together. It will be to the advantage of both of us in the long run, you know.’ He smiled what he thought was a winning smile. He was dressed in Home Office uniform today—black jacket, pin-stripe trousers, stiff white collar and an Old Mill Hillian tie.

‘Gehlen’s people told me that Semitsa should come into Berlin two weeks from today,’ I said.

‘Oh, we know all about that,’ said Hallam airily.

‘How?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you people from Charlotte Street. You’re all secrecy and bad manners. Grannie Dawlish is the worst of all.’ I nodded.

‘We call him Grannie Dawlish here, you know.’

‘You just did,’ I said.

‘Semitsa isn’t a secret agent, my dear chap. He is giving a talk at Humboldt University on “Synthetic Insecticides—the development of resistance in Pests to DDT”. He gives the talk on Tuesday the 29th, so he’ll arrive some time the previous weekend. I got all that from ADN.
¹
It isn’t secret. What’s more, I would wager you he’ll stay at the Hotel Adlon.’

‘Now you
are
guessing,’ I said.

‘Not at all,’ said Hallam. ‘That’s where Humboldt usually put their top-rank guest lecturers.’ He produced his cigarette holder. ‘Can you let me have a cigarette?’ he asked. I brought out a pack of Gauloises, tore the corner and offered them.

‘French?’ Hallam said. ‘They’re rather coarse, aren’t they?’ As he was lighting it there was a tap at the door. An aged crone in a floral apron limped painfully across the carpet.

‘Put it down there, Mrs Meynard, that’s lovely: and chocolate digestives too. My goodness, we don’t deserve it.’ Hallam moved a large jug of cut flowers to make room for the coffee tray.

The aged crone smiled a big smile and locked an errant forelock into a curler in embarrassment.

‘How’s your back today, Mrs Meynard?’ Hallam asked.

‘I think it will rain, sir,’ she said.

‘Never wrong, our Mrs Meynard,’ Hallam said to me proudly.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘She should be on the Air Ministry roof.’

Mrs Meynard grinned, picked up three cups and saucers from the window sill and said to Hallam, ‘You owe me two weeks’ coffee money, Mr Hallam sir.’

‘
Two
weeks?’ asked Hallam. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Mrs Meynard very shortly.

Hallam produced a small leather purse, undid the flap with great care and shook coins into his hand like they were segments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

‘
Two?
’ said Hallam, hoping for a final reprieve.

‘Sir,’ said Mrs Meynard, nodding firmly.

He sorted through the money like he didn’t want the light to get at it, gave Mrs Meynard two half-crowns and said ‘Keep the change’, rather grandly.

‘There’ll be another shilling,’ said Mrs M. ‘You’re forgetting the three lots of biscuits.’ Hallam gave her the money and she left, but Hallam was gazing at the door for a long time. He felt quite certain that he had paid her last week.

‘For Christ’s sake, Hallam,’ I said. ‘Let’s get down to it. Why do we want to mess about bringing an insecticide expert here?’

‘Please keep still,’ Hallam said. ‘Isn’t that chair comfortable?’ He poured out the coffee from a
fine Dresden china pot and passed me a cup that didn’t sell for one and six in Portobello Road.

‘It isn’t so comfortable that I want to sit here all week trying to get you to answer two or three simple questions.’

‘Biscuits?’ he said.

‘No thanks,’ I said shortly.

Hallam wrinkled his nose. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘They’re chocolate.’ As Hallam stretched his sleeve, I noticed the large gold Jaeger-le-Coultre wristwatch.

‘New watch?’ I said.

Hallam stroked the sleeve over his watch. ‘I saved up for it,’ he said. ‘It is nice, isn’t it?’

‘You are a man, Hallam,’ I said—I watched his face, as I paused—‘of the most impeccable taste.’ His eyes shone with delight as he busily arranged papers on his desk.

He said, ‘I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you all this—it’s very secret.’ It was Hallam having a little joke. I gave him a nod and a smile.

‘You know that this Semitsa chap is an enzyme specialist. Is that too strong for you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Go on talking.’

Hallam clasped his thin hands behind his head and swung gently from side to side in his swivel chair. As the light from the window moved across his features, I could see the handsome ground plan of his bombed-out face. Now the powdery skin, sun-lamped to a pale nicotine colour, was supported only by his cheek-bones, like a tent when the guy ropes are slackened.

‘Do you know what DDT is?’ Hallam asked.

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s one of a group we call chlorinated hydrocarbons. These tend to persist in the soil. They all persist in body fats too.
You
probably have onetwentieth of a gram of DDT in your body fat right now.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘It may well be,’ said Hallam, ‘but many Americans have five times as much as that. Frankly, some of our people here are a little alarmed. Anyway, the other group that Semitsa has done so much on is called the organo-phosphorus group. They don’t persist—they break down very quickly.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Hallam. He sipped a little coffee and then settled the cup into the saucer like he was landing a damaged helicopter.

‘Where does Semitsa’s knowledge of enzymes come in?’ I asked.

‘Good question,’ said Hallam. ‘That’s the important part. You see, two of this last group—Parathion and Malathion—work by depressing the production of an enzyme named cholinesterase. This kills the insect. The great advantage Parathion and Malathion have over DDT is that at present insects haven’t been able to develop resistance to them the way they have to DDT.’ He drank a little coffee.

‘And that’s important?’

‘Very important,’ said Hallam. ‘Semitsa’s
research doesn’t sound very
dramatic,
but agriculture is the keystone of our island heritage.’ He smiled a big supercilious porcelain smile. ‘Emerald isle and all that.’ He popped a piece of sugar into his mouth.

‘And that’s what you sent for me for?’ I said.

‘Not in even the slightest way, my dear boy. You brought up that little subject, didn’t you now?’ He crunched the sugar into oblivion.

I nodded. Hallam said, ‘It’s a political matter we want to talk about.’ He put an elastic band around the Semitsa file and tripped carefully through the filing cabinet with his finger-tips until sliding it down into its rightful position.

‘Colonel Stok. That’s what I want to talk to
you
about…’ He sniffed loudly and tapped his long cigarette holder on the inkstand.

‘Can you let me have another one of those French cigarettes. They are rather…’ He searched for a word, ‘…exotic.’

‘Don’t develop a taste for them,’ I said. ‘When this pack’s gone, you’ll be buying your own.’ Hallam smiled and lit up.

‘Stok,’ I said.

‘Ah yes,’ said Hallam. ‘We are rather interested in Stok.’

‘Grannie’ Dawlish, I thought. That was pretty good, coming from Hallam.

Hallam looked up and raised a bony finger. ‘“War is a continuation of politics…” You know what Clausewitz tells us.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to have a word with Clausewitz. He keeps saying the same thing over and over.’

‘Now now,’ said Hallam. He waggled the bony finger.

He picked up a slip of paper from his desk, read it through quickly, then said, ‘We need to know to what extent Chekists
²
like Stok are happy with the idea of the Party being in complete control of the land. Also whether in five years’ time the Army expect to have regained an élite position. As you know there is this constant change of balance in their influence.’ Hallam moved his flat palms up and down like scale pans.

‘A love-hate relationship,’ I said.

‘Beautifully put,’ said Hallam. ‘Well, our political forecast people are rather keen on this sort of information. They say that when the Army people are feeling confident we can expect the cold war to blow hot. When the Party are firmly in the saddle, we get lessening of tension.’ Hallam made a little movement of the fingers, as though brushing a fly away from his hand. ‘They like all that sort of thing downstairs.’ He obviously thought them eccentric.

‘So you don’t believe that Stok will defect,’ I said.

Hallam raised his chin and looked down his long nose at me. ‘You’ve rumbled that already,
surely. You aren’t a complete fool.’ He rubbed a finger along his nose. ‘So why take me for one?’ He rearranged the dossiers. ‘Stok’s an interesting case, you know; a real Old Guard Bolshie. He was with Antonov-Ovseyenko in the storming of the Winter Palace in ‘17; you understand what that means in Russia.’

‘It means you are an expendable hero,’ I said.

‘I say, that’s rather good,’ said Hallam. He took out a gold propelling pencil. ‘In an absolute nutshell. I’ll write that down. “Expendable hero”, that’s what Stok is all right.’ He popped another piece of sugar into his mouth and began to write.

A knight can be used to simultaneously
threaten two widely spaced units. (This is
called a ‘fork’.) If one of these threats
is against a king the other piece must
inevitably be lost.

Saturday, October 12th

The grey stones of the Cenotaph shone in the hard wintry sunlight as I surrendered my Home Office pass and stepped into Whitehall. In Horse Guards Avenue and right along to the Thames Embankment, hollow tourist buses were parked and double-parked.

The red-cloaked Horse Guards sat motionless clutching their sabres and thinking of metal polish and sex. In Trafalgar Square pigeons were enmeshed in the poisonous diesel gauze.

A cab responded to my wave by carving abruptly through the traffic.

I said: ‘Henekey’s, Portobello Road.’

‘Portobello Road,’ said the cab driver, ‘where the beatniks go?’

‘Sounds like it,’ I said. The driver jammed the flag down and pulled abruptly back into the traffic. A man in a Mini shouted, ‘You stupid bastard!’ at my driver and I nodded agreement.

Henekey’s is a great barn of a place, bare enough not to be spoiled by the odd half-glass of best bitter being spilled across the floor; cashmere, suede, straw, leather and imitation leather jostle, jabber and posture with careful narcissism. I bought a double Teacher’s and edged through the crowd.

A girl with Edwardian hair and science-fiction breasts produced a Copenhagen teapot from a huge straw basket. ‘…I said you’re a bloody old robber…’ she was saying to a man with a long beard and a waisted denim jacket, who said, ‘Academic training is the final refuge of the untalented.’ The girl put the teapot away, fluttered her big sooty eyes

and said, ‘I wish you’d told the silly old——that.’

She retied the belt of her leather coat and took a packet of Woodbines from the man’s jacket pocket.

‘I’ll throttle him,’ she said. ‘He is the biggest…’ she described the man in Chatterleyan terms while the unacademic man held a pint glass of stout to his lips and studied his reflection with loving skill.

I sipped my drink and watched the door. There was still no sign of Sam. Behind me the man with the denim and beard was saying ‘…I’ll tell you who I feel like when I smoke it. I feel like Hercules,
Jason, Odysseus, Galahad, Cyrano, D’Artagnan and Tarzan with a football-pool cheque in my pocket.’ The sooty-eyed girl laughed and tapped her straw bag to be sure the teapot was still there. The bearded man looked at me and said, ‘You waiting for Samantha Steel?’

‘Could be,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said, studying my clothes and face carefully. ‘He said you’d look a bit square.’

‘I’m as square as a cube root,’ I said. The sooty girl had a high-pitched giggle.

‘Here’s an oblong for you,’ said the bearded man. He gave me an envelope. Inside was a sheet of paper with ‘Dear Mr Kadaver, All the papers must be at our Berlin office by Monday
A.M.
or we can’t guarantee delivery.’ There was a signature that I couldn’t decipher.

‘What did he look like, the man who gave you this?’ I asked.

‘Like Martin Bormann,’ said the bearded man. He laughed briefly and plucked the paper from my hand. ‘I said I’d destroy this for him because we don’t want it getting in the wrong hands.’

‘What is it?’ said the sooty girl.

‘——off,’ said the bearded man. ‘This is business.’ He folded the sheet of paper and tucked it into his denim pocket. ‘Here’s your tart now,’ he said affably to me. Samantha was twisting her head trying to see me across the room.

Samantha said ‘Hello David’ to the bearded man and ‘Hello Hettie’ to the sooty girl who was
studying Sam’s leather boots too carefully even to notice. Then she said ‘Hello’ to about a dozen other poets, painters, writers, art directors (with organizations known only by their initials), and occasionally a model or a photographer. No one was introduced as a secret agent; not even David.