The Berlin Assignment (28 page)

“The Stasi had plenty on everyone, including themselves,” said Graf Bornhof.

“I doubt…” said McEwen menacingly, “…I doubt I could keep my diplomatic spectators together if this piece of work is not performed. I fear things would fall apart. You would have to start from scratch when you take over in Berlin.” In the ensuing silence, McEwen began collecting his papers.

The Mercedes was taking McEwen away from Pullach. Senior executive class to the airport courtesy of Graf Bornhof, a cheap tourist seat from there to Berlin. The master had enjoyed the final scene. Seidel with his drawl regrouped the quickest, arguing the loss of a window on the diplomatic scene could be significant. He became impatient with Heine's ongoing second guessing. But Graf Bornhof was conciliatory.

“It would be expensive for us, Randolph,” he said at last.

“Don't use Mercedes 600s then. Cut costs.”

“We might find a way to do it for six weeks.”

“Two months.”

“It will take a month to set it up. We need authorizations.”

“Get them in two weeks.”

“Impossible. We have never obtained an approval in less than four.”

“I get mine in twelve hours.”

“You don't have a constitution.”

Saying goodbye, Graf Bornhof had pressed a box of Christmas cookies into McEwen's palm and closed the Mercedes door. The Pullach gate slid open. The car surged noiselessly ahead.

The egg incident–
droppings from a little bird
– was forgotten quickly in diplomatic circles. The reference to the consul was deeply buried in the papers and scarcely noticed, Gundula excepted. She clipped the article and sent it to Hanbury in an envelope marked
personal
. A photo was enclosed, grainy, taken from far away and blown up. He was clearly recognizable in the VIP area – mouth open, eyes aghast – watching the dripping mess.
The Cowboy strikes again!
her impertinent caption read.

“That Gundula,” he thought. He regretted not having run into her at the demo. He believed that in two sentences or less she would have distilled the motivations of four hundred thousand people into something he would understand. That ability – reducing complexity into simpler components, fashioning order out of chaos – always eluded him. A reason to admire her, to look forward to her columns.

Chaos was something he wanted to avoid, though it confronted him daily. It arrived courtesy of his countrymen. Quite a few had a habit of parking themselves in the consulate reception area, where they put on dramatic shows of lives they had managed to gum up. Innocents robbed of passports, welshers claiming destitution, deviants insisting on cost-free lawyers, the sick insisting on help to get home to be healed. Effective exporters of personal problems. The consul instinctively shied away from them. He'd seen enough of that business in Cairo. What would he do without Gifford, he often thought, that tireless solver of all problems, that efficient dispatcher of the consular freight.

Consular duties were not the only tiresome things. Viewing houses, Hanbury believed, was little better, but this was an obligation he couldn't shirk. Gifford said money was available and a quick decision was essential. Real estate prices were about to go out of sight. “A green light from headquarters?” a disbelieving consul had asked, studying the administrator across the small table. “That's remarkable.” Gifford, with a slight bow, confirmed a wonder had indeed occurred and proceeded with a briefing. Elbows on the table, hands clasped in a pose of prayer, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, the administrator revealed that options for a residence had been narrowed down to fifteen. “Some are beauties.” “Fifteen?” an alarmed Hanbury had said.

It took several weeks to view them all. Gifford, affably seated beside the consul in the back seat of the Opel, provided details as they went: price, location, condition, floor space, size of dining room, size of drawing
room, suitability for live-in servants, garden, overall appropriateness as a diplomatic residence, and so on and so forth. He had written a computer program, he said, to ensure accurate analysis and an objective ranking. Wandering through villas together, some empty and sounding hollow, others packed with garish furniture accumulated over the generations, Gifford took photographs – to aid recall. “You could entertain a hundred in here easy,” he told the consul as they sauntered through an imitation Greco-Roman palace built in the ostentatious eighteen-nineties.

Throughout the confusion, half-deaf to complex considerations of layout or modernisations done or pending, Hanbury remained aloof. In fact, he became steadily more non-committal. After days of tramping through innumerable rooms, he complained that his mind and vision were blurring.

“The decision is yours,” Gifford said crisply when they were driving back from the last candidate, a massive, neo-Gothic mansion in a tangled forest on a rise overlooking a lake between Potsdam and Berlin. It had been built close to the Babelsberg studios by a German film magnate in the twenties, but was requisitioned at war's end by the Russians. During the next forty years Red Army officers trod the mansion, so to speak, into the dust. A battalion of vagrants would have had difficulty achieving their level of destruction. The place was stripped bare: faucets and light fixtures were gone; hardwood floors had been ripped out; doors were missing, hinges included; gaping holes in the walls showed where electric switches used to be. In Russia, it was rumoured, such objects had more value than military pensions. “Not this last one,” replied Hanbury. “It would take years to get it back in shape.” “I've read the Russians plundered all the houses,” Sturm interjected from behind the wheel. “Scorched earth. Like with Napoleon. Must be something in their genes.”

“The house is sound structurally,” Gifford pointed out. “The large hall at the side has potential, a ballroom possibly, with a view towards the lake. Imagine the woods on the opposite shore lit up at night. That would stir the Germans. Soften their edges. A not-unimportant representational objective.” Gifford, composing this scene, sounded as if the house would be his ticket to a career in films. “Balls are popular in Berlin,” he added. “A consul throwing a ball? People would notice that.” “I don't know how to dance,” said Hanbury. Sturm interrupted them once more. “The house poses problems for drivers.” “How so?” the administrator asked sharply.

Sturm, a world authority, explained. The best places have a circling drive in front, sufficient room for parking on the side, and a separate entrance for the drivers. This one had no drivers' quarters and there was practically no room for parking. Messy. A foreign government shouldn't cause a parking problem. In that house, from a driver's point of view, a ball would be disastrous. Sturm recalled, for the benefit of Gifford, that next to Lord Halcourt's manor there had been a huge car park and spacious chauffeurs' quarters in an adjoining barn. “Could the side hall be turned into a drivers' room?” he speculated. “It does have that lake view. Drivers would appreciate it. A ballroom could be added on the forest side. People don't study the natural landscape when they dance.” “Drivers should spend their time studying the depth of the shine they put on cars,” said Gifford coldly. “It's important to get it right,” Sturm persisted. “If drivers are unhappy, things break down. Appointments are missed. Things aren't delivered properly. It's chaos. If drivers are treated well, there's less scandal, more order.” “Is that in your computer program, Earl?” the consul wanted to know. “Do you have a category for ease of parking and drivers' quarters?” “Of course,” said Gifford.

Even with the neo-Gothic mansion off the list, the choice was huge and Hanbury was unable to make up his mind. Neither the computer
analyses, three dozen pages of dense facts, nor the objective ranking swung him one way or another. Gifford pressed for a decision. The consul again went through the hundreds of photos and reread the stats, but did not advance. On some days, Gifford suspected, he actually receded. “It's difficult,” Hanbury sighed. “It's impossible to make the
right
decision. All of them are fine, really.”

He even tried a mind game. He imagined Gundula as hostess receiving guests at the front door. Which of the many available front doors suited her? The black one? Her hair was black. The white one? Her skin was very pale. A double front door? She was quite slight. Should there be many steps, as in a ducal palace? But Gundula was not pretentious; she would scoff at too many steps. Actually, Gundula looked superb opening the doors of all the houses. But then, she would be elegant slipping aside a grass curtain serving as entrance to a hut.

“It's not as if you have to choose a wife,” Gifford said when he observed the consul repeatedly going through the pictures. “It's only a house. It isn't forever.”

In the end, when purchase options threatened to run out, Gifford made the decision. “If we don't strike now, we'll have to start again. We might even have to settle for that place in Babelsberg. The computer says the Greco-Roman mansion. That's the one we go for.” Hanbury, relieved the crisis had broken, agreed it was the best.

The mansion, a dream turned into reality by a wealthy archeologist a century before, had an excellent Dahlem address. Even in that exclusive neighbourhood it was considered special. A row of Doric columns along the front imitated a Greek temple. Inside and out, it possessed lovely symmetry. Delightful classical elements decorated the windows. Splendid double doors – copies of a Roman centurion's palace in Sardinia – opened to a superb, round vestibule. The dining room's ceiling imitated one in a bishop's opulent summer residence in the high country near Rome. The salon was large enough to double as
a ballroom. A music room had a wide view of the grounds. Private quarters on the second floor were tasteful, intimate and quiet. The driveway and in-ground parking passed the standards set by Sturm. A side entrance led down into a bright room in the cellar which was connected to the vestibule by an intercom. Sturm, speechless, went into his new emporium. A large smooth table stood in the centre – a great platform for future chauffeurial debates – surrounded by numerous upholstered chairs. He slumped down on one and closed his eyes. Still dizzy, he visualized elegant
soirées
in the magnificent garden hosted by the consul and imagined the drivers taking their chairs outside, positioning them under an ancient beech to enjoy evening birdsong. Sturm loved the sound of nightingales. He remembered them behind Lord Halcourt's manor in the days he courted Betsy. As for Hanbury, he saw himself on his prospective steps – not so many that they were pretentious – gazing down on the driveway curving past the portico and wondering whether one day he would admire Trabi bedding down there for the night.

“Well done Earl,” he said, when the ink was drying on the contract. Gifford beamed. On his way home, overwhelmed by raw success, he bought Frieda a gift, yet another ring, this one a ruby, to symbolize joy. The gesture brought a rich reward. That evening Frieda insisted that nothing she might otherwise be wearing should take attention from the blood-red stone. A little later, dangling from a little thong, the ruby decorated Gifford too. The consul's residence put the Giffords into seventh heaven as much as it had Sturm.

Minor renovations were required; interior decoration would take a little time; a delay of several months was expected before the consul could move in.

Although outwardly indifferent to the news of delay, Hanbury felt a twinge of regret over it all the same. There was a letter from Zella in which she announced she was being assigned to Ankara and asked if she could take him up on his offer to visit Berlin. Did he have plans for Christmas? He recalled her high expectations that he would be housed in luxury in Berlin. Would the bungalow spoil a visit? But Zella's uncomplicated charm jumped at him from the note and in his reply –
Yes, do come!
– he hinted only that Berlin might not be all she was expecting. He also asked her to pass on his regards to everyone he knew still left in the Priory, adding tongue in cheek:
Tell Heywood I now appreciate what it's like to have to carry the whole show
.

With the dates of Zella's visit stamped firmly in his mind, Hanbury turned to a mountain of pre-Christmas invitations. Most would have to be rejected. “Let's be careful which ones we accept,” he cautioned Frau Carstens. She stiffened, scarcely believing her ears. “As always,” she replied with disdain. For her, if there was a problem with the daily haul of invitations, it was the consul not making commitments. He put decisions off. To keep things moving she was acquiring a dictatorial touch. “You must accept the Wintergarten gala,” she ordered. “It would be impossible not to. And the next evening is the première of a documentary film on the bison. You have been asked to speak; you have little choice. By the way, are those beasts still around? I thought they were extinct.”

The consul informed her a few herds survived in parks. “I guess I could give a talk,” he mused, “although I've never seen a buffalo.”

“Maybe there's one in the zoo.”

Frau Carstens processed the invitations. All the evenings filled, except a few before Christmas that he insisted be kept open. “And the Press Ball in January?” she demanded sharply. “Are you interested?”

“I don't know how to dance.”

“It's televised. People go there to be seen. No one dances. It's too crowded.”

Hanbury's interest perked up. The Lustgarten rally had been crowded; no one could move there either. “I'll think about it,” he said.

Frau Carstens reminded him it was a ball. “You'll need an escort,” she said severely.

When he was alone, Hanbury fingered the Press Ball invitation and on impulse called Gundula.

“Cowboy!” she exclaimed. “Congratulations on your act of bravery. Throwing yourself in front of an egg aimed at the President. Is that taught in diplomatic school?”