'For the time being . . .'
‘I not staying here. I have someone I can go to. Don't worry, Bernard. By the time you come back from Berlin all my things will be out of here. At last I can see you as you really are.'
She was still limp in my arms, still sobbing with a subdued and desolate weariness, but I could hear the determination in her voice. There was no way she was going to stay except on promise of marriage and that was something I couldn't bring myself to give. She turned over to face away from me and hugged herself. She wouldn't be comforted. I remained awake a long time, but she went on sobbing very quietly. I knew there was nothing I could do. There is no sadness to compare with the grief of the young.
Berlin is a sombre city of grey stone. It is an austere Protestant town; the flamboyant excesses of South German baroque never got as far as Prussia's capital. The streets are as wide as the buildings are tall, so that the cityscape dwarfs people hurrying along the windswept streets, in a way that the skyscrapers of Manhattan do not overwhelm the human figure. Even Berlin's modern buildings seem hewn from stone, their glass fa
ç
ades mirroring the grey sky, monolithic and forbidding.
Inside Lisl Hennig's hotel the furniture had the same massive proportions that characterized the city. Solid, stately, and uncompromising, the oak tables, the heavy mahogany wardrobes, and the elegant Biedermeier cupboards and china cabinets of peach and pear wood dominated the house. Even in my little room at the top of the house, the corner cabinet and the chest of drawers, the carved chair and the bed built high upon several mattresses left little space to move from window to door.
I always slept in this room. It was the one I'd occupied as a child, when my family had th? top floors assigned to them by the British Army of Occupation. From this window I'd floated my paper aeroplanes, blown soap bubbles, and dropped water bombs into the courtyard far below. Nowadays no one else wanted to use this dark cramped little box room so far from the bath. So the dark-brown floral patterned wallpaper remained, and over the tiny fireplace there still could be seen the framed engraving of medieval Dresden that Lisl Hennig had put there to hide the marks where Werner's air gun had been fired at a drawing of Herr Storch, the fat mathematics teacher. Storch had been a dedicated Nazi, but he had somehow managed to evade the denazification procedures and get his job back after the war.
I moved the picture to show Werner that the marks were still there. 'Spat! spat! spat!' said Werner, firing an imaginary pistol at the place where the drawing of Storch had once been.
'You've got to hand it to him,' I said without mentioning Storch by name. 'He stuck to his views.'
'He was a Nazi bastard,' said Werner without rancour.
'And he did little to hide it,' I said. The sky was black with storm clouds and now the rain began, huge drops of water that hit the glass with loud noises and made patterns on the dirty windowsill.
'Storch was cunning,' said Werner. 'He rephrased all his Nazi claptrap into anti-British and anti-American tirades. They could have put him inside for spreading Nazi ideas, but the British and the Americans kept telling everyone how much they believed in free speech. They couldn't do much about Storch.' Werner was standing by the fireplace, fidgeting with the china figure of William Tell that had been relegated to this room after a maid had dropped it into the sink while cleaning it. The pieces had been stuck together with a glue that had oozed to make brown ridges around the arms and legs.
I'd been trying to find some suitable opportunity to tell Werner about Tessa's meeting with my wife and about her request for the children, but the right moment didn't come. 'Do you ever see him? Herr Storch, do you ever see him?'
'He got married again,' said Werner. 'He married a widow who had a watchmaker's shop in Munich.' Werner was dressed in a dark-grey worsted jacket and the corduroy trousers that the Germans call
Manchesterkosen
. His shirt was green and with it he wore a green polyester tie with little red horses. On the hook behind the door he'd hung a tired old grey raincoat. I knew he had an appointment with some East Bloc bank officials that afternoon, but even if he hadn't told me, I would have guessed he was going over to the East; he always wore such proletarian clothes when going there. His long black coat with its astrakhan collar and the kind of tailored wool suits he preferred, to say nothing of his taste in shoes, would have been too conspicuous in the streets of East Berlin.
'Trust Storch to fall on his feet.'
'He made your life hell,' said Werner.
'No, I wouldn't say that.'
'All that extra homework, and always making you come out to the front of the class and do the geometry at the blackboard.'
'It was good for me. I was top for mathematics two years running. My dad was amazed.' There was a crash of thunder and a blue flash of lightning.
'Even then, old Storch kept on at you.'
'He hated the English. His son was killed fighting in the Libyan Desert. He told the boys in the top class that the English had shot all their prisoners.'
'That was just propaganda,' said Werner.
'You don't have to spare my feelings,' I said. 'There are bastards everywhere, Werner. We both know that.'
'Storch didn't have to take it out on you.'
'I was the only
Engl
ä
nder
he could get his hands on.'
'I've never heard you say a bad word about old Storch.'
'He was a tough-minded old bastard,' I said. 'He must have known that one word to my dad about him having been a stormtrooper would have got him kicked out of his job, but he didn't seem to care.'
'I would have squealed on him,' said Werner.
'You hated him more than I did.'
'Don't you remember all that poisonous stuff about Jewish profiteers, and the way he stared at me all the time?'
'And you said, "Don't look at me, sir, my father was a gravedigger." '
'That was when old Herr Grossmann was away on sick leave, and Storch did the history lessons.' A long roll of thunder sounded as the storm moved over the city and headed for Poland, such a short drive down the road. Werner scowled. 'All Storch knew about history was what he'd read in his Nazi propaganda — about how the Jewish profiteers had made Germany lose the war and ruined the economy. They should never have let a bigot like that take the history class.'
'I think I know what you're going to say, Werner.'
Werner sat down on the sagging armchair, smiled at me, and, although I knew what was coming, he said it anyway. 'One man was the very worst scoundrel, he told us. Already rich — he amassed a second fortune in a few months. He borrowed from the central bank to buy coal mines, private banks, paper mills and newspapers. And he paid back the loans in money so devalued by inflation that this whole spread cost him almost nothing.'
'It sounds like you've been looking at the encyclopedia, Werner,' I said. Hugo Stinnes. 'Yes, I was thinking of that long passionate lecture from old Storch only the other day.'
'So why would some Russian bastard with a KGB assignment choose a name like Stinnes as an operating name?'
'I wish I knew,' I said.
'Hugo Stinnes was a German capitalist, a class enemy, obsessed by the threat of world Bolshevism. What kind of joke is it for a Russian KGB man to choose that name?'
'What kind of man would choose it?' I said.
'A very, very confident Communist,' said Werner. 'A man who was so trusted by his KGB masters that he could select such a name without fear of being contaminated by it.'
'Did you only think of that now?' I asked.
'Right from the time I first heard the name it seemed a curious choice for a Communist agent. But now — now that so much depends upon his loyalty — I think of it again. And I worry.'
I said. 'Yes, the same with me, Werner.'
Werner paused and, using his little finger, scratched his bushy eyebrows. 'When the Nazi party sent Dr Goebbels to open their first office in Berlin, they used that little back cellar in Potsdamerplatz that belonged to Storch's uncle. It was a filthy hole; the Nazis called it "'the opium den". They say Storch's uncle let them have it without paying rent and in return Storch got a nice little job with the Party.'
I looked at the rain as it polished the roofs of the buildings across the courtyard. The roofs were tilted, crippled, and humpbacked, like an illustration from 'Hansel and Gretel'. My mind was not on old Herr Storch any more than Werner's was. I said, 'Why not use his real name — Sadoff — why use a German name at all? And if a German name, why Stinnes?'
'It raises a lot of questions,' said Werner as his mind went another way. 'If Stinnes was planted solely as a way of giving us false information, then the Miller woman was used only to support that trick.'
'That's not difficult to believe, Werner,' I said. 'Now that we know she wasn't drowned in the Havel, now that we know she's safe and well and working for the East German government, I've changed my mind about the whole business.'
'The whole business? Her collecting that material from the car at the big party in Wannsee? Did she want to get arrested that night when we set it up so carefully and were so pleased with ourselves? Was that confession she gave you at some length — was it all set up?'
To implicate Bret? Yes, the Miller woman made a fool of me, Werner. I believed everything she told me about the two code words. I went back to London convinced that there was another agent in London Central. I disobeyed orders. I went and talked to Brahms Four. I was convinced that someone in London Central — probably Bret — was a prime KGB agent.'
'It looked that way,' said Werner. He was being kind, as always. He could see how upset I was.
'It did to me. But no one else was fooled. You told me again and again. Dicky turned up his nose at the idea, and Silas Gaunt got angry when I suggested it. I even began to wonder if there was a big cover-up. But the truth is that they weren't fooled by her and her story, and I was.'
'Don't blame yourself, Bernard. They didn't see her. She was convincing, I know.'
'She made a fool of me. She had nicotine stains on her fingers and no cigarettes! She had inky fingers and no fountain pen! She drowns, but we find no body. How could I be so stupid! A clerk from East Berlin; yes, of course. Everyone in London Central was right and I was wrong. I feel bad about that, Werner. I have more field experience that any of those people. I should have seen through her. Instead I went around doing exactly what they wanted done.'
'It wasn't like that, Bernie, and you know it. Silas Gaunt and Dicky and the rest of them didn't argue with you or give any reasons. They wouldn't believe your theory because it would have been too inconvenient to believe it.'
'Then Posh Harry gave me documents that supported the idea that there was a mole in London Central.'
'You're not saying Posh Harry was in on it?'
'I don't think so. Posh Harry was a carefully selected go-between. They used him the way we've used him so often. That was probably Fiona's idea.'
'It's the very hell of a complicated scenario they had,' said Werner, rubbing his face. 'Are you sure that you've got it right now? Would it be worth them going to all that trouble? When you got Stinnes out of Mexico City, you nearly got killed doing it. A KGB man from the Embassy was shot.'
'That shooting was an accident, Werner. Pavel Moskvin was the one who gave me a tough tune in East Berlin. If Stinnes is a plant, then Moskvin is the man behind it. I can't prove it, of course, but Moskvin is the sort of hard-nosed Party man that Moscow has monitoring and masterminding all their important departments.'
'You think Moskvin planted him without any contacts or case officer or letter drop? You think Stinnes is all on his own?'
' "Solitaries", the Russians call them; agents whose real loyalties are known to only one or two people at the very top of the command structure. The only record of their assignment is a signed contract locked into a safe in Moscow. Sometimes when such people die, despised and unlamented, even their close relatives — wife, husband, children — aren't told the real story.'
'But Stinnes left his wife. He'd even had a fight with her.'
'Yes,' I said, 'and that convinced me that he really wanted to come over to the West. But the fight was genuine — his story false. We should have allowed for that possibility, I suppose.'
'So now you think Stinnes is a solitary?' said Werner.
'For them the solitary isn't so unusual, Werner. Communism has always glamorized secrecy; it's the Communist method; subversion, secret codes, cover names, secret inks, no agent permitted to contact more than two other agents, cells to make sure that one lost secret doesn't lead to the loss of another. All these things are not exclusively Russian, and not peculiar to the KGB; this sort of secrecy comes naturally to any Communist. It's part of the appeal that worldwide Communism has for the embittered loner. If my guess is right Moskvin is the only other person who knows the whole story. They probably didn't tell the truth to the snatch team that hit the launderette. The KGB would reason that just one extra person knowing the real story would increase the risk of us discovering that Stinnes was a plant.'