Samson 05 - Hope, page 20
‘You know what, I do for a living?’ I said, more to confirm that his memory was functioning than because I had doubt of it.
‘Yes, I do. I know your name, your wife and your job.’
‘I’ve come to tell you that it’s all over: kaputtmacht,’ I said. ‘You’ve come to a standstill.’ I was being provocative of course, I wanted to see how he would react. He looked at me, used a forefinger to push his glasses a fraction up on his nose, but gave no sign of having heard or understood. ‘This network is blown,’ I said. ‘DELIUS is coughing blood. The network can’t be salvaged.’
‘We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and behold trouble.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘Jeremiah.’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about the network. It’s blown and you blew it. You know my name and my job. Well I don’t know your name not your real name but I do know your part-time job. You report, to the Stasi.’
‘You’ve been listening to gossip. Village gossip is the worst kind,’ he told me with an indulgent smile.
‘I came over here to pick up the pieces, but I don’t see how it can be put together again.’
‘Like Humpty-Dumpty?’
‘Yes, like Humpty-Dumpty. You’ve had a long run, but nothing lasts forever.’ I waited for him to respond but he stood very still, his eyes staring at me, his expression calm. He showed no sign of wanting to argue or explain. For ‘an unofficial collaborator’ I found his coldness disconcerting. Informers usually lived on their nerves and were easy to jolt. ‘I’ve been authorized to offer you a deal,’ I said after a long pause.
‘Oh? What kind of a deal would that be?’
‘Everyone goes into the bag eventually,’ I said. ‘For every agent’ who is good at what he does … who pushes opportunities to extremes and consistently takes chances, being exposed is the inevitable career climax.’
‘Being a pastor is not a career; it is a vocation,’ he said, as if determined to bluff his way out of it.
I continued my spiel. ‘But a career’s climax doesn’t have to be a career’s end.’
‘I can’t believe you are serious. Are you saying what you seem to be saying?’
‘Think what we could do. London would put the network together again. We’d reassemble it to be even better more productive than before. You’d go on reporting to Normannenstrasse as usual. And drawing your pay from them.’
The pastor scratched his cheek with a fingernail and said, ‘The Gospel of St. Matthew tells us that no man can serve two masters without coming to hate the one, and love the other.’
‘I thought that was putting the finger on materialism and spirituality,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that the passage that Matthew continues, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon”?’
‘You have an enviable memory.’
‘It’s a part of the job,’ I said. ‘So what’s your answer? London or Berlin?’
‘I thought I’d given you my answer.’
‘Not quite. You haven’t told me which is God, and which is mammon.’
‘You come here to my country, and you threaten me as if I was in your country.’ His voice was still calm but he was hardening and that was good. This was the nearest he’d come to bluster, but I could see now that I’d had it all wrong. He wasn’t an unofficial collaborator; this man had the resilience of a trained and experienced Stasi man.
I said, ‘You understand what I’m offering, don’t you? You see the alternatives?’
‘Why don’t you make them clearer?’
‘I can’t make it much clearer,’ I said. ‘You know as well as I do that if you don’t cooperate, London will have to eliminate you. They can’t permit you to walk away.’
‘Eliminate me,’ he said, repeating my word ‘ausschalten’, and making a movement with his fingers as if operating a light switch. ‘Is this your idea? To give me a chance to join you in spying against my own people?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t listen to me. I wanted to waste you, without the option.’
He responded with a grim smile. He was annoyed with himself for being stampeded into discussing a deal. The face remained as calm as ever, but there was suppressed anger to be seen around his mouth. ‘You shit-head!’ he said softly. ‘I’ll show you how we do the switching off of filth like you.’
We had both started off this conversation with the wrong idea. It was nothing but good luck that had made my error of judgment work, while his misfired. Now, from his back pocket, he took a pigskin wallet. From a compartment in it he produced a sheet of paper and placed it on the table in front of me. I recognized what it was before he flattened it out for me to read. It was crudely printed on coarse yellowing paper. Constant folding had worn the paper so that it had almost separated into four quarters. It was a Stasi warrant. In the bottom corner there was a solemn man holding a numbered board up to the camera’s lens. The text identified him as a captain employed by the Ministry of Security and enjoined all comers to help and assist him.
‘I’ve seen one before,’ I said, pushing the paper back towards him.
‘I’m sure you have.’
‘Think it over,’ I said, getting to my feet. This was the dangerous moment; the time when he was deciding whether to arrest me, kill me, or keep me warm as some kind of insurance policy for his old age.
He smirked. It was a stand-off; the knowing smile was his acknowledgement of that fact, just as my telling him to think it over was my way of admitting as much. ‘How would we make contact?’ he said. ‘Is there a code? … I mean in the event that I thought it over, and wanted to do a deal?’
‘Usual network procedure. Ask for a dozen gold sovereigns in any context, and I’ll come and see you.’
‘Not thirty?’ He looked at his watch. Everyone I talked to kept looking at their watches; it was beginning to give me a complex.
I buttoned up my coat and picked up my battered felt hat. I wondered if he would phone to have me stopped at the checkpoint. I was pleased that I had taken the extra precaution of changing transport and identity in Berlin.
‘I have sick parishioners to comfort,’ said the pastor as he struggled into a heavy overcoat and put on a woolen hat. ‘I do my rounds every night, like a shepherd.’
‘Or maybe like a jailer?’ I said.
‘I used to ask myself that question sometimes.’
‘And?’
‘In the end I decided there is no difference.’ His voice was firmer now. He had called my bluff and ended up master. For the next few hours while I was in the DDR I was a card in his hand and he could play me any way he liked. I opened the door. ‘Good night, Herr Samson,’ he said. ‘May the Lord protect you.’
I grunted a goodnight.
I’d parked in the school alley across the road but the pastor’s car a Trabant even older than mine was sheltered in the nearby barn. It took me a few minutes to scrape the frost from my glass but the pastor had had the foresight to protect his windshield with newspaper. Now he removed it and jumped into his car to watch me as I made repeated attempts to start up. He was going to see me off before he left; he didn’t want me following him.
Finally the loud rattle of my engine came, provoking a clatter of wings from the nearby trees as alarmed birds climbed sleepily into the night sky. I let in the clutch and moved forward cautiously, glancing in the mirror as I carefully negotiated the narrow stone entrance that bridged the ditch.
Reflected in the driving mirror I saw the pastor’s Trabant. As I watched, it lit up inside, as if he was testing a powerful flashlight. In its bright interior I could see his scowling face, his spectacle lenses flashing like silver dollars. Later I realized that this preliminary glow was some kind of misfire. Immediately the first blaze of light was overcome by a brighter one that transformed the car’s glasswork into sheets of polished silver. Fragments of flying glass caught the light of the explosion and enclosed the car in what was, for one brief instant, a great globe of glittering mirrors. Then it all fell to the ground and disappeared like snowflakes. By the time the force of the explosion came, I was through the entrance gate and on to the road. The blast almost rolled my car into the ditch, and the sound hit my eardrums like a thunderclap. The echoes of the explosion rolled across the yard and were replaced by a low hoarse roaring sound as the pastor’s Trabbie became a sizzling furnace.
Theo, you stupid bastard! They’ll come in and tear you all to pieces now. In my younger days I might have turned around, briefed them about reassembling and started them all running for cover. But I was no longer young. I stabbed the gas pedal. The glow of the fire disappeared behind a hill and I rolled up my car window and kept going.
All the following day I sat behind my desk waiting for the next hammer blow to fall.
‘A teleprinter intercept from Dresden,’ said Lida, putting it, on my desk together with a fiercely strong cup of coffee. I looked at her; she stared back without expression. Frank Harrington in a characteristic gesture of support had assigned to me the brightest and best secretary in the building. Lida was a fifty-year-old widow with diamant6-studded bifocals, a remarkable supply of brightly colored woolens, an encyclopedic memory and adequate command of most Western European languages.
‘How many of them is that?’ I asked her.
‘Five.’
‘But not Theo Forster?’
‘Not yet.’ Lida was a realist.
‘No,’ I said grimly. ‘Not yet. They’ll leave him to last.’
Lida had left my door unguarded and now the Idd poked his head around it. ‘Can I see you, boss?’ His arms loaded, he pushed the door with a shoulder and entered (!rabwise.
‘I suppose so.’
The kid put two box files on my desk and opened the top one. ‘I’d better show you what I found,’ he said.
‘I know what you found,’ I said. ‘You found that there is no way to immediately replace the DELIUS network as a means of putting people into place.’
‘Yes.’
‘No matter,’ I said. ‘With DELIUS compromised, all the Church networks are suspect. We’ll have to think of something drastic.’
He stood by my desk stroking his files. ‘Why do they pick them up one at a time?’ he said. ‘Why not a swoop that brings them all in together? Keep the prisoners apart and interrogate them separately.’
‘It’s their system,’ I said. ‘Always one by one. They tap all the phones and watch all the houses and try to stamped(- the other suspects into doing something foolish. They hope to get leads to people they don’t know about.’
‘They have more or less got the lot now.’
‘More or less,’ I agreed.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m one hundred percent,’ I told him.
‘You look done in. I hope you didn’t catch that Chinese flu that’s been going around the girls in the cashier’s department. It starts with a rough furry tongue. Have you got the same?’
‘I don’t think so, but I haven’t had time to match tongues with the girls in the cashier’s office.’
‘And stomach pains,’ explained the kid earnestly.
‘I’ve got a lot of work to do.’ He meant well, I could see that, but I needed time on my own. I needed to think.
‘They didn’t arrest the pastor,’ said the kid, waving some more papers at me.
‘Give them time,’ I said. ‘We’ll look at all the intercepts tomorrow. And we’ll see what Frank has to say. He might want to come back here and take charge.’
‘You haven’t told him yet?’
‘I’ll phone him in London. He’ll probably want to warn the D-G what’s happening.’
‘That should spoil his evening,’ said the kid.
‘Frank’s been around a long time. He’s seen the networks come and go.’
‘I suppose you get used to it. Is that what you mean?’
‘No, you never get used to it,’ I said. ‘You don’t break down and weep, but you don’t get used to it.’
‘I’ll see if there’s anything on the Magdeburg criminal police sheets,’ said the kid, balancing the contents of my out tray on the top of his box files and making for the door. Then he stopped and said, ‘My father wrote to me the other day and asked me what I thought I would be doing when I was fifty years old. He said that if a man thinks about where and what he’s going to be when he’s fifty all the preceding years fall into place. Do you agree, boss?’
‘I’ll let you know,’ I said. Sometimes I wondered if he said these things to wind me up.
When he had gone, Lida said: ‘Shall I stay on tonight?’
‘No. Go home. ‘Fell the night-duty man to switch his internal line through to me and give me two outside lines. I’ll sleep on the sofa.’
‘I sent your bags over to the Hotel Hennig but I didn’t ask for a room for you.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘There’s a little attic room. Frau Hennig lets me use it when I’m in Berlin.’
‘And what about a meal?’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. I didn’t want her to mother me. She nodded and said good night, but about thirty minutes later she returned waving a flimsy sheet from the monitoring service. ‘I thought you’d want to see this immediately,’ she said. ‘Magdeburg area. A pastor severely burned in a vehicle fire. With it the news services are putting out a government warning about illegal storage of gasoline.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘I think it’s our man. They are trying to play it down by means of the warning.’
‘Can I smell burning?’ I said. She looked at me and shrugged. ‘There is a burning smell,’ I said.
‘I was making toast. Is it forbidden?’
‘No, Lida,’ I said.
‘There is an electric toast machine for the office staff … If it is forbidden …’
‘No. No. Get along home, Lida-I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Good night Herr Samson.’ As she went out through the door the smell of burning was stronger and far more pungent.
Any last hope I was nursing, about Theo being eliminated from the list of suspects, was gone by midnight when it was confirmed that he’d been arrested. Theo was the last one to go into the bag. I read the message twice and then closed my eyes to think about everything that had happened. The next thing I knew it was six in the morning and I was waking up with a headache and dry mouth, just like the girls with the Chinese influenza. I had just keeled over and gone to sleep at my desk. It wasn’t flu, it was nerves. Never mind all that stuff about the adrenalin flowing; real petrifying fear and despair brings only an overwhelming weariness.
Yawning and disheveled I went and sniffed at early morning Berlin with all the sounds and smells I remembered as a child going to school. I had a stubbly face, bleary eyes and an urgent need for a cup of coffee. A car pool driver took me to one of my old haunts, an all night bar tucked away between the bus tenninal and Witzleben S-Bahn. Its neon sign looked pale in the watery pink dawn. I went in and looked around at the people in there truck drivers, railway men, pimps and night shift workers but the only face I recognized belonged to the proprietor.
‘Bernd. Long time, no see,’ called Sammy the owner without removing the cigar from his mouth. He was a plump, pink-faced Hungarian who used to earn a comfortable living from Berlin clubs and restaurants to which he sold alcohol, cigarettes and cigars stolen from the big trucks. Now he’d become almost completely respectable, providing food and drink to long-distance truck drivers at the end of the Autobahn that led through the DDR to West Germany. He was still selling alcohol and tobacco but his days of thieving were gone; he had a wholesale business and two large warehouses from which he could make just as much money without breaking the law.
I sat down and waited. The air was laden with smoke and coffee and the sweet smell of doughnuts. I drank a strong espresso coffee with a schnapps chaser and read a newspaper that some customer had left behind. There was no real news in it, just stories about TV stars and sports. Bruno Forster arrived eventually as I felt sure he would. He stood in the doorway looking around the room to find me. He was bareheaded and wearing mechanic’s coveralls with a railway uniform jacket. He was obviously on duty. When he spotted me he did not smile or wave, he came over to the table holding a packet as if he was about to deliver a warrant.
‘There it is, Herr Samson. Dad said you always wanted it.’ He dropped a heavy white envelope on to the plastic table-top.
‘Hello, Bruno,’ I said, looking up at him. Apart from a small wispy moustache he looked very much like Theo had looked in the old days. I didn’t touch the envelope.
‘He told me to give it to you. It’s the Blutorden. ‘ He spat it out Blood Order with all the contempt he could muster. It was a medal one of the rarest of the Nazi decorations and Theo had had one in his collection since he was a schoolkid. I’d desperately wanted to add it to my modest little collection.
‘Thanks, Bruno. Will you have coffee? Or a drink?’
‘He’ll never survive prison. You know that don’t you?’ He stood over me and ignored the invitation.
‘Did you see him?’ I said.
‘You bastard. Are you satisfied now?’
‘Did you see him?’
‘Yes, they let me see him. He was crying.’ Bruno let me absorb that one. ‘He was sitting hunched up, with his arms round his knees. Sitting in the visitor’s room sobbing his heart out … like a child.’
‘Had They hurt him?’
‘What do you care? No, they hadn’t hurt him. They hadn’t tortured him the way your rotten Western newspapers say our detectives torture their prisoners. And if you’d left him alone he would be free and happy.’
‘He’s sick,’ I said. ‘They’ll probably let him out soon.’
‘You come into people’s lives and interfere, and make them miserable and stir up the shit. And where does it get you?’
