Samson 01 - Berlin Game, page 29
‘Is that how you met? I met Walter at the big house his parents had near Bernau. They are an old important family, you know.’
‘I met your husband’s father once,’ I said. ‘He was a remarkable old man. I was only a small child, but he spoke to me as an equal. And a few days later, he sent me a leather-bound copy of Die schöne Müllerin. It had come from his library, and had his name embossed in gold on the cover and an engraved bookplate inside. My father told me that only a dozen books from his library had survived the war. I have it still.’
‘You lived in Berlin as a child. That explains your perfect Berlin accent.’ She seemed more relaxed now that she knew I’d met old von Munte. ‘Hundreds of local people went to the old gentleman’s funeral. They had it out there at the house where all the rest of the family had been buried. My father was a country physician. He attended the old man right until the end. What did your father do for a living?’
‘He started out as a clerk. In the thirties he was unemployed for a long time. Then he went into the Army. The war began and he became an officer. After the war he stayed in the Army.’
‘I’m Walter’s second wife, of course. Ida was killed in one of the very first air raids.’ She poured coffee for us. ‘Do you have children?’
‘Two: a boy and a girl.’
‘It’s Ida’s child, of course - the one he wants to see.’ She pushed the large cup of black coffee across the table to me in a gesture that contained an element of rejection.
‘In Săo Paulo?’
‘There’s only the one child. That’s why Walter dotes on him so much. I hope and pray he is not disappointed.’
‘Disappointed how?’
‘It’s such a long time,’ she said as if on that account the chances of the two men disappointing each other were self-evident.
‘He’s sure to be grateful,’ I said. ‘Walter has given him so much.’
‘He’s given his son everything,’ she said. ‘He’s given him every penny he’s earned from you. He’s given him the life that was rightfully mine.’ She drank some coffee. Her words were bitter but her face was calm.
‘And now his son will be able to thank you both.’
‘We’ll be strangers to him. His son won’t want the burden of looking after us. And Walter has no chance of earning any more.’
‘It will be all right,’ I promised vaguely.
‘Our presence will remind him of his obligation, and he will resent that. Then he’ll start feeling guilty about such feelings and associate us with that guilt.’ She drank more coffee. She’d obviously been thinking about it a great deal. ‘I’m always a pessimist. Is your wife a pessimist?’
‘She had to be an optimist to marry me,’ I said.
‘You haven’t told me how you met,’ said Mrs Munte.
I mumbled something about meeting her at a party, and went over to look out the window. She’d arrived with two other girls. Dicky Cruyer knew her name, and so I immediately approached her with a bottle of Sancerre and two empty glasses. We’d danced to music from an old broken record player and discussed our host, a Foreign Office junior clerk who was celebrating a posting to Singapore.
Fiona was typing letters for a travel company in Oxford Street. It was a temporary job, due to finish the next week. She asked me if I knew of any really interesting work for someone with a good degree who could type and take shorthand in three languages. I didn’t think she was serious at first. Her clothes and jewellery made her look anything but desperate for employment.
‘She told me she was out of work,’ I said.
At the time, Bret Rensselaer was setting up an undercover operation that worked out of an office block in Holborn and processed selected data from the Berlin office. We needed staff and Bret had already decided that we would not go through the normal civil-service recruitment procedure. It took too long and involved too much form-filling and interviewing; to make matters worse, the civil service only sent us applicants that the Foreign Office had already decided were not good enough for them.
‘What was she wearing?’ said Mrs Munte.
‘Nothing special,’ I said. It was a tight sweater of angora wool. I remember it because it took two dry cleanings and a lot of brushing to remove the final fluffs of wool from my only good suit. I asked her where she’d learned shorthand and typing and she cracked some silly joke that made it clear that she was an Oxford graduate, and I pretended not to understand such subtlety. Dicky Cruyer tried to cut in on our dancing at that point, but Fiona said couldn’t he see that she was dancing with the most handsome man in the room?
‘But you saw her again?’ said Mrs Munte.
I had a date with her the very next evening. And I wanted to be able to say I had a job for her. It was an attractive idea to have her in the same office with me. Bret Rensselaer didn’t much like the idea of taking on someone we hadn’t properly vetted, but when we found out that she was related to Silas Gaunt - who’d become something of a legend in the Department - he gave me a grudging okay. At first it was conditional on her working only out of my office, and not having access to the really sensitive material or any contact with our Berlin people. But in a few years, hard work and long hours gave her a series of promotions that put her in line for an Operations desk.
‘I got her a job,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it was the job, rather than you, she was after,’ said Mrs Munte, tilting her head on one side to show me it was not a serious suggestion.
‘Perhaps it was,’ I said.
I was watching two men at the far end of the narrow lane that led up from the Buchholz church. They were both in civilian clothes, but unmistakably Stasis. It was government policy that the secret police never wore beards or moustaches, and dressed in plain clothes of a type that made them immediately recognizable to every East German who saw them. Everyone except the most naive realized that there were other plainclothes policemen who weren’t so easy to spot, but where the hell were they? Frau von Munte,’ I said matter of factly, ‘there are a couple of policemen coming up the lane checking each of the houses in turn.’ I kept watching them. Now I could see that there were two more men - one in police uniform - and, behind them, a black Volvo negotiating the narrow lane with great care. Beyond that came a minibus with a light fixed to the roof. ‘Four policemen,’ I said. ‘Perhaps more.’
She came over to the window, but had the good sense to stand well back from it. ‘What kind of policemen?’ she asked.
‘The kind who get Volvos,’ I said. With the scarcity of any sort of hard currency, only senior ranks or special squads could get an imported car.
‘What do we do?’ She gave no sign of fear. Married to a spy for a couple of decades, I suppose she’d lived through this nightmare times without number.
‘Get two boxes of those seedlings from the greenhouse,’ I said. ‘I’ll just look round in here before we leave.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Back to my car.’
‘We’ll have to go past them.’
‘They’ll see us whichever way we go. Better to brazen it out.’
She put on an absurd fez-like felt hat and fastened it into her hair with ferocious-looking hatpins. She looked round the room. There were obviously many things she’d planned to take with her, but she grabbed only a fur coat from a box under the bed and put it on. She went out to the greenhouse, came back, and handed me a box of seedlings and kept one for herself. As we went out, I smiled to the neighbour stretched out on a blanket in front of his castle. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Closing the little garden gate carefully after Mrs Munte, I followed her down the lane towards the policemen.
They were working systematically, a two-man team on each side of the lane. One man to go into the garden and knock at the door, the other to watch the back. The driver of the car would be ready to take a potshot at anyone trying to run for it. In the back of the Volvo there was another man. It was Lenin, the senior officer of the team that had arrested Rolf Mauser. He was sprawled across the back seat ticking off names and addresses from papers on a clipboard.
‘Who are you, where are you going?’ said one of the policemen as we got near. It was the young Saxon conscript again. He’d been given the job of plodding along the lane to hold back the bushes that might scratch the paintwork of the car.
‘None of your business, young man,’ said Mrs Munte. She made an incongruous figure, standing there in the sunshine holding the plants and wearing her fur coat and Kaffeeklatsch hat.
‘Do you live here?’ He moved out to block the path. I noticed that the flap of his pistol holster was undone. His arms were folded across his body, a gesture that policemen like to think looks friendly.
‘Live here?’ said Mrs Munte. ‘What do you think we are, squatters?’
Even the policemen smiled. Whatever Mrs Munte looked like, she could not be mistaken for one of the dirty long-haired squatters seen so frequently on TV news from the West Sector. ‘Do you know anyone here named Munte?’
‘I don’t know any of these people,’ she said disdainfully. ‘I come to this dreadful place only to buy things I can’t get elsewhere. My son is helping me with these carnations. It’s his day off and he’s brought his car here. Ten marks for these few seedlings. It’s disgraceful. You should be concerning yourself with the profiteers that are flourishing here.’
‘We are,’ said the policeman. He still smiled but didn’t move.
She leaned close to him. ‘What are you doing?’ she whispered loudly. ‘Is it wife swoppers you are after? Or have the whores moved in here again?’
He grinned and stood aside. ‘You’re too young to know about that kind of thing, Mutti,’ he said. He turned round and watched us as we staggered along with the boxes of plants. ‘Make way for the busy gardeners,’ he called to the policemen behind him. And they stood aside too. The man in the back of the Volvo stared at his papers and said nothing. He probably thought our papers had been checked.
27
My box of carnation plants was heavy enough to make me sweat by the time we got to the church at Buchholz, but Mrs Munte was not complaining. Perhaps she was much stronger than she looked. Or perhaps she’d chosen a lighter one for herself.
Buchholz marks the end of the number 49 tram route. In the cobbled village square were the bicycles of commuters who lived beyond the terminus. There were hundreds of them, racked, stacked, hanging and piled; the narrow pathways that gave access to them made an intricate maze. Within this maze a man was standing. He had a newspaper in his hands and he was reading from it in a preoccupied way that permitted him to glance round him, and to look down the street as if waiting for the tram to arrive. It was Werner Volkmann; there was no mistaking the big bearlike torso and short legs, and the hat that was planted right on top of his large head.
He gave no sign of seeing me, but I knew he’d chosen that spot so he could keep the car in his line of vision. I unlocked the doors and put the plants in the boot and Mrs Munte in the back seat. Only then - when Mrs Munte was shut in the car and couldn’t hear us - did Werner cross the road to talk to me.
‘I thought you’d be across the other side of town,’ I said quietly, stifling the impulse to scream at him.
‘It’s probably okay,’ said Werner. He turned to look up the street. There was a police car outside the post office, but the driver was showing no interest in us. He was talking to a cop in one of the long white coats that only traffic police wear. ‘Four plainclothes cops visited your man’s office this morning. It was nothing more than a few polite inquiries, but it scared hell out of him.’
‘The same team who arrested Rolf Mauser are now raking through the Lauben and asking if anyone knows him.’
‘I know. I saw them arrive.’
‘Thanks, Werner.’
‘No sense in me rushing in there to get arrested with you,’ said Werner defensively. ‘I can be more help to you free.’
‘So where is he?’
‘Brahms Four? He left his office soon after arriving at work. He came into the street holding a small attaché case and wearing a pained look. I didn’t know what to do - no phone here to reach you. So I had one of my people grab him. I stayed clear. He doesn’t know me. I didn’t want him to see the warehouse, so I had someone drive him out to Müggelsee. The truck will go separately. Then I came up here to ask you whether we should still go ahead.’
‘At least let’s make the kind of attempt that will look good on the report,’ I said. ‘Let’s take this old lady over to Müggelsee and put her in the truck.’
‘You kept your man well wrapped up,’ said Werner. Twenty years at least he’s been operating in this town, and I’d never seen him until today.’
‘Deep cover,’ I said, imitating the voice of Frank Harrington at his most ponderous.
Werner smiled. He enjoyed any joke against Frank.
Werner got in the driver’s side and took the wheel. He started up and turned the car south for Berlinerstrasse and the city centre. ‘For Müggelsee the autobahn will be quicker, Werner,’ I said.
‘That would take us out of the East Sector and into the Zone,’ said Werner. ‘I don’t like crossing the city boundaries.’
‘I came that way to get here. It’s quicker.’
‘This is Himmelfahrt - Ascension Day. A lot of people will be taking the day off to swim and sun. It’s not an official holiday, but there’s a lot of absenteeism. That’s the only kind of “ism” that’s really popular here. There will be cops on the roads that lead out of town. They’ll be taking names and arresting drunks and generally trying to discourage people from having a holiday whenever they feel like goofing off.’
‘You talked me out of it, Werner.’
Mrs Munte leaned forward between the seats. ‘Did you say we’re going to Müggelsee? That will be crowded. It’s popular at this time of year.’
‘Me and Bernie used to swim out there when we were kids,’ said Werner. ‘The Grosser Müggelsee is always the first to warm up in summer and the first to freeze for ice skating. It’s shallow water. But you’re right, gnädige Frau, it will be crowded out there today. I could kick myself for forgetting about the holiday.’
‘My husband will be there?’
I answered her: ‘Your husband is there already. We’ll join him and you’ll be across the border by nightfall.’
It was not long before we saw the first revellers. There were a dozen or more men in a brewer’s dray. Such horse-drawn vehicles, with pneumatic tyres, are still common in Eastern Europe. But this one was garlanded with bunches of leaves and flowers and coloured paper. And the fine dapple-grey horses were specially groomed with brightly beribboned manes. The men in the dray wore funny hats - many of them black toppers - and short-sleeved shirts. Some wore the favourite status symbol of Eastern Europe: blue jeans. And inevitably there were Western T-shirts, one blazoned ‘I love Daytona Beach, Florida’ and another ‘Der Tag geht…Johnnie Walker kommt’. The horses were going very slowly and the men were singing very loudly between swigging beer and shouting to people in the street and catcalling after girls. They gave a loud cheer as our car went past them.
There were more such parties as we got to Köpenick. Groups of men stood under the trees at the edge of the road, smoking and drinking in silence with a dedication that is unmistakably German. Other men were laughing and singing; some slept soundly, neatly arranged like logs, while others were being violently ill.
Werner stopped the car well down the Müggelheimer Damm. There were no other vehicles in sight. Plantations of tall fir trees darkened the road. This extensive forest continued to the lakes on each side of the road and far beyond. There was no sign of Werner’s big articulated truck, but he’d spotted its driver standing at the roadside. He was near one of the turnoffs, narrow tracks that led to the edge of the Müggelsee.
‘What is it?’ Werner asked him anxiously.
‘Everything is in order,’ said the man. He was a big beefy rednecked man, wearing bib-and-brace overalls and a red and white woollen hat of the sort worn by British football supporters. ‘I had the truck here, as we arranged, but a crowd of these lunatics …’ He indicated some small groups of men standing in a car park across the road. ‘They began climbing all over it. I had to move it.’ He had the strongest Berlin accent I’d ever heard. He sounded like one of the old-style comedians, who can still be heard telling Berliner jokes in unlicensed cabarets in the back streets of Charlottenburg.
‘Where are you now?’ said Werner.
‘I pulled off the road into one of these firebreaks,’ said the driver. ‘The earth’s not so firm - all that bloody rain last week. I’m heavy, you know. Get stuck and we’re in trouble.’
‘This is the other one,’ said Werner, moving his head to indicate Mrs Munte in the back seat.
‘She doesn’t look too heavy,’ said the driver. ‘What do you weigh, Fraulein? About fifty kilos?’ He grinned at her. Mrs Munte, who obviously weighed twice that, didn’t answer. ‘Don’t be shy,’ said the driver.
‘And the man?’ said Werner.
‘Ah,’ said the driver, ‘the Herr Professor.’ He was the sort of German who called any elderly well-dressed fellow-countryman ‘Professor’. ‘I sent him up to that lakeside restaurant to get a cup of coffee. I told him someone would come for him when we are ready.’
While he was saying that, I saw the black Volvo and the minibus coming down the road from the direction of Müggelheim. They would have made good time on the autobahn, flashing their lights to get priority in the traffic or using their siren to clear the fast lane.
‘Get the professor,’ said Werner to me. ‘I’ll drive the old lady down to where the truck is parked, and come back to meet you here.’
As I hurried along the woodland path towards the lake, I could hear a curious noise. It was the regular roaring sound that waves make as they are sucked back through the pebbles on a long stony beach. It got louder as I approached the open-air restaurant, but that did not prepare me for the scene I found there.
