Samson 01 - Berlin Game, page 30
The indoor restaurant was closed on weekdays, but there were hundreds of men milling around the lakeside Biergarten in inebriated confusion. They were mostly young workers dressed in bright shuts and denim pants, but some wore pyjamas and some had Arab headdress, and many of them had brought the black top hat that is traditional for Himmelfahrt. I could see no women, just men. There were long lines of them waiting at a serving hatch marked ‘Getränke’ and an equally long line at a hatch marked ‘Kaffee’, where only beer, in half-litre plastic cups, was being served. Tables were crammed with dozens and dozens of empty plastic cups stacked together, and there were more empties scattered in the flower beds and lined up along the low dividing walls.
‘Heiliger bim-bam!” said a drunk behind me, as surprised as I was at the sight.
The roars of sound were coming from the throats of the men as they watched a rubber ball being kicked high into the air. It went up over their heads and cut an arc in the blue sky before coming down to meet yet another skilfully placed boot that sent it back up again.
It took me a few minutes to spot Munte. By some miracle he’d found a chair and was sitting at a table at the edge of the lake where it was a little less crowded. He seemed to be the only person drinking coffee. I sat down on the low wall next to him. There were no other chairs in sight; prudent staff had no doubt removed them from the danger zone. ‘Time to go,’ I said. ‘Your wife is here. Everything is okay.’
‘I got it for you,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I knew you would.’
‘Half the clerks in my department have taken the day off too. I had no trouble walking into the chiefs office, finding the file and helping myself.’
‘I’m told you had a visit from the police.’
The office had a visit from the police,’ he corrected me. ‘I left before they found me.’
‘They came out to Buchholz,’ I said.
‘I was trying to think of some way of warning you when a man came up to me in the street and brought me here.’ He reached into his pocket and produced a brown envelope. He put it on the table. I left it there for a moment. ‘Aren’t you going to open it and look inside?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. Not far away from us, a six-piece wind band had assembled. Now they were making all those sounds musicians have to make before playing music.
‘You want to see the writing. You want to see who is the traitor in London Central.’
‘I know who it is,’ I said.
‘You’ve guessed, you mean.’
‘I know. I’ve always known.’
‘I risked my freedom to get it this morning,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I picked up the envelope and toyed with it as I reasoned out what to do. Finally I handed it back to him. ‘Take it to London,’ I said. ‘Give it to Richard Cruyer - he’s a slim fellow with curly hair and chewed fingernails - make sure no one else gets it. Now we must go. The police seem to have traced us here. They’re the same ones who went to Buchholz.’
‘My wife - is she safe?’ He got to his feet in alarm. As he did so, the wind band began playing a drinking song.
‘Yes, I told you. But we must hurry.’ I could see them arriving now. I could see Lenin, with his long brown leather overcoat and his little beard. He was wearing a brown leather cap too, and metal-rimmed glasses. His face was hard and his eyes were hidden behind the bright reflections of his lenses. Alongside him was the young Saxon conscript, white-faced and anxious, like a child lost in a big crowd. It was unusual to have a conscript in such a team. His father’s influence must be considerable, I thought. The four policemen had stopped suddenly at the end of path, surprised, just as I had been upon first catching sight of the multitude.
The band music was loud. Too loud to make conversation easy. I grabbed Munte’s arm and moved him hurriedly into a crowd of men who had linked arms and were trying to dance together. One of them - a muscular fellow with a curly moustache - was wearing striped pyjamas over his clothes. He grabbed Munte and said, ‘Komm, Vater. Tanzen.’
‘I’m not your father,’ I heard Munte say as I stood on tiptoe to see the policemen. They had not moved. They remained on the far side of the beer garden, bewildered at the task of finding anyone in such a crowd. Lenin tapped one of the older men and sent him down the line of men waiting to buy beer. He sent the fourth man back along the path; no doubt he was going to bring more men from the minibus.
For the second time, Munte disengaged his arm from that of the man in pyjamas. ‘Ich bin vaterlos,’ said the man sorrowfully. The ‘fatherless’ man pretended to cry. His friends laughed and swayed in time with the om-pah-pah music. I grabbed Munte and pushed through the dancers. Looking back, I caught sight of the leather-capped Lenin, who was clambering onto a tub of flowers to see over the heads of the crowd. Around him the dancing had stopped and the football went rolling down the steps unheeded.
‘Walk that way, through the trees,’ I told Munte. ‘You’ll meet a broad-shouldered man, about my age, wearing a coat with an astrakhan collar. In any case, keep going along the road until you see a very big truck with a bright yellow tarpaulin marked “Underberg”. Stop the truck and get in. Your wife will be there already.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll try to delay the police.’
‘That’s dangerous, Bernd.’
‘Get going.’
‘Thank you, Bernd,’ said the old man soberly. We both knew that, after Weimar, it was what I had to do for him.
‘Walk, not run,’ I called as he ambled away. His dark suit ensured that he would soon be swallowed up by the gloom of the forest.
I pushed my way along to the edge of the lake. A number of men had walked out on the little pier and climbed into a small sailing boat. Now someone was trying to untie the mooring ropes, but it was proving difficult for the maladroit drunk. One of the restaurant staff was shouting at the men, but they paid no heed.
A very loud cheer brought my attention round to the beer garden again. Three young drunks were walking along the top of a low wall. Each carried a pitcher of beer and wore a black top hat, and each was otherwise naked. Every few paces they stopped, bowed deeply to acknowledge the applause, and then drank from the jugs.
Lenin had his three cohorts at his side as he elbowed his way through the muttering crowd of holiday makers, their exuberance stifled by his presence. Thinking the policemen were there to check absentees from work, and were about to arrest the streakers, the onlookers were resentful. Intoxication emboldened them enough to show their resentment. There were catcalls. The four policemen were jostled and pushed. They were confronted by a particularly big opponent, a bearded man in sweat shirt and jeans, who seemed determined to bar their way. But they were trained to deal with such situations. Like all cops, they knew that quick action, with a nicely judged degree of violence, is what crowd control depends upon. One of the uniformed cops felled the bearded man with a blow of his truncheon. Lenin blew three blasts on his whistle - to suggest that many more policemen were on call - and they plunged on through a crowd which parted to make way for them.
By now Munte was a hundred yards or more into the forest and out of sight, but Lenin had obviously spotted him for, once through the thickest part of the crush of men, he began running.
I ran, too, choosing a path that would converge on the policemen’s. I ran alongside them through the springy undergrowth of the dark forest. Lenin looked round to see who was chasing him, saw me, and looked to his front again. ‘This way!’ I shouted, and headed down a path that led back to the lakeside.
For a moment Lenin and his three subordinates continued going the way that Munte had gone. Surely the old man had heard them coming after him by now. ‘You four!’ I shouted with the sort of arrogance that was calculated to convince them of my seniority. ‘This way, you bloody fools. He’s heading for the boat!’
Still the men raced after Lenin, while I continued on the path. This was my last chance. ‘Do you hear me, you idiots?’ I shouted breathlessly. ‘This way, I say!’
My desperation must have been the convincing factor, for Lenin changed direction and came thumping across the forest floor, his ammunition boots shaking the earth, his eyeballs dilated and his face bright red with exertion. ‘The boat is hidden,’ I shouted to account for what I guessed would be the complete absence of any boat when they reached the water. I waved the uniformed cops past me and then went back up the path as if expecting more policemen who might need guidance.
But by the time I was fifty yards up the track, Lenin had got to the waterfront and found no boats or places along the lake’s edge where any could be hidden. He’d sent the young Saxon conscript back to find me.
‘Stop, sir,’ said the cop in that unmistakable accent.
‘This way!’ I shouted, bluffing to the end.
‘Stop, sir,’ said the cop again. ‘Stop or I shoot.’ He had his pistol in his hand. I reasoned that a conscript lad who argued with the leader of his arrest team might well be the type who would pull the trigger. I stopped. ‘Your identification, please, sir,’ said the cop.
I could see Lenin plodding back up the path, breathing heavily and wriggling his fingers in anger. The game was up. ‘I was just trying to help,’ I said. ‘I saw him come this way.’
‘Search him,’ said Lenin to the Saxon boy. He paused to catch his breath. Then take him back and lock him up.’ To the other cop he said, ‘We’ll go to the Müggelheimer Damm, but we’ve probably lost them. They must have had a car waiting there.’ He came very close to me and stared me in the eyes. ‘We’ll find out all about it from this one.’
28
They locked me in an office of the police barracks. It had a barred window and a mortice lock; they figured I wasn’t dangerous enough to need a prison cell. In a perverse way I resented that. And I resented the fact that Lenin sent the Saxon kid in to do the first interrogation. ‘What’s your name and who employs you?’ - all that sort of crap. And always that accent. I kept trying to guess the exact location of his hometown, but it was a game he wouldn’t join. I think he was from some little town in the German backwoods where Poland meets Czechoslovakia. But I got him off guard by talking about his accent and his family. And when I suddenly switched the topic of conversation to the fiasco at Müggelsee, he let slip that the Muntes had got away. I nodded and asked him for something to eat so quickly afterwards that I don’t think he even noticed what he’d said.
After the Saxon kid had finished, they left a blank-faced young cop sitting in the office with me, but he wouldn’t respond to my conversation. He didn’t say anything, or even watch me, when I went to look out the window. We were on the top floor of what the international intelligence community calls ‘Normannenstrasse’, East Germany’s State Security Service block in Berlin-Lichtenberg.
From this side of the building I could look down on Frankfurterallee. This wide road is Berlin’s main highway eastwards and there was a steady stream of heavy traffic. The weather had turned colder now, and the only people on the street were clerical staff from the State Security Ministry filing down the steps into Magdalenenstrasse U-Bahn station at the end of the working day.
Lenin joined in the fun about midnight. They’d taken my wristwatch, of course, along with my money, a packet of French cigarettes, and my Swiss Army knife, but I could hear a church or a municipal clock striking each hour. Lenin was amiable. He even laughed at a joke I made about the coffee. He was older than I had estimated: my age perhaps. No wonder that chase through the forest had made him puff. He wore a brown corduroy suit with button-down top pocket and braided edges to the lapels. I wonder if he’d designed it himself or had picked it up from some old village tailor in a remote part of Hungary or Rumania. He liked travelling; he told me that. Then he talked about old American films, the time he’d spent seconded to the security police in Cuba, and his love for English detective stories.
He brought out his tiny cheroots and offered me one; I declined. It was the standard interrogator’s ploy.
‘I can’t smoke them,’ I told him. ‘They give me a sore throat.’
‘Then I suggest that we both smoke the French cigarettes we took from you. Permit?’
I was in no position to object. ‘Okay,’ I said. He produced my half-empty packet of Gauloises from his coat and took one before sliding one across to me.
‘I found those Western cigarettes on the U-Bahn train,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘That’s what I wrote in the arrest report. You think I don’t listen to what you say?’ He threw his cigarette lighter to me. It was of Western origin, an expendable one with visible fuel supply. It was very low but it worked. ‘Now we destroy the evidence by burning, you and me. Right?’ He winked conspiratorially.
Lenin, who said his real name was Erich Stinnes, had an encyclopedic memory; he was able to recite endlessly the names of his favourite authors - for they were many and varied - and he seemed to know in bewildering detail every plot they’d written. But he spoke of the fictional characters as if they were alive. ‘Do you think,’ he asked me, ‘that Sherlock Holmes, coming across a criminal of some foreign culture, would find detection more difficult? Is it perhaps true that he is effective only when working against a criminal who shares the creed of the English gentleman?’
‘They’re just stories,’ I said. ‘No one takes them seriously.’
‘I take them seriously,’ said Lenin. ‘Holmes is my mentor.’
‘Holmes doesn’t exist. Holmes never did exist. It’s just twaddle.’
‘How can you be such a philistine,’ said Lenin. ‘In The Sign of Four, Holmes said that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Such perception cannot be dismissed lightly.’
‘But in A Study in Scarlet he said almost the opposite,’ I argued. ‘He said that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.’
‘Ah, so you are a believer,’ said Lenin. He puffed on the Gauloise. ‘Anyway, I don’t call that a contradiction.’
‘Look, Erich,’ I said. ‘All I know about Sherlock bloody Holmes is the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’
Lenin waved a hand to silence me, sat back with hands placed fingertips together, and said, ‘Yes, “Silver Blaze”.’ A frown came as he tried to remember the exact words: ‘The dog did nothing in the night-tune. That was the curious incident.’
‘Exactly, Erich, old pal,’ I said. ‘And, as one Sherlock Holmes fan to another, would you mind explaining to me the equally curious absence of any proper bloody attempt to interrogate me.’
Lenin smiled a tight-lipped little smile, like a parson hearing a risqué joke from a bishop. ‘And that’s just what I would say in your position, Englishman. I told my superior that a senior security man from London will wonder why we are not following the normal procedure. He will begin to hope that he’ll get special treatment, I said. He’ll think we don’t want him to know our interrogation procedure. And he’ll think that’s because he’s going home very soon. And once a prisoner starts thinking along those lines, he closes his mouth very tight. After that it can take weeks to get anything out of him.’
‘And what did your superior say?’ I asked.
‘His exact words I am not permitted to reveal.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘But as you can see for yourself, he paid no heed to my advice.’
‘That I should be interrogated while still warm?’
He half closed his eyes and nodded; again it was the mannerism of a churchman. ‘It’s what should have been done, isn’t it? But you can’t tell these desk people anything.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Yes. You know what it’s like, and so do I,’ he said. ‘Both of us work the tough side of the business. I’ve been West a few times, just as you’ve come here. But who gets the promotions and the big wages - desk-bound Party bastards. How lucky you are not having the Party system working against you all the time.’
‘We have got it,’ I said. ‘It’s called Eton and Oxbridge.’
But Lenin was not to be stopped. ‘Last year my son got marks that qualified him to go to university, but he lost the place to some kid with lower marks. When I complained, I was told that it was official policy to favour the children of working-class parents against those from the professional classes, in which they include me. Shit, I said, you victimize my son because his father was clever enough to pass his exams? What kind of workers’ state is that?’
‘Are you recording this conversation?’
‘So they can put me into prison with you? Do you think I’m crazy?’
‘I still want to know why I’m not being interrogated.’
‘Tell me,’ he said, suddenly leaning forward, drawing on his cigarette, and blowing smoke reflectively as he formed the question in his mind. ‘How much per diem do you get?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m not asking you what you do for a living,’ he said. ‘All I want to know is how much do they pay you for daily expenses when you are away from home.’
‘One hundred and twelve pounds sterling per day for food and lodging. Then we get extra expenses, plus travel expenses.’
Lenin blew a jet of smoke in a gesture that displayed his indignation. ‘And they won’t even pay us a daily rate. The cashier’s office insists upon us writing everything down. We have to account for every penny we’ve handled.’
‘That’s the sort of little black book I wouldn’t like to keep,’ I said.
‘Incriminating. Right. That’s it exactly. I wish I could get that fact into the heads of the idiots who run this bureau.’
‘You’re not recording any of this?’
‘Let me tell you something in confidence,’ said Lenin. ‘I was on the phone to Moscow an hour ago. I pleaded with them to let me interrogate you my way. No, they said. The KGB Colonel is on his way now, Moscow says - they keep saying that, but he never arrives - you are ordered not to do anything but hold the prisoner in custody. Stupid bastards. That’s Moscow for you.’ He inhaled and blew smoke angrily. ‘Quite honestly, if you broke down and gave me a complete confession about having an agent in Moscow Central Committee, I’d yawn.’
