Samson 01 - Berlin Game, page 31
‘Let’s try you,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘What would you do in my place? This KGB Colonel will take over your file when he gets here tomorrow morning. Do you think he’ll give me any credit for work done before he arrives? Like hell he will. No, sir, I’m not going to dig anything out of you for those Party bigshots.’
I nodded but I was not beguiled by his behaviour. I’d long ago learned that it is only the very devout who toy with heresy. It’s only the Jesuit who complains of the Pope, only the devoted parent who ridicules his child, only the super rich who pick up pennies from the gutter. And in East Berlin it is only the truly faithful who speak treason with such self-assurance.
They took me downstairs at seven o’clock the next morning. I’d heard cars arriving shortly before, and men shouting in the way that guard commanders shout when they want to impress some visiting hotshot.
It was a plush office by East European standards: modern-design Finnish desk and chairs and a sheepskin rug on the floor. A faint aroma of disinfectant mingled with the cheap perfume of the floor polish. This was the smell of Moscow.
Fiona was not sitting behind the desk; she was standing at the side of the room. My friend Lenin was standing stiffly at her side. He’d obviously been briefing her, but Fiona’s authority was established by the imperious way in which she dismissed him. ‘Go to your office and get on with it. I’ll call if I want you,’ she said in that brisk Russian that I’d always admired. So the so-called Erich Stinnes was a Russian - a KGB officer no doubt. Well, he spoke bloody good Berlin German. Probably he’d grown up here, the son of an occupier, as I was.
Fiona straightened her back as she looked at me. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘Hello, Fiona,’ I said.
‘You guessed?’ She looked different; harder perhaps, but confident and relaxed. It must have been a relief to be her real self after a lifetime of deception. ‘Sometimes I was sure you’d guessed the truth.’
‘What guessing was needed? It was obvious, or should have been.’
‘So why did you do nothing about it?’ Her voice was steel. It was as if she were pushing herself to be as robotic as a weighing machine.
‘You know how it is,’ I said vaguely. ‘I kept thinking of other explanations. I repressed it. I didn’t want to believe it. You didn’t make any mistakes, if that’s what you mean.’ It wasn’t true, of course, and she knew it.
‘I should never have handwritten that damned submission. I knew those fools would leave it in the file. They promised… .’
‘Is there anything to drink in this office?’ I asked. Now that I had to face the truth, I found it easier than dealing with the dread of it. Perhaps all fear is worse than reality, just as all hope is better than fulfilment.
‘Maybe.’ She opened the drawers in the desk and found an almost full bottle of vodka. ‘Will this do?’
‘Anything will do,’ I said, getting a teacup from a shelf and pouring myself a measure of it.
‘You should cut down on the drinking,’ she said impassively.
‘You don’t make it easy to do,’ I said. I gulped some and poured more.
She gave me the briefest of smiles. ‘I wish it hadn’t ended like this.’
‘That sounds like a line from Hollywood,’ I said.
‘You make it hard on yourself.’
That’s not the way I like it.’
‘I always made it a condition that nothing would happen to you. Every mission you did after that business at Gdynia I kept you safe.’
‘You betrayed every mission I did, that’s the truth of it.’ That was the humiliating part of it, the way she’d protected me.
‘You’ll go free. You’ll go free this morning. It made no difference that Werner demanded it.’
‘Werner?’
‘He met me with a car at Berlin-Tegel when my plane landed. He held me at pistol point. He threatened me and made me promise to release you. Werner is a schoolboy,’ she said. ‘He plays schoolboy games and has the same schoolboy loyalties you had when I first met you.’
‘Maybe that was my loss,’ I said.
‘But not my gain.’ She came closer to me, for one last look. ‘It was a good trick to say you’d cross first. It made me think I might get here in time to catch Brahms Four; your precious von Munte.’
‘Instead you caught me,’ I said.
‘Yes, that was clever, darling. But suppose I hang on to you?’
‘You won’t do that,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t suit you to have me around. In a Soviet prison I’d be an impediment to you. And an imprisoned husband wouldn’t suit that social conscience you care so much about.’
‘You’re right.’
‘At least you’re not trying to find excuses,’ I said.
‘Why should I bother? You wouldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘You just talk about the class system and make jokes about the way it works. I do something about it.’
‘Don’t explain,’ I said. ‘Leave me something to be mystified about.’
‘You’ll always be the same arrogant swine I met at Freddy Springfield’s party.’
‘I’d like to think I was just a little smarter than the man you made a fool of then.’
‘You’ve got nothing to regret. You’ll go back to London and get Dicky Cruyer’s desk. By the end of the year you’ll be running Bret Rensselaer out of his job.’
‘Will I?’
‘I’ve made you a hero,’ she said bitterly. ‘You made me run for cover, and at a time when no one else suspected the truth. Until you phoned about the handwritten report, I thought I could keep going for ever and ever.’
I didn’t answer. I kicked myself for not acknowledging the truth years before - that I had been Fiona’s greatest asset. Who would believe that Bernard Samson would be married to a foreign agent and not realize it? Her marriage to me had made her life more complicated, but it had kept her safe.
‘And you rescued your precious agent. You got Brahms Four home safely enough to make all your other agents breathe easily once more.’
I still said nothing. She might be leading me on. Until I was sure that the Muntes were safe, I preferred to play dumb on the subject.
‘Oh, yes. You’re a professional success story, my darling. It’s only your domestic life that is a disaster. No wife, no home, no children.’
She was gloating. I knew she wanted to provoke me into an outburst of bad temper. I recognized that tone of voice from other times, other places and other arguments. It was the tone of voice she sometimes used to criticize Werner, my grammar, my accent, my suits, my old girlfriends.
‘Can I go now?’
‘The arresting officer - Major Erich Stinnes - is taking you to Checkpoint Charlie at nine o’clock. The arrangements are all made. You’ll be all right.’ She smiled. She was enjoying the chance to show me how much authority she had. She was a KGB Colonel; they would treat her well. The KGB look after their own, they always have done. It’s only the rest of the world they treat like dirt.
I turned to go, but women won’t let anything end like that. They always have to sit you down at the table for a lecture, or write you a long letter, or make sure they have not just the last word but the last thought too.
‘The children will go to the best school in Moscow. It was part of the arrangements I made. I might be able to arrange that you have a safe passage to see them now and again, but I can’t promise.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘And I can’t send them to England on visits, darling. I just couldn’t trust you to send them back, could I?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t. Now can I go?’
‘I paid off the overdraft and put six hundred into your account to pay off Nanny. And one hundred for some outstanding bills. I wrote it all down and left the letter with Mr Moore, the bank manager.’
‘Okay.’
‘The D-G will send for you, of course. You can tell him that the official policy at this end will be one of no publicity about my defection. I imagine that will suit him all right, after all the scandals the service has suffered in the past year.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ I promised.
‘Goodbye then, darling. Do I get one final kiss?’
‘No,’ I said. I opened the door; Lenin was waiting on the landing, leather cap in hand. He saw Fiona standing behind me. He didn’t smile in the presence of a senior officer. I wondered if he knew she was my wife. She’d probably be working out of Berlin. Poor Erich Stinnes.
When we got to the ground floor, I walked past him and he hurried to catch up with me as I marched to the front door to get out of that foul building. ‘Is there anything else?’ Lenin asked as he signalled for the car.
‘For instance?’ I said.
I sat in the black Volvo and looked out at the sunny streets: Stalinallee that had become Karl-Marx-Allee one night when all the street signs were changed before daybreak. The Alex, left onto Unter den Linden, and then left again so that Checkpoint Charlie was to be seen at the bottom of Friedrichstrasse.
‘I’ll take you right through the checkpoint,’ said Stinnes. The driver touched the horn. The frontier police recognized the car, put the booms up and we drove through without stopping.
The American soldier in the glass-sided hut on the Western side gave us no more than a glance. ‘Far enough,’ I said. ‘I’ll get one of these cabs.’ But in fact I’d already caught sight of Werner. He was seated in the car over the road where we always parked when we waited at Checkpoint Charlie. The Volvo turned and stopped. I got out and took a deep breath of that famous Berliner Luft. I wanted to run down to the canal and follow it to Lutzowplatz and then to Dad’s office on Tauentzienstrasse. I would open his desk and take the chocolate bar that was his ration. I’d climb up the mountain of rubble that filled half the street, and slide down the other side hi a cloud of dust. I’d run through the carefully swept ruins of the clinic, where cleaned bottles, dusted bricks and salvaged pieces of charred timber were arranged so proudly. At the shop on the corner I’d ask Mr Mauser if Axel could come out to play. And we’d go and find Werner and maybe go swimming. It was that sort of day… .
‘Did it go all right, Werner?’
‘I phoned England an hour ago,’ said Werner. ‘I knew it would be the first thing you’d ask. There’s an armed police guard around your mother’s house. Anything the Russians try won’t work. The children are safe.’
‘Thanks Werner,’ I said. Thinking about the children made it easier not to think about Fiona. Better still would be not having to think at all.
Len Deighton, Samson 01 - Berlin Game
