'For instance?' said Dicky looking at me. 'What is it about VERDI that you don't remember?'
'You'd better share the true facts with me, Dicky. All this stuff about VERDI being desperate to come over to us doesn't ring true. These stories about him wanting to talk to some old buddy he knows, and that he's just itching to defect with a box full of floppy disks. All that stuff is bullshit, Dicky. Admit it! The truth is that you've targeted VERDI because he has all this electronic know-how. Maybe he is showing no interest in defecting. Maybe he's got a better offer from the Americans. You've been sending him boxes of chocolates and polishing his apples and whatever else you do for these jerks, but it's not VERDI wooing us, it's us wooing him. Admit it? I need to know.'
Dicky became very agitated; I was asking all the wrong questions. He went over to his canvas folio as if he was going to get out his charts and diagrams, and give me an off-Broadway rendering of his whole presentation. 'He's wavering,' admitted Dicky, shifting ground a little. 'He's paranoid. He'll only deal with people he recognizes.'
'I see,' I said.
Dicky said: 'He's frightened the KGB will send a couple of goons around to see him, pretending that they're our people.' He turned to Fiona and said: 'Didn't you tell me that's the standard KGB tactic if they want to test a man's loyalty? That's why he was asking for Bernard.'
'Is that what he's been selling you?' I said. 'Listen, Dicky, a man like that, a Moscow-trained senior Stasi officer, has on his desk every morning a list of all the contracted employees, contacts, informants and hangers-on used by Frank's office. Names and addresses; sweethearts and wives; habits and preferences. Complete with photos and medical sheets.' I was exaggerating of course. Dicky had gone pale at the thought of it. 'He doesn't have to worry about us sending someone to call on him that he doesn't recognize,' I said.
'He's nervous,' Dicky persisted. 'We've been through all this before, haven't we?'
'You bet we have,' I said. A hard-nosed KGB man named Stinnes had come to us with a bag full of Spielmaterial, and everyone had taken it seriously. So seriously that MI5 sent a K-7 search and arrest team to pick Bret up. There is no telling what mischief would have been made, except that Bret escaped to Berlin and, helped and protected by Frank Harrington, we provoked a showdown.
I suppose Dicky guessed what was going through my mind. He said: 'VERDI is the right one, Bernard. We've checked with the Americans: they aren't negotiating with him, and they are not going to. We'll share him with the Yanks. Believe me, he's what we want and he's ready to roll our way.'
'I hope you're right, Dicky,' I said. 'Because some people who know what's what tell me he's the sort of nasty little bastard who will bite juicy mouthfuls out of anyone who approaches him. I think he will lead us up the garden as far as he can, and then he'll blow the whistle.'
'I don't think so,' said Dicky.
'He'll take our money and laugh in our face. And anyone who is unfortunate enough to be on the other side of the Wall when it happens will be shipped back in a box.'
'It won't be like that, Bernard.'
'Not for you it won't,' I said. 'You won't be there.' I saw Fiona's face tighten. She hated rows, and I suppose she felt she was unfairly positioned in the middle of this one.
I thought Dicky was going to face me with a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum. But Dicky doesn't precipitate showdowns that he might lose. Even ones he might only lose on points. 'Think it over, Bernard,' he said in a mild and friendly way. Then, as if the thought had suddenly come to him out of the blue, he added: 'I think you and Werner Volkmann working together would make a perfect team for this one.'
'How would that work, exactly?' I asked.
'You'd need a new network.' Dicky was obviously using off-cuts and out-takes from his lecture. 'But reliable people; people you and Volkmann know from way back.'
Dicky looked at me quizzically. What did he think I was going to do: leap up on to the table, stand to attention and whistle Rule Britannia? The idea of turning over my old contacts to Dicky was too horrifying to think about. I stared back at him without letting any reaction show on my face.
Dicky said: 'And Volkmann might be grateful for a chance to work for us again. He would be given a completely free hand.'
'Really, Dicky?' I said.
'In so far as anyone has a free hand,' Dicky corrected himself. 'And he'd be rehabilitated of course. Quite frankly he's not in a position to refuse.'
'I'll think about it,' I said.
'Good,' said Dicky, 'good.'
He knew I would agree. Quite frankly I wasn't in a position to refuse either.
10.
Those grey and stormy days were, like my life, punctuated by what the weather men call 'bright intervals'. We were driving down to visit our children, and I didn't care that the rain was beating down from an angry sky.
'I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you driving a car,' I said.
Fiona glanced at me suspiciously; she was always apt to suspect I was needling her when I said or did anything she wasn't ready for. 'Driving a car? Why?'
'I don't know,' I said. It was something to do with the calm way she did it. She drove fast but kept everything under control and was never flustered or uncertain. 'You drive like you do everything,' I added, but then became stuck for words. She drove as if she was guiding the Berlin Philharmonic through pianissimo passages of Ravel. I wished I could drive with that sort of restraint: my style was more like von Karajan winding them up for the end of the 1812 Overture.
'I prefer automatics now,' she confessed. 'That's a sign of getting old, I suppose. I used to say I'd never buy one.' She switched the wipers to the slower speed.
'You haven't bought an automatic,' I pointed out to her. 'You've borrowed it from your father.' It was an almost new Jaguar V-12 in metallic red with cream-coloured leather. Some might have thought it flashy, but my father-in-law considered it an example of his unassuming good taste. Now we were on our way to see him: and our two children who were in his care.
'Yes, but I've a good mind to give it back to him,' she said. 'I thought having a resident's parking permit would mean I'd find a place to park near home. Last night I had terrible trouble finding a space, and it gets worse the nearer to Park Lane you go. I wonder how George managed. I wonder how all those other people in the block manage.'
'Oh, the problems of the rich! They have chauffeurs, darling. Or take cabs.'
'I suppose you're right.' A few years back her father had given her a red Porsche for her thirty-fifth birthday, but he was so enraged when he heard that his daughter had defected that he seized the car and sold it. Now Fiona was a heroine and David Kimber-Hutchinson manifested his pride with an unhesitating generosity that was characteristic of him: he'd given her his wife's Jaguar.
'Are you sure you don't mind me driving?' she asked. I watched a bearded youth in a bread delivery van swerve across three lanes to pursue a mini-bus, drenching us with a spray of dirty rainwater as he went.
'No. You drive. I hate driving,' I said. It wasn't entirely true, but she was an obsessive driver and she hadn't had a chance to drive decent cars during her time in the DDR. And after that, at the house in California, Bret had become nervous whenever anyone decided to break out of prison for a few hours. Anyway this was Fiona's mother's car, and I didn't relish the prospect of explaining away any scratches the car might suffer while in my care. I was happy to be a passenger with nothing to do but look around. I toyed with a leather box that was between our seats. It contained audio cassettes. 'Are these yours?' I asked.
'Mummy's.'
'Wagner?' It seemed unlikely. Fiona's mother was a pinched pale-faced woman who seemed to have no role other than providing an awed audience for her husband's loud-mouthed and shallow-minded lifestyle. 'Boulez's complete Das Rheingold with Peter Hofmann's Siegmund?'
'You like to put everyone into little boxes, don't you? Then we have to comply with your classification.'
'Your mother and Wagner? They've been keeping it very dark.'
'She only plays it in the car, or on her Sony Walkman with earphones. Daddy can't stand Wagner.'
There must have been two dozen Wagner cassettes in the box, and there was no mistaking the signs that they were well used. 'I had your mother down for something more like this,' I said, holding up the one interloper and reading the label aloud: 'The Best of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.'
'Oh, good,' said Fiona. 'Daddy's been looking everywhere for that. In fact I think he's ordered another one from Harrods.'
I put it back and closed the box. 'I met an old man a a pastor a over there in Magdeburg. He talked of you as if you were a saint. He said you were a great woman.'
'And I'm sure you put him right, darling.'
'Don't be that way, Fi. No one can be more proud of you, and what you did, than I am.'
'There's still so much to do over there.' We had never talked at length about her work in the East; she always managed to evade questions or make everything into a joke.
'He knew you. Wrinkly-faced old man with steel-rimmed granny glasses and one of those strong South Saxon accents that make even a sermon sound like a funny story.'
'I met so many pastors.' I glanced at her and she looked back at me without expression. Her double life in the East had provided an enigmatic overlay to the cool English serenity.
'He talked about you in a hushed voice. You taught them how to fight, he said. His flock regularly say prayers for you.'
Fiona shivered. 'I know.' Evidently she would have preferred not to know.
'Fight the government? Outwit the Stasi? Is that what you were preaching to those poor bastards over there?'
'Mobilizing the churches was the major part of the project.'
'It won't work, Fi. They'll be pulverized.'
'Do you think I don't worry about what I did? And about those people?'
'You won't bring the Wall down using only the trumpets of the Church. Joshua took an army with him.'
'You underestimate the Church. Everyone is underestimating it. Bret was the one who first saw the possibilities a that the Church was the most powerful force for change.'
'Bret? The Church?'
'They were Lutherans. Bret pointed out that of the twenty million people living in the DDR, more than ninety per cent of them were still members of the Church.'
'Even so ...'
'I know what you're going to say. I heard it from everyone when we were trying to get permission for me to do my defection trick. Everyone here thought the DDR is the same agnostic chaos of materialism that we have in the West. It is not. You know that, Bernard.'
'Chaoten,' I said. The radicals, the squatters, drug addicts, serial killers, bomb-wielding terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof persuasion a these were the aspects of Western life that even the most repressed Ossis feared.
'Churchgoers in the East are a powerful, cohesive force, armed with their deeply held faith.'
'Deeply held faiths leap out of the window when the Stasi knock on the door.'
'No, Bernard, no. You have your faith just as they have theirs. You've faced nameless horrors bolstered only by your faith in the Tightness of your cause. Give the Germans the benefit of the doubt. To each of those members of the Church, a promise has been made at baptism that they should be brought up in the Christian faith. And for a German, a promise is a solemn commitment.'
'I don't see it, Fi. I wish I could believe that the Churchmen could orchestrate a vast ground-swell of popular revolution that would sweep through the land and knock the Wall over. Is that what you truly hope?'
'Yes, it is.'
'Drip by drip, perhaps. A gradual process of liberalization. But that's not going to knock the Wall down before the end of the century. If ever.'
'We'll see,' she said.
'There's no denying that you've lit the fuse, Fi. But this new world of freedom is not waiting just round the corner. Anyone who thinks it is will be sticking their necks out.'
'They won't be risking anything for themselves that I didn't risk on their behalf.'
'Take it easy, Fi. I know Jesus Christ was a woman, but don't pull rank.'
She gave me a vicious jab in the ribs with her elbow. I gave her a kiss on the cheek in response. She said: 'Don't work against me, Bernard. That's all I ask.'
'I would be the only one,' I said.
'What do you mean?'
'Don't pretend you haven't noticed, darling. They roll out the red carpet for you. They hang on your every word. Dicky is courting you. Your secretary brings you fresh-cut flowers. The juniors give themselves hernias carting furniture to give you a lovely office. The Department is yours for the taking.'
'I wish it were true. But you don't see the opposition to my ideas that comes from those on high.'
'This business with Dicky a trying to tap into the Stasi mainframe computer and having Werner set up a network to collect the updates. Is that something you are really and truly pressing for?'
'Why do you ask?'
'There's something damned odd going on,' I said. 'Dicky went and did his stand-up comic routine in the Cabinet Office without anyone else there.'
'He's being groomed for stardom. Didn't you know that?'
'No one from the Department was there, except Dicky and the FO Adviser, who is not really one of us. That's unprecedented. Last year when the D-G was sick, and the Deputy was tied up with his law practice, the Cabinet Office refused to set up a meeting with the Controller Europe in the chair.'
'Perhaps they are becoming more easygoing.'
'Ha-bloody-ha.'
'What then?'
'Perhaps the D-G and DD-G are determined to keep at arm's length from it.'
'From what?'
'God knows.'
'Don't be so cryptic.'
'I really don't know,' I insisted. 'But judging by the lousy rotten things we know they are prepared to countenance, it must be something damned murky.'
'And Dicky is a part of this Machiavellian contrivance?' It was her way of scoffing at my cynicism, but I answered seriously just the same.
'I hope so,' I said. 'Because if he's not a party to it, he must be putting his head on the block.'
'Is this your devious way of telling me to stay clear of it?'
'I wouldn't presume.'
'Well, thanks anyway, darling. But if the Stasi mainframe computer can shed some light upon Tessa's end, I shall be standing up and giving three cheers for Dicky.'
Fiona's parents lived in an old house set in woodlands near Leith Hill in Surrey. The rain gods were packing up their act as we arrived, and a repentant sun scattered gold coins over my father-in-law's house and surrounding trees. Fiona got out of the car, stamped her feet and hurried inside, blowing on her hands. But I stood there for a moment, tasting the clean country air and looking at the landscape, no less haunting for being almost colourless. Winters were so much more severe here than in London. The ornamental fish pond was covered in ice, and in the shadows where the sun never reached, the grass and plants were spiky with frost. 'Come along, Bernard. You'll freeze to death if you stand there gawking at the pond.'
'Can the fish still be alive under that ice?'