Bernard Samson: Faith - Bernard Samson: Faith Part 3
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Bernard Samson: Faith Part 3

The kid said: 'Someone was killed a it might have been our contact who was killed ... And we had trouble on the road. You should be prepared for house-to-house searches.'

'It's not often that things go according to plan,' the pastor said, remaining almost unnaturally calm in the circumstances. The only sign of anxiety came in the way he took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one with that steady determination that is the mark of the addict. He blew smoke. 'It's in the nature of undercover work that the unexpected so often happens. You plan for three different eventualities but the fourth occurs.' He grinned and reached for the coffee jug. 'Moltke said it: he said it about war.'

'No more coffee for me.' I put my hand across the top of the china mug.

'This is a war that is going on here,' he said. 'It's no use denying it. Men are always at war. We are always at war because every man is at war with himself.'

'Is that another of Moltke's sayings?' I asked him.

He'd been looking at me quizzically and now a jug in hand a he ventured: 'We met. Remember? Some sort of celebration in a private house in Kopenick ... No; wait: a hotel off the Ku-Damm and a fancy-dress party. I know your wife?'

It was framed as a question. 'It's possible,' I said warily.

'Yes, I worked with her. She is a great woman.' He said it with a depth of reverence and awe that startled me.

'Yes,' I said.

Perhaps my subdued response prompted him to tell me more: 'She started us on our first steps to freedom. We have a long way to go of course, but it was your wife who taught us that we must fight. We had never fought. It was a hard lesson to learn.'

I must have looked puzzled. It was no longer a secret that my wife had defected to the East in an elaborate and successful scheme that had encouraged widespread grassroots opposition to the communist rulers. I'd heard other people speak of my wife's profound achievements and I'd always nodded it through. This time I didn't. 'What did she do?' I asked him.

He smiled. He had one of those rubber-mask faces that relax naturally into a grin. It was an old-fashioned face: the sort Hollywood used to cast as a priest who plays the harmonica and says wise things to Bing Crosby.

'You've got to understand how it has always been for the Church in Germany,' he said. 'Countless small principalities, the religion of each of them decided by its ruling prince or bishop. That ensured that the Church and State were indivisible. Even in Nazi times, the State's tax-gathering officers collected Church dues from every citizen and paid them to the Church. Little wonder that we churchmen found it so difficult to confront the Nazis, and then after the war even more difficult to resist the institutionalized anti-Christ of communism. We became dependants of the State. But your wife told the Churches of all denominations that if this monstrous regime under which we suffer is ever to be resisted and overthrown, the rallying places must be sanctuaries offered by the Church: the German churches.' He sipped his coffee. The kid and I were silenced by this display of emotion. The pastor added: 'Lenin said "Whoever controls Germany, possesses Europe." This will be the last place the communists yield.'

His passionate speech had made me uneasy, but such deeply held feelings were needed by anyone confronting the communists in their police-State. For lately the politicians here had seen what was happening to their fellows a the communist crooks who were running the neighbouring countries a and were beginning to identify the Churches as their most dangerous enemy.

'I say a prayer for her,' said the pastor. 'All my flock say a prayer for her. Cherish her.'

'Yes,' I said.

'It will be getting light,' said the kid. He'd been shuffling about as if made uncomfortable by this high-flown talk.

'You are too young to understand,' said the pastor gently. 'Only old men know enough to cry.'

Suddenly I remembered where I'd last seen the pastor. He'd been at a big fancy-dress party at Lisl Hennig's hotel in West Berlin. It was the night when everything seemed to go wrong. My wife was brought out of the East that night. We were involved in a stupid gun battle on the Autobahn and I saw Tessa my sister-in-law murdered. That night I left Germany and solemnly vowed I would never come back here. Never. 'Yes, I remember you now,' I told the pastor. 'That party in the hotel near the Ku-Damm.' Amid that frantic collection of revellers, in his dark clerical suit and dog-collar, I had taken the pastor for just another guest in fancy dress. Perhaps his presence there that night supplied one of the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was still far from complete.

'Yes, I was there that night,' he admitted. He'd been about to add something else but now he stopped suddenly as we heard the sound of vehicles coming along the road. Several of them. They slowed and turned into the cobbled churchyard where we had left the Volvo in the barn. I hoped they wouldn't search the premises, for the Volvo with its West licence plates would make them start tearing everything apart.

'Pray!' said the pastor and dropped to his knees. I heard them more clearly now. Two vehicles: one heavy diesel and one petrol. There were loud squeaks and the hiss of hydraulic brakes. A car door opened and slammed. That meant one person. It was a bad sign. I had no doubt that the heavy truck contained an armed assault team of barrack-police who were now sitting silent and alert and waiting for orders. 'Pray!' said the pastor again, and I sank down on my knees before him, as did the kid and the woman who'd made the coffee.

The pastor began a droning litany of prayers as metal boot studs sounded on the stone steps. With a stifled groan of pain the woman got to her feet, rubbed her arthritic knee, and went to receive the visitor with a soft and deferential greeting on her lips and a cup of hot coffee in her hand. 'Is something wrong?' she asked him.

'Yes,' said the cop without explaining further. He sipped the coffee.

'A night of continuous prayer,' she said, and explained our presence as bereaved parishioners from a neighbouring town. She had a strong local accent and as the explanation continued I could follow it only with difficulty.

Out of my half-closed eyes I could see the policeman standing feet apart staring at us. His uniform revealed him as a local cop, sent no doubt to lead a team of outsiders from Magdeburg a draftees perhaps a who didn't know the country districts. Impatient toots of a car horn made the cop look at his watch. Then there was the sound of another car door and the hurried clatter of boots. 'You haven't got time for cups of coffee,' came a shout from the top of the stone steps. The unseen commander a disconcertingly accurate in his guess about the coffee a had a voice that was hard and Berlinerisch, the accent that educated urbane men use to command those they regard as country bumpkins.

Jolted by the accusation the cop pushed the coffee cup back into the woman's hand. 'All is in order here, Captain,' the policeman shouted, and started back up to join his commander. The German Democratic Republic a more realistically an undemocratic dictatorship run by the Soviets a was changing. Out here in the country districts some of the more cautious officials had begun hedging their bets against the day when the unthinkable happened, and their beat became part of a truly democratic republic with all the dangerous consequences such a turn-round could bring to those in rural isolation.

'You need not pretend to pray any more,' said the pastor when the sound of the two vehicles had dwindled to nothing.

'I wasn't pretending,' I said. The old man looked at me and rose to his feet.

There was just a thin line of purple along the skyline as we got back on the road. The kid was driving: I wanted to look around.

'The pastor is a decent old man. His family had a big estate here. They were landowners since goodness knows when. He volunteered for the U-boats,' said the kid. 'After the war, when he was released from the POW camp in England he came back and found that the family estate had been confiscated without compensation. It was rotten luck. The Russians only seized farms larger than 250 acres and theirs was only a few acres larger than that.'

'Then he found God,' I said.

'No, that's the funny thing. He became a fervent communist at first. It was only afterwards that he went back to the Church and then started working against the regime.'

'It happens.'

'He said he used to think that Karl Marx was an economist. It was when he realized that Marx was a moralist that he began to see how deeply the theories were flawed.' When I made no response to this he said: 'Have you read Marx?'

'Karl Marx was a nut,' I said. 'He should have kept his mouth shut like Harpo.'

'We'll be in Berlin early. Do you want to return the gun to your friend?'

'Didn't I tell you to forget about the gun?'

I'd let my anger show. 'Sorry, boss.'

'I must get rid of it. I'm glad you reminded me.'

'Is it the shooting you're worried about?'

'Who said I was worried?'

'You did everything exactly right,' he said, with an exuberance calculated to cheer me up. 'It was terrific.'

'But it smells all wrong,' I said. 'Who were those bruisers?'

'In a shiny new 500 SEL Merc? They were Stasis or left-behind KGB or something. They weren't innocent peasants on their way to church, if that's what's worrying you.'

'They did nothing except drive along a public road. I shot holes in them.'

'You can't be serious?'

'They didn't shoot back, that's what's worrying me. This is their territory. In a car like that they always stow all manner of weapons ... and heavies like that get their shots in first.'

'But ...?'

'I have a feeling we were set up. I have a nasty feeling that a apart from my shooting that driver a we did everything the other side wanted us to do, right from the moment we were stopped at that militia checkpoint.'

'Well if you are right, we sure put a spanner in the works.' He was not to be deprived of his gleeful satisfaction.

'And don't mention Krohn's bar or that damned handgun in your report.'

'You can rely on me, old-timer.'

'And you can leave out the old-timer, Kinkypoo.'

3.

'I have your report,' said Frank Harrington. 'I read it very carefully.' Frank Harrington was Head of the Berlin Field Unit. Because the Russians call their equivalent outfits rezidentura he was usually called the Berlin Rezident, and that had passed into official use. Frank, although no longer young, had a soldier's bearing, a pale face and blunt-ended stubbly moustache, so that he was frequently mistaken for an officer of the British garrison. He'd been one of my father's best friends.

I didn't respond. Dicky Cruyer, Controller of German Stations and temporarily in charge of Operations in London, had come hurrying to Berlin. Presumably he wanted to be here when VERDI arrived. Now he stood by the window peering through the louvred window shutters to see down into Frank Harrington's extensive back garden, sucking on the end of his Mont Blanc fountain-pen and trying not to interrupt. Although these days it was growing more and more difficult to distinguish soldiers from anyone else, a soldier was not the first guess one would make about Dicky Cruyer's occupation. His curly hair was too bushy and he favoured faded designer denim, and the sort of tall elaborately decorated cowboy boots that he was wearing today.

In another part of the city, the Berlin offices were temporarily hidden behind a cocoon of scaffolding, and enjoying a long-overdue redecoration. To get away from the mating cries of construction workers, the regular clang and jangle of metal rods dropped from a height upon pavement and the pungent smell of paint, Frank was staying home and using the office he'd established in one of the upstairs rooms of his grand old Berlin mansion in Grunewald. None of the room lights were lit, and only a thin melancholy daylight filtered through the window shutters. The sombre light in the domestic surroundings, the stillness, and the silence into which the two men had fallen, produced a feeling that they shared some almost overwhelming sorrow into which I found it difficult to break. And now I waited for one or the other of them to speak.

I looked around. This was the mansion provided to Frank in his capacity of Rezident, and I had known this room since my father occupied that coveted post. There was the same buttoned leather bench, scarred, whitened and worn but as familiar as an old friend. The wall was adorned with the horned heads of various fleet-footed quadrupeds. It was difficult to believe that Frank had actually shot any of these mournful beasts, for Frank a despite his wistful attitude to the profession of arms a had always showed a curious antipathy for guns. Getting him to issue any sort of handgun was such a struggle that most of the field agents found it simpler to provide their own. Amid the trophies of the hunt there was a formal sepia-coloured portrait photo of the Queen. It hung immediately above a camphor-wood military chest upon which Frank Harrington's ancient typewriter was enshrined; a totem of the ascendant role of paperwork in service to the Crown.

Unforgettably, it was also the day that the heating of Frank's mansion suffered a failure that defied all the efforts of three determined heating engineers and now caused all three of us to be wearing our overcoats. The antique stove, six feet tall, standing in the corner clad with lovely old blue pattern tiles, had been coaxed into use for the first time in many decades. The comfort it gave was entirely illusory. Despite the efforts of Frank's servants with bundles of kindling and screwed-up pages from Der Spiegel followed by the more inflammatory sheets of Die Welt, there was no sign of flame through its dull and discoloured mica door, but the distinctive aroma of burned paper made my nostrils twitch.

'Your report is a masterpiece,' said Frank, speaking as if this verdict was the result of long and deep reflection. He was sitting before the stove, stiff-backed on a small bentwood chair, wearing a smooth woollen herring-bone overcoat of such beautiful material and cut that, had I not known Frank so well, I might have suspected it as a reason for turning off the heat. 'It will be incorporated into the lectures at the training school and some future Director-General will quote pages of it from memory.' Such heavy sarcasm did not come naturally to Frank, who was avuncular, and by nature a healer of wounds rather than one to rub salt into them.

The ensuing silence was broken only by the sound of Dicky tapping his expensive fountain-pen against his still more expensive teeth. I recognized that look on his face: Dicky was thinking; lost in a world of dreams, plans and ambitions. Feeling that a reply was expected of me, and with Dicky's recent promotion a albeit temporary a a living reminder that the Department was inclined to value effort above result, I said: 'I spent a long time writing it.'

'I'm certain of that,' said Frank with a snort. 'And I spent a long time reading it. The first time I read it, I marvelled. Here was a report seemingly reasoned, acute and reflective and informative.'

I said nothing. With a self-tormenting perversity that I suspected to be a product of his public school years, Frank, who was trying to give up smoking, was toying ceaselessly with the bright yellow oilskin pouch that contained his favourite tobacco and pipe.

'I read it two or three more times,' said Frank, as he stood up and dumped the pouch on the table. 'To see the extent to which the whole thing is evasive, ambivalent and noncommittal.'

'I try to be empirical,' I said.

'Imperious I would have said. Even when you meet a Lutheran pastor you call him "a man in clergyman's clothes". At what stage does cautious observation become evasion?' Just because a large measure of Frank's irascibility was due to the torment caused by his renunciation of tobacco, it didn't make being the target of his bitter comments any more appealing. I looked at him with polite attention and said nothing.

Frank said: 'Yes, I know you have been away. I know you feel you've been badly treated by the Department. That you resent not being told everything about the decision to send your wife across there as a double ...'

'Anything,' I corrected him mildly. 'I was not told anything.'

Dicky had been staring down into the garden and giving no sign of following Frank's questioning or my responses. Now Frank paused long enough for Dicky to swing round and say: 'For God's sake! Need-to-know! That's the essence of the business we're in.' He was wearing a short black leather overcoat, a double-breasted design complete with lots of buckles and buttons and shoulder straps. As he moved, the lining of bright red silk was revealed. It looked brand-new. I guessed he'd just bought it in one of those swanky men's shops in the Ku-Damm; every visitor found time to visit them. 'You're supposed to be a secret agent, Bernard. How can you complain about the way secrets are guarded?'

I saw Frank make a paddling motion with a limp hand that was hanging at his side. It was a signal to Dicky to shut up and let him handle the situation. Frank said: 'You are still judging us, Bernard. It's not healthy.'

'Not unless you would prefer being permanently behind a desk somewhere,' drawled Dicky. Just in case I recognized that as the threat it was, he added: 'You know what they are like in London,' as if he had no say in postings and assignments.

'I wish you would be a little more explicit,' said Frank to me.

'It was a set-up,' I said.

'Why not put you in the bag?'

'Surely that's what they were trying to do?' I said.

'The men in the car you fired the pistol at? Umm.' Frank rubbed his chin as he thought about what I'd written. 'Not a very serious effort unless you've missed something out.'

'Oh, no? What could they have done to make their effort more serious?' I asked, without letting my irritation show. Neither of these two desk men had ever heard a shot fired in anger, so I didn't take easily to their dismissal of an action of the sort that, on the rare cases when it's happened to other more senior men, has been marked by flowery commendations and promotions. I smiled.

'The monitor service heard nothing: no orders to block off the Autobahn exits, no instructions to Berlin checkpoints, nothing.'

'Their car slid back into a ditch,' I said. 'Maybe they ended up unconscious and were put into hospital.'

'Perhaps that's it,' said Frank, in a tone that indicated that it was not high on his list of possible explanations. 'But VERDI... why did they wait outside and shoot him through the window? Why not inside? Why not somewhere more private?'

'I didn't say they did shoot him through the window,' I said.

'I noticed that,' said Frank. He let the pages of my report flutter in the warm draught that was coming from a fan heater that one of his servants had placed so that the air warmed his feet. 'Why?'

'The hole in the window wasn't made by a bullet.'

'Can you be sure?'

'Yes,' I said. 'It's something you learn to recognize. I won't go into the details.'

'Go into the details,' said Dicky, joining the conversation suddenly. 'I'm interested in how you can be so categorical about it, and still leave it out of your report.'

I looked at Frank. Frank raised an eyebrow.

I said: 'A high-velocity missile going through glass, a round from a hand-gun for instance, produces radial fractures and several concentric fractures. In this case there were none. Furthermore the hole made by a bullet produces a powdering of glass around the actual hole. A low-velocity missile, such as a stone, knocks a piece out of the glass leaving a neater smoother edge.'

'Are you snowing me, Bernard?' said Dicky, shaking his head to stress his disbelief. Frank looked from one to the other of us, adopting his favourite role of unbiased adjudicator. 'Is this just your own theory or something out of a home-repairs manual?'

'Surely, Dicky, every schoolboy knows that glass is a supercooled liquid which, under impact from a fast-moving missile, bends until it fractures in long cracks radiating from the point of impact. It continues bending for a long distance until eventually it makes a second series of cracks concentrically from the point of impact. Also a high-velocity missile makes a quite different type of hole. It fragments or powders the glass as it exits, and this reveals the direction of the missile. The degree of fragmentation usually gives a rough idea of the likely range from which the shot came; the closer the range the heavier the fragmentation.'

Frank smiled.

'Okay, you clever shit,' said Dicky. 'So why didn't you say the killer definitely was not waiting outside? You didn't say they weren't waiting outside did you?'

'Because the killer might have fired through a hole in the glass that was already there,' I said.

'You didn't say that either,' he complained.

'I can't be sure what I said.' If proof was needed to tell me I was slipping, my ill-timed lecture about fracturing glass was it. In the old days I would have taken more care when kicking the sand of science into the face of a prima donna like Dicky, especially doing it in the presence of Frank, an old-timer everyone respected, or claimed to. 'The fact is that I didn't stick around to find out.'

Dicky had been to Oxford University and come away with an undisputed reputation for cleverness. That reputation had stuck. Cleverness was not measured and quantified in the way that passing exams or rowing strenuously enough to become a blue was on record. Cleverness was a vague characteristic not universally respected by Englishmen of Dicky's class; it suggested cunning and the sort of hard work and determination that marked the social climber. And so Dicky's cleverness remained a threat ever present, but a promise still unfulfilled. He looked at me and gave a sour grin. 'But why cut and run, Bernard? You had a good man with you.'

'An inexperienced kid.'