'Fearless,' said Dicky. This suggested to me that the kid might be one of Dicky's proteges, some amiable graduate he'd met on one of his frequent bibulous visits to his alma mater. 'We've used him on a couple of previous jobs: utterly fearless.'
'An utterly fearless man is more to be dreaded as a comrade than as an enemy,' I said.
Frank laughed before Dicky had absorbed it. In Frank's hand, along with my brief account of our unsuccessful mission, I could see the report the kid had submitted. In yellow marker I spotted a sentence about me firing the gun. There was some lengthy comment pencilled in the margin. They hadn't mentioned the gun I collected from Andi. I still had that to come.
Dicky said: 'This dead colonel a this VERDI a asked for you. What's this about someone owing someone a favour? What favour did the poor bastard owe you?'
'They always say that,' I explained. 'That's the standard form when they are seeking a deal with the other side.'
'When did you last see him?' said Dicky.
'I know nothing of him. His asking for me was just a gimmick.'
'Try and remember,' said Dicky in a voice that clearly said that he didn't believe me. 'He knows you all right.'
'More to be dreaded as a comrade than as an enemy,' said Frank, as if committing it to memory, and chuckled. 'That's a good one, Bernard. Well, if you can't remember VERDI maybe we'll leave it at that. You'll want to get back to London and see your children. Your wife is joining you there I heard.'
'That's right,' I said.
Dicky shot a glance at me. He didn't like the way that Frank was letting me off the hook, and I thought for a moment he was going to mention Gloria, the woman I'd been living with during the time I believed my wife was a defector working for the East. 'Then why is there a seat reserved for Samson on the flight to Zurich?' Dicky asked.
I got to my feet. 'Samson's a common name, Dicky,' I said, without getting excited.
'Field agents are all devious.' Frank smiled and waved a languid hand in the air. 'It's the job that does it. How could Bernard be so good at his job without being constantly wary?'
'Who do you know in Zurich?' Dicky asked, as if knowing someone in Zurich was in itself a sinister development.
'My brother-in-law.' Frank looked at Dicky as if expecting some reaction to this, but Dicky just nodded. 'He moved there after his wife was killed. I will have to see him eventually ... there are domestic affairs that will have to be settled. Tessa assigned property and her share of a trust to Fiona.'
Frank smiled. He knew why I was going to Zurich of course. He knew I would be cross-checking with Werner Volkmann everything the Department had told me. Dicky knew too. Neither of them liked the idea of me talking to Werner, but Frank was rather more subtle and able to hide his feelings.
Dicky had been pacing about and now he turned on his heel and left the room, saying he would be back in a moment.
'He gave a little party last night at a new restaurant he found in Dahlem. Indian food apparently, and he suspects the bhindi bhaji has upset him,' Frank confided when Dicky had gone. 'Do you know what a bhindi bhaji is?'
'No, I'm not quite sure I do, Frank.'
Frank nodded his approval, as if such knowledge would have alienated us. 'Did Bret Rensselaer tell you to see Werner in Zurich?'
I hesitated, but the fact that Frank had waited for Dicky to exit encouraged me to confide in him. 'No, Bret told me to stay away from Werner. But Werner gets to hear things on the grapevine long before we get to know them through our channels. He might say something useful.'
'Dicky has staked a lot on having VERDI sitting in London spilling his guts to us. VERDI dead means all Dicky's planning dies with him. He'll be casting about for someone to blame; make sure it's not you.'
'I wasn't there,' I explained for what must have been the thousandth time. 'He was dead when we got there.'
'VERDI's father was a famous Red Army veteran: one of the first into Berlin when the city fell.'
'So everyone keeps telling me.' I looked at him. 'Who cares? That was over forty years ago and he was just one of thousands.'
'No,' said Frank. 'VERDI's father was the lieutenant commanding Red Banner No. 5.'
'Now you've got me,' I admitted.
'Well, well! Berlin expert admits defeat,' said Frank smugly. 'Let me tell you the story. In mid-April 1945 a as they advanced on Berlin a the 79th Rifle Corps got orders from the Military Council of the Third Shock Army that a red flag was to be planted on top of the Reichstag. And Stalin had personally ordered that it should be in place by May Day. On April 30th, with the deadline ticking, our man and his team of infantry sergeants fought their way up inside the Reichstag building, from room to room, floor to floor, until they climbed up on to the roof and with only four of them still alive, completed their task with just seventy minutes to go before it was May Day.'
'No, but I saw the movie,' I said.
'Make jokes if you like. For war babies like you it may mean nothing, but I guarantee that communists everywhere would have been devastated at the news that the son of such a man a a symbol of the highest peak of Stalinist achievement a would come over to us.'
'Devastated enough to kill him to prevent it?'
'That's what we want to know, isn't it?'
'I'll find out for you,' I said flippantly.
'Don't go rushing off to Switzerland to ask Werner,' said Frank. 'You know Dicky; he is sure to have asked the Berne office to assign someone to meet the plane and discreetly find out where you go. Treat Dicky carefully, Bernard. You can't afford to make more enemies.'
'Thanks, Frank,' I said and meant it warmly. But such assurances left Frank unsatisfied, and now he gave me a penetrating stare as if trying to see into my mind. Long ago he had promised my father that he would look after me, and he took that promise seriously, just as Frank took everything seriously, which was what made him so difficult to please. And like a father, Frank was apt to resent any sign that I could have a mind of my own and enjoy private thoughts that I did not share with him. I suppose all parents feel that anything less than unobstructed open-door access to all their offspring's thoughts and emotions is tantamount to patricide.
Frank said: 'As soon as Dicky knew that VERDI was dead he said someone must have talked.'
'Dicky likes to think that people are plotting against him.'
'Can't you see the obvious?' said Frank with an unusual display of exasperation. 'They haven't sent Dicky here as a messenger. Dicky is important nowadays. Whatever Dicky thinks will inevitably become the prevailing view in London.'
'No one talked in London or anywhere else. It's absurd. They'll eventually discover their mistake.'
'Oh no they won't. The people in London never discover their mistakes. They don't even admit them when others discover their mistakes. No, Bernard, they'll make their theories come true whatever it costs in time and trouble and self-delusion.'
I pulled a face.
Frank said: 'And that means that you'll be put under the microscope ... Unless of course you can take Dicky aside and gently persuade him that he's wrong.' He prodded his oilskin tobacco pouch as if resenting the torment it offered him. 'Werner's contract was ended and he was hounded for no real reason except that he seems to upset someone on high. From what little I hear he's feeling damned bitter about it all. But he's not working for us. Don't let him persuade you he is.'
'You know what us field agents are like,' I said.
'I'm not sure I'm getting through to you.'
'Tell me again, Frank.'
He had the oilskin pouch in his hand. Now he swung it around. 'Admit it. Someone talked, didn't they? It wasn't just a coincidence that you arrive in Magdeburg and there is a warm corpse waiting for you.'
'About VERDI?'
'Don't be so stupid. Of course. They set him up and killed him. Had they squeezed him before killing him they might have got you too.'
'And that's what Dicky thinks?'
'You have a different theory?' He had the tobacco pouch in his hand, holding it up as if to admire its lines but also keeping it within olfactory range.
'It's one way of looking at it,' I said grudgingly.
'Yes, it is,' said Frank, sniffing at the tobacco pouch. 'Someone preferred VERDI dead, rather than alive and over here talking to us.'
'Maybe.'
'How long were you held up at that militia checkpoint outside Magdeburg?'
'About half an hour.'
'And would you say that when you arrived VERDI had been dead for about half an hour?'
'What are you getting at? Are you suggesting that the delay was arranged so that VERDI could reach the rendezvous and be intercepted and killed before we got there?'
'It all fits together doesn't it?' said Frank.
'No.' He looked at me and I yielded a little. 'It's possible. But there is no evidence whatsoever to support that theory. Unless you have some evidence to add.'
'Or ... looking at this business and pretending that we didn't know the agents involved ...' Frank's voice trailed off. 'Do you see what I mean, Bernard?'
'Yes, I see what you mean all right. You mean that if I and that kid invented the hold-up at the checkpoint we could have got there and killed VERDI ourselves.'
'Using that pistol that came from nowhere,' added Frank for good measure. 'It could look bad if someone wanted to throw mud at you.'
'Ask the kid. He's Dicky's man isn't he?'
'Very much Dicky's man,' agreed Frank amiably. 'He wants to please Dicky; Dicky says there might eventually be a place for him in London.'
'He's a decent kid. He wouldn't tell lies. He'd tell an inquiry the truth, and blow Dicky's theory sky-high.'
'I'm glad you are so confident about that,' said Frank. 'That settles my mind. But of course one can't guarantee anyone a job in London. Nowadays a young chap like that one can find himself posted to some God-forsaken place in Asia or Africa. Some of them are out of touch for years.' He opened the door of the stove and prodded the burned paper delicately with a poker. For a moment I thought he was going to throw my report in there. Such dramatic gestures by Frank were not unknown. But instead he tried again to light the fire using small pieces torn from a newspaper. He was rewarded by a sudden flame and pushed a piece of kindling into it.
'Point taken, Frank,' I said.
He looked up and gave a fleeting smile, pleased perhaps at his success with the fire. 'Of course I've kept this business very need-to-know. Dicky, me, you, and of course what's-his-name: this youngster who went with you.'
'Plus secretaries, code-clerks and messengers a any one of them might have leaked it,' I added, joining in the silly game in an effort to show the absurdity of his conspiracy theory. 'And there's VERDI too. He knew we were coming, didn't he?'
'Of course he did. And who knows who else got to hear? I've no intention of starting a witch-hunt, Bernard. That killing might have had nothing to do with him wanting to defect. A man like that a deep in the secrets of the KGB and Stasi too a is sure to have made plenty of enemies. For all we know the reason he wanted to come to us was because his life was in danger from whoever murdered him.'
'Exactly,' I said. I got up to go.
'I know I can't stop you visiting Werner,' said Frank, 'but you'd better guard your tongue when you are with him. If London gets to hear that you've been sharing Departmental secrets with him a even low-grade ones a they will throw the book at you.'
'I'll be careful, Frank. I really will.'
As I was going to the door, he undid the pouch and put his empty pipe into his mouth while fingering the tobacco. The smell of it reached me as he grabbed a handful of it. I watched him, thinking he was going to fill the pipe, but he didn't. He opened the door of the stove and thrust the entire contents of the pouch into the fire. The tobacco flared and hissed and a snake of pungent grey smoke coiled out into the room. 'I'm determined this time,' said Frank, looking over his shoulder at me, his eyes wide and birdlike.
I was outside the door, and about to push it closed, when Frank called out to me and I looked back inside.
'The pistol, Bernard. I haven't asked you about the pistol.' He pursed his lips. In Frank's view anyone using a gun betrayed the Department and all it stood for. 'You shot the tyres out, it said in the report. But where did the hand-gun come from?'
'I thought the kid told you about that,' I said warily.
'No, he was as puzzled as we were,' said Frank, watching me with great interest.
'I found it on the body,' I said.
'Fully loaded?' said Frank formally, as if he was about to write it down and ask me to sign.
'That's right, fully loaded. A Makarov a German manufacture: a Pistole M to be precise a I put it in my pocket and that's what I used when they chased us in the car.'
'I don't remember anything of that in your report.'
'I thought the kid would have covered those sort of details.'
'Write the whole thing again,' suggested Frank. 'Fill in a few of those missing details ... the Pistole M, how glass bends and so on. You know what those people in London are like. They might think you collected the gun from one of your East Berlin cronies. And then they won't give me any peace until I find out who it might have been.'
'You're right, Frank,' I said, wondering how quickly I could close the door and get out of there without offending him, and how soon Dicky would return with a thousand more questions.
'Smell that tobacco,' said Frank, wallowing in the smoke coming out of the stove top. 'I'm beginning to think it's better than smoking.'
4.
'You just leave it to me, Mr Samson,' said the cheerful ordnance lieutenant.
The army is always there when you need it. My father's loyalty to the army remained no matter how long after his army service he worked for the Foreign Office. And Frank Harrington's devotion to the army was renowned. The army looks after its own and was always ready to take under its wing those who understood the obligations this entailed. And now it was a young army lieutenant who, without any up-to-date paperwork or even a telephone call, had put me into the cab of one of his trucks heading down the Autobahn. The soldiers were posted back to their depot. They were in convoy for Holland, and the ferry to Harwich in England. But I was on my way to Switzerland.
'We're getting near to the place you're wanting, sir,' said the driver without preamble. 'You'll hitchhike south from there.' He had a Newcastle accent you could cut with a knife, and my German upbringing had left me unable to comprehend the more pronounced British regional voices. 'Going home,' he added, doing his best to make me understand. 'We're all going home.'
'Yes,' I said. You could see the joy of it written in the faces of all these soldiers.
'What about you, sir?'
'Yes, I'll soon be going home too,' I said mechanically. The truth was I had no home; not in the sense that these men had their homes in Britain. My English parents had brought me up in Berlin and sent me to the neighbourhood school, frequently reminding me how lucky I was to have two languages and two countries; two lands in which I could pass myself off as a national. But as I got older I discovered just how tragically wrong they were. In fact even my most intimate German friends a boys who'd been close chums at school a had never regarded me as anything except a foreigner. While the British a not the least those men who sat behind the desks at London Central a regarded me as an unreliable outsider. I had none of the credentials essential for anyone who wanted to join their ranks. I wore no school or university tie, nor that of any smart regiment. I rode with no hunt, loitered in no Jermyn Street club, had no well-known tailor chasing me for payment. I couldn't even name a seedy local pub where I regularly played darts and could get a pint of beer on credit.
'You'll need money,' the corporal warned me. 'Hitchhikers are expected to pay their fare nowadays. It's the way things are.'
'I've got enough.'
'You should have bought a couple of bottles of duty-free booze. That's what most of the boys do. Do you understand me?'
'I understand,' I said. 'I wish I'd thought of it.'