Spy hook: a novel (36 page)

Berlin-Tegel is in the French Sector of occupied Berlin. This small airport is technically under the control of the French air force. So the incongruous presence of four British military policemen was especially noticeable, if not to say disturbing. They were dressed in that unnaturally perfect way that only military policemen can manage. Their shoes were gleaming, their buttons bright and their khaki had knife-edge creases in all the places where creases were supposed to be.

And if the incongruous presence of British “redcaps” was not enough, I now noticed that one of them was a captain. Such men are not commonly seen standing and staring in public places, for MP captains do not patrol airports to make sure there are no squaddies going around improperly dressed. A quick glance round revealed two British army vehicles - a khaki car and a van - drawn up on the apron. Behind them there was a blue van bearing the winged badges of I’armde de I’air. A few yards behind that there was a civilian police car too. Inside it there were a couple of cops in summer uniforms. Quite a police presence for a virtually empty airport.

As we walked across the apron the four British MPs straightened up and stared at us. Then the captain strode forward on a path that intercepted us.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said the British captain. He was a diffident young man with a large moustache that was less than bushy. “Which of you is Mr. Samson?”

Always afterwards I wondered exactly what made Werner unhesitatingly say, “I’m Bernard Samson. What is it, Captain?” Werner could smell trouble, that’s why he said it. He could smell trouble even before I got a whiff of it, and that was very quick indeed.

“I’ll have to ask you to come with me,” said the captain. He glanced at the sergeant - a burly forty-year-old with a pistol on his belt - and the looks they exchanged told me everything I needed to know.

“Come with you?” said Werner. “Why?”

“It’s better if we sort it out in the office,” said the captain, with a hint of nervousness in his voice.

“I’d better go with him, Werner,” said Werner, continuing the act.

I nodded. Surely the soldiers could hear Werner’s German accent. But perhaps they hadn’t been told that Bernard Samson was English.

As if demonstrating something to me, Werner turned to the captain and said, “Am I under arrest?”

“Well . . .” said the captain. He’d obviously been told that arresting a man in public was something of a last resort, something you only did when sweet talk failed. “No. That is

... Only if you refuse to come.”

“We’ll sort it out at your office,” said Werner. “It’s a stupid mistake.”

“I’m sure it is,” said the captain with marked relief “Perhaps your friend will take the package.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

The captain turned to one of the corporals and said, “Help the gentleman, Corporal- Take the parcel for him.” I had Werner’s briefcase in my hand. It contained his passport and all sorts of other personal papers. If they took Werner to their police office, it might take an hour or two before they discovered that he was the wrong man. So I followed the corporal and Werner’s parcel of chinaware and left Werner to his fate.

With the military policeman acting as my escort my passage through customs and immigration got no more than a nod. In the forecourt there were lines of taxi cabs. My cab driver was an unshaven youngster in a dirty red tee shirt with the heraldic device of Harvard University crudely printed on the front. “I want an address in Oranienburger Strasse. I know it by sight ... go to the Wittenau S-Bahn station.” I said it in slow German, in earshot of the soldier. It would give them a confusing start, for Oranienburger Strasse stretches across town from the airport to Hermsdorf. Not the sort of street in which you’d want to start a door-to-door inquiry. Once the taxi was clear of the airport I told the driver that I’d changed my mind. I wanted to go to Zoo Station. He looked at me and gave a knowing smile that was inimitably berlinerisch. “Zoo Station,” he said. It was a squalid place, the Times Square of West Berlin. “Alles Han” In that district there was no shortage of people who would help a fugitive to hide from authority of any kind. The cab driver probably thought I was outsmarting the army cops, and he approved.

Yes, I thought, everything is clear. No sooner had I finished talking to him than the bloody D-G had signalled Berlin to have me arrested. It was artful to do it in Berlin. Here the army was king. Here I had no civil liberties that couldn’t be overruled by regulations that dated from wartime. Here I could be locked away and forgotten. Yes, alles klar, Sir Henry. I am hooked.

Don’t ask me what I hoped to achieve. I don’t know what I was trying to do beyond gain time enough to collect my thoughts and see some way of extricating myself from this mess. My mind worked frantically. I dismissed the idea of picking up -the Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 and five hundred pounds” worth of mixed currency small denomination paper money that I used to keep in Lisl’s safe but now kept in a twenty-four-hour safe-deposit box in the Ku-Damm. Neither ready cash nor flying lead would help me if the Department was after my blood. I dismissed too the Austrian passport that was sewn into the lining of a suitcase in a room in Marienfelde. I could become Austrian, if I raised my voice an octave and kept a tight grip on my nose. But what for; by Monday they would have good recent photos of me circulated, and being a phoney Austrian wouldn’t help.

A taxi took Werner’s box of china round to the hotel with a note for Ingrid Winter that I’d gone with Werner to the cinema. For anyone who knew us well, the idea of such an excursion was absurd. But Ingrid didn’t know us very well, and it was the only excuse I could think of that would prevent her making inquiries about us for two or three hours.

Some of my actions were less well reasoned. As if driven by some demon from my over-active past, I took a second cab and asked for Checkpoint Charlie. It was almost night by now but my world was tilting towards the sun and it was not dark. My cab edged through the traffic as battalions of weary tourists wandered aimlessly around the neon and concrete charms of the Europa Centre and chewed popcorn and “curry-wurst”. “Checkpoint Charlie?” said the driver again just to be sure.

“Yes,” I said.

Once clear of the crowds we headed for the Canal. This quiet section of the city provides the shortest route to Checkpoint Charlie. No tourists walked the gently curving banks of the Landwehr Canal and yet there was more history in this short stretch than in the entire length of the Kurfursten Damm. It was not always such a neglected backwater. The street names of yesterday tell their own story. Bendlerstrasse, from which the Wehrmacht marched to conquer Europe, is now named after Stauffenberg, architect of the failed anti-Nazi putsch. But is there some militaristic ambition burning deep inside the town planners who keep Bendler Bridge still Bendler Bridge?

Here on the canal bank is the building where Admiral Canaris, Hitler’s chief of military intelligence, sat in his office plotting against his master. And into these murky waters the battered body of Rosa Luxemburg was thrown by the army’s assassins.

Soon the dark tree-lined canal was left behind and the taxi was in Kreuzberg, speeding past Leuschner’s Cafd and along Koch Strasse - Berlin’s Fleet Street - and to the Friedrichstrasse intersection that provides a view into the heart of East Berlin.

I paid off the cab and made a point of asking the American soldier on duty in the temporary hut, which has been positioned there for forty years, what time the checkpoint closed. It never closed, he told me; never! It was enough to make sure he remembered me passing through. If I was going to leave a trail that the MPs would follow, it would be better to make it wide and deep. The Department would not be fooled, but on past performance it would take a little time to get them into action. A Friday evening: Dicky Cruyer would have to be got back to his office from somewhere where the fishing and shooting was good and the telephoning demonstrably bad.

On the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie you’ll find only a couple of well laid-back GIs lounging in a hut, but the Eastern side is crowded with gun-toting men in uniforms deliberately designed in the pattern of the old Prussian armies. I gave my passport to the surly DDR frontier guard who showed it to his senior officer who pushed it through the slot under the glass window. There it was photographed and put under the lights to find any secret marks that previous DDR frontier police might have put there. They gripped my passport with that proprietorial manner that all bureaucrats adopt towards identity papers. For men who man frontiers regard passports and manifests as communications to them from other bureaucrats in other lands. The bearers of such paper are no more than lowly messengers.

As a thinly disguised tax, all visitors are made to exchange Western money for DDR currency at an exorbitant rate. I paid. Guards came and went. Tourists formed a line. Buses and private cars crawled through and were examined underneath with the aid of large wheeled mirrors. A shiny new black Mercedes, flying the flag of some remote and impoverished African nation, was halted at the barrier behind a US army jeep that was demonstrating the victorious armies” right to patrol both sides of the city. The DDR guards did everything with a studied slowness. It all takes time: here everything takes time. And some of the victors have to be kept in their place.

East Berlin is virtually the only place to find a regime staunch and wholehearted in its application of the teachings of Karl Marx. Why not? Who could have doubted that the Germans, who had given such unquestioning faith and loyalty - not to mention countless million lives - to Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler, would soldier on, long after Marxism had perished at its own hand and been relegated to the levelled Fdhrerbunker of history.

The taller buildings around the shanty-town of huts that is Checkpoint Charlie give the feeling of being in an arena. So do the banners and the slogans. But the bellicose themes have gone. It is a time of retrenchment. The communist propaganda has abandoned the promises of outstripping the West in prosperity or converting it politically. Now the messages stress continuity and security and tell the proletariat to be grateful.

Emerging from Checkpoint Charlie you can see all the way to Friedrichstrasse station. There, a steel bridge crossing the street cuts a pattern in the indigo sky. Across the bridge go the trains that connect Paris with Warsaw and eventually Moscow, but the bridge itself is also the Friedrichstrasse station platform of the elevated S-Bahn, the commuter line that runs through both East and West Berlin.

The sight of the bridge gives the impression that the station is only a short walk, but the distance is deceptive and as I walked up Friedrichstrasse - past the blackened and pockmarked shells of bombed buildings that people said were owned by mysterious Swiss companies that even the DDR did not wish to offend - I remembered too late that it’s worth getting a cab that short distance when one is in a hurry.

The S-Bahn station Friedrichstrasse provides another demonstration of the enormous workforce that the DDR devotes to manning the Wall. I went through its agonizingly slow passport control - there are even more checks on people leaving than on those entering - and eventually went through the tunnel and up to the platform.

The station is a huge open-ended hangar-like building with overhead gantries patrolled by guards brandishing machine guns. The S-Bahn’s rolling stock, like the stations and the track, are ancient and dilapidated. The train came rattling in, its windows dirty and the lights dim. I got in. It was almost empty: those privileged few permitted to cross the border are not to be found travelling westwards at this time of evening. It took only a few minutes to clatter over the Wall. The “antifascist protection barrier” is particularly deep and formidable here where the railway crosses the Alexander Ufer: perhaps the sight of it is intended to be a deterrent.

There is an almost audible sigh of relief from the passengers who alight at Zoo Station. I had to change trains for Grunewald, but there was only a minute or two to wait and it was quicker than taking a cab and getting tangled up in the Ku-Damm traffic which would be thick at this time.

From the station I walked to Frank Harrington’s home. I approached it carefully in case there was anyone waiting for me. It seemed unlikely. The standard procedure was to cover the frontier crossing points - those for German nationals as well as the ones for foreigners - and the airport. On a Friday night at short notice that would provide more than enough problems.

Frank as the Berlin chief was already given special protection by the civil police. My guess was that whoever was allotting the personnel would decide that Frank couldn’t be afforded a car and a three-shift watch. They would describe me as a fugitive special category three: “possibly armed but not dangerous”. It was Axel Mauscr - one of the kids at school here - who first showed me the proper way to climb drainpipes. Until then I’d been using my hands and getting my clothes into a terrible state. It was Axel who said, “Climb ropes with your hands; drainpipes with your feet” and showed me how the burglars did it without getting their hands dirty. I don’t know who showed Axel how to do it: his father probably. His father, Rolf Mauser, used to work in the hotel for Lisl. Rolf Mauser was an unscrupulous old crook. I’d believe almost anything of Rolf. I was remembering all that as I climbed into the upstairs master bedroom of Frank’s big house in Grunewald. There were no burglar alarms at the back. I knew where all the burglar alarms were. I’d helped Frank decide where to put them. And Frank always kept the bathroom window ajar. Frank was a fresh-air fiend. He’d often told me it was unhealthy to close the bedroom windows no matter how cold it was. Sometimes I think that’s why his wife doesn’t like living with him; she can’t stand those freezing cold bedrooms. I told Fiona that once: she said don’t be ridiculous but it didn’t seem ridiculous to me. I can’t stand cold bedrooms: I prefer unhealthy warmth. Frank wasn’t in bed of course, I knew he wouldn’t be. That’s why I got in upstairs. I got through the window and then had to stand there, carefully removing from the sill about three hundred bottles, tubes and sprays of bath oil, shaving soap, hair shampoo, toothpaste and God knows what. What could Frank ever want with all that stuff? Or was it the unredeemed property of Frank’s girl-friends?