Spy Line (5 page)

‘Tell me about the Wall.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Escaping. I’m out of touch these days. Bring me up to date.’

He stared at me for a moment as if thinking about my request. ‘Forget glasnost,’ said Lange. ‘If that’s what you’ve come here to ask me. No one’s told those frontier guards about glasnost. They are still spending money improving the minefields and barbed wire. Things are still the same over there: they still shoot any poor bastard who looks like he might want to leave their part of town.’

‘So I hear,’ I said.

‘Then where do I start?’

‘At the beginning.’

‘Berlin Wall. About 100 miles of it surrounds West Berlin. Built Sunday morning August 1961…Hell, Bernard, you were here!’

‘That’s okay. Just tell me the way you tell the foreign journalists. I need to go through it all again.’

A flicker of a smile acknowledged my gibe. ‘Okay. At first the hastily built Wall was a bit ramshackle and it was comparatively easy for someone young, fit and determined to get through.’

‘How?’

‘I remember the sewers being used. The sewers couldn’t be bricked off without a monumental engineering job. One of my boys came through a sewer in Klein-Machnow. A week after the Wall went up. The gooks had used metal fencing so as not to impede the sewage flow. My guys from this side waded through the sewage to cut the grilles with
bolt-cutters and got him out. But after that things gradually got tougher. They got sneaky: welded steel grids into position and put alarms and booby-traps down there – put them under the level of the sewage so we couldn’t see them. The only escape using the sewers that I heard of in the last few years were both East German sewage workers who had the opportunity to loosen the grid well in advance.’

‘So then came the tunnels,’ I said.

‘No, at first came all the scramble escapes. People using ladders and mattresses to get across places where barbed wire was the main obstacle. And there were desperate people in those buildings right on the border: leaping from upstairs windows and being caught in a
Sprungtuch
by obliging firemen. It all made great pictures and sold newspapers but it didn’t last long.’

‘And cars,’ said Werner.

‘Sure cars: lots of cars – remember that little bubble car…some poor guy squeezed into the gas tank space? But they wised up real fast. And they got rid of any Berlin kids serving as
Grenztruppen
– too soft they said – and brought some real hard-nosed bastards from the provinces, trigger-happy country boys who didn’t like Berliners anyway. They soon made that sort of gimmick impossible.’

‘False papers?’

‘You must know more about that than I do,’ said Lange. ‘I remember a few individuals getting through on all kinds of Rube Goldberg devices. You British have double passports for married couples and that provided some opportunities for amateur label fakers, until the gooks over there started stamping “travelling alone” on the papers and keeping a photo of people who went through the control to prevent the wrong one from using the papers to come back.’

‘People escaped in gliders, hang-gliders, microlites and even hot-air balloons,’ said Werner helpfully. He was looking at me with some curiosity, trying to guess why I’d got Lange started on one of his favourite topics.

‘Oh, sure,’ said Lange. ‘No end of lunatic contraptions and some of them worked. But only the really cheap ideas were safe and reliable.’

‘Cheap?’ I said. I hadn’t heard this theory before.

‘The more money that went into an escape the greater the number of people involved in it, and so the greater the risk. One way to defray the cost was to sell it to newspapers, magazines or TV stations. You could sometimes raise the money that way but it always meant having cameramen hanging around on street corners or leaning out of upstairs windows. Some of those young reporters didn’t know their ass from their elbow. The pros would steer clear of any escapes the media were involved with.’

‘The tunnels were the best,’ pronounced Werner, who’d become interested in Lange’s lecture despite himself.

‘Until the DDR made the 100-metre restricted area, all along their side of the Wall, tunnels were okay. But after that it was a long way to go, and you needed ventilation and engineers who knew what they were doing. And they had to dig out a lot of earth. They couldn’t take too long completing the job or the word would get out. So tunnels needed two, sometimes three, dozen diggers and earth-movers. A lot of bags to fill; a lot of fetching and carrying. So you’re asking too many people to keep their mouths shut. You trust a secret to that many people and, on the law of averages, at least one of them is going to gossip about it. And Berliners like to gossip.’

I said nothing. Mrs Koby came in with the tea. Upon the tray there was a silver teapot and four blue cups and saucers with gilt rims. They might have been heirlooms or a job lot from the flea-market at the old Tauentzienstrasse S-Bahn station. Gerda poured out the tea and passed round the sugar and the little blue plate with four chocolate ‘cigarettes’. Lange got a refill of his plum wine: he preferred that. He took a swig of it and wiped his mouth with a big wine-stained handkerchief.

Lange hadn’t stopped: he was just getting going. ‘Over there, the Wall had become big business. There was a department of highly paid bureaucrats just to administer it. You know how it is: give a bureaucrat a clapboard doghouse to look after and you end up with a luxury zoo complete with an administration office block. So the Wall kept getting bigger and better and more and more men were assigned to it. Men to guard it, men to survey it and repair it, men to write reports about it, reports that came complete with cost-estimates, photos, plans and diagrams. And not just guards: architects, draftsmen, surveyors and all the infrastructure of offices, with clerks who have to have pension schemes and all the rest of it.’

‘You make your point, Lange,’ I said.

He gave no sign of having heard. He poured more wine and drank it. It smelled syrupy, like some fancy sort of cough medicine. I was glad to be allergic to it. He said, ‘Wasteful, yes, but the Wall got to be more and more formidable every week.’

‘More tea, Bernard,’ said Gerda Koby. ‘It’s such a long time since we last saw you.’

If Gerda thought that might be enough to change the subject she was very much mistaken. Lange said, ‘Frank Harrington sent agents in, and brought them out, by the U-Bahn system. I’m not sure how he worked it: they say he dug some kind of little connecting tunnel from one track to the next so he could get out in Stadtmitte where the West trains pass under the East Sector. That was very clever of Frank,’ said Lange, who was not renowned for his praise of anything the Department did.

‘Yes, Frank is clever,’ I said. He looked at me and nodded. He seemed to know that Frank had deposited me into the East by means of that very tunnel.

‘Trouble came when the gooks got wind of it. They staked it out and dumped a pineapple down the manhole just as two of Frank’s people were getting ready to climb out of it.
The dispatching officer was blown off his feet…and he was two hundred yards along the tunnel! Frank wasn’t around: he was apple-polishing in London at the time, telling everyone about the coming knighthood that he never got.’

I wasn’t going to talk about Frank Harrington; not to Lange I wasn’t. ‘So the diplomatic cars are the only way,’ I said.

‘For a time that was true,’ said Lange with a wintry smile. ‘I could tell you of African diplomats who put a lot of money into their pockets at ten thousand dollars a trip with an escapee in the trunk. But a couple of years ago they stopped a big black Mercedes with diplomatic plates at Checkpoint Charlie and fumigated it on account of what was described as “an outbreak of cattle disease”. Whatever they used to fumigate that car put paid to a 32-year-old crane operator from Rostock who was locked in the trunk. They say his relatives in Toronto, Canada, had paid for the escape.’

‘The guards opened the trunk of a diplomatic car?’ asked Werner.

‘No. They didn’t have to,’ said Lange grimly. ‘Maybe that poison gas was only intended to give some young escaper a bad headache but when the trunk was opened on this side, the fellow inside was dead. Hear about that, Bernard?’ he asked me.

‘Not the way you tell it,’ I admitted.

‘Well that’s what happened. I saw the car. There were ventilation holes drilled into the trunk from underneath to save an escaper from suffocating. The guards must have known that, and known where the vents were.’

‘What happened?’ asked Werner.

‘The quick-thinking African diplomat turned around and took the corpse back to East Berlin and into his embassy. The corpse became an African national by means of pre-dated papers. Death in an embassy: death certificate signed by an African medico so no inquiries by the East German police.
Quiet funeral. Buried in a cemetery in Marzahn. But here’s the big boffola: not knowing the full story, some jerk working for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Volkskammer thinks a gesture of sympathy is required. So – on behalf of the government and people of the DDR – they send an enormous wreath in which the words “peace, trust and friendship” are made from miniature roses. It was only on the grave for a day or two then it was discreetly removed by someone from the Stasi.’ Lange laughed loudly. ‘Cheer up, Bernie,’ he said and laughed some more.

‘I thought you’d have good news for me, Lange. I thought things had eased up.’

‘And don’t imagine going through Hungary or Czechoslovakia is any easier. It’s tight everywhere. When you read how many people have been killed crossing the Wall you should add on the hundreds that have quietly bled to death somewhere out of sight on the other side.’

‘That’s good tea, Gerda,’ I said. I never knew whether to call her Mrs Lange or Gerda. She was one of those old-fashioned Germans who prefer all the formalities: on the other hand she was married to Lange.

‘Bringing someone out, Bernie?’ said Lange. ‘Someone rich, I hope. Someone who can pay.’

‘Werner’s brother-in-law in Cottbus,’ I said. ‘No money, no nothing.’

Werner, who knew nothing of any brother-in-law in Cottbus, looked rattled but he recovered immediately and backed me up gamely. ‘I’ve promised,’ said Werner and sat back and smiled unconvincingly.

Lange looked from one of us to the other. ‘Can he get to East Berlin?’

‘He’ll be here with his son,’ Werner improvised. ‘For the Free German Youth festival in summer.’

Lange nodded. Werner was a far better liar than I ever imagined. I wondered if it was a skill that he’d developed
while married to the shrewish Zena. ‘You haven’t got a lot of time then,’ said Lange.

‘There must be a way,’ said Werner. He looked at his watch and got to his feet. He wanted to leave before I got him more deeply involved in this fairy tale.

‘Let me think about it,’ said Lange as he got Werner’s coat and hat. ‘You didn’t have an overcoat, Bernie?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Aren’t you cold, Bernard?’ said Gerda.

‘No, never,’ I said.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Lange. He opened the door for us but before it was open wide enough for us to leave he said, ‘Where’s the other half of that banknote, Bernard?’

I gave it to him.

Lange put it in his pocket and said, ‘Half a banknote is no good to anybody. Right, Bernie?’

‘That’s right, Lange,’ I said. ‘I knew you’d quickly tumble to that.’

‘There’s a lot of things I quickly tumble to,’ he said ominously.

‘Oh, what else?’ I said as we went out.

‘Like there not being a
Freie Deutsche Jugend
festival in Berlin this summer.’

‘Maybe Werner got it wrong,’ I said. ‘Maybe it was the
Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik
that have their Festival in East Berlin this summer.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lange, calling after us in that hoarse voice of his, ‘and maybe it’s the CIA having a gumshoe festival in West Berlin this summer.’

‘Berlin is wonderful in the summer,’ I said. ‘Just about everyone comes here.’

I heard Lange close the door with a loud bang and slam the bolts back into place with a display of surplus energy that is often the sign of bad temper.

As we were going downstairs Werner said, ‘Is it your wife Fiona? Are you going to try to get her out?’

I didn’t answer. The timeswitch plopped and we continued downstairs in darkness.

Vexed at my failure to answer him, Werner said somewhat petulantly, ‘That was my hundred marks you gave Lange.’

‘Well,’ I explained, ‘it’s your brother-in-law isn’t it?’

Some men are born hoteliers, others strive to acquire hotels, but Werner Volkmann was one of those rare birds who have a hotel thrust upon them. It would be difficult to imagine any man in the whole world less ready to become a hotel manager than my good friend Werner Volkmann. His dedi c ation to Tante Lisl, the old woman who had brought him up when he was orphaned, compelled him to take over from her when she became too old and sick to continue her despotic reign.

It was not a sumptuous establishment but the neighbourhood could hardly be more central. Before the war it had been Lisl’s family home, set in the fashionable New West End. In 1945 the division of the city between the Russians and the Western Allies had made Der Neuer Westen the centre of ‘capitalist Berlin’.

Werner was making changes, but sensitive to Lisl’s feelings, for she was still in residence and monitored every new curtain and every drip of paint, the modifications did little to change the character of this appealing old place where so much of the interior was the same as it had been for fifty or more years.

After we left Lange Koby’s apartment that evening I let Werner persuade me to move in to his hotel. There was little reason to suffer the dirt and discomfort of my Kreuzberg slum now that Frank Harrington had demonstrated his
office’s ability to put a finger out and reach me any time they chose.

Before going to bed Werner offered me a drink. We walked through the newly refurbished bar – there was no one else there – to the small office at the back. He poured me a big measure of scotch whisky with not much soda. Werner drank soda water with just a splash of Underberg in it. I looked around. An amazing transformation had taken place, especially pleasing for anyone who’d known Werner back in the old days. It had become a den and Werner’s treasures had miraculously resurfaced. There was a lion’s head: a moth-eaten old fellow upon whose wooden mounting some drunken wag had neatly inscribed
felis leo venerabilis.
Next to it on the wall hung an antique clock. It had a chipped wooden case upon the front panel of which a bucolic scene was unconvincingly depicted. It ticked loudly and was eight minutes slow but it was virtually the only thing he possessed which had belonged to his parents. Hanging from the ceiling there was the model Dornier flying boat that Werner had toiled so long to construct: twelve engines, and if you lifted up each and every cowling the engine detail could be seen inside. I remember Werner working on those tiny engines: he was in a vile temper for over a week.

We’d done no more than say how well Lange looked and what a fierce old devil he was when Ingrid Winter came into the room.

‘Bernie is staying here with us,’ Werner said rather more sadly than I would have hoped, but then Werner was like that.

Ingrid had come into the room without my noticing. ‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said. It would be easy to see Ingrid as a timid, self-effacing spinster, for she was always willing to appear in this guise. Her greying hair, which she did nothing to tint, her quiet voice and her style of floral-patterned woollen dresses all contributed to this picture. But even on our short acquaintance I’d discovered that Ingrid was a creature of
fortitude and strength. Werner had discovered the same thing, and more, for the relationship between them was close. ‘That woman was here again,’ she told Werner in a voice tinged with disapproval.

‘The Duchess?’

‘The Englishwoman. The woman you said was a busybody.’

Werner looked at me and grinned selfconsciously. ‘What did she want?’

‘The Duchess likes it here,’ I interjected. ‘She hopes it’s becoming a sort of club for the people she knows.’

Werner’s face tightened. Ingrid was watching him as I spoke but her face showed no emotion, not even reflecting that of Werner. Werner looked at me and said, ‘Ingrid thinks there is more to it than that.’

‘What sort of more?’

‘I told her about Frank,’ said Werner as if that would explain everything. When I didn’t react he added, ‘Frank wants to use this place. It’s obvious.’

‘It’s not obvious to me, Werner,’ I said. ‘Use it how?’

Werner poured himself more soda water and added no more than a drop of Underberg which only just coloured it. He took a sip of it and said, ‘I think Frank has ordered his people to come here. They’ll return to the office and report to him every word they hear and everything they see. It will all go on file.’ This mild paranoia – complete with his rather endearing picture of Frank’s rigorous and capable administration – provided a perfect example of Werner’s ingrained Germanic thinking. In fact, Frank was typically English. Idle and congenial, Frank was an easygoing time-server who’d muster neither the energy nor the inclination to organize such a venture.

Werner on the other hand was provincial and narrow-minded in the way that Germans are prey to being. These differing attitudes were fundamental to their enmity, but I would never tell either of them what I thought. Werner would have been horrified: he always thought of himself as a
cosmopolitan liberal. But of course all wealthy well-travelled bigots make that claim.

‘As long as they pay cash for their drinks,’ I said.

This flippancy did not please Werner. ‘I don’t mind Frank’s people coming here but I don’t want them to monopolize the place and try to turn it into some awful sort of English pub. And anyway, Bernie,’ he added in a very quiet measured voice, as if talking to a small child, ‘if you’re here, they’ll spy on you.’

Any difficulty I might have had in answering Werner was removed by Ingrid. I had a feeling she was not listening to us very carefully. Perhaps she was already familiar with Werner’s suspicions about the Departmental personnel transmogrifying his bar. During a lapse in the conversation she said, ‘There is something else. I heard them talking about Bernard. And about his wife.’

My wife! My wife! Now she had all my attention, and I wanted to hear all about it. She said that the Duchess had come into the bar in the early evening. She’d ordered a gin and tonic and read the
Daily Express.
Werner had recently started to provide the hotel with French and English, as well as German, daily papers, impaling them upon wooden
Zeitunghälter
and hanging them alongside the coat rack. Two other Department people – a man and a woman – came in soon afterwards and invited the Duchess to join them.

I recognized Ingrid’s description of the second woman of this trio. The voice, the Burberry scarf, the horseshoe-shaped diamond brooch. It was Pinky: there was only one Pinky, and thank God for that. Her daddy owned race horses, mumsie hunted foxes, and her brother’s nightclub adventures were regularly chronicled in the gossip columns. I remembered her when she’d come to work in the Department. She was newly divorced from ‘Bang-bang’ Canon, a captain in the Horse Guards who went into insurance. She said she couldn’t stand the sight of him in mufti but that might have been her sense
of humour. Pinky started using her maiden name again when Bang-bang went to prison for fraud.

From across the other side of the bar Ingrid had heard Pinky say in her shrill Home-Counties voice, ‘When a man loses his wife it looks like carelessness, darling.’ And laughing loudly and calling for another drink.

‘What about the telephone?’ the man asked. Long fair wavy hair parted high, almost centre. Check-patterned suit and mustard-coloured shirt. Larry Bower, taking Pinky in for a drink on their way back from a hard day’s work at the safe house in Charlottenburg.

Pinky said, ‘His phones were tapped from the first moment she walked out. That’s the drill. The transcripts go to Frank.’

‘Eventually they’ll fire him,’ said Bower.

Pinky said, ‘You know how the Department works, darling: they have to make sure about him. It will take time. They’ll get rid of him when it suits them.’

‘I never met her,’ said Bower. ‘What sort of woman was she?’

The Duchess answered the question, ‘Very beautiful. But I could never understand why she married him. Every man who clapped eyes on her wanted her, she has a sort of magic I suppose. Some women are lucky like that.’

‘I never got to know her,’ said Pinky. ‘No one did. She wasn’t a woman’s woman, if you know what I mean.’

‘I think she spent a lot of money on clothes,’ said the Duchess. ‘But in all fairness I have to say that she could wear an old sweater and jeans and make herself look like…’

‘A film star?’ supplied Bower.

‘No,’ said Pinky. ‘Never like a film star. She wasn’t brainless, darling! Men can’t abide the notion that beautiful women can be brainy. But they can.’

‘Yes, but what sort of woman was she really?’ said Bower. ‘Everyone’s talking about her but no one seems to really know her.’

‘An absolute cow!’ answered Pinky.

‘Sometimes an absolute cow can be a good wife,’ said the Duchess.

‘Oh no!’ said Pinky. ‘She made his life a misery. Everyone knew that.’

‘He seems to be managing without her,’ said Bower.

‘He’s something of a play-actor,’ said the Duchess sadly. ‘He always has been.’

‘He can put down a few,’ said Bower.

‘I’ve never seen him drunk,’ said the Duchess.

‘Have you not, darling? My goodness yes but he can hold it. Let’s face it, he was never really one of us, was he?’ said Pinky.

‘He hasn’t got a bean, you know,’ said the Duchess.

‘But there were no papers missing?’ said Bower.

Pinky said, ‘Not as far as anyone can see…But who knows what was copied?’

‘She phoned Frank, you say?’ the Duchess asked.

‘Early this morning, at his home,’ said Pinky, who seemed to know everything. ‘I don’t know how she had that number. It’s changed regularly.’

‘You don’t think that she…and Frank…’ said Bower.

‘Having it off with Frank?’ Pinky’s laugh ended in a giggle. ‘Good old Frank! Not my type, darling, but it’s astounding how the ladies zero in on the poor old thing.’ Then in a more serious voice, ‘No, I don’t think there could be anything like that.’

‘Not in the dim and distant past?’ said Bower.

‘No, not even in the dim and distant past.’ This time the Duchess answered, firmly closing that door.

‘So did Frank tell him?’ said Bower.

‘Tell hubbie?’ Pinky said. ‘About the phone call…No. And no one knows what she said. We just know that Frank cancelled all his appointments and ordered his car brought round the front…driving himself. No one knows where he went. Of course Frank’s sudden departure may have nothing to do with it. You know what Frank is like. He might have
just decided to spend the day with his army cronies or play golf or something.’

‘I just hope,’ said the Duchess, ‘that it’s not all going to start all over again.’

‘Drinky for Pinky, darling,’ said Pinky to Bower.

Bower said, ‘All what start all over again?’

‘You’ll soon know,’ said the Duchess. ‘Life becomes hell for everyone once one of these security purges begin. Internal Security arrive and it’s questions, questions, questions.’

‘Drinky for Pinky, darling. Drinky for Pinky.’

‘The same again three times,’ Bower called across the bar to Ingrid. Then five cheerful Australians came in. They were on some government-financed jaunt; buying ten thousand hospital beds or something of that sort. They’d spent all day at a huge residential complex where internationally renowned architects had competed to produce the world’s ugliest apartment blocks. The Aussies needed a drink and, pleased to hear English spoken after a long day, joined the Duchess and her friends for a boozy evening. The conversation turned to lighter matters, such as why the Germans invaded Poland.

I thanked Ingrid for passing on to me the gist of this conversation she’d overheard. Then I quickly downed another stiff drink and went up to bed.

I had my usual room. It was a tiny garret at the top of the house, the sort of place which inspired Puccini to orchestrate Mimi’s demise. It was a long walk to the bathroom. The floral wallpaper’s big flowers and whirling acanthus leaves had gone dark brown with age, so that the pattern was almost invisible, and there in the corner was the little chest of drawers that had once held my stamp collection, my home-made lock picks and the secret hoard of Nazi badges which my father had forbidden me to collect.

The bed was made up ready for me. There was a pair of pyjamas wrapped round a hot water bottle. It was all as if Werner had guessed that it was just a matter of time before I saw sense.

I undressed and got into bed, put my pistol in my shoe so I could reach it easily and went straight off to sleep. I must have been very tired, for I had plenty to stay awake and worry about.