The Innocent (29 page)

The place was larger than he had imagined it. He had been expecting something narrow and intimate, with high-backed booths for whispering in. But the Café Prag was vast, with a remote and grubby ceiling and scores of small round tables. He chose a conspicuous place and ordered a coffee. Class had once told him that you only had to wait until one of the
Hundert Mark Jungen
came across. The place was filling up for lunch. There were plenty of serious-looking types at the tables. They could just as easily have been local office workers as spies from half-a-dozen nations.

He passed the time drawing a map in pencil on a paper napkin. Fifteen minutes went by, and nothing happened. It was, Leonard decided, one of those Berlin stories. The Café Prag was said to be a stock exchange of unofficial information. In fact it was a large, dull East Berlin café where the coffee was weak and lukewarm. He was on his third cup and feeling sick. He had not eaten in two days. He was searching his pockets for East marks when a young man, face ablaze with freckles, sat down opposite him.

“Vous êtes français.”
It was a statement of fact.

“No,” Leonard said, “English.”

The man was about Leonard’s age. He had his hand up for a waiter. He seemed to feel no need to explain or apologize for
his error. It was simply an opening line. He ordered two coffees and extended a speckled hand across the table. “Hans.”

Leonard shook it and said, “Henry.” It was his father’s name and felt less like a lie.

Hans took out a pack of Camels, offered one and was rather self-conscious, Leonard thought, with his Zippo. Hans’s English was faultless. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“I haven’t been here before.”

The coffee that did not quite taste of coffee arrived, and when the waiter had left them Hans said, “So, you like it here in Berlin?”

“Yes, I do,” Leonard said. He had not imagined there would have to be small talk, but it was probably the custom. He wanted to get things right, so he asked politely, “Did you grow up here?”

Hans replied with an account of a childhood in Kassel. When he was fifteen his mother had married a Berliner. It was hard to concentrate on the story. The pointless details made him feel hot, and now Hans was asking him about his life in London. After Leonard had given a brief sketch of his childhood there, he concluded by saying that he found Berlin far more interesting. Immediately he regretted his words.

Hans said, “But surely this can’t be so. London is a world capital. Berlin is finished. Its greatness is all in the past.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Leonard said. “Perhaps I just like to be abroad.” That too was a mistake, for now they were talking about the pleasures of foreign travel. Hans asked Leonard which other countries he had been in, and Leonard was too tired to offer less than the truth. He had been to Wales and West Berlin.

Hans was exhorting him to be more adventurous. “You are English, you have the opportunities.” Then there followed a list of places, headed by the United States, that Hans intended to visit. Leonard looked at his watch. It was ten past one. He was not certain what that meant. People would be looking for him. He was not certain what it was he was going to tell them.

As soon as Leonard looked at his watch, Hans brought his list
to a close and glanced around the room. Then he said, “Henry, I think you came looking for something. You wanted to buy something, is that right?”

“No,” Leonard said. “I want to give something to the right person.”

“You have something to sell?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m happy to give it away.”

Hans offered Leonard another cigarette. “Listen, my friend. I’ll give you some advice. If what you have is free, people will think it’s worthless. If it’s good, then you must make people pay.”

“Fine,” Leonard said. “If someone wants to give me money, that’s fine.”

“I could take what you have and sell it myself,” Hans said. “All the profit would be mine. But I like you. Perhaps I’ll visit you in London one day, if you give me your address. So I’ll take a commission. Fifty percent.”

“Anything,” Leonard said.

“So then. What is it you have?”

Leonard lowered his voice. “What I have is of interest to the Soviet military.”

“That’s good, Henry,” Hans said at normal volume. “I have a friend here today who knows someone in the High Command.”

Leonard produced his map. “On the east side of the Schönefelder Chaussee, just north of this cemetery here in Altglienicke, their telephone lines are being tapped. They run along a ditch here. I’ve marked the spot where they should look.”

Hans took the map. “How can they tap these lines? It’s not possible.”

Leonard could not help his pride. “There’s a tunnel. I’ve marked it with a thick line. It runs from what looks like a radar station in the American sector.”

Hans was shaking his head. “It would be too far. It’s not possible. No one will believe this. I wouldn’t get twenty-five marks.”

Leonard was close to laughter. “It’s a huge project. They don’t have to believe it. They just need to go and look.”

Hans took the map and stood up. He shrugged and said, “I’ll talk to my friend.”

Leonard watched him cross to the far side of the room and speak to a man who was obscured by a pillar. Then both went out through a set of swing doors to where the lavatories and telephone were. A couple of minutes later Hans came back, looking livelier.

“My friend says it looks interesting, at least. He’s trying to reach his contact now.”

Hans went back across the room. Leonard waited until he was out of sight, then he left the café. He was fifty yards down the street when he heard a shout. A man with a white tablecloth tucked around his waist was sprinting toward him waving a slip of paper. He owed for five coffees. He was just paying up and apologizing when Hans came running up. His freckles were garish in daylight.

The waiter went away and Hans said, “You were going to give me your address. And look—my friend paid two hundred marks.”

Leonard walked on, and Hans kept by his side. Leonard said, “You keep the money, and I’ll keep my address.”

Hans linked his arm through Leonard’s. “This isn’t what we agreed.”

The touch gave Leonard a thrill of horror. He shook his arm free.

“Don’t you like me, Henry?” Hans said.

“No, I don’t,” Leonard said. “Bugger off.” He increased his pace. When he glanced over his shoulder, Hans was walking back toward the café.

At Alexanderplatz Leonard fell into another dither. He needed to sit down and rest his foot, but before he did that, he had to decide where to go. He ought to see Maria, and he knew he still could not face her. He wanted to go home, but MacNamee might be waiting for him. If the seals had been broken on the cases, the military police would be there. In the
end he bought a ticket to Neu-Westend. He could make up his mind on the train.

He got off at the zoo, having decided to go into the park and find somewhere to sleep. It was a sunny day, but once he had walked for twenty minutes and found a quiet stretch on the banks of the canal, he found the wind a little too brisk to permit him to relax. For half an hour he lay shivering on the newly cut grass. He walked all the way back through the gardens to the station and took the U-Bahn home. Sleep was now his only priority. If the MPs were there, he would only be confronting the inevitable. If it was MacNamee, he would think of a story when it was necessary.

He glided along the pavement from Neu-Westend to Platanenallee. Tiredness dissociated him from the action of his legs. He was being walked home. There was no one waiting for him. Inside the apartment two notes had been put through the door. One, from Maria, said, “Where are you? What’s happening?” The other, from MacNamee said, “Phone me” and gave three numbers. Leonard went straight to the bedroom and pulled the curtains. He took all his clothes off. He did not bother with pajamas. In less than a minute he was asleep at last.

In less than an hour he was awake with an urgent need to urinate. The phone was ringing, too. He hesitated in the hallway, not knowing which to attend to first. He went to the phone and knew as he picked it up that he had made the wrong decision. He would not be able to concentrate. It was Glass, sounding distant and very upset. In the background there was a commotion of some sort. He was like a man having a bad dream.

“Leonard, Leonard, is that you?”

Shivery and naked in his sunless living room, Leonard crossed his legs and said, “Yes, it’s me.”

“Leonard? Are you there?”

“Bob, it’s me. I’m here.”

“Thank God. Listen. Are you listening carefully? I want you to tell me what’s in those cases. I need you to tell me right now.”

Leonard felt his legs going weak. He sat down on the carpet among the debris of the engagement party. He said, “Have they been opened?”

“Come on, Leonard. Just tell me.”

“Bob, for a start, it’s classified, and anyway, this is not a secure line.”

“Don’t give me that shit, Marnham. All hell is breaking loose here. What’s in those bags?”

“What’s happening there? What’s all that noise?”

Glass was shouting to be heard. “Christ! Haven’t you been told? They found us. They broke into the tap chamber. Our people just made it out. No one had time to close the steel doors. They’re all over the tunnel, it’s all theirs, right up to the sector boundary. We’re clearing stuff out of the warehouse just to be safe. I’m seeing Harvey in an hour and I have to give him a damage report. I need to know what was in those cases. Leonard?”

But Leonard could not speak. His throat was constricted by a joyous gratitude. The speed and simplicity of it all. And now the great Russian silence could descend. He would get dressed now and go and tell Maria that everything was fine.

Glass was shouting his name. Leonard said, “Sorry, Bob. I was stunned by the news.”

“The cases, Leonard. The cases!”

“Right. It was the body of a man I hacked into pieces.”

“You asshole. I don’t have much time.”

Leonard was trying to keep the lightness out of his voice. “Actually, you don’t have much to worry about. It was decoding equipment that I was building myself. It was only half completed, and it turns out the ideas were out of date.”

“So what was the big deal this morning?”

“All decoding projects are level four,” Leonard said. “But listen, Bob, when did all this happen?”

Glass was talking to someone else. He broke off. “What was that?”

“When did they break in?”

Glass did not hesitate. “Twelve fifty-eight.”

“No, Bob. That can’t be right.”

“Listen, if you want to know more, just tune into Deutschlandsender. They’re talking about nothing else.”

Leonard felt a spreading coldness in his stomach. “They can’t go public with it.”

“That’s what we thought. They’d lose face. But the commandant of the Soviet Berlin garrison is out of town. The second-in-command, a guy called Kotsyuba, must be nuts. He’s milking it for propaganda. They’re going to come out of this looking stupid, but that’s what they’re doing.”

Leonard was thinking of the joke he had just made. He said, “It can’t be true.”

Again someone was trying to talk to Glass. He spoke hurriedly. “They’re holding a press briefing tomorrow. They’re going to show the press corps around the tunnel on Saturday. They’re talking about opening it up to the public. A tourist attraction, a monument to American treachery. Leonard, they’re going to use every last damn thing they can find.”

He rang off, and Leonard hurried to the bathroom.

J
ohn MacNamee insisted on meeting Leonard at Kempinski’s and wanted to sit outside. It was barely ten o’clock in the morning and all the other customers were inside. It was the same bright, cold weather. Each time an enormous white cumulus cloud drifted in front of the sun, the air became icy.

Leonard had been feeling the cold lately. He always seemed to be shivering. The morning after Glass’s phone call he woke with shaking hands. It was no mere tremble, it was a palsied shake, and it took him minutes to button his shirt. It was a
delayed muscular spasm, he decided, brought on by carrying the cases. When he went out for his first meal in over two days at a
Schnellimbiss
on Reichskanzlerplatz, he dropped his sausage on the pavement. Someone’s dog was there to eat it, mustard and all.

At Kempinski’s he was in a sun trap, but he kept his coat on and clenched his teeth to stop them chattering. He could not trust himself to hold a coffee cup, so he ordered a beer, and that too was icy. MacNamee looked comfortable enough wearing a tweed jacket over a thin cotton shirt. When his coffee came he stuffed his pipe and lit it. Leonard was downwind, and the smell and its associations made him feel sick. He went to the lavatory as a pretext for changing seats. When he came back he sat on the other side of the table, but now he was in the shade. He pulled his coat around him and sat on his hands. MacNamee passed the untouched beer across to him. There was condensation on the glass, through which two droplets of water were carving an erratically parallel path.

“Right then,” MacNamee said. “What about it?”

Leonard could feel his hands shaking under his buttocks. He said, “When I couldn’t get anything from the Americans, I began to have one or two ideas of my own. I started to build something in my spare time. I really thought I could see my way through to separating out the clear text echo from the encoded message. I worked at home for safety. But it didn’t come out right. The ideas turned out to be old hat anyway. I brought the stuff in, intending to dismantle it in my room, where I keep all the parts. I never imagined I’d be searched so thoroughly. But there were two new boys on the gate. It wouldn’t have mattered, but Glass was right there with me. I couldn’t afford to let him see the kind of thing I had. It’s hardly in my job description. I’m sorry if it got your hopes up.”

MacNamee tapped his stumpy brown teeth with the stem of his pipe. “I was rather excited for an hour or two. I thought you’d got your hands on a version of Nelson’s thing from somewhere. But not to worry—I think they’re almost there at Dollis Hill.”