London Match

‘I don’t want him to know any non-German service is involved. If he tumbles to who we are, he’ll know Stinnes is in London.’

‘They know already, Bernie. They must know where he is by now.’

‘Stinnes has got enough troubles without a KGB hit squad searching for him.’

Werner was looking at the dancers and smiling to himself as if at some secret joke, the way people sometimes do when they’ve had too much to drink. His face was still tanned from his time in Mexico and his teeth were white and perfect. He looked almost handsome despite the lumpy fit of his suit. ‘It’s like a Hollywood movie,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The budget’s too big for television.’ The ballroom was crowded with elegant couples, all wearing the sort of clothes that would have looked all right for a ball at the turn of the century. And the guests weren’t the desiccated old fogies I was expecting to see at this fiftieth birthday party for a manufacturer of dishwashers. There were plenty of richly clad young people whirling to the music of another time in another town. Kaiserstadt – isn’t that what Vienna was called at a time when there was only one Emperor in Europe and only one capital for him?

It was the makeup and the hairdos that sounded the jarring note of modernity, that and the gun I could see bulging under Werner’s beautiful silk jacket. I suppose that’s what was making it so tight across the chest.

The white-coated waiter returned with another big tray of glasses. Some of the glasses were not empty. There was the sudden smell of alcohol as he tipped cherries, olives, and abandoned drinks into the warm water of the sink before putting the glasses into the service lift. Then he turned to Werner and said respectfully, ‘They’ve arrested the contact, sir. Went to the car just as you said.’ He wiped the empty tray with a cloth.

‘What’s all this, Werner?’ I said.

The waiter looked at me and then at Werner and, when Werner nodded assent, said, ‘The contact went to the suspect’s parked car … a woman at least forty years old, maybe older. She had a key that fitted the car door. She unlocked the glove compartment and took an envelope. We’ve taken her into custody but the envelope has not yet been opened. The captain wants to know if he should take the woman back to the office or hold her here in the panel truck for you to talk to.’

The music stopped and the dancers applauded. Somewhere on the far side of the ballroom a man was heard singing an old country song. He stopped, embarrassed, and there was laughter.

‘Has she given a Berlin address?’

‘Kreuzberg. An apartment house near the Landwehr Canal.’

‘Tell your captain to take the woman to the apartment. Search it and hold her there. Phone here to confirm that she’s given the correct address and we’ll come along later to talk to her,’ I said. ‘Don’t let her make any phone calls. Make sure the envelope remains unopened; we know what’s in it. I’ll want it as evidence, so don’t let everybody maul it about.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the waiter and departed, picking his way across the dance floor as the dancers walked off it.

‘Why didn’t you tell me he was one of our people?’ I asked Werner.

Werner giggled. ‘You should have seen your face.’

‘You’re drunk, Werner,’ I said.

‘You didn’t even recognize a plainclothes cop. What’s happening to you, Bernie?’

‘I should have guessed. They always have them clearing away the dirty dishes; a cop doesn’t know enough about food and wine to serve anything.’

‘You didn’t think it was worth watching his car, did you?’

He was beginning to irritate me. I said, ‘If I had your kind of money, I wouldn’t be dragging around with a lot of cops and security men.’

‘What would you be doing?’

‘With money? If I didn’t have the kids, I’d find some little pension in Tuscany, somewhere not too far from the beach.’

‘Admit it; you didn’t think it was worth watching his car, did you?’

‘You’re a genius.’

‘No need for sarcasm,’ said Werner. ‘You’ve got him now. Without me you would have ended up with egg on your face.’ He burped very softly, holding a hand over his mouth.

‘Yes, Werner,’ I said.

‘Let’s go and arrest the bastard … I had a feeling about that car – the way he locked the doors and then looked round like someone might be waiting there.’ There had always been a didactic side to Werner; he should have been a schoolteacher, as his mother wanted.

‘You’re a drunken fool, Werner,’ I said.

‘Shall I go and arrest him?’

‘Go and breathe all over him,’ I said.

Werner smiled. Werner had proved what a brilliant field agent he could be. Werner was very very happy.

He made a fuss of course. He wanted his lawyer and wanted to talk to his boss and to some friend of his in the government. I knew the type only too well; he was treating us as if we’d been caught stealing secrets for the Russians. He was still protesting when he departed with the arrest team. They were not impressed; they’d seen it all before. They were experienced men, brought in from the BfV’s ‘political office’ in Bonn.

They took him to the BfV office in Spandau, but I decided they’d get nothing but indignation out of him that night. Tomorrow perhaps he’d simmer down a little and get nervous enough to say something worth hearing before the time came when they’d have to charge him or release him. Luckily it was a decision I wouldn’t have to make. Meanwhile, I decided to go and see if there was anything to be got out of the woman.

Werner drove. He didn’t speak much on the journey back to Kreuzberg. I stared out of the window. Berlin is a sort of history book of twentieth-century violence, and every street corner brought a recollection of something I’d heard, seen, or read. We followed the road alongside the Landwehr Canal, which twists and turns through the heart of the city. Its oily water holds many dark secrets. Back in 1919, when the Spartakists attempted to seize the city by an armed uprising, two officers of the Horse Guards took the badly beaten Rosa Luxemburg – a Communist leader – from their headquarters at the Eden Hotel, next to the Zoo, shot her dead and threw her into the canal. The officers pretended that she’d been carried off by angry rioters, but four months later her bloated corpse floated up and got jammed into a lock gate. Now, in East Berlin, they name streets after her.

But not all the ghosts go into this canal. In February 1920 a police sergeant pulled a young woman out of the canal at the Bendler Bridge. Taken to the Elisabeth Hospital in Lützowstrasse, she was later identified as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Czar of All the Russias and only survivor of the massacre.

‘This is it,’ said Werner, pulling in to the kerb. ‘Good job there’s a cop on the door, or we’d come back to find the car stripped to the chassis.’

The address the contact had given was a shabby nineteenth-century tenement in a neighbourhood virtually taken over by Turkish immigrants. The once imposing grey stone entrance, still pitted with splinter damage from the war, was defaced by brightly coloured graffiti sprays. Inside the gloomy hallway there was a smell of spicy food and dirt and disinfectant.

These old houses have no numbered apartments, but we found the BfV men at the very top. There were two security locks on the door, but not much sign of anything inside to protect. Two men were still searching the hallway when we arrived. They were tapping the walls, prizing up floorboards, and poking screwdrivers deep into the plaster with that sort of inscrutable delight that comes to men blessed by governmental authority to be destructive.

It was typical of the overnight places the KGB provided for the faithful. Top floors: cold, cramped and cheap. Perhaps they chose these sleazy accommodations to remind all concerned about the plight of the poor in the capitalist economy. Or perhaps in this sort of district there were fewer questions asked about comings and goings by all kinds of people at all kinds of hours.

No TV, no radio, no soft seats. Iron bedstead with an old grey blanket, four wooden chairs, a small plastic-topped table and upon it black bread roughly sliced, electric ring, dented kettle, tinned milk, dried coffee, and some sugar cubes wrapped to show they were from a Hilton hotel. There were three dog-eared German paperback books – Dickens, Schiller, and a collection of crossword puzzles, mostly completed. On one of the two single beds a small case was opened and its contents displayed. It was obviously the woman’s baggage: a cheap black dress, nylon underwear, low-heeled leather shoes, an apple and orange, and an English newspaper – the Socialist Worker.

A young BfV officer was waiting for me there. We exchanged greetings and he told me the woman had been given no more than a brief preliminary questioning. She’d offered to make a statement at first and then said she wouldn’t, the officer said. He’d sent a man to get a typewriter so it could be taken down if she changed her mind again. He handed me some Westmarks, a driving licence, and a passport; the contents of her handbag. The licence and passport were British.

‘I’ve got a pocket recorder,’ I told him without lowering my voice. ‘We’ll sort out what to type and have it signed after I’ve spoken with her. I’ll want you to witness her signature.’

The woman was seated in the tiny kitchen. There were dirty cups on the table and some hairpins that I guessed had come from a search of the handbag she now held on her lap.

‘The captain tells me that you want to make a statement,’ I said in English.

‘Are you English?’ she said. She looked at me and then at Werner. She showed no great surprise that we were both in dinner suits complete with fancy cuff links and patent-leather shoes. She must have realized we’d been on duty inside the house.

‘Yes,’ I said. I signalled with my hand to tell Werner to leave the room.

‘Are you in charge?’ she asked. She had the exaggerated upper-class accent that shop girls use in Knightsbridge boutiques. ‘I want to know what I’m charged with. I warn you I know my rights. Am I under arrest?’

From the side table I picked up the bread knife and waved it at her. ‘Under Law 43 of the Allied Military Government legislation, still in force in this city, possession of this bread knife is an offence for which the death sentence can be imposed.’

‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘The war was almost forty years ago.’

I put the knife into a drawer and slammed it shut. She was startled by the sound. I moved a kitchen chair and sat on it so that I was facing her at a distance of only a yard or so. ‘You’re not in Germany,’ I told her. ‘This is Berlin. And Decree 511, ratified in 1951, includes a clause that makes information gathering an offence for which you can get ten years in prison. Not spying, not intelligence work, just collecting information is an offence.’

I put her passport on the table and turned the pages as if reading her name and occupation for the first time. ‘So don’t talk to me about knowing your rights; you’ve got no rights.’

From the passport I read aloud: ‘Carol Elvira Miller, born in London 1930, occupation: schoolteacher.’ Then I looked up at her. She returned my gaze with the calm, flat stare that the camera had recorded for her passport. Her hair was straight and short in pageboy style. She had clear blue eyes and a pointed nose, and the pert expression came naturally to her. She’d been pretty once, but now she was thin and drawn and – in dark conservative clothes and with no trace of makeup – well on the way to looking like a frail old woman. ‘Elvira. That’s a German name, isn’t it?’

She showed no sign of fear. She brightened as women so often do at personal talk. ‘It’s Spanish. Mozart used it in Don Giovanni.’

I nodded. ‘And Miller?’

She smiled nervously. She was not frightened, but it was the smile of someone who wanted to seem cooperative. My hectoring little speech had done the trick. ‘My father is German … was German. From Leipzig. He emigrated to England long before Hitler’s time. My mother is English … from Newcastle,’ she added after a long pause.

‘Married?’

‘My husband died nearly ten years ago. His name was Johnson, but I went back to using my family name.’

‘Children?’

‘A married daughter.’

‘Where do you teach?’

‘I was a supply teacher in London, but the amount of work I got grew less and less. For the last few months I’ve been virtually unemployed.’

‘You know what was in the envelope you collected from the car tonight?’

‘I won’t waste your time with excuses. I know it contained secrets of some description.’ She had the clear voice and pedantic manner of schoolteachers everywhere.

‘And you know where it was going?’

‘I want to make a statement. I told the other officer that. I want to be taken back to England and speak to someone in British security. Then I’ll make a complete statement.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why are you so anxious to go back to England? You’re a Russian agent; we both know that. What’s the difference where you are when you’re charged?’

‘I’ve been stupid,’ she said. ‘I realize that now.’

‘Did you realize it before or after you were taken into custody?’

She pressed her lips together as if suppressing a smile. ‘It was a shock.’ She put her hands on the table. They were white and wrinkled with the brown freckle marks that come with middle age. There were nicotine stains, and the ink from a leaky pen had marked finger and thumb. ‘I just can’t stop trembling. Sitting here watching the security men searching through my luggage, I’ve had enough time to consider what a fool I’ve been. I love England. My father brought me up to love everything English.’

Despite this contention she soon slipped back into speaking German. She wasn’t German; she wasn’t British. I saw the rootless feeling within her and recognized something of myself.

I said, ‘A man was it?’ She looked at me and frowned. She’d been expecting reassurance, a smile in return for the smiles she’d given me and a promise that nothing too bad would happen to her. ‘A man … the one who enticed you into this foolishness?’

She must have heard some note of scorn in my voice. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was all my own doing. I joined the Party fifteen years ago. After my husband died I wanted to keep myself occupied. So I became a very active worker for the teachers union. And one day I thought, well, why not go the whole hog.’

‘What was the whole hog, Mrs Miller?’

‘My father’s name was Müller; I may as well tell you that because you will soon find out. Hugo Müller. He changed it to Miller when he was naturalized. He wanted us all to be English.’ Again she pressed her hands flat on the table and looked at them while she spoke. It was as if she was blaming her hands for doing things of which she’d never really approved.

‘I was asked to collect parcels, look after things, and so on. Later I began providing accommodation in my London flat. People were brought there late at night – Russians, Czechs, and so on – usually they spoke no English and no German either. Seamen sometimes, judging by their clothing. They always seemed to be ravenously hungry. Once there was a man dressed as a priest. He spoke Polish, but I managed to make myself understood. In the morning someone would come and collect them.’

She sighed and then looked up at me to see how I was taking her confession. ‘I have a spare bedroom,’ she added, as if the propriety of their sleeping arrangements was more important than her services to the KGB.

She stopped talking for a long time and looked at her hands.

‘They were fugitives,’ I said, to prompt her into talking again.

‘I don’t know who they were. Afterwards there was usually an envelope with a few pounds put through my letterbox, but I didn’t do it for the money.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘I was a Marxist; I was serving the cause.’

‘And now?’

‘They made a fool of me,’ she said. ‘They used me to do their dirty work. What did they care what happened to me if I got caught? What do they care now? What am I supposed to do?’

It sounded more like the bitter complaint of a woman abandoned by her lover than of an agent under arrest. ‘You’re supposed to enjoy being a martyr,’ I said. ‘That’s the way the system works for them.’

‘I’ll give you the names and addresses. I’ll tell you everything I know.’ She leaned forward. ‘I don’t want to go to prison. Will it all have to be in the newspapers?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘My married daughter is living in Canada. She’s married to a Spanish boy she met on holiday. They’ve applied for Canadian citizenship but their papers haven’t come through yet. It would be terrible if this trouble I’m in ruined their lives; they’re so happy together.’

‘And this overnight accommodation you were providing for your Russian friends – when did that all stop?’

She looked up sharply, as if surprised that I could guess that it had stopped.

‘The two jobs don’t mix,’ I said. ‘The accommodation was just an interim task to see how reliable you were.’

She nodded. ‘Two years ago,’ she said softly, ‘perhaps two and a half years.’

‘Then?’

‘I came to Berlin for a week. They paid my fare. I went through to the East and spent a week in a training school. All the other students were German, but as you see I speak German well. My father always insisted that I kept up my German.’

‘A week at Potsdam?’

‘Yes, just outside Potsdam, that’s right.’

‘Don’t miss out anything important, Mrs Miller,’ I said.

‘No, I won’t,’ she promised nervously. ‘I was there for ten days learning about shortwave radios and microdots and so on. You probably know the sort of thing.’

‘Yes, I know the sort of thing. It’s a training school for spies.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘You’re not going to tell me you came back from there without realizing you were a fully trained Russian spy, Mrs Miller?’

She looked up and met my stare. ‘No, I’ve told you, I was an enthusiastic Marxist. I was perfectly ready to be a spy for them. As I saw it, I was doing it on behalf of the oppressed and hungry people of the world. I suppose I still am a Marxist-Leninist.’

‘Then you must be an incurable romantic,’ I said.

‘It was wrong of me to do what I did; I can see that, of course. England has been good to me. But half the world is starving and Marxism is the only solution.’

‘Don’t lecture me, Mrs Miller,’ I said. ‘I get enough of that from my office.’ I got up so that I could unbutton my overcoat and find my cigarettes. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ I said.

She gave no sign of having heard me.

‘I’m trying to give them up,’ I said, ‘but I carry the cigarettes with me.’

She still didn’t answer. Perhaps she was too busy thinking about what might happen to her. I went to the window and looked out. It was too dark to see very much except Berlin’s permanent false dawn: the greenish white glare that came from the floodlit ‘death strip’ along the east side of the Wall. I knew this street well enough; I’d passed this block thousands of times. Since 1961, when the Wall was first built, following the snaky route of the Landwehr Canal had become the quickest way to get around the Wall from the neon glitter of the Ku-damm to the floodlights of Checkpoint Charlie.

‘Will I go to prison?’ she said.

I didn’t turn round. I buttoned my coat, pleased that I’d resisted the temptation to smoke. From my pocket I brought the tiny Pearlcorder tape machine. It was made of a bright silver metal. I made no attempt to hide it. I wanted her to see it.

‘Will I go to prison?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I hope so.’

It had taken no more than forty minutes to get her confession. Werner was waiting for me in the next room. There was no heating in that room. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, the fur collar of his coat pulled up round his ears so that it almost touched the rim of his hat.

‘A good squeal?’ he asked.

‘You look like an undertaker, Werner,’ I said. ‘A very prosperous undertaker waiting for a very prosperous corpse.’

‘I’ve got to sleep,’ he said. ‘I can’t take these late nights any more. If you’re going to hang on here, to type it all out, I’d rather go home now.’

It was the drink that had got to him, of course. The ebullience of intoxication didn’t last very long with Werner. Alcohol is a depressant and Werner’s metabolic rate had slowed enough to render him unfit to drive. ‘I’ll drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll make the transcription on your typewriter.’

‘Sure,’ said Werner. I was staying with him in his apartment at Dahlem. And now, in his melancholy mood, he was anticipating his wife’s reaction to us waking her up by arriving in the small hours of the morning. Werner’s typewriter was a very noisy machine and he knew I’d want to finish the job before going to sleep. ‘Is there much of it?’ he asked.

‘It’s short and sweet, Werner. But she’s given us a few things that might make London Central scratch their heads and wonder.’

‘Such as?’

‘Read it in the morning, Werner. We’ll talk about it over breakfast.’

It was a beautiful Berlin morning. The sky was blue despite all those East German generating plants that burn brown coal so that pale smog sits over the city for so much of the year. Today the fumes of the Braunkohle were drifting elsewhere, and outside the birds were singing to celebrate it. Inside, a big wasp, a last survivor from the summer, buzzed around angrily.

Werner’s Dahlem apartment was like a second home to me. I’d known it when it was a gathering place for an endless stream of Werner’s oddball friends. In those days the furniture was old and Werner played jazz on a piano decorated with cigarette burns, and Werner’s beautifully constructed model planes were hanging from the ceiling because that was the only place where they would not be sat upon.

Now it was all different. The old things had all been removed by Zena, his very young wife. Now the flat was done to her taste: expensive modern furniture and a big rubber plant, and a rug that hung on the wall and bore the name of the ‘artist’ who’d woven it. The only thing that remained from the old days was the lumpy sofa that converted to the lumpy bed on which I’d slept.

The three of us were sitting in the ‘breakfast room’, a counter at the end of the kitchen. It was arranged like a lunch counter with Zena playing the role of bartender. From here there was a view through the window, and we were high enough to see the sun-edged treetops of the Grunewald just a block or two away. Zena was squeezing oranges in an electric juicer, and in the automatic coffee-maker the coffee was dripping, its rich aroma floating through the room.

We were talking about marriage. I said, ‘The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change. Both are invariably disappointed.’

‘What rot,’ said Zena as she poured the juice into three glasses. ‘Men do change.’

She bent down to see better the level of the juice and ensure that we all got precisely the same amount. It was a legacy of the Prussian family background of which she was so proud, despite the fact that she’d never even seen the old family homeland. For Prussians like to think of themselves not only as the conscience of the world, but also its final judge and jury.

‘Don’t encourage him, Zena darling,’ said Werner. ‘That contrived Oscar Wilde-ish assertion is just Bernard’s way of annoying wives.’

Zena didn’t let it go; she liked to argue with me. ‘Men change. It’s men who usually leave home and break up the marriage. And it’s because they change.’

‘Good juice,’ I said, sipping some.

‘Men go out to work. Men want promotion in their jobs and they aspire to the higher social class of their superiors. Then they feel their wives are inadequate and start looking for a wife who knows the manners and vocabulary of that class they want to join.’