London Match

‘Source names. Yes, Martello sounds familiar,’ said von Munte. ‘Perhaps the others too, I can’t remember.’

‘Two names used by one agent at the same time,’ I said.

‘That would be unprecedented,’ said von Munte. He was loosening up now. ‘Two names, no. How would we ever keep track of our material?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ I said.

‘This was from the woman arrested in Berlin?’ said Silas suddenly. He dropped the pretence of looking at his plants. ‘I heard about that.’ Silas always knew what was happening. In earlier days, while the D-G had been settling in, he’d even asked Silas to monitor some of the operations. Nowadays Silas and the D-G kept in touch. It would be foolish of me to imagine that this conversation would not get back to the Department.

‘Yes, the woman in Berlin,’ I said.

Walter von Munte touched his stiff white collar. ‘I was never allowed to know any secrets. They gave me only what they thought I should have.’

I said, ‘Like Silas distributing his food and cigars, you mean?’ I kept wishing that Silas would depart and leave me and von Munte to have the conversation I wanted. But that was not Silas’s way. Information was his stock in trade, it always had been, and he knew how to use it to his own advantage. That’s why he’d survived so long in the Department.

‘Not as generously as Silas,’ said von Munte. He smiled and drank some of the Madeira and then shifted about, deciding how to explain it all. ‘The bank’s intelligence staff went over to the Warschauer Strasse office once a week. They would have all the new material in trays waiting for us. Old Mr Heine was in charge there. He’d produce for us each item according to subject.’

‘Raw?’ I said.

‘Raw?’ said von Munte. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Did they tell you what the agent said or did they merely tell you the content of his message?’

‘Oh, the messages were edited, but otherwise as received. They had to be; the staff handling the material didn’t know enough about economics to understand what it was about.’

‘But you identified different sourees?’ I asked yet again.

‘Sometimes we could, sometimes that was easy. Some of it was total rubbish.’

‘From different agents?’ I persisted. My God, but it was agony to deal with old people. Would I be like this one day?

‘Some of their agents sent only rumours. There was one who never provided a word of good sense. They called him “Grock”. That wasn’t his code name or his source name; it was our joke. We called him “Grock”, after the famous clown, of course.’

‘Yes,’ I said. But I’m glad von Munte had told me it was a joke; that gave me the cue to laugh. ‘What about the good sources?’ I said.

‘You could recognize them from the quality of their intelligence and from the style in which it was presented.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘Perhaps I should explain what it was like in the Warschauer Strasse office. It wasn’t our office. It is supposed to be an office belonging to Aeroflot, but there are always police and security guards on the door, and our passes were carefully scrutinized no matter how often we visited there. I don’t know who else uses the building, but the economic intelligence staff met there regularly, as I said.’

‘And you were included in “economic intelligence staff”?’

‘Certainly not. They were all KGB and security people. My superior was only invited to attend when there was something directly affecting our department. Other bank officials and Ministry people came according to what was to be discussed.’

‘Why didn’t the briefing take place at the KGB offices?’ I asked. Silas was sitting upright on his metal chair, his eyes closed as if he were dozing off to sleep.

‘The Warschauer Strasse office was – perhaps I should say is – used at arm’s length by the KGB. When some Party official or some exalted visitor has enough influence to be permitted to visit the KGB installation in Berlin, they are invariably taken to Warschauer Strasse rather than to Karlshorst.’

‘It’s used as a front?’ said Silas opening his eyes and blinking as if suddenly coming awake from a deep slumber.

‘They wouldn’t want visitors tramping through the offices where the real work was being done. And Warschauer Strasse has a kitchen and dining room where such dignitaries can be entertained. Also there is a small lecture hall where they can see slide shows and demonstration films and so on. We liked going over there. Even the coffee and sandwiches served were far better than anything available elsewhere.’

‘You said you could tell the source from the quality and the style. Could you enlarge on that?’ I asked.

‘Some communications would begin an item with a phrase such as “I hear that the Bank of England” or whatever. Others would say, “Last week the Treasury issued a confidential statement.” Others might put it, “Fears of an imminent drop in American interest rates are likely to bring …”. These different styles are virtually sufficient for identification, but correlated with the proved quality of certain sources, we were soon able to recognize the agents. We spoke of them as people and joked about the nonsense that certain of them sometimes passed on to us.’

‘So you must have recognized the first-class material that my wife was providing.’

Von Munte looked at me and then at Silas. Silas said, ‘Is this official, Bernard?’ There was a note of warning in his voice.

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘We’re sailing a bit close to the wind for chitchat,’ Silas said. The choice of casual words, and the softness of his voice, did nothing to hide the authority behind what he said; on the contrary, it was the manner in which certain classes of Englishmen give orders to their subordinates. I said nothing and von Munte watched Silas carefully. Then Silas drew on his cigar reflectively and, having taken his time, said, ‘Tell him whatever you know, Walter.’

‘As I told you, I only saw the economic material. I can’t guess what proportion of any one agent’s submissions that might be.’ He looked at me. ‘Take the material from the man we called “Grock”. It was rubbish, as I said. But for all I know, Grock might have been sending wonderful stuff about underwater weaponry or secret NATO conferences.’

‘Looking back at it, can you now guess what my wife was sending?’

‘It’s only a guess,’ said von Munte, ‘but there was one tray of material that was always well written and organized in a manner one might call academic.’

‘Good stuff?’

‘Very reliable but inclined towards caution. Nothing very alarming or exciting; mostly confirmations of trends that we could guess at. Useful, of course, but from our point of view not wonderful.’ He looked up at the sky through the glass roof of the conservatory. ‘Eisenguss,’ he said suddenly and laughed. ‘Nicht Eisenfuss; Eisenguss. Not iron foot but cast iron or pig iron; Gusseisen. Yes, that was the name of the source. I remember at the time I thought he must be some sort of government official.’

‘It means poured iron,’ said Silas, who spoke a perfect and pedantic German and couldn’t tolerate my Berlin accent.

‘I know the word,’ I said irritably. ‘The audiotypist was careless, that’s all. None of them are really fluent.’ It was a feeble excuse and quite untrue. I’d done it myself. I should have listened more carefully when I was with the Miller woman or picked up my mistranslation when typing from the tape recording.

‘So now we have a name to connect Fiona with the material she gave them,’ said Silas. ‘Is that what you wanted?’

I looked at von Munte. ‘Just the one code word for Fiona’s tray?’

‘It all came under the one identification,’ said von Munte. ‘Why would they split it up? It wouldn’t make sense, would it?’

‘No,’ I said. I finished my drink and stood up. ‘It wouldn’t make sense.’

Upstairs I could hear the children growing noisy. There was a limit to the amount of time that TV kept them entertained. ‘I’ll go and take charge of my children,’ I said. ‘I know they tire Mrs Porter.’

‘Are you staying for supper?’ said Silas.

‘Thanks, but it’s a long journey, Silas. And the children will be late to bed as it is.’

‘There’s plenty of room for you all.’

‘You’re very kind, but it would mean leaving at crack of dawn to get the children to school and me to the office.’

He nodded and turned back to von Munte. But I knew there was more to it than simple hospitality. Silas was determined to have a word with me in private. And on my way downstairs, after I’d told the children that we’d be leaving soon after tea, he emerged from his study and, with one hand on my shoulder, drew me inside.

He closed the study door with great care. Then, in a sudden change of mood that was typical of him, he said, ‘Do you mind telling me what the bloody hell this is all about?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t what me, Bernard. You understand English. What the hell are you cross-questioning von Munte about?’

‘The arrested woman …’

‘Mrs Miller,’ he interrupted me, to show how well informed he was.

‘Yes, Mrs Carol Elvira Johnson, née Miller, father’s name Müller, born London 1930, occupation schoolteacher. That’s the one.’

‘That was quite uncalled for,’ said Silas, offended at my reply. ‘Well, what about her?’

‘Her testimony doesn’t fit what I know of KGB procedures and I wanted to hear about von Munte’s experience.’

‘About using multiple code names? Did the Miller woman say they used multiple code names?’

‘She handled two lots of exceptionally high-grade intelligence material. There were two code names, but the Department is happy to believe that it all came from Fiona.’

‘But you incline to the view that it was two lots of material from two different agents?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I’m still trying to find out. It can’t hurt to improve upon our knowledge, can it?’

‘Have you spoken to anyone at the office about this?’

‘Dicky Cruyer knows.’

‘Well, he’s a bright lad,’ said Silas. ‘What did he say?’

‘He’s not interested.’

‘What would you do in Dicky Cruyer’s place?’

‘Someone should check it with Stinnes,’ I said. ‘What is the point of debriefing a KGB defector if we don’t use him to improve upon what we already know?’

Silas turned to the window; his lips were pressed tight together and his face was angry. From this first-floor room there was a view across the paddock all the way to the stream that Silas called his ‘river’. For a long time he watched the flecks of snow spinning in the air. ‘Drive slowly. It will freeze hard tonight,’ he said without looking round at me. He’d suppressed his anger and his body relaxed as the rage drained out of him.

‘No other way to drive in that old banger of mine.’

When he turned to me he had his smile in place. ‘Didn’t I hear you telling Frank that you’re buying something good from your brother-in-law?’ He never missed anything. He must have had superhuman hearing and, in defiance of the laws of nature, it improved with every year he aged. I had been telling Frank Harrington about it, and, in keeping with our curious father-son sort of relationship, Frank had told me to be very careful when I was driving it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A Rover 3500 saloon that a couple of tear-aways souped up to do one hundred and fifty miles an hour.’

‘With a V-8 engine that shouldn’t be too difficult.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You’ll surprise a few Sunday drivers with that one, Bernard.’

‘Yes, that’s what Tessa’s husband said. But until it’s ready I have to manage with the Ford. And in that I can’t surprise anyone.’

Silas leaned close and his manner was avuncular. ‘You’ve come out of the Kimber-Hutchinson business with a smile on your face, Bernard. I’m pleased.’ I couldn’t help noticing that his distant relative Fiona was now referred to by her maiden name, thus distancing both of us from her.

‘I don’t know about the smile,’ I said.

He ignored my retort. ‘Don’t start digging into that all over again. Let it go.’

‘You think that’s best?’ I said, to avoid giving him the reassurance he was asking for.

‘Leave all that to the people at Five. It’s not our job to chase spies,’ said Silas and opened the door of his study to let me out on to the landing.

‘Come along, children,’ I called. ‘Tea and cake and then we must leave.’

‘The Germans have a word for the results of such over-enthusiasm, don’t they,’ said Silas, who never knew when to stop. ‘Schlimmbesserung, an improvement that makes things worse.’ He smiled and patted my shoulder. There was no sign of anger now. Silas had become Uncle Silas again.

5

‘Why does anyone have to go to Berlin,’ I asked Dicky resentfully. I was at home: warm and comfortable and looking forward to Christmas Day.

‘Be sensible,’ said Dicky. ‘They’re getting this Miller woman’s body out of the Hohenzollern Canal. We can’t leave it to the Berlin cops, and a lot of questions will have to be answered. Why was she being moved? Who authorized the ambulance? And where the hell was she being moved to?’

‘It’s Christmas, Dicky,’ I said.

‘Oh, is it?’ said Dicky feigning surprise. ‘That accounts for the difficulty I seem to be having getting anything done.’

‘Don’t Operations know that we have something called the Berlin Field Unit?’ I said sarcastically. ‘Why isn’t Frank Harrington handling it?’

‘Don’t be peevish, old boy,’ said Dicky, who I think was enjoying the idea of ruining my Christmas. ‘We showed Frank how important this was by sending you over to supervise the arrest. And you interrogated her. We can’t suddenly decide that BFU must take over. They’ll say we’re unloading this one onto them because it’s the Christmas holiday. And they’d be right.’

‘What does Frank say?’

‘Frank isn’t in Berlin. He’s gone away for Christmas.’

‘He must have left a contact number,’ I said desperately.

‘He’s gone to some relatives in the Scottish Highlands. There have been gales and the phone lines are down. And don’t say send the local constabulary to find him because when I track him down, Frank will point out that he has a deputy on duty in Berlin. No, you’ll have to go, Bernard. I’m sorry, but there it is. And after all, you’re not married.’

‘Hell, Dicky. I’ve got the children with me and the nanny has gone home for Christmas with her parents. I’m not even on stand-by duty. I’ve planned all sorts of things over the holiday.’

‘With gorgeous Gloria, no doubt. I can imagine what sort of things you planned, Bernard. Bad luck, but this is an emergency.’

‘Who I spend my Christmas with is my personal business,’ I said huffily.

‘Of course, old chap. But let me point out that you introduced the personal note into this conversation. I didn’t.’

‘I’ll phone Werner,’ I said.

‘By all means. But you’ll have to go, Bernard. You are the person the BfV knows. I can’t get all the paperwork done to authorize someone else to work with them.’

‘I see,’ I said. That was the real reason, of course. Dicky was determined that he would not go back into the office for a couple of hours of paperwork and phoning.

‘And who else could I send? Tell me who could go and see to it.’

‘From what you say, it’s only going to be a matter of identifying a corpse.’

‘And who else can do that?’

‘Any of the BfV men who were in the arrest team.’

‘That would look very good on the documentation, wouldn’t it,’ said Dicky with heavy irony. ‘We have to rely on a foreign police service for our certified identification. Even Coordination would query that one.’

‘If it’s a corpse, Dicky, let it stay in the icebox until after the holiday.’

There was a deep sigh from the other end. ‘You can wriggle and wriggle, Bernard, but you’re on this hook and you know it. I’m sorry to wreck your cosy little Christmas, but it’s nothing of my doing. You have to go and that’s that. The ticket is arranged, and cash and so on will be sent round by security messenger tomorrow morning.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Daphne and I will be pleased to entertain the children round here, you know. Gloria can come round too, if she’d like that.’

‘Thanks, Dicky,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it.’

‘She’ll be safe with me, Bernard,’ said Dicky, and did nothing to disguise the smirk with which he said it. He’d always lusted after Gloria. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I think Daphne, his wife, knew it too. I hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

And so it was that, on Christmas Eve, when Gloria was with my children, preparing them for early bed so that Santa Claus could operate undisturbed, I was standing watching the Berlin police trying to winch a wrecked car out of the water. It wasn’t exactly the Hohenzollern Canal. Dicky had got that wrong; it was Hakenfelde, that industrialized section of the bank of the Havel River not far from where the Hohenzollern joins it.

Here the Havel widens to become a lake. It was so cold that the police doctor insisted the frogmen must have a couple of hours’ rest to thaw out. The police inspector had argued about it, but in the end the doctor’s opinion prevailed. Now the boat containing the frogmen had disappeared into the gloom and I was left with only the police inspector for company. The two policemen left to guard the scene had gone behind the generator truck, the noise of which never ceased. The police electricians had put flood lamps along the wharf to make light for the winch crew, so that the whole place was lit with the bright artificiality of a film set.

I stepped through the broken railing at the place where the car had gone into the water. Looking down over the edge of the jetty I could just make out the wobbling outline of the car under the dark oily surface. The winch, and two steadying cables, held it suspended there. For the time being, the car had won the battle. One steel cable had broken, and the first attempts to lift the car had ripped its rear off. That was the trouble with cars, said the inspector – they filled with water, and water weighs a ton per cubic metre. And this was a big car, a Citroën ambulance. To make it worse, its frame was bent enough to prevent the frogmen from getting its doors open.

The inspector was in his mid-fifties, a tall man with a large white moustache, its ends curling in the style of the Kaiser’s soldiers. It was the sort of moustache a man grew to make himself look older. ‘To think,’ said the inspector, ‘that I transferred out of the Traffic Department because I thought standing on point duty was too cold.’ He stamped his feet. His heavy jackboots made a crunching sound where ice was forming in the cracks between the cobblestones.

‘You should have kept to traffic,’ I said, ‘but transferred to the Nice or Cannes Police Department.’

‘Rio,’ said the inspector, ‘I was offered a job in Rio. There was an agency here recruiting ex-policemen. My wife was all in favour, but I like Berlin. There’s no town like it. And I’ve always been a cop; never wanted to be anything else. I know you from somewhere, don’t I? I remember your face. Were you ever a cop?’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about what I did for a living.

‘Right from the time I was a child,’ he continued. ‘I’m going back a long time now to the war and even before that. There was a traffic cop, famous all over Berlin. Siegfried they called him; I don’t know if that was his real name but everyone knew Siegfried. He was always on duty at the Wilhelmplatz, the beautiful little white palace where Dr Goebbels ran his Propaganda Ministry. There were always crowds of tourists there, watching the well-known faces that went in and out, and if there was any kind of crisis, big crowds would form there to try and guess what was going on. My father always pointed out Siegfried, a tall policeman in a long white coat. And I wanted a big white coat like the traffic police wear. And I wanted to have the ministers and the generals, the journalists and the film stars, say hello to me in that friendly way they always greeted him. There was a kiosk there on the Wilhelmplatz which sold souvenirs and they had postcard photos of all the Nazi bigwigs and I asked my father why there wasn’t a photo card of Siegfried on sale there. I wanted to buy one. My father said that maybe next week there would be one of Siegfried, and every week I looked but there wasn’t one. I decided that when I grew up I’d be the policeman in the Wilhelmplatz and I’d make sure they had my photo on sale in the kiosk. It’s silly, isn’t it, how such unimportant things change a man’s life?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I know you from somewhere,’ he said, looking at my face and frowning. I passed the police inspector my hip flask of brandy. He hesitated and took a look round the desolate yard. ‘Doctor’s orders,’ I joked. He smiled, took a gulp, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

‘My God, it’s cold,’ he said as if to explain his lapse from grace.

‘It’s cold and it’s Christmas Eve,’ I said.

‘Now I remember,’ he said suddenly. ‘You were in that football team that played on the rubble behind the Stadium. I used to take my kid brother along. He was ten or eleven; you must have been about the same age.’ He chuckled at the recollection and with the satisfaction of remembering where he’d seen me before. ‘The football team; yes. It was run by that crazy English colonel – the tall one with glasses. He had no idea about how to play football; he couldn’t even kick the ball straight, but he ran round the pitch waving a walking stick and yelling his head off. Remember?’

‘I remember,’ I said.

‘Those were the days. I can see him now, waving that stick in the air and yelling. What a crazy old man he was. After the match he’d give each boy a bar of chocolate and an apple. Most of the kids only went to get the chocolate and apple.’

‘You’re right,’ I said.

‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.’ He stood looking across the water for a long time and then said, ‘Who was in the ambulance? One of your people?’ He knew I was from London and guessed the rest of it. In Berlin you didn’t have to be psychic to guess the rest of it.

‘A prisoner,’ I said.

It was already getting dark. Daylight doesn’t last long on clouded Berlin days like this in December. The warehouse lights made little puff balls in the mist. Around here there were only cranes, sheds, storage tanks, crates stacked as high as tenements, and rusty railway tracks. Facing us far across the water were more of the same. There was no movement except the sluggish current. The great city around us was almost silent and only the generator disturbed the peace. Looking south along the river I could see the island of Eiswerder. Beyond that, swallowed by the mist, was Spandau – world-famous now, not only for its machine guns but for the fortress prison inside which the soldiers of four nations guarded one aged and infirm prisoner: Hitler’s deputy.

The police inspector followed my gaze. ‘Not Hess,’ he joked. ‘Don’t say the poor old fellow finally escaped?’

I smiled dutifully. ‘Bad luck getting Christmas duty,’ I said. ‘Are you married?’

‘I’m married. I live just round the corner from here. My parents lived in the same house. Do you know I’ve never been out of Berlin in all my life?’

‘All through the war too?’

‘Yes, all through the war I was living here. I was thinking of that just now when you gave me the drink.’ He turned up the collar of his uniform greatcoat. ‘You get old and suddenly you find yourself remembering things that you haven’t recalled in about forty years. Tonight for instance, suddenly I’m remembering a time just before Christmas in 1944 when I was on duty very near here: the gasworks.’

‘You were in the Army?’ He didn’t look old enough.

‘No. Hitler Youth. I was fourteen and I’d only just got my uniform. They said I wasn’t strong enough to join a gun crew, so they made me a messenger for the air defence post. I was the youngest kid there. They only let me do that job because Berlin hadn’t had an air raid for months and it seemed so safe. There were rumours that Stalin had told the Western powers that Berlin mustn’t be bombed so that the Red Army could capture it intact.’ He gave a sardonic little smile. ‘But the rumours were proved wrong, and on December fifth the Americans came over in daylight. People said they were trying to hit the Siemens factory, but I don’t know. Siemensstadt was badly bombed, but bombs hit Spandau, and Pankow and Oranienburg and Weissensee. Our fighters attacked the Amis as they came in to bomb – it was a thick overcast but I could hear the machine guns – and I think they just dropped everything as soon as they could and headed home.’