Absolute Friends (25 page)

"I do not remember how I walked the short distance from the drawing room to the desk in his study where he provided me with the necessary writing paper and pen. My head was swimming with repulsive and simultaneous revelations. _From the day of his incarceration in the Soviet Union__--do you know what those words meant to me? That on his arrival in Russian prison camp my father at once became a stool pigeon and gained the protection of the politkommissars, who recruited him as their spy and trained him for the future use of East German State Security. That when he returned to the GDR and set up as a good priest in Leipzig, any member of his flock who had oppositional tendencies was tempted to confide them to him, not knowing he was a professional Judas. Until this moment I believed I had plumbed the depths of my father's baseness. Now I realized I had been living in a fool's paradise. If there was any single moment when I came face to face with the idiocy of my decision to throw in my lot with the Communist cause, it was this. If a desire for retribution has a moment of conception, this was when it occurred. I do not remember what words of sycophantic adoration I wrote through my secret tears of rage and hatred. I remember the Professor's consoling hand on my shoulder as he informed me that I was henceforth the bearer of a considerable state secret. The Party, he said, was therefore faced with the choice of returning me to the White Hotel for an indefinite period, or permitting me to enter the portals of state security in a lowly capacity so that my movements could at all times be observed. In the short term, it was accepted that I would have some transient value as an authority on aspects of West Berlin's disintegrating anarchist and Maoist groups. In the longer view, he hoped I would aspire to become a dedicated Chekist, exhibiting my father's aptitude for conspiracy, and following in his footsteps. Such was the Professor's ambition for me. Such was the course of action that, as my father's most loyal friend and controller, he had personally urged upon his illustrious comrades. 'Now it is up to you, Sasha,' he told me, 'to show them I was right.' He assured me that my future path in the Stasi would be hard and long, and that much would depend on the extent to which I submitted my temperamental personality to the Party's will. His final words were his most vile. 'Always remember, Sasha, that henceforth you are the Comrade Professor's favourite child.'"

Does the story end here? For the time being it seems so, for Sasha, volatile as ever, has looked at his watch and, with an exclamation, sprung to his feet.

"Teddy. We must be quick. They will waste no time."

"To do what?" For now it is Mundy's turn to lose his way.

"I must seduce you. Secure you for the cause of Peace and Progress. Not all at once, but from me a compelling overture, and from you a less than convincing rejection of my advances. And tonight you will be morose--it is arranged, yes?"

_Yes, tonight it is arranged that I will be morose.__

"And a little drunk?"

_Also a little drunk, though not as drunk as I may appear.__

Sasha takes the tape recorder from his pocket, then a fresh cassette, which he brandishes in Mundy's face in warning. He slips the cassette into its housing, presses the start button, replaces the recorder in an inside pocket of his jacket, puts on his beret and with it the impassive scowl of the apparatchik who has submitted his temperamental personality to the Party's will. His voice hardens and acquires a hectoring edge.

"Teddy, I will ask you this frankly. Are you telling me you have turned your back on everything we fought for together in Berlin? That you are leaving the revolution to take care of itself--_undermining__ it even? That you are in love with your bank account, and your sweet little house, and you have put your social awareness to _sleep?__ Okay: we didn't change the world that time! We were kids, playing soldiers of the revolution. But what about joining the _real__ revolution? Your country's fallen under the spell of a fascistic warmonger--_but you don't give a fuck!__ You are the paid lackey of an antidemocratic propaganda machine--_and you don't give a fuck!__ Is this what you will be telling your petit bourgeois when it grows up? _I didn't give a fuck?__ We need you, Teddy! It makes me sick to watch you, for two nights already, how you flirt with us, show us one tit then put it back in your shirt, then show us the other one! Smirking while you sit there with the fence halfway up your arse!" His voice drops. "You know something else, Teddy? Shall I tell you something in very great confidence, just you and me and the rabbits? We're not proud. We understand human nature. When it's necessary we even _pay__ people to listen to the voice of their political conscience."

Everyone is charmed by the sight of a lanky Englishman on a bobby's bicycle arriving at the British Embassy gates dressed in a dark suit and tie and cycle-clips. And Mundy, as always when he is called upon to do so, plays the part for all it's worth. He sounds the silver bell on his handlebars as he weaves precariously between parking and departing cars, he yells, "Pardon me, madam," to a diplomatic couple whom he narrowly misses scything down, he flings up an arm to assist the braking process, and gives a drayman's "Whoa, there, girl!" as he brings his steed to a halt and takes up his place at the back of the ragged queue of fellow guests--Czech officials, British cultural representatives, dance masters and mistresses, organizers and performers. Shuffling his bike towards the sentry box, he chatters merrily with whomever he happens to be alongside, and when it's his turn to show his passport and invitation card, he takes exaggerated umbrage at the suggestion that he might leave his bicycle in the street rather than inside the embassy compound.

"Wouldn't dream of it, old boy! Your gallant citizens would pinch it in five minutes cold. Got a bike shed? Bike stand? Anywhere you say except on the roof. How about over there in the corner?"

He's in luck. His protests have been heard by a member of the embassy staff who happens to be hovering at the opening of the tented walkway that leads to the front door.

"Problem?" he inquires blandly, taking a casual look at Mundy's passport. He is the chubby man with circular spectacles who complained that Mundy had bowled him out first ball.

"Well, not really, officer," says Mundy facetiously. "I just need somewhere to park my bike."

"Here. Hand it over. I'll shove it round the back. You'll be going home on it, I take it?"

"Absolutely, if I'm sober. Got to get my deposit back."

"Well, give me a yell when you decide it's time to go. If I'm AWOL, ask for Giles. No troubles on the road?"

"None."

He walks. This is how tarts feel. Who are you, what do you want and how much will you pay for me? He is in Prague on a perfect moonlit night, striding down cobbled alleys. He is drunk, but drunk to order. He could drink twice as much and not be drunk. His head is swirling, but from Sasha's story, not from alcohol. He feels the weightlessness that he felt in Berlin on Christmas Eve when Sasha told him for the first time about the Herr Pastor. He feels the shame that comes on him when he encounters pains he can only imagine, never share. He is walking Sasha-style, one leg leading as he pounds unsteadily along. His head is everywhere, now with Kate at home, now with Sasha in his White Hotel. The streets are lit by wrought-iron lanterns. Dark shrouds of washing drift across them. The ornate houses are slatternly, their doorways barred, windows shuttered. The eloquent silence of the city accuses him, the atmosphere of quelled revolt is palpable. While we gallant students of Berlin were hoisting our red flags over the rooftops, you poor bastards were pulling yours down and getting crushed by Soviet tanks for your trouble.

Am I being followed? _First assume it, then confirm it, then relax.__ Am I sufficiently morose, distraught? Am I wrestling with a great decision, angry with Sasha for putting me on the spot? He no longer knows which parts of him are pretending. Perhaps all of him is. Perhaps he has never been anything but pretended man. A natural. A naturally pretended man.

At the embassy reception he was also a natural, the soul of wit. The British Council should be proud of him, but he knows it isn't. _Then I'm sorry too,__ says Personnel, the fairy godmother he never had.

From the embassy, he has ridden the policeman's bicycle triumphantly back to his hotel and left it in the forecourt for Sasha to reclaim. Did it feel different after Giles had removed its contents? Lighter? No, but I did. He has again telephoned Kate from his hotel room and this time he made a better job of it, even if in retrospect his end of the conversation sounds more like a letter home from school.

_This city is more beautiful than you can imagine, darling... I just so wish you were here, darling... I never knew I liked watching dance so much, darling... Tell you what, I've had a brilliant idea!__--it comes to him as he speaks. He hadn't thought of it till now--_When I get home, let's take out a couple of those season tickets to the Royal Ballet. The Council might even come up with the cost. After all, it's their fault I've become a dance junkie. Oh and to confirm: the Czechs are really super. It's always the way, isn't it, with people who have to make do on next to nothing?... And you too, darling. Deeply, truly... And our baby. Sleep well. Tschüss.__

He _is__ being followed. He has assumed it, he has confirmed it, but he has not relaxed. Across the road from him, he has recognized the staid couple who were sitting in the corner of the bar last night. Behind him two dumpy men in baggy hats and raincoats are playing Grandmother's Footsteps with him at thirty yards' distance. Abandoning the tenets of the Edinburgh School of Deportment, he stops, squares himself, swings round, cups his hands to his mouth and screams blue murder at his pursuers.

"Get off my fucking back! Get out of my hair, all of you!" His voice ricochets up and down the street. Windows are slapping open, curtains are being cautiously parted. "Fuck off, you ridiculous little people. _Now!__" Then he plonks himself on a convenient Hapsburg bench and demonstratively folds his arms. "I've told you what to do, so now let's see you do it!"

The footsteps behind him have stopped. The staid couple across the road have disappeared up a side street. In about half a minute they'll be popping up pretending to be someone else. Great. Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are. A large car crawls into the square but he refuses to be interested in it. It rolls past him, stops, reverses. Let it. His arms are still folded. He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about.

The car has drawn up. He hears a door open. And stay open. He hears footsteps climbing towards him. The square is on a slope, and he is at the upper end of it, which is why there has to be a short climb, then a leveling out as the footsteps cross the cobbled platform and come to a halt a yard away. But Mundy is too fed up, too confused and put upon, to lift his head.

Fancy German shoes. Mushroom-colored leather with brogue toe caps. Brown trousers with cuffs. A hand descends on his shoulder and gently shakes it. A voice that he refuses to recognize speaks perfumed German English to him.

"Ted? Is it you? Ted?"

After a very long pause, Mundy agrees to look up and sees a parked black saloon at the curbside with Lothar at the wheel and Sasha in his beret peering at him from the rear seat. He looks higher and sees the elegant features of the silken-haired Professor as he gazes down on him with fatherly concern.

"Ted. My dear fellow. You remember me. Wolfgang. Thank God we found you. You look all in. I understand you had a jolly interesting conversation with Sasha this afternoon. This is not the behavior we expect from a disciple of the late, great Dr. Mandelbaum. Why don't we go somewhere quiet and talk about God and the world?"

Mundy stares at him for a while in mystification. Gradually he lets the penny drop. "And why don't you move your fucking shadow," he suggests, and remains seated, his face buried in his hands, until the Professor, with Sasha's assistance, carefully raises him to his feet and guides him to the car.

_Traitors are opera stars, Edward. They have nervous breakdowns, crises of conscience and outrageous needs. The Wolfgangs of this world know that. If you don't make it hard for them they'll never believe you were worth buying.__

A classic Cold War double-agent operation is taking its first cautious steps towards consummation. If the seduction is agonizingly slow, that is because Ted Mundy in his many parts turns out to be a master of prevarication.

At an international convention of Egyptologists in Bucharest he flourishes a tantalizing sample of the sort of material he thinks he might be able to provide: a top secret plan to disrupt a forthcoming World Federation of Trade Unions in Warsaw--but can he bear to deceive his colleagues? His tempters hasten to reassure him. In the service of the true democracy, they tell him, such scruples are misplaced.

At a book fair in Budapest he provides an enticing, if retrospective, overview of how anti-Communist disinformation is fed to the Third World press. But the risk he took still scares him. He'll have to think about it. His tempters wonder aloud whether fifty thousand capitalist dollars will assist his thought processes.

At the Leningrad Festival of Peace and Song, exactly at the point where the Professor and his people dare to believe they have landed their fish, Mundy throws a convincing five-star tantrum about the proposed terms of his remuneration. What proof can they give him, when he shows up at the Bank Julius Bär in Geneva five years from now and utters the magic password, that the cashier will hand over the cash and not ring for the police? It takes a five-day seminar of international oncologists in Sofia to iron out the final details. A discreet but lavish dinner in the upper room of a grand hotel overlooking Lake Iskur marks the breakthrough.

Faking illness to Kate and his notional employers at the British Council, Mundy allows himself to be spirited from Sofia to East Berlin. In the Professor's villa in Potsdam where Sasha was first told that his father the Herr Pastor was a Stasi spy, glasses are raised to the brilliant new agent at the heart of Britain's subversive propaganda machine, and his recruiter, Sasha. Seated shoulder to shoulder at the center of the candlelit table, the two friends proudly listen as the Professor reads aloud a telegram of congratulation from his masters in Moscow.