London Match (23 page)

'Yes,' I said. 'But a Russian remembers it also as the widely used excuse for the injustices, imprisonments, and massacres by Stalin.'

'You're a goddamned encyclopedia brain, Samson,' said Bret. 'And this guy Stinnes is a tricky little shit.'

I nodded and leaned back in the real leather. For security reasons the senior staff were expected to use the car pool for duty trips, and the only chauffeur-driven car was that provided to the Director-General, but Bret Renssellaer cared nothing for all that. The Belgravia residence his family had maintained in London since before World War I came complete with servants and motorcars. When Bret became a permanent fixture at London Central there was no way to ask him to give up his pampered lifestyle and start driving himself around in some car appropriate to his departmental rank and seniority.

'And here we are,' said Bret. He'd been reading the transcript of his previous talks with Stinnes and now he put the typewritten pages back into his case. His reading hadn't left him in a very happy mood.

Berwick House, a fine old mansion of red brick, was built long before that building material became associated with new and undistinguished provincial colleges. It was an eighteenth-century attempt to imitate one of Wren's country mansions. But the War Office official who chose to commandeer the whole estate just after World War II started was no doubt attracted by the moat that surrounded the house.

The house couldn't be seen from the road; it only came into view after the car turned in at the weathered sign that announced that Berwick House was a Ministry of Pensions training school. I suppose that was the most unattractive kind of establishment that the occupiers could think of. There was a delay at the gate lodge. We went through the outer gate and then pulled into the gravel patch where there were detection devices to check every vehicle. They knew we were coming and Bret's shiny black Bentley was well known to them, but they went through the formal procedure. Ted Riley even wanted to see our identification and that of Albert the chauffeur. Ted was an elderly man who had long ago worked for my father. I knew him well but he gave no sign of recognition.

'Hello, Ted.'

'Good morning, sir.' He was not a man who would presume on old friendships.

Ted had been an Intelligence Corps captain in Berlin after the war, but he got involved with some black-market dealers in Potsdamer Platz and my father had transferred him out uncomfortably quickly. Ted had given my mother whole Westphalian hams from time to time, and when my father discovered that Ted had dabbled in the black market, he was furious at what he thought was some kind of attempt to involve us. Ted was white-haired now, but he was still the same man who used to give me his chocolate ration every week
>when I was small. Ted Riley waved us through. The second man opened the electric gates and the third man phoned to the guard box at the house.span>

'They're rude bastards,' said Bret, as if his definition was something I should write down and consult at future visits.

'They have a bloody awful job, Bret,' I said.

'They should use Defence Ministry police down here. These people are full of crap. Identity. They know me well enough.'

'Ministry of Defence police look like cops, Bret. The whole idea is that these people wear civilian clothes and look like civilians.'

'This bunch look like civilians, all right,' said Bret scornfully. 'They look like senior citizens. Can you imagine how they'd handle a real attempt to break into this place?'

'At least they're reliable and don't attract attention locally. They're all carefully vetted, and Ted Riley, who's in charge, is a man I'd stake my life on. The number-one priority here is that we have people on guard duty who won't take bribes from newspaper reporters or smuggle gin for the inmates.' When he didn't answer I added, 'They're not supposed to be able to repulse an armoured division.'

'I'm glad you told me,' said Bret sarcastically. 'That makes me feel much better about them.' He stared out as we passed the Nissen huts where the guards lived and at the slab-sided grey structures that were sometimes used for conferences. The landscape was brown and bare, so that in places the alarms and wires had become visible.

We went over the old bridge across the moat. It was only when the car turned into the courtyard at the rear of the building that its true condition could be seen. It was like a film set: the east wing was little more than a fa
ç
ade supported by huge slabs of timber. This side of the house had been burned to the ground by incendiary bombs jettisoned by a Luftwaffe pilot trying desperately to gain height. He'd failed and the Heinkel crashed, six miles away after taking a small section of steeple from the village church.

London Debriefing Centre was an updated version of what used to be called the 'London District Cage', the place where the War Crimes Investigation Unit imprisoned important Nazis awaiting trial. Signs of those days hadn't entirely disappeared: there were still the remnants of old wartime posters to be seen in some of the offices, and defacing the walls of some of the subterranean 'hard-rooms' — a polite departmental euphemism for prison cells — there were the curious runelike marks that prisoners use to keep track of time.

The LDC senior administration staff were all there when we arrived. Their presence was no doubt due to the fact that Bret had now taken over liaison duties. On my previous visits to Berwick House I'd wandered in and out with only a perfunctory hello and scribbled signature, but Bret was important enough for both the Governor and Deputy Governor to be in their offices.

The Governor, still in his middle thirties, was a huge man with heavy jowls, black hair brushed tight against his skull, and a carefully manicured hairline moustache, the sort of thing Valentine wore when being a rotter. To complete the effect, he was smoking a cigarette in an amber cigarette holder. Like his Deputy, he was dressed in black pants, white shin and plain black tie. I had the feeling that they would both have preferred the whole staff to be in uniform, preferably one with plenty of gold braid.

The Governor's office was in fact a large panelled room with comfortable armchairs and an impressive fireplace. The only justification for calling it an office was a small desk in the corner together with two metal filing cabinets and a box of small file cards on the windowsill. He offered us a drink and wanted us to sit down and chat about nothing in particular, but Bret declined.

'Let me see,' said the Governor, reaching for his little file cards and walking his fingertips along the edges of them as if Stinnes wasn't the only person they were holding. 'Sadoff . . . ah, here we are: Sadoff, Nikolai.' From the box he plucked a photo of Erich Stinnes and slapped it on the desk top with the air of a man winning a poker game. The photo showed Stinnes staring into the camera and holding across his chest a small board with a number.

'He usually calls himself Stinnes,' I said.

The Governor looked up as if seeing me for the first time. 'We don't let people indulge their fantasies here at the Debriefing Centre. Let them use a pseudonym and you invite them to invent the rest of it.' He put down his cigarette and pulled a card out of the box far enough to read the handwriting on it, but he'd kept his little finger in position so that he hadn't lost the place. I suppose you learn little tricks like that when you spend a lifetime counting paper clips.

'When was he last interviewed?' Bret asked.

'We are letting him stew for a few days,' said the Governor. He smiled. 'He began to be very tiresome.'

'What did he do?' Bret asked.

The Governor looked at his bearded Deputy who said, 'He shouted at me when I took some books away from him. A childish display of temper, no more than that. But you have to let him see who's the boss.'

'Is he locked up?' I said.

'He's confined to his room,' said the Governor.

'We're trying to get information from him,' I explained patiently. 'We're in a hurry.'

'Life and death, is it?' the Governor asked with a not quite hidden edge of sarcasm in his tone.

'That's right,' I said, responding in the same manner.

He was smoking the cigarette in the amber holder again. 'It always is with you chaps,' said the Governor, smiling like an adult playing along with a children's game. 'But you can't hurry these things. The first thing is to establish the relationship between the staff and the prisoner. Only then can you get down to the real nub of the intelligence.' He sat down in a chair that was far too small for him and crossed his legs.

'I'll try and remember that,' I said.

He didn't look at me; he looked at Bret and said, 'If you want to see him, you can, but I prefer him not to be permitted out of his room.'

'And there was the medical,' the bearded Deputy reminded his boss.

'Ah, yes.' The Governor's voice was sad as he put the cards and photo away. 'He twice refused to let the doctor examine him. We can't have that. If anything happened to him, there'd be hell to pay, and you chaps would put the blame on me.' Big smile. 'And you'd be right to do so.'

'So what's the position now?' Bret asked.

'The doctor refused to attempt an examination unless Sadoff was willing and cooperative. So we've deferred it until next week. But meanwhile we don't even have a note of his height and weight and so on.' He looked up at us. I suppose both Bret and I were looking worried. The Governor said, 'It's nothing new to us. We've seen all this before. By next week he'll be willing enough, have no fear.'

Bret said, 'It sounds as if it's developed into a contest of wills.'

'I don't enter into contests,' said the Governor with a closed-mouth smile. 'I'm in charge here. The detainees do as I say. And certainly I won't allow any one of them to avoid a physical examination.'

'We'll have a word with him,' said Bret.

'I'll come with you,' said the Governor. He heaved himself to his feet.

'That won't be necessary,' said Bret.

'I afraid it will,' said the Governor.

I could see that Bret was becoming more and more angry, so I said to him, ‘I not sure the Governor's security clearance would be sufficient, considering the subject to be discussed.'

There was of course no particular subject on the agenda, but Bret got the idea quickly enough. That's quite true,' said Bret. He turned to the Governor and said, 'Better we keep to the regulations, Governor. From what you say, Stinnes might well make a written complaint about something or other. If that happens, I'd like to make sure you're completely in the clear.'

'In the clear?' said the Governor indignantly. But when Bret made no supplementary explanation, he sat down heavily, moved some papers around, and said, 'I've got a great deal of work to get through here. If you're quite sure you can manage on your own, by all means carry on.'

I went in alone. Erich Stinnes looked content — as much as anyone locked up in Berwick House and left to the mercies of the Governor and his Deputy could have looked content. I knew which room they'd choose for him. It was up on the second floor; cream-painted walls and a plain metal-frame bed, with a print of a naval battle on the wall. That was the room that had the microphones. And the mirror over the sink could be changed so that a TV camera in the next room could film through it.

They'd replaced the light cotton suit he'd worn in Mexico with a heavier English one. It wasn't a perfect fit but it looked good enough. His spectacles flashed with the light from the window as he turned round to see me. 'Oh, it's you,' he said, with no emotion to reveal whether he was happy or disappointed to see me. He'd been standing near the window sketching.

Stinnes was forty years old, a thin bony figure with Slavic features and circular gold-rimmed glasses behind which quick intelligent eyes glittered, and made an otherwise nondescript face hard. He might have been taken for an absent-minded professor, but Sadoff — who preferred his operational name of Stinnes — had been until a few weeks ago a KGB major. Married twice, with a grown-up son who was trying to get into Moscow University, he'd defected and thus got rid of a troublesome wife and been paid a quarter of a million dollars for his services. For such a man, time was not pressing; he was youngish and he was Russian. It was imbecilic to think that 'letting him stew for a few days' would have any effect upon him. I'd never seen him looking more relaxed.

I went to look at his drawing. He must have spent most of the daylight hours at the window. There was a copy of the
Reader's Digest Book of British Birds
with scraps of paper to mark some of the pages. A school notebook was crammed with his spiky writing. He'd diligently recorded the birds he'd sighted.

A bird identification book was the first thing he'd asked for when he arrived at Berwick House. He'd also asked for a pair of binoculars, a request that was denied. There had been a discussion about whether Erich's birdwatching was genuine or whether he had some other reason for wanting the binoculars. If it was a pretence, he'd certainly devoted a lot of time and energy to it. There were sketches of the birds too, and notes about their songs.