London Match (24 page)

But his observations were not confined to ornithology. He'd pinned a piece of paper to a removable shelf, that was propped against the window frame. It made a crude easel so that he could draw the landscape as seen from his room. The paper was some sort of brown wrapping paper, and to draw he was using the stub end of an old pencil and a fountain pen.

'I didn't know you were an artist, Erich . . . the perspective looks spot on. Your trees are a bit shaky though.'

'Trees are always difficult for me,' he confessed. 'The bare ones are easy enough, but the evergreens are difficult to draw.' Thoughtfully he added a couple of extra touches to the line of trees that surmounted the hill beyond the village. 'Do you like it?' he asked, indicating the drawing with his hand and not looking up from it.

'I love it,' I said. 'But they won't like it downstairs.'

'No?'

'They'll think you're compromising security by making a drawing of the moat and grounds and the walls and what's beyond them.'

'Then why put me on the second floor? If you don't want me to see over the wall, why put me here?'

'I don't know, Erich. It's not my idea to hold you here at all.'

'You'd put me into a four-star hotel, I suppose?'

'Something like that,' I said.

He shrugged to show that he didn't believe me. 'This is good enough. The food is good, the room is warm, and I can have as many hot baths as I wish. It is what I expected . . . better than I feared it might be.' This was not in line with what Bret had said about Stinnes and his complaints.

Without preamble I said, 'They released the male secretary. It was political: Bonn. We had enough evidence, but it was a political decision to let him go. We picked up the courier too. I thought we'd got a case officer at first, but it was just the courier.'

'What name?' said Stinnes. He was still looking at his landscape drawing.

'M
ü
ller — a woman. Do you know her?'

'I met her once. A Party member, a fanatic. I don't like using people like that.' He held up the pencil to show me. 'Do you have a penknife?'

'Radio operator,' I prompted him. I wondered if he liked holding some bits of information back so that I would feel clever at getting them out of him. Certainly he gave no sign of reticence at telling me the rest of what he knew.

'Correct. She came over to Potsdam for the course. That was when I met her. She didn't know I was from the Command Staff, needless to say.'

'She was working out of London, probably handling my wife's material,' I said.

'Are you sure?' He took my Swiss Army knife from me and sharpened his pencil very carefully. 'If I use my razor blade, it's no good for shaving. They only give one blade per week and always take the old one away.'

'It's a guess,' I admitted. 'Grow a beard.'

'It's probably a good guess. In our system we keep Communications completely separated from Operations, so I can't tell you for sure.' He passed the knife back to me and tried out the pencil on the edge of his picture. He made a lot of little scribbles, wearing it down to give the pencil an especially sharp point. Then he had another go at the trees.

'With two code names?' I said. 'One agent with two codes? Is that likely?'

Stinnes stopped toying with his drawing and looked at me, frowning, as if trying to understand what I was getting at. 'Of course, Communications staff are a law unto themselves. They have all sorts of crazy ideas, but I have never heard of such a thing.'

'And material kept coming after my wife defected,' I said.

He smiled. It was a grim smile that didn't extend to his cold eyes. 'The M
ü
ller woman is telling you this?'

'Yes, she is.' I kept it in the present tense. I didn't want him to know that the woman was lost to us.

'She is mad.' He looked at his drawing again. I said nothing. I knew he was reflecting on it all. 'Oh, she might have had more material, but operators never know the difference between top-rate material and day-to-day rubbish. The Müller woman is fooling you. What is it she is trying to get from you?' He made the trees a little taller. It looked better. Then he shaded the wall darker.

Think, Erich. It's important.'

He looked at me. 'Important? Are you trying to persuade yourself that there is another one of our people deeply embedded in London Central?'

'I want to know,' I said.

'You want to make a name for yourself. Is that what you mean?' He looked into my eyes and smoothed his thinning hair against the top of his head. It was wispy hair and the light from the window made it into a halo.

'That would be a part of it,' I admitted.

'I would have been told.' He pricked the sharp pencil point against the palm of his hand, not once but again and again like a sapper cautiously feeling for buried mines. 'If there was another well-placed agent in London Central, I would have been told.'

'Suppose the Müller woman had regular traffic direct with Moscow.'

'That's quite possible. But they would have told me. I was the senior man in Berlin. I would have known.' He stopped fidgeting with the pencil and put it into his top pocket. 'The Muller woman is trying to make you go round and round in circles. I'd advise you to disregard any suggestions about another KGB agent in London. It's the sort of thing that Moscow would like to start you wondering about.'

'Do you have enough to read?'

'I have the Bible,' he said. They gave me a Bible.'

'Is that what you're reading, the Bible?'

'It's always interested me, and reading it in English helps me learn. I am beginning to think that Christianity has a lot in common with Marxist-Leninism.'

'For instance?'

'God is dialectical materialism; Christ is Karl Marx; the Church is the Party, the elect is the proletariat, and the Second Coming is the Revolution.' He looked at me and smiled.

'How do heaven and hell fit into all that?' I asked.

He thought for a moment. 'Heaven is the socialist millennium, of course. I think hell must be the punishment of capitalists,'

'Bravo, Erich,' I said.

'You know I used to be with Section 44?'

Section 44 was the KGB's Religious Affairs Bureau. 'It was in your file,' I said. 'You left at the wrong time, Erich.'

'Because of Poland, you mean? Yes, the man running Section 44 these days is a general. But I would never have got that sort of promotion. They would have slotted less expert people in above me. Had I stayed there, I would still be a lieutenant. It's the way things are done in Russia.'

'It's the way things are done everywhere,' I said. 'So the Bible is enough for you?'

'A few books would be welcome.'

'I'll see what I can do,' I said. 'And I'll see if I can get you moved to somewhere more comfortable, but it might take time.' I took from my pocket five small packets of cheroots. They were evil smelling and I didn't want to give him a chance to light up before I left the room.

'What is time?' He displayed the palms of both hands. There was no humour in his gesture: just contemptuous mockery.

'Did you have to tell him that Bonn ordered the release of that guy?' said Bret. He was standing in the surveillance room with a set of headphones in his hands. 'That's lousy security, Bernard. We took a lot of trouble keeping that out of the newspapers.' It was a tiny dimly lit room with just enough space for the radio and TV equipment, although today there was nothing in use but the bugging equipment wired here from the second floor.

'Maybe you did, but every reporter in town knows about it, so don't think Moscow is puzzling. It's a two-way traffic, Bret. Stinnes has got to feel he's a part of what's going on.'

'You should be pushing harder. That's what I wanted you for, to help push the interrogation along faster.'

'I will, but I'm not the interrogator and I can't undo weeks of stupidity in one short interview, Bret,' I said. 'Easy does it. Let me move him out of here and establish a working relationship.'

'Hardly worth the journey down here,' Bret complained, putting the headphones on the shelf and switching off the light. 'I could have got a lot done this afternoon.'

'That's what I told you, but you insisted on coming with me.'

'I never know what you're likely to get up to when you're on your own.' The only light came from a small grimy skylight and Bret's face was completely in shadow. He put his hands into his trouser pockets so that his dark melton overcoat was held open. This aggressive stance, the clothes, and the lighting made him look like a still photo from some old gangster film.

'That makes me wonder why you chose me to work with you on this one,' I said. That much was true, very true.

He looked at me as if deciding whether to bother with a proper reply. Then he said, 'There's no one in the German Section with field experience comparable to yours. You're bright as hell, despite your lack of proper schooling and the chip you have on your shoulder about it. For most things concerning the German Section, you've got your own unofficial sources of information, and often you dig out material that no one else can get. You are straight. You make up your own mind, and you write your reports without giving a damn what anyone wants to hear. I like that.' He paused and just slightly flexed his leg as if his bad knee was troubling him. 'On the other hand, you put yourself and your personal problems before the Department. You're damned rude and I don't find your sarcastic remarks as amusing as some of the others do. You're insubordinate to the point of arrogance. You're selfish, reckless, and you never stop complaining.' 'You must have been reading my mail, Bret,' I said. It was interesting to see that Bret made no comment about what Stinnes had said about the Müller woman or about the suggestion that the KGB had another agent working inside London Central. Perhaps he thought it was just my way of drawing Stinnes out.

The Science Museum was quiet that morning. It was Saturday. The giggling, chewing, chatting, scuffling battalions of school children who are shepherded through it by glassy-eyed teachers on weekdays do not choose to visit such institutions in their own time. Especially when there's a football match on TV.

I was with the children and Gloria. It had become a regular Saturday routine: a visit to one of the South Kensington museums followed by lunch at Mario's restaurant in Brompton Road. Then she came back home with me and stayed until Sunday night, or sometimes Monday morning.

The aviation gallery on the top floor of the Science Museum was empty. We stood on the overhead walkway that provided a chance to be up among the old planes suspended from the roof. The children had run ahead to stare at the Spitfire, leaving me and Gloria with the dusty old Vickers Vimy that made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. We hadn't been talking about work, but I suddenly said, 'Do you know the sort of chits they fill out when someone has to go across to the Cabinet Office and ask questions? Pale green chits with lines and a little box for a rubber stamp. You know what I mean?'

'Yes,' she said. She leaned over the balcony of the walkway trying to see where the children were.

'Have you ever dealt with anyone in the Cabinet Office? Do you know anyone over there?'

'From time to tune I have to deal with some of them,' she said. She still was giving the conversation only perfunctory attention. She had picked up the phone handpiece to get a recorded account of the exhibit and I had to wait until she had finished. Then she offered the phone to me but I shook my head.

'It's going to rain,' she said. 'I should have brought an umbrella.' She had just come from the hairdresser's and rain is the hairdresser's friend. I looked out through the big windows. You could see across the rooftops of West London from here. The clouds were dark grey so that inside the hall it was gloomy. The huge planes were casting dark shadows on the exhibits below us.

When she'd put the earpiece down I said, 'Do you know anyone in the Cabinet Office? Do you know anyone I could talk to without official permission?'

'You want to go over there and make enquiries?' she said. She was alert now and turned to watch my face. 'I suppose so, if that's what you want.' She smiled.

It was her immediate cheerful complaisance that made me feel guilty. 'No, forget it,' I said. I heard the children clattering down the stairs at the far end and watched them emerge from under the walkway. Billy made straight for the aero engines. He'd always liked the engines, even when he was small.