London Match (3 page)

'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 M
ü
ller; I may as well tell you that because you will soon find out. Hugo M
ü
ller. 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 run 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.