London Match (47 page)

'Maybe not. But that's not the way I'd treat someone like her. Imagine that
we
had been running a truly remarkable source in the KGB offices in Moscow. Would we let a case officer or radio operator for that agent go back over there for ten minutes, let alone a couple of hours? You know we wouldn't.'

'The KGB are different,' said Werner. He drove the spoon around the table, cornering recklessly when it came to the fruit bowl.

'Maybe they are, but my supposition isn't complete yet. What if they not only had one remarkable source but two remarkable sources? And one of them is still in place, Werner — a source right in London Central still going strong. Are the KGB so different that they'd still let the Miller woman go and put her head in a noose? Would they take a chance on her being arrested and telling us enough to blow their other agent?'

'It's no good trying to think the way they think. That's the first thing I had to learn when I started dealing with them. They don't think like us. And you're being wise after the event. They had no idea that we were going to move in on that party at Wannsee. To them it must have seemed like the most routine and safe assignment possible.' Werner tried to drink from the cup he'd already emptied. Even when he knew it was empty, he tipped his head right back to get the final drips. He hadn't touched his brandy.

'I still find it difficult to believe they'd take the risk,' I said.

'What risk? Our people risk everything when they go through the Wall. They risk the detailed inspection of documents, the guards watching every move they make and listening to everything they say. There are the secret marks made on the passports and travelling papers. Everyone going East is scrutinized under a microscope no matter who they are. But what do their people risk when they come to spy on the West? No one crossing to our side is inspected very closely. Being a KGB agent is one of the safest jobs going. We're a walkover, Bernie. That woman's job was a sinecure. It was a million-to-one chance that she was swept up by the arrest team.'

'And even then she got away with it.'

'Exactly. All she had to do was make some gesture at suicide and she's conveniently moved to the Steglitz Clinic, all ready for the rescue. Damn it, Bernie, why are we so soft?'

'If you are right, Werner, it means that the KGB don't know what she divulged to us about the radio codes.'

Werner turned the cup in the saucer and thought about that and didn't answer.

I pressed him. 'Would they have put her right back into that job at the Rathaus if she'd admitted to giving us a confession?'

'Probably not.'

'She didn't tell them, Werner. I'd bet on that. Perhaps they were impressed by their own efficiency. Maybe they were so pleased at themselves for rescuing her so swiftly and smoothly that it never occurred to them that they were already too late.'

'I know what you're thinking,' said Werner.

'What am I thinking?'

'That she can be turned. You think we should blackmail her, threaten to tell the KGB that she confessed. . . .'

'And get her to work for us? A tired old woman like that? What would she tell us . . . all the latest dope on the ration-card issues? All the town hall gossip? No, Werner, I wasn't thinking of turning her.'

'What then?'

'I don't know.'

Werner changed the subject. 'Do you remember that terrible place under the rubble in Koch Strasse, where the old man made the model planes?'

'The bearded one who built a workshop out of bits of packing cases?' I remembered it well. We were kids; the 'old man' was probably no more than thirty, but there were lots of very elderly thirty-years-olds in Berlin at that time. He'd been a combat engineer in an armoured division, a skilled fitter who scraped a living by selling model aircraft to the conquerors. Even as a child I'd seen the irony of him sitting in the bombed rubble of central Berlin and making so lovingly the model B-17 bombers that the American airmen bought as souvenirs. He was a fierce-looking man with a crippled arm. We called him 'Black Peter' and when we went to watch him working he'd sometimes let us help him with sandpapering or boiling up the smelly animal glue.

'Did you know that the cellar he lived in was part of the prison cells under Prinz-Albrecht Strasse?' Prinz-Albrecht Strasse was the guarded way in which German adults of that time referred to Gestapo headquarters.

'I thought the Gestapo building was on the Eastern side.'

'I was there last week with a friend of mine, a photographer who's doing a magazine article — photos of the graffiti on the Wall. Some of it's very funny.'

'Only from this side,' I said. 'Drink your brandy, Werner. It was a Christmas present from Uncle Silas.'

'Anyway, I walked back to look at the place where we used to visit Black Peter. It's all been levelled. They're building there. I found a big billboard that had fallen on its face. I picked it up and it was a notice — in four languages, so it must be old — saying
you are now STANDING ON THE SITE OF THE GESTAPO PRISON WHERE MANY PATRIOTS DIED.

'Is Black Peter's cellar still there?'

'No, the bulldozers went over it. But there in the middle of the rubble someone had placed a small bunch of flowers, Bernie.'

'Near the sign?'

'The sign was face down. Someone had gone out to that desolate place and put an expensive bunch of flowers on the ground. No one walks across that empty site from one year to the next. How many Berliners know that that heap of rubble is the old Gestapo prison. Can you imagine someone taking flowers out there to remember someone . . .? After all these years. Fancy someone still doing that, Bernie. Like a secret little ritual. It made me shiver.'

'I suppose it would,' I said. I was slightly embarrassed by the depth of Werner's feelings. 'It's a strange city.'

'Don't you ever miss it?'

'Berlin? Yes, sometimes I do,' I admitted.

'It's an amazing town. I've lived there all my life and yet I still discover things that astound me. I wish my father had lived a little longer . . . I couldn't live anywhere else,' said Werner. For him and for me, Berlin represented some part of our fathers' lives that we still hoped to discover.

I said, 'And you're the one who keeps talking about retiring to live in the sun.'

'Because Zena would love it, Bernie. She's always talking about living somewhere warm and sunny. I suppose we will one day. If it made Zena happy, I could put up with it.'

'Talking of bouquets, do you remember that day we trailed Black Peter to see where he was going?'

'I don't know who was more frightened, him or us,' said Werner.

'Us,' I said. 'Remember how he kept getting off his bicycle and looking back?'

'I wonder how much he paid for that big bunch of flowers.'

'A week's work at least,' I said. 'Did you know it was the Jewish cemetery?'

'Didn't you?'

'Not at the time,' I said.

'Every Jew knows it.' For a moment I had forgotten how Werner's Jewish father had survived the Nazi regime by digging graves in a Jewish cemetery, a job no 'Aryan' was permitted to do. 'The Jewish school and the Jewish old-age home were there too. Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse was the heart of Berlin's old Jewish quarter, dating back hundreds of years.'

'Yes, I knew the Jewish old-age home. That was where Berlin Jews were taken and held, prior to being transported to the East.'

'It's strange that they chose such a very public place,' said Werner. 'In other cities the Jews were assembled at railway sidings or empty factory sites. But here they were right in the city centre, a short step from Unter den Linden. From the neighbouring apartment blocks and office buildings the roll calls and loading could be seen by hundreds of local people.'

'He chained his bicycle to the gate, I remember, and you said Black Peter couldn't be a Jew, he was in the Army.'

'Then we saw that the graves were marked with
crosses
,' said Werner. 'There must have been two hundred of them.'

'The way he put the flowers on the grave I guessed it was a relative. He knelt at the grave and said a prayer. He knew we were watching by then.'

'I could tell he wasn't a Jew when he crossed himself,' said Werner, 'but I still didn't realize what it was all about. Who could have guessed that they'd bury all those SS men in the old Jewish cemetery?'

'The bodies were from the fighting round the S-Bahn station B
ö
rse. The first orders the Red Army gave, when the fighting stopped, was to start burying the corpses. I suppose the old Jewish cemetery in Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse was the nearest available place.'

'The Russians were frightened of typhus,' said Werner.

'But if the cemetery was very old, it must have been full,' I said.

'No. In 1943 it was all dug up and the graves destroyed. Berlin was declared
judenrein
— cleared of Jews — about that time. The cemetery grounds stood empty from then until the end of the fighting.'

'I thought he was going to kill you when he caught you.' He'd hidden behind some bushes and grabbed Werner as we were leaving.

'I was always a little scared of him; he was so strong. Remember how he used to bend those bits of metal when he was making stands for the planes?'

'We were just kids, Werner. I think we liked to pretend he was dangerous. But Black Peter was miserable and starving, like half the population.'

'He was frightened. I think he must have found out your father was an English officer.'

'Do you think Black Peter was with his brother in the SS?' I asked.

'Do SS men say prayers? I don't know. I just believed everything he told us at the time. But if he wasn't in the fighting with his brother, how would he have known where he was buried.'

I said, 'Remember the evening we went back there and you brought a flashlight to see the name on the grave?'

They weren't real front-line soldiers . . . clerks from Prinz-Albrecht Strasse and police headquarters, cooks, and Hitler Youth. What terrible luck to be killed when the war was so nearly over.'

'I wonder who decided to give them all proper markers with name, rank and unit.'

'It wasn't the Red Army,' said Werner, 'you can bet on that. I go past there sometimes. It's a memorial park nowadays. Moses Mendelssohn's grave is there and they've given him a new stone.'

'I suppose we shouldn't have followed him. He never forgave us for finding out his little secret. We weren't welcome in his cellar after that.' From the kitchen I heard the sound of the dishwasher starting. It was a very noisy machine and Gloria only switched it on when she was finished. The ladies are coming with more coffee,' I said.

'I'll talk to her,' said Werner, as if he'd been thinking of the Miller woman all the time. 'Maybe it will come to nothing, but I'll try.'

'Better do nothing, Werner. It's a departmental problem; let the Department solve it. No sense in you getting into trouble.'

'I'll sound her out,' said Werner.

'No, Werner. And that's an order.'

'Whatever you say, Bernie.'

'I mean it, Werner. Don't go near her.'

Then Gloria came in holding a jug of fresh coffee. She said, 'What have you men been talking about?'

'What we always talk about: naked girls,' I said.

Gloria thumped me between the shoulder blades before she poured out coffee for all four of us.

Zena Volkmann laughed; she was excited. She was hardly into the room before she said, 'Werner, Gloria has been showing me an antique American quilt that Bernard bought for her. Can we buy one, Werner dearest? Appliqu
é
work — a hundred and fifty years old. I've got the address of the shop. They cost an absolute fortune, but it would look wonderful on our bed. It would be a sort of anniversary present for us.'

'Of course, my darling.'

'Isn't he a perfect husband?' said Zena, leaning over and cuddling Werner and planting a kiss on his ear.

'Remember what I said, Werner. For the time being, do nothing.'

'I remember,' said Werner.

'If you don't want that brandy, Werner, I'll drink it.'

Gloria expressed her love for me with such desperate intensity that I was frightened by it. Was it, I wondered, the unique passion that she wanted it to be? Was it the one and only chance for us both to find everlasting happiness? Or were these ideas just a measure of her youth? She could be so many different people: amusing companion, shrewd colleague, sulky child, sexy bedmate, and concerned mother to my two children. Sometimes I saw her as the fulfilment of all my hopes and dreams; at others I saw in her just a beautiful young girl balanced on the edge of womanhood and myself as a self-deluding middle-aged lecher.