Spy Line (23 page)

This evening the front drive was empty, the cars locked away. Her parents were spending ten days at their holiday villa in Spain. Gloria went through an elaborate routine of unlocking doors and switching off burglar alarms within the prescribed sixty seconds. Then we went inside.

The house smelled of a syrupy perfume resembling violets. Gloria said their cleaning woman was coming in every morning and systematically ‘shampooing’ the carpets. ‘I’ll make you a cup of coffee,’ she suggested. I agreed. It was interesting to watch her in her parents’ home. She became a different person: not a more diffident or childlike one, but vicariously proprietorial, as if she were a real estate clerk showing the house to a prospective purchaser.

We sat in the kitchen. It was a designer kitchen: Marie-Antoinette at her most rustic. We sat on uncomfortable stools at a plastic Louis Seize counter and watched the coffee dripping through the machine. The overhead light – bleak and blue – came from two long fluorescent tubes which buzzed.

It gave me a chance to look at her. All day she’d been her usual warm and good-natured self. It was almost as if she’d forgotten yesterday’s clash. But she hadn’t. She didn’t forget anything. How beautiful she was, with all that energy and radiance that is the prerogative of youth. No wonder people such as Dicky envied me. Had they realized that Fiona would soon be returning perhaps they would have envied me even more. But for me it was a miserable dilemma.
I couldn’t look at Gloria without wondering if I was going to be able to handle the personal crisis that Fiona’s return would bring. The idea of Fiona being kept in deep cover for six months made it even more irresolvable. And what about the children?

‘I don’t think you’ve been listening to a word of what I’ve said,’ I suddenly heard Gloria say.

‘Of course I have,’ and with an inspired evasion tactic I added, ‘Did I tell you who Dicky is going to Berlin with?’

‘No.’ Her eyes were wide open. She swung her blonde hair back and held it as she leaned very close so that I was conscious of the warmth of her body. She was wearing a crimson shirt dress. On most women it would have looked awful but she brought a dash to such cheap bright clothes, just as small children so often do.

‘Tessa,’ I said.

‘Your Tessa?’

‘My sister-in-law. Yes.’

‘So Tessa is up to her old tricks. I thought the affair with Dicky was over long ago.’

‘Yes. That’s been puzzling me too.’

‘It’s hardly a puzzle, darling. People like Dicky, and Tessa too, are capricious.’

‘But Dicky was warned off last time.’

‘Warned off seeing Tessa? By Daphne, you mean?’

‘No. The Department didn’t like it. Clandestine meetings with the sister of a defector looked like a potential security risk.’

‘I’m surprised Dicky took any notice.’

‘You shouldn’t be. Dicky may wear funny bow ties and play the Bohemian student, but he knows exactly how far to go. When the bugle sounds and the medals are being awarded he toes the line and salutes.’

‘Except when it comes to Tessa you mean. Perhaps it’s love.’

‘Not Dicky.’

‘So perhaps he’s had official permission to bed Tessa,’ she joked.

‘That’s what it must be,’ I agreed, and not long afterwards I was to reflect upon her joke. ‘Perhaps what Dicky found irresistible was not having to pay her fare.’

‘What a swine he is. Poor Daphne.’ She poured the coffee and, in a dented biscuit tin, discovered a secret supply of chocolate biscuits.

‘And he’s booked his hotel in my name. What about that?’

She took it very calmly. ‘Why?’

‘I suppose he’s going to tell Daphne some story about me going off with Tessa.’

‘But you’re not going?’

‘I’m afraid I am.’

‘The weekend?’ I nodded. She said, ‘I told the Pomeroys to come to dinner on Saturday.’

‘Who the hell are the Pomeroys?’

‘The parents of Billy’s friends. The children were eating with them last night. They are terribly kind.’

‘You’ll have to put them off,’ I said.

‘I’ve put them off twice before when you went on trips.’

‘It’s an order from the D-G. You know what that means. There’s no way I can get out of it.’

‘The weekend?’

‘I go on Friday morning; back on Monday or Tuesday. Dicky’s secretary will know what’s happening over there.’

‘And on Sunday there’s Billy’s car club meeting. I said you’d take him.’

‘Look! It’s not my idea, darling.’

For a long time she drank her coffee without speaking. Then she said, ‘I know it’s not,’ as if responding to some other question that only she knew about. ‘But you said there was going to be a party at Werner’s hotel. I know you wanted to go.’

‘It’s just to promote the hotel. We’ll go some other time.
They are always having parties, and anyway it would be no fun without you.’

After the coffee I went with her to the room she had when living here with her parents. They kept it for her as if they were expecting her every night. Toys, teddy bear, dolls, children’s books, school books, a Beatles poster on the wall. The bed had been made up with freshly laundered linen. Taking her away from them was my doing and there were times when I felt bad about it. And I hadn’t even married her. How would I feel if some time my daughter Sally disappeared with some middle-aged married man? Sometimes I wondered how I would be able to deal with the inevitable separation from the children. Would I find myself keeping their bedrooms as shrines at which I could pray for a return of their childhood days with me?

Looking out from the bedroom window I could see the flat roof of a large single-story building that had been added to the house. Seeing me looking at it, Gloria said, ‘I cried when they ruined my view of the garden. There was a lovely chestnut tree there and a rhododendron.’

‘Why did you need extra space?’

‘It’s a surgery and workshop for Daddy.’

‘I thought he had a surgery in town.’

‘This is for special jobs. Didn’t you know?’

‘Why would I know?’

‘Want to see? It’s where he does work for the Department.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘Come and see.’

She got the big bunch of keys that her father had left with her and we went down into the neat little dental surgery. She opened the door, and while she searched for the light switches the room was only lit from a glass box in the corner where tropical flowers appeared under ultraviolet lights. When she switched on the light, apart from seeming unusually crammed with apparatus, it was like any other dentist’s workplace: a modern fully adjustable chair and elaborate drill facing a large
window. There was a big ceramic spittoon, a swivelling cold-light and many glass-fronted instrument cabinets, packed with rows and rows of curiously shaped drills, forceps, scalers and other spiky implements.

Gloria went round the room naming the equipment and describing what it was for. She seemed to know a lot about dentistry despite having resisted her father’s wish that she should become one. This she said was her father’s secret sanctum.

‘Who comes here for treatment?’ I asked.

‘Not so many nowadays, but I can remember a time when Daddy worked more hours here than at his proper surgery. I remember one poor Polish boy who was in the chair for at least six hours. He was so exhausted that Daddy let him come and sit in the drawing room with Mummy and me, to take his mind off things.’

‘Agents?’

‘Yes, of course. At university, Daddy wrote a thesis on the history of European dentistry. After that he began his collection of old dental tools. Now he can look into anyone’s mouth and know where they had their teeth fixed, and when. Look at that.’ She held up a particularly barbarous-looking instrument. ‘It’s very old…from Russia.’

‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘My teeth were always fixed by a Berlin dentist and my cover story was always German. I didn’t have to have any of my dental work changed.’

‘I’ve known my father to completely eliminate all previous dentistry to give an agent a completely new mouth: Russian, Polish, Greek…Once he did old-fashioned Spanish dental work for a man who was going to be using the identity of a Civil War veteran.

‘Come and look at the workshop.’ She unlocked the door of an adjoining room and we went inside. This was even more cramped, with filing cabinets and racks of tools and equipment. There was a tiny lathe, a bench drill and even a small electric kiln. On a large table near the window there was the
work in progress. A desk light was centred upon something concealed under a cloth. Gloria removed the cotton dust-cloth and gave a little shriek as a human skull was revealed. ‘Alas, poor Yorick! We mustn’t touch it. It’s probably a demonstration piece that will be photographed for a textbook. He does replicas of old dentistry and sends them as examples to police pathologists and coroner’s departments all over the world. This one must be a special job, from the way he’s covered it over so carefully.rs;

I went closer to look at the skull. It was shiny, like plastic, and there were gold inlays and porcelain crowns fitted into it. ‘Did you never want to be a dentist?’

‘Never. And Daddy was always so considerate that he never really pressed the idea on to me. It was only recently that I realized how much he’d always hoped I’d become interested in his practice, and his collection. Sometimes he had students work with him. Once I remember he brought a young newly qualified dentist home for dinner. I’ve often wondered if he was hoping that a romance would blossom.’

‘Let’s lock up and go home,’ I said. ‘Shall we take some fish and chips back for everyone?’

‘Do let’s.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit bad-tempered lately, darling.’

‘I haven’t noticed any difference,’ she said.

Afterwards I looked back and saw that weekend in Berlin as the beginning of the end, but I don’t know how much of that view was hindsight. At the time, it seemed unusual simply because of the hectic way in which meeting followed meeting and the way Frank Harrington – always something of a mother hen – became so flustered that he was phoning me in the middle of the night, and then admitting that he’d forgotten what he was calling about.

Not that any of the meetings decided anything very much. They were typically casual Berlin Field Unit conferences at which Frank presided in his inimitably avuncular style and smoked his foul-smelling pipe and indulged in long rambling asides about me or my father or the old days or all three together.

It was on Sunday morning that Frank first gave me an inkling of what was happening. Dicky was not there. He had left a message to say he was showing Tessa ‘round the town’, although what Dicky knew about Berlin could be written on the head of a pin and still leave plenty of room for the Lord’s Prayer.

It was just me and Frank. We were in his study in the big house at Grunewald. He had a secretary there and some of the top secret material was filed there. It gave Frank an excuse for a day at home now and again. That incredible and un forgettable study! Although I could not identify any single
object as having its origins in the sub-continent, this room could have been the Punjab bungalow of some pukka regimental officer, some hero of the Mutiny just back from hunting the nimble blackbuck with cheetahs. Shuttered against the daylight, the dim lamps revealed a fine military chest with magnificent brass fittings, the mounted horns of some un identified species of antelope, a big leather-buttoned sofa and rattan furniture; all of it bleached, creaky or worn, as such things become in the tropics. Even the sepia portrait of the sovereign seemed to have been selected for her resemblance to the young Victoria. The room expressed all Frank’s secret longings, and like most people’s secret longings they had no basis in reality.

Even Frank was at his most regimental, with a khaki safari shirt, slacks and plain brown tie. He’d been tapping the map with his fountain pen and asking me questions of a sort that usually were the concern of other technical grades. ‘What do you know about the East Berlin Autobahn entrances?’ he said.

He indicated the wall upon which two large maps had been fixed. They were a new addition and rather spoiled the ‘great days of the Raj’ décor. One was a map of east Germany, or the German Democratic Republic, the rather Orwellian name its rulers prefer. Like an island in this communist sea, our Sectors of Berlin were bridged to the West by three long Autobahnen. Used by motorists of both East and West, these highways were a favoured place for clandestine meetings. Smugglers, spies, journalists and lovers all arranged brief and dangerous rendezvous at the roadside. And consequently the DDR made sure the roads were policed constantly night and day.

The second map – the one Frank was tapping upon – was a Berlin street map. The whole city, not just the West. It was remarkably up to date, for I immediately noticed the projected changes to the Autobahn entrances, including the yet to be built turn-off which would – some time in the dim and distant future – provide the West with a new control
point on the south side of the city. Rumours said the East Germans wanted the West to pay a great deal of money for it. That was the usual way that anything got done.

‘I don’t use them,’ I said. ‘I always fly nowadays.’

‘Pity.’ He looked at the street map and with his pen showed me the old Berliner Ring and the route that East Berliners took when joining the Autobahn from their side of the city.

‘There was a general directive about us using the Autobahn,’ I reminded him gently. There was a fear that departmental employees, with heads full of secrets, might be kidnapped on the Autobahnen. It was not a groundless fear. There was a whole filing case full of unsolved mysteries: motorists who started out on the long drive to the Federal Republic and were never seen again. There was no way for the West’s authorities to investigate such mysteries. We had to grin and bear it. Meanwhile, those who could fly, flew.

‘I want you to drive back down the Autobahn this time,’ said Frank.

‘When?’

‘I’m waiting to hear.’ His pipe stem was tapped against his nose in what I suppose was a gesture of confidentiality. ‘Someone is coming out.’

‘Through Charlie?’ That would mean a non-German.

‘No. You’ll pick them up on the Autobahn,’ said Frank. I waited for some explanation or expansion but he gave neither. He continued to look at the street map and then said, ‘Ever heard of a man named Thurkettle? American.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You have?’ Unless Frank had been attending drama lessons since our previous meeting, he was completely taken aback by this revelation. Clearly he’d not heard about my escapade in Salzburg. ‘Tell me about him.’

I briefly told Frank about Thurkettle without going into detail about my task in Salzburg.

‘He’s here,’ said Frank.

‘Thurkettle?’ It was my turn to be surprised.

‘Arrived by air last night. I told London but I got only an “acknowledgement and no further action” signal. I’m wondering if London knows all this you’ve just told me.’

‘Yes, they do,’ I said.

Frank frowned. ‘We both know how signals get spiked and forgotten,’ he said. ‘They should at least let me tell the Americans and the police.’

‘You can tell them off the record,’ I said.

‘That might bounce and get me into hot water.’ Frank was something of an expert at finding reasons for inaction. ‘If Thurkettle has come here on some secret mission for the Yanks, and London has been informed in the usual way, well!…’ He shrugged. ‘They might be displeased to find I’ve told all and sundry.’

‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘if Thurkettle has come to town to blow away one of the CIA’s golden boys, they might feel that one routine signal to London was an under-reaction.’

‘It was a confidential,’ said Frank. ‘My informant was someone who I can absolutely not name. If London, or the CIA office, demand details of the identification I will find myself having one of those wretched arguments that I hate so much.’ He looked at me and I nodded. ‘What do you think this fellow’s here for, Bernard?’

‘No one seems to be sure who Thurkettle works for. The prevailing wisdom – if Joe Brody is anyone to go by – is that he’s a hit man who works for anyone, that is to say anyone who comes up with the right target for the right price. Brody says the KGB have used him over the past two years. If Thurkettle was on his way to see our friends in Normannenstrasse, he’d fly into Schönefeld.’

‘You mean he’s targeting someone here in the West?’ Frank screwed his face up. ‘I can’t put a tail on him. I don’t know where he’s gone, and even if I did know I simply haven’t got the resources.’

‘West Berlin isn’t on the way to anywhere,’ I said. ‘No
one comes here en route to anywhere; they come here and go back again.’

‘You’re right. Perhaps I should send London a reminder.’ He used his clenched fist to brush up the ends of his moustache. To the casual observer it looked as if he was giving himself two quick punches on the nose: perhaps that’s what he thought London was likely to give him if he persisted. ‘I’ll leave it for the weekend; they might respond again.’

Good old Frank: never hesitate to do nothing. ‘Phone the old man,’ I suggested.

‘The D-G? He hates being disturbed at home.’ He scratched his cheek and said, ‘No, I’ll leave it for the time being. But I’m disturbed by what you told me, Bernard.’

I realized that my description of Thurkettle’s activities had put Frank into a difficult position. Until talking with me he still had the chance to plead ignorance of anything concerning the man or the danger that he might present to Allied personnel here. I wondered if I should suggest that we both forget what I’d said but Frank could be very formal at times. Despite the friendship that went back to my childhood – or even because of it – he might consider such a suggestion treasonable and insulting. I decided not to take a chance on it.

‘One thing I still haven’t got clear, Frank,’ I said. He raised an eyebrow. ‘You sent Teacher to get me, and had me sit in on Larry Bower and the old apparatchik. Why?’

Frank smiled. ‘Didn’t Larry explain that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Larry didn’t explain anything.’

‘I thought it might be something that would interest you. I remembered that you were handling Stinnes at one time.’

‘Why not simply show me the transcript?’

‘Of the debriefing?’ Pursed lips and a nod, as if this was a novel and most interesting suggestion. ‘We could have done that; yes.’

‘Would you like to hear what I think?’ I said.

‘Of course I would,’ said Frank with that suppressed irony with which a doting parent might indulge a pre cocious child. ‘Tell me.’

‘I kept thinking about it. I wondered why you would give me a close look at a still active agent. That’s not the way the training manual says it’s done.’

‘I don’t always go by the training manual,’ said Frank.

‘You are not contrary or perverse, Frank,’ I said. ‘What you do, you do with a purpose.’

‘What’s eating you, Bernard?’

‘You didn’t invite me to that safe house in Charlottenburg to hear the debriefing and see Valeri,’ I said. ‘You brought me over there so that Valeri could see me. See me close up!’

‘Why would I have done that, Bernard?’ He found a stray thread on his sleeve, plucked it off and dropped it into an ashtray.

‘To find out if Valeri could identify me as one of the people mixed up in the narcotics racket?’

‘There is such a thing as being too sceptical,’ said Frank gently.

‘Not in this business there isn’t.’

He smiled. He didn’t deny the allegation.

‘You need a holiday, Bernard.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Meanwhile, when do I start my trip down the Autobahn?’

‘Not for a few days,’ said Frank. ‘Tuesday at the earliest.’ I suppose he thought I would welcome a few days idling around in Berlin but I wanted to get back and he must have seen that in my face. ‘Look on the bright side. You’ll be able to enjoy Werner’s costume party tonight.’ When I didn’t respond to this he added, ‘It’s out of my control, Bernard. We just have to wait for the message.’

‘When am I to be briefed?’

‘There won’t be a briefing. We’re keeping it all very low-key. But Jeremy Teacher will be with you. He’s waiting downstairs. I’ll get him up here now and he’ll tell you his
plans.’ Frank picked up his internal phone and said, ‘Send Mr Teacher up here, would you.’

‘I wasn’t delighted at the idea of having Teacher tell me his plans. ‘Let’s get this straight, Frank,’ I said. ‘Is Teacher running this show, or am I?’

‘No need to designate a boss,’ said Frank. ‘Teacher is easy to get along with. And it’s a simple enough job.’

‘Never mind all that smooth London Central talk, Frank,’ I said. ‘If I’m picking up a DDR national on DDR territory and bringing him out, that’s Operational. When did Teacher ever work in Operations?’

‘He didn’t,’ admitted Frank. ‘And he’s never been a field agent either. I suppose that’s the real thrust of what you’re saying.’

‘You’re damn right it’s the real thrust of what I’m saying. I’ll go alone. I don’t want to be playing nanny to some pen-pusher who wants a glimpse of life at the sharp end.’

‘You can’t do it alone. You’ll have a passenger. Someone will have to drive. Who knows what unexpected things might happen? We can’t risk it.’

‘Teacher?’

‘He’s the best man I’ve got.’

‘Let me take Werner,’ I said.

‘Werner is a German national cleared only for non-critical employment,’ said Frank primly.

‘And that bloody Teacher is…’

There was a knock at the door and Teacher came in. Losing his wife did not seem to have done anything to improve his miserable demeanour. He brought a sulking broodiness into the room. The smile he gave as he shook hands was sour, and although the grip of his hand was firm there was something listless in the gesture. Perhaps he’d heard me before he came in.

‘Tell Bernard what you’ve arranged,’ said Frank.

‘Volkswagen van. Diplomatic plates. We meet the other
car at a pull-off near the Brandenburg exit. It should be very straightforward. They don’t stop diplomatic vans.’

‘Bernard says when will you go?’

‘I’m waiting for diplomatic passports for all three of us. We can’t expect those to come through until after the weekend.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t let’s ruin anyone’s weekend.’

Teacher looked at me and looked at Frank.

Frank said, ‘Are you armed, Bernard?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Jeremy will have a non-ferrous pistol,’ said Frank, unable to conceal his distaste. Frank had a dislike of firearms that ill fitted his romantic notions of the army.

‘That’s nice,’ I said. Teacher pretended I wasn’t there.

‘It won’t come to that,’ said Frank. ‘It’s a straightforward little job. A drive down the Autobahn, that’s all.’ I didn’t respond and neither did Teacher. If it was so bloody simple, I thought, why wasn’t Frank doing it? ‘But there is one more thing…I’ve been through this with Jeremy.’ A pause revealed that Frank was having difficulty; that’s probably why he’d left it to last. ‘There must be no question of the field agent going into custody over there. You understand?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand. We’ll be in a diplomatic vehicle you said.’

‘That’s not one hundred per cent, Bernard. Remember poor little Fischbein? They dragged him out of that car right in the Alex.’

‘I’ve been briefed,’ said Teacher.

But I wasn’t going to let Teacher get Frank off the hook. ‘Then brief me, Frank.’

‘If the worst came to the worst, Bernard. The agent would have to be…eliminated.’

‘Killed?’

‘Yes, killed.’ Frank looked again at the map, as if searching for something, but I think he was trying to avoid my eyes. ‘Jeremy has the gun for that purpose.’

‘Poor bloody agent,’ I said.

‘All concerned are aware of what’s at stake,’ said Frank stiffly. ‘Including the agent.’