Spy Line (4 page)

It was not an easy lunch. We consumed 250 grams of Russian sevruga virtually in silence. With it we had rye bread and vodka. ‘The spring catch,’ said Teacher knowledgeably as he tasted the caviar. ‘That’s always the best.’

Unsure of an appropriate response to that sort of remark I just said it was delicious.

Clemmie’s mascara was smudged. She responded minim ally to her husband’s small-talk. She wouldn’t have a drink: she kept to water. I felt sorry for both of them. I wanted
to tell them it didn’t matter. I wanted to tell her it was just the Berlin Blues, the claustrophobic time that all the wives suffered when they were first posted to ‘the island’. But I was too cowardly. I just contributed to the small-talk and pretended not to notice that they were having a private and personal row in silence.

‘Keep going!’ I told Teacher as he began to slow down to let me out of the car.

‘What?’

‘Keep-going keep-going keep-going!’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said, but he kept going and passed the car that had attracted my notice. It was parked right outside my front door.

‘Turn right and go right round the block.’

‘What did you see? A car you recognize?’

I made a prevaricating noise.

‘What then?’ he persisted.

‘A car I didn’t recognize.’

‘Which one?’

‘The black Audi…Too smart for this street.’

‘You’re getting jumpy, Samson. There’s nothing wrong, I’ll bet you…’

As he was speaking a police car cruised slowly past us, but Teacher gave no sign of noticing it. I suppose he had other things on his mind. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said. ‘I am a bit jumpy. I remember now it belongs to my landlady’s brother.’

‘There you are,’ said Teacher. ‘I told you there was nothing wrong.’

‘I need a good night’s sleep. Let me off on the corner. I must buy some cigarettes.’

He stopped the car outside the shop. ‘Closed,’ he said.

‘They have a machine in the hallway.’

‘Righto.’

I opened the car door. ‘Thanks for sharing your caviar. And tell Clemmie thanks too. Sorry if I outstayed my welcome.’ He’d let me have a hot shower. I felt better but couldn’t help wondering if the grime was going to block the drain. I was grateful. ‘And best wishes to Frank,’ I added as an afterthought.

He nodded. ‘I was on the phone to him. Frank says you’re to keep away from Rudi Kleindorf.’

‘Forget about the good wishes.’

He gave a grim little smile and revved the motor and pulled away as soon as I closed the door. He was worried about his wife. I took a deep breath. The air was thick with the stink from the lignite-burning power stations that the DDR have on all sides of the city. It killed the trees, burned the back of the throat and filled the nostrils with soot. It was the Berlinerluft.

I let Teacher’s car go out of sight before cautiously returning down the street to rap on the window of the red VW Golf. Werner reached over to unlock the door and I got into the back seat.

‘Thank God. You’re all right, Bernie?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Where have you been?’ Werner was good at hiding his feelings but there was no doubt about his agitated state.

‘What does it matter?’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Spengler is dead. Someone murdered him.’

Bile rose in my throat. I was too old for rough stuff: too old, too involved, too married, too soft. ‘Murdered him? When?’

‘I was going to ask you,’ said Werner.

‘What’s that mean, Werner? Do you think I’d murder the poor little sod?’ Werner’s manner annoyed me. I’d liked Spengler.

‘I saw Johnny. He was looking for you, to warn you that the cops were here.’

‘Is Johnny all right?’

‘Johnny is at the Polizeipräsidium answering questions. They’re holding him.’

‘He has no papers,’ I said.

‘Right. So they’ll put him through the wringer.’

‘Don’t worry. Johnny’s a good kid,’ I said.

‘If he has to choose between deportation to Sri Lanka or spilling his guts, he’ll tell them anything he knows,’ said Werner with stolid logic.

‘He knows nothing,’ I said.

‘He might make some damaging guesses, Bernie.’

‘Shit!’ I rubbed my face and tried to remember anything compromising Johnny might have seen or overheard.

‘Get down, the cops are coming out,’ said Werner. I crouched down on the floor out of sight. There was a strong smell of rubber floor mats. Werner had moved the front seats well forward to give me plenty of room. Werner thought of everything. Under his calm, logical and conventional exterior there lurked an all-consuming passion, if not to say obsession, with espionage. Werner followed the published, and unpublished, sagas of the cold war with the same sort of dedication that other men gave to the fluctuating fortunes of football teams. Werner would have been the perfect spy: except that perfect spies, like perfect husbands, are too predictable to survive in a world where fortune favours the impulsive.

Two uniformed cops walked past going to their car. I heard one of them say,
‘Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens’
– With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.

‘Schiller,’ said Werner, equally dividing pride with admiration.

‘Maybe he’s studying to be a sergeant,’ I said.

‘Someone put a plastic bag over Spengler’s head and suffocated him,’ said Werner after the policemen had got into their car and departed. ‘I suppose he was drunk and didn’t make much resistance.’

‘The police are unlikely to give it too much attention,’ I said. A dead junkie in this section of Kreuzberg was not the sort of newsbreak for which press photographers jostle. It was unlikely to make even a filler on an inside page.

‘Spengler was sleeping on your bed,’ said Werner. ‘Someone was trying to kill
you.’

‘Who wants to kill me?’ I said.

Werner wiped his nose very carefully with a big white handkerchief. ‘You’ve had a lot of strain lately, Bernie. I’m not sure that I could have handled it. You need a rest, a real rest.’

‘Don’t baby me along,’ I said. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

He frowned, trying to decide how to say what he wanted to say. ‘You’re going through a funny time; you’re not thinking straight any more.’

‘Just tell me who would want to kill me.’

‘I knew I’d upset you.’

‘You’re not upsetting me but tell me.’

Werner shrugged.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Everybody says my life is in danger but no one knows from who.’

‘You’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, Bernie. Your own people wanted to arrest you, the Americans thought you were trying to make trouble for them and God knows what Moscow makes of it all…’

He was beginning to sound like Rudi Kleindorf; in fact, he was beginning to sound like a whole lot of people who couldn’t resist giving me good advice. I said, ‘Will you drive me over to Lange’s place?’

For a moment he thought about it. ‘There’s no one there.’

‘How do you know?’ I said.

‘I’ve phoned him every day, just the way you asked. I’ve sent letters too.’

‘I’m going to beat on his door. Perhaps Der Grosse wasn’t kidding. Maybe Lange is playing deaf: maybe he’s in there.’

‘Not answering the phone and not opening his mail? That’s not like Lange.’ Lange was an American who’d lived in Berlin since it was first built. Werner disliked him. In fact it was hard to think of anyone who was fond of Lange except his long-suffering wife: and she visited relatives several times a year.

‘Maybe he’s going through a funny time too,’ I said.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Just drop me outside.’

‘You’ll need a ride back,’ said Werner in that plaintive, martyred tone he used when indulging me in my most excruciating foolishness.

When we reached the street where John ‘Lange’ Koby lived I thought Werner was going to drive away and leave me to it, but the hesitation he showed was fleeting and he waved away my suggestions that I go up there alone.

Dating from the last century it was a great grey apartment block typical of the whole city. Since my previous visit the front door had been painted and so had the lobby, and one side of the entrance hall had two lines of new tin postboxes, each one bearing a tenant’s name. But once up the first staircase all attempts at improvement ceased. On each landing a press-button timer switch provided a dim light and a brief view of walls upon which sprayed graffiti proclaimed the superiority of football teams and pop groups, or simply made the whorls and zigzag patterns that proclaim that graffiti need not be a monopoly of the literate.

Lange’s apartment was on the top floor. The door was old and scuffed, the bell push had had its label torn off as if someone had wanted the name removed. Several times I pressed the bell but heard no sound from within. I knocked, first with my knuckles and then with a coin I found in my pocket.

The coin gave me an idea. ‘Give me some money,’ I told Werner.

Obliging as ever he opened his wallet and offered it. I
took a hundred-mark note and tore it gently in half. Using Werner’s slim silver pencil, I wrote ‘Lange – open up you bastard’ on one half of the note and pushed it under the door.

‘He’s not there,’ said Werner, understandably disconcerted by my capricious disposal of his money. ‘There’s no light.’

Werner meant there was no light escaping round the door or from the transom. I didn’t remind him that John Lange Koby had been in the espionage game a very long time indeed. Whatever one thought of him – and my own feelings were mixed – he knew a thing or two about fieldcraft. He wasn’t the sort of man who would pretend he was out of town while letting light escape from cracks around his front door.

I put a finger to my lips and no sooner had I done so than the timer switch made a loud plop and we were in darkness. We stood there a long time. It seemed like hours although it was probably no more than three minutes.

Suddenly the door bolts were snapped back with a sound like gunshots. Werner gasped: he was startled and so was I. Lange recognized that and laughed at us, ‘Step inside folks,’ he said. He held out his hand and I gave it the slap that he expected as a greeting. Only a glimmer of light escaped from his front door. ‘Bernard! You four-eyed son of a bitch!’ Looking over my shoulder he said, ‘And who’s this well-dressed gent with false moustache and big red plastic nose? Can it be Werner Volkmann?’ I felt Werner stiffen with anger. Lange continued, not expecting a reply. ‘I thought you guys were Jehovah’s Witnesses! The hallelujah peddlers been round just about every night this week. Then I thought to myself, “It’s Sunday, it’s got to be their day off!”’ He laughed.

Lange read my written message again and tucked the half banknote into the pocket of his shirt as we went inside. In the entrance there was an inlaid walnut hallstand with a mirror and hooks for coats, a shelf for hats and a rack for
sticks and umbrellas. He took Werner’s hat and overcoat and showed us how it worked. It took up almost all the width of the corridor and we had to squeeze past it. I noticed that Lange didn’t switch on the light until the front door was closed again. He didn’t want to be silhouetted in the doorway. Was he afraid of something, or someone? No, not Lange: that belligerent old bastard was fearless. He pushed aside a heavy curtain. The curtain was in fact an old grey
Wehrmacht
blanket, complete with the stripe that tells you which end is for your feet. It hung from a rail on big wooden rings. It kept the cold draught out and also prevented any light escaping from the sitting room.

They only had one big comfortable room in which to sit and watch television, so Lange used it as his study too. There were bookshelves filling one wall from floor to ceiling, and even then books were double-banked and stuffed horizontally into every available space. An old school-desk near the window held more books and papers and a big old-fashioned office typewriter upon which German newspapers and a cup and saucer were precariously balanced.

‘Look who finally found out where we live,’ Lange said to his wife in the throaty Bogart voice that suited his American drawl. He was a gaunt figure, pens and pencils in the pocket of his faded plaid shirt, and baggy flannel trousers held up by an ancient US army canvas belt.

His wife came to greet us. Face carefully made-up, hair short and neatly combed, Gerda was still pretty in a severe spinsterish style. ‘Bernard dear! And Werner too. How nice to see you.’ She was a diminutive figure, especially when standing next to her tall husband. Gerda was German; very German. They met here in the ruins in 1945. At that time she was an opera singer and I can remember how, years later, she was still being stopped on the street by people who remembered her and wanted her autograph. That was a long time ago, and now her career was relegated to the history books, but even in her cheap little black dress she had some arcane
magic that I could not define, and sometimes I could imagine her singing Sophie in
Der Rosenkavalier
the way she had that evening in 1943 when she brought the
Staatsoper
audience to its feet and became a star overnight.

‘We tried to phone,’ explained Werner apologetically.

‘You are looking well,’ said Gerda, studying Werner with great interest. ‘You look most distinguished.’ She looked at me. ‘You too, Bernard,’ she added politely, although I think my long hair and dirty clothes disturbed her. ‘Would you prefer tea or coffee?’ Gerda asked.

‘Or wine?’ said Lange.

‘Tea or coffee,’ I said hurriedly. Each harvest Gerda made enough plum wine to keep Lange going all year. I dread to think how much that must have been, for Lange drank it by the pint. It tasted like paint remover.

‘Plum wine,’ said Lange. ‘Gerda makes it.’

‘Do you really, Gerda?’ I said. ‘What a shame. Plum wine brings me out in spots.’

Lange scowled. Gerda said, ‘Lange drinks too much of it. It’s not good for him.’

‘He looks fit on it,’ I pointed out, and considering that this huge aggressive fellow was in his middle seventies, or beyond, was almost enough to convert me to Gerda’s jungle juice.

We sat down on the lumpy sofa while Mrs Koby went off to the kitchen to make some tea for us. Lange hovered over us. He’d not changed much since the last time I’d seen him. In fact he’d changed very little from the ferocious tyrant I’d worked for long long ago. He was a craggy man. I remember someone in the office saying that they’d rather tackle the north face of the Eiger than Lange in a bad mood, and Frank Harrington had replied that there was not much in it. Ever since then I’d thought of Lange as some dangerous piece of granite: sharp and unyielding, his topsoil long since eroded so that his rugged countenance was bare and pitiless.

‘What can I do for you boys?’ he said with the urgent politeness with which a shopkeeper might greet a customer arriving a moment or two before closing time.

‘I need advice, Lange.’

‘Ah, advice. Everybody wants it: nobody takes it. What can I tell you?’