The Company of Strangers (47 page)

Her breath clouded the air and dispersed into the still, freezing night. Her heels on the silver cobbles were the only sound in the street. As she hit Knaackestrasse she bore left and walked straight into the entrance of the
Mietskasern.
She leaned against the wall and dragged the icy air
up her nostrils, tried to clear her mind, prayed for it to be twenty-four hours later and everything done.

He’d told her not to think about it. He’d told her to keep acting, never stop, never pause for a fraction of a moment’s thought. When she’d told him that she couldn’t, he’d reminded her of the ruthlessness with which everybody else was acting.

‘You just have to find your own values,’ he’d said, ‘the ones you’re prepared to protect with the same ruthlessness.’

An image came to her from God knows where in her memory. One she’d never seen. Judy Laverne in the flaming cage of her car crashing down into the ravine. Lazard had been ruthless. Yes. Beecham Lazard. The sight of that bullet tearing out his throat, the crashing noise of the gun, the blood. That was the only time she’d ever seen anyone killed close up, as close as she was going to be to this man. This man, who she didn’t know. The one who was going to save them. He’d told her how she would know the man, how she would know that he was there and the right man. He’d also told her the terrible thing she had to do, how to make it certain, how to make it look right. It was going to demand more of her than any other act in her life. Yes. Act, he’d said. Always act. It will not be you, he had said, but it was her.

She set off across the courtyard between the
ersterhof
and the
zweiterhof,
through the arch and into the next courtyard. She angled her walk towards the left-hand corner. She took out a torch she’d bought and walked up the stairs to the third floor, slowed down. She turned off the torch. Waited. She smelt the frozen air cut with the mustiness of degrading plaster, the mould of rotting timber. Her hand closed around the gun in her right-hand pocket. She walked steadily down the corridor until she arrived above the arch. She looked at her watch. A minute past
ten. She shone her torch into the room, at the two piles of cement blocks on either side of the table. She sat on one of the piles, put her hand under the table and found the woollen ski mask, tucked it into the same pocket as the passport and money. She waited, desperate for a smoke but wanting to keep the air clear. Six minutes past ten. She turned off the torch and slipped out of her shoes.

She reached for the door, turned left down the corridor, one hand to the wall, the other holding the gun at waist height. She reached the first doorway, put her face into the blackness of the room, breathed in. She moved on to the next doorway. Nothing. Even before she reached the third doorway she could smell the unmistakable perfume of hair tonic. She stood in the doorway and clicked on her torch. Rieff was in the corner, gun hanging from his hand at his side, eyes wide in the torchlight. She fired quickly, three times. Three thuds into the heavy coat. His gun fell to the floor. She rushed at him as he began to fall forward and drove her shoulder into him so his knees buckled and he fell sideways against the wall. She tore the mask out of her pocket and stretched it over his head, not thinking, only acting, and to make it certain, to make it look right, fired a fourth shot through the ski mask into his face. His heavy head cracked back, destabilizing him, and he slid forward off the wall and ended face-down on the floor. She picked up his gun and stuffed it in his pocket. She took the passport and money out and put it into his other pocket. She ran out of the room, back down the corridor and into the room above the arch. She stepped into her shoes, sat on the cement blocks and put her head on the table and vomited between her feet.

Footsteps ran across the courtyard, sprinted up the stairs. Other, slower footsteps followed. Torch beams ricocheted down the corridor. Two armed men in combat gear appeared at the door. One stayed, the other moved on.
The slower footsteps took forever to get up the stairs. They lumbered down the corridor. There was an exchange of Russian. Yakubovsky looked in on her and continued to where the other soldier was standing.

An order was given. The soldier reacted. There was a stunned silence. Another order was barked out. Yakubovsky moved back up the corridor, appeared in the doorway, passport in hand. He muttered something else and the soldiers staggered past with the body between them. He unhooked Andrea’s fingers from the gun and put it in his pocket with the passport. He picked up the torch, offered Andrea his arm and they left the building.

‘It’s always distressing,’ he said, ‘to find that one of one’s most valued colleagues is, in fact, a charlatan.’

In the morning, as a measure of respect due to a valued servant of the Soviet Union, General Yakubovsky ordered Major Kurt Schneider of the AGA to take Andrea to the airport. He picked her up at the hotel and they headed south out of the city, not talking for the first few minutes of the journey. Andrea sat in the back staring out at the greyscale of the framed cityscape.

‘You’re blaming yourself now, aren’t you, for what I had to do?’ she said to the back of his head.

‘I keep thinking that there must have been another way.’

‘I’m the strategist, remember, and there was no other way. The only uncertainty was that he would be there at all. When he was, I did as you said. It was ironic, that’s all.’

‘Ironic?’

‘My piano teacher was killed by a direct hit on his house back in the Blitz in 1940. I was sixteen and I said to myself then that I would kill a German. When the time came for me to even the score…I couldn’t find any of that old
hate, only fear and certainty. I did it and there was no satisfaction.’

‘Certainty?’

‘From that ruthlessness you talked about.’

‘You shouldn’t have been put in that position in the first place.’

‘Now you’re going to blame Jim Wallis.’

‘I am.’

‘The way I see it is that I put myself in that position. I agreed to work for Gromov back in London. I took the step of going back to the Company. Jim Wallis just did his job,’ she said. ‘It surprised me to find he had that kind of toughness in him. I thought he was soft…good-natured.’

He took a buff envelope out of his pocket, handed it to her between the seats.

‘Your security,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t open it. Don’t look at it. Just give it to Jim, and tell him the negative is in safe-keeping in East Berlin.’

‘And what is it?’

‘It’s another one of those sad, seedy sideshows to our great intelligence industry,’ said Schneider. ‘It’s a photograph of Jim Wallis being buggered in a public lavatory in Fulham.’

‘Jim?’ she said, astonished. ‘Jim’s on his second marriage.’

‘Maybe that’s why the first didn’t work out,’ he said. ‘The glue that holds us together is, not infrequently, our shame.’

‘Even with this I’m going to get a hard time for sacrificing the Varlamov defection.’

‘Varlamov,’ said Schneider to himself. ‘Varlamov didn’t smell right from the beginning.’

‘Is this retrospective genius?’

‘Probably. When I was told to set the defection up, they
were very firm on one point…that I should never make contact with the subject until they gave the go-ahead. I’m still waiting. Varlamov was going to be leaving today.’

‘Yakubovsky said they’re going to take him back to Russia in chains.’

‘I don’t think Varlamov wanted to defect. Jim Wallis used him to keep the KGB distracted. They thought that he was the goal of the operation whereas…well…everything’s worked. My cover is still intact, as is yours with the Russians, and Varlamov, a great servant of the State, has been discredited.’

They passed under the S-bahn between Schöneweide and Oberspree and the traffic eased up on the Adler-gestell. He put his hand back between the seats and she held it, stroked the knuckles with her thumb.

‘Why did you tell me about that dissident exchange you’re doing on Sunday night?’ she asked.

He threaded his fingers through hers.

‘I thought about going with them,’ he said, and she squeezed his hand, suddenly anxious. ‘I thought about driving them to the middle of the bridge for the exchange and then just keeping on driving. It…it would be possible…in my head.’

‘So you’re not going to do it.’

Their eyes connected in the rear view.

‘Elena and the girls,’ he said. ‘They’d let them drop through the floor.’

She turned her head, let her eyes fall on the road markings flashing past the car, the dirty snow, the bare trees.

At Grünau he took his hand back and they peeled off the Adler-gestell, turned back underneath it and headed south-west on the autobahn to Schönefeld. They went through a document check at the police post to leave Greater Berlin and from there it was a few minutes to the airport.

‘So this is it, for us?’ she said. ‘One day we might be on the same side.’

‘Our ration for the next quarter of a century,’ he said, putting his hand back to her again. ‘And we
are
on the same side…
our
side…where nobody else matters.’

‘Twenty-five years. That’ll be 1996,’ she said. ‘I’ll be seventy-two. They should have let me out of prison by then.’

‘They won’t send you to prison, and there’s always
détente
,’ he said. ‘We have to have faith in
détente.
London thinks that Ulbricht’s finished. Yakubovsky said that Rieff was well placed. Rieff used to work with Erich Honecker. I think Honecker will be Moscow’s new man.’

‘And what’s he like?’

‘A dry man but not arrogant like Ulbricht, not full of his own importance or hate for Willi Brandt…a better chance for
détente
…possibly.’

‘Or a better chance for the Russians to retain control,’ she said. ‘Dry doesn’t sound very flexible to me.’

‘Maybe it’s better…maybe he’s breakable…crumbly.’

‘In the end, Brezhnev dictates,’ she said, and was suddenly depressed. ‘You know why they use the word “
détente
”? I think it’s because it doesn’t sound as easy as “relaxation”.’

He swung into the airport and parked up close to departures.

‘We can add another two hours or so to our total,’ he said. ‘I worked it out once when I was in Krasnogorsk. We still haven’t managed a whole day together…yet.’

He squeezed her hand. The moment suddenly on them.

‘I know it hasn’t been a day,’ he said, ‘but I know you. I said it once to myself out loud in the apartment in Lisbon. I am not alone. It sounded stupid, like all these things do, but it’s what has mattered to me all this time, that at least there’s been somebody.’

‘When I flew back from Lisbon after putting Luís and Julião in the family mausoleum, I was panic-struck. I thought I’d become afraid of flying. But then I realized that it was the fear of suddenly finding myself alone. It was a sudden terror of crashing and dying in the company of strangers…unknown and unloved.’

‘We’re all strangers,’ he said. ‘Even more so in this business.’

‘That’s the point, Karl…’

‘Or is it Kurt?’ he said, his one operational eyebrow arched, and they both laughed.

She reached for the car door and he asked her for one last look at the photograph of Julião. He nodded it into his head.

He took her case, walked across the dry, frozen tarmac, cleared snow piled at the edges in solid ridges. He gave the case to a porter. They stood at the entrance, their breath joining in the icy air. He shook her hand and wished her a safe flight, stepped back and saluted her. He walked off without a backward glance, got into his car and drove away into his colourless world.

Wallis met her at the airport, took her by the arm as if he was going to march her straight into a waiting police car. They got into the back of a cab.

‘Clapham,’ he said, and sat back, pleased with himself.

‘There’s a police station at the top of the Latchmere Road,’ she said.

‘Come on, Andrea. No need for that. You did a great job.’

‘By accident, rather than design.’

‘Oh no, no, no,
I
think it was by design.’

‘And now?’

‘This isn’t Russia, you know. We’re not the KGB. No salt mines here, old girl. We take care of you. You go back
to Admin, work hard, get your gong, take your pension.’

She checked him for sincerity. He returned her look. Karl had been right, he was still young behind that fat face, willing and eager to please. He made it all sound cosy.

‘And, of course,’ he said, ‘in return, we hope you’ll be amenable to maintaining a relationship with Mr Gromov.’

‘And if I’m not?’

‘Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred pounds. Go To Jail.’

‘I told Gromov I’d only do one job for him.’

‘Really? Why was that?’

‘I wanted that pension you’re talking about. I didn’t want to live my life in a constant sweat. And, besides, the hate’s gone. There’s nothing left in me to keep me going.’

‘Hate?’ asked Wallis. ‘Not sure what you’re on about there, old girl.’

‘How Louis Greig got me to work for Gromov in the first place.’

‘But “hate”? Who do you hate? Louis Greig?’

‘Louis turned pathetic,’ she said, and after a laden pause: ‘Perhaps I hate the same person you hate.’

‘
I
don’t hate anybody,’ said Wallis, shifting to the corner of the taxi, turning to her. ‘Hate…you know, Andrea, it’s not a very British thing that, is it? We don’t have those sort of…feelings.’

‘I know, Jim, you don’t even hate your traitors, do you? Or maybe you would if they were really close, right deep inside…I mean, in the Hot Room…that far inside.’

‘We’ve cleaned our house, old girl. Bad show in the sixties, but we’re spic-and-span now,’ said Wallis, defensive, taking this as a strangely personal attack.

‘Are you?’ she asked, deflected for the moment. ‘You know, when I told Gromov the contents of the Cleopatra file…the names.’

‘Yes, Cleopatra,’ said Wallis, taking it away from her, relieved, back to being high on the hog, ‘that was all a blind, just to test the…er…lines of communication between London, Moscow and Berlin. Moscow wanted to weaken Ulbricht, clear out his cronies, including Stiller. So Yakubovsky put Stiller on the list. You found out, told Gromov. Gromov presents the case to Moscow. Moscow ask Mielke what the hell is going on. Yakubovsky gets the order to execute. Andrea Aspinall passes her initiation test with Gromov.’