Spy Hook. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ suppose you’re right.’

      ‘She’d have enough cash to live her last few years in comfort.’

      ‘But the house means such a lot to her.’

      ‘She can’t have it both ways,’ said Frank.

      ‘I can’t imagine coming to Berlin and not being able to go to Lisl’s,’ I said selfishly. My father had been billeted in that house, and eventually my mother took me there to join him. We lived there all through my schooldays and my youth. Every room, every stick of furniture, every bit of frayed carpet held memories for me. I suppose that was why I was pleased that so little was done to bring it up to date. It was my private museum of nostalgia, and the thought of being deprived of it filled me with dread. It was tantamount to someone wrenching from me memories of my father.

      ‘Just one?’ said Frank. He laid his pipe on the ashtray with reverential care, and went to the drinks trolley. ‘I’m opening the bottle anyway.’

      ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said changing my mind and sitting down again while Frank poured a glass of his tawny port for me. I said, ‘The last time I was at Lisl’s, only three rooms were occupied.’

      ‘That’s only half of the trouble,’ said Frank. ‘The doctor said running that place is too much for her. He told Werner that he wouldn’t give her more than six months if she doesn’t rest completely.’

      ‘Poor Lisl.’

      ‘Yes, poor Lisl,’ said Frank handing me a brimming glass of port wine. There was a sardonic note in his voice: he usually called her Frau Hennig.

      ‘I know you never liked her,’ I said.

      ‘Come, Bernard. That’s not true.’ He picked up his pipe and got it going again.

      ‘Isn’t it?’

      ‘I said she was a Nazi,’ he said in a measured way and smiled to acknowledge his dissembling.

      ‘That’s nonsense.’ She was like a second mother to me. Even if Frank was like a second father I wasn’t going to let him get away with such damaging generalizations about her.

      ‘The Hennigs were social climbers in Hitler’s time,’ said Frank. ‘Her husband was a member of the Party, and a lot of the people she mixed with were damned shady.’

      ‘For instance?’

      ‘Don’t get so defensive, Bernard. Lisl and her friends were enthusiastic Hitler supporters right up to the time when the Red Army started waving a flag from the Brandenburger Tor.’ He sipped. ‘And even after that she only learned to keep her political opinions to herself.’

      ‘Maybe,’ I said grudgingly. It was true that Lisl had always had a quick eye for any failings of socialism.

      ‘And that Lothar Koch … Well, we’ve been through all that before.’

      Frank was convinced that Lothar Koch, an old friend of Lisl’s, had some sort of Nazi past. One of Frank’s German pals said Koch was a Gestapo man but there were always stories about people being Gestapo men, and Frank had said the same thing about many other people. Sometimes I thought Frank spent more time worrying about the Nazis than he did about the Russians. But that was something common to a lot of the old-timers.

      ‘Lothar Koch was just a clerk,’ I said. I emptied my glass and got to my feet. ‘And you’re just a romantic, Frank, that’s your problem. You’re still hoping that Martin Bormann will be discovered helping Hitler to type his memoirs in a tin hut in the rain forest.’

      Still puffing his pipe Frank got to his feet and gave me one of his ‘we’ll-see-one-day’ smiles. When we got to the door he said, ‘I’ll acknowledge Dicky’s memo on the teleprinter, and we’ll get together late tomorrow so you can take a verbal back to him. Will that suit you?’

      ‘Just right! I wanted to have a day sightseeing,’ I said.

      He nodded knowingly and without enthusiasm. Frank didn’t approve of some of my Berlin acquaintances. ‘I thought you might,’ he said.

      It was about one-thirty when I got back to Lisl Hennig’s little hotel. I’d arranged that Klara should leave the door unlatched for me. I crept up the grand front staircase under crippled cherubs that were yellowing and cobwebbed. A tiny shaded table lamp in the bar spilled its meagre light across the parquet floor of the salon, where the enormous baroque mirrors – stained and speckled – dimly reflected the tables set ready for breakfast.

      The pantry near the back stairs had been converted to a bedroom for Lisl Hennig when her arthritis made the stairs a torment to her. There was a wedge of yellow light under her door and a curious intermittent buzzing noise. I tapped lightly.

      ‘Come in, Bernd,’ she called, with no hint in her voice of the frailty I’d been led to expect. She was sitting up in bed, looking as perky as ever: cushions and pillows behind her and newspapers all over the red and green quilt. Reading newspapers was Lisl’s obsession.

      Parchment lampshades made the light rich and golden and made a halo of her disarranged hair. She had a small plastic box in her hands and she was pushing and pulling at it. ‘Look at this, Bernd! Just look at it!’

      She fiddled with the little box again. A loud buzz with a metallic rattle came from behind me. I was visibly startled and Lisl laughed.

      ‘Look at it, Bernd. Careful now! Isn’t that wonderful!’ She chuckled with delight. I jumped aside as a small olive-coloured jeep came rattling across the carpet, but it swerved aside and rushed headlong at the fireplace, hitting the brass fender with a loud clang before reversing and swinging round – antenna wobbling – to race across the room again.

      Lisl, who was wrestling with the controls of this little radio-controlled toy, was almost hysterical with joy. ‘Have you ever seen anything like it, Bernd?’

      ‘No,’ I said. Not wanting to tell her that every toy shop in the Western world was awash with such amusements.

      ‘It’s for Klara’s nephew’s son,’ she said, although why Lisl should be playing with it in the small hours was left unexplained. She put the control box alongside a glass of wine on the bedside table where the wind-up gramophone, and a pile of old 78 records, were at her elbow. ‘Give me a kiss, Bernd!’ she ordered.

      I rescued the little toy jeep from where it had come to a halt on the rumpled carpet and gave her an affectionate hug and kiss. She smelled of snuff, a heavy spicy mixture that she’d spilled down the front of her bed jacket. The idea of losing this crazy old woman was a terrible prospect. She was no less dear to me than my mother.

      ‘How did you get in?’ she said and glared at me. I moved back from her, trying to think of a suitable answer. She put on her glasses so that she could see better. ‘How did you get in?’

      ‘I …’

      ‘Did that wretched girl leave the door on the latch?’ she said angrily. ‘The times I’ve told her. We could all be murdered in our beds.’ She hit the newspaper with her loose fingers so that it made a loud smack. ‘Doesn’t she read the papers? People are murdered for ten marks in this town nowadays … muggers! heroin addicts! perverts! violent criminals of all kinds. You only have to go a hundred metres to the Ku-Damm СКАЧАТЬ