Faith. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ is being kept informed but the operation is controlled directly from London Central.’

      ‘From London Central,’ I repeated softly. It was getting worse every minute.

      The kid tried to cheer me up: ‘If there is any problem we also have a safe house in Magdeburg.’

      ‘There’s no such thing as a safe house in Magdeburg,’ I said. ‘Magdeburg is home town for those people. They operate out of Magdeburg, it’s their alma mater. There are more Stasi men running around the Westendstrasse security compound in Magdeburg than in the whole of the rest of the DDR.’

      ‘I see.’ We finished our tea in silence, then I picked up the phone and dialled the number for Tante Lisl, a woman who’d been a second mother to me. I wanted to pass on to her Bret’s message of encouragement, and if surgery for her arthritis was going to prove costly I wanted to see the hospital and make my own financial arrangements with them. Meanwhile I planned to buy a big bunch of flowers and go round to her funny little hotel to hold her hand and read to her. But when I got through, someone at reception said she had flown to Miami and joined a winter cruise in the Caribbean. So much for my visions of Tante Lisl expiring on a couch; she was probably playing deck tennis and winning the ship’s amateur talent competition with her inimitable high-kick routine of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’.

      ‘I’ll shave, shower and change my clothes,’ I said as I sorted through my suitcase. To make conversation I added: ‘I’m putting on too much weight.’

      ‘You should work out,’ he said solemnly. ‘The older you get the more you need exercise.’

      I nodded. Thanks, kid, I’ll make a note of it. Well that was great. While I was nursemaiding this kid he was going to be second-guessing everything I did because he thought I was out of condition and past it.

      The bathroom was in chaos. I’d almost forgotten what the habitat of the young single male looked like: on a chair there was draped a dirty tee-shirt, a heavy sweater and a torn denim jacket – he’d obviously donned his one and only suit in my honour. Three kinds of shampoo, two flavours of expensive after-shaves and an illuminated magnifying mirror to examine spots.

      I went to the bathroom window, an old-fashioned double-glazed contraption, the brass handles tightly closed and tarnished with a green mottle as if it had not been opened in decades. Along the bottom ledge, between the dusty sheets of glass, lay dozens of dead moths and shrivelled flies of all shapes and sizes. How did they get inside, if they couldn’t get out alive? Maybe there was a message there for me if only I could work it out.

      The view from the window brought mixed feelings. I had grown up here; it was the only place I could think of as home. Not so long ago, in California, I had continually ached to be back in Berlin. I had been homesick for this town in a way I had never thought possible. Now that I was here there were no feelings of happiness or satisfaction. Something inexplicable had happened, unless of course I was frightened of going once more to the other side, which once I’d regarded as no more demanding than walking to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. The kid thought I was nervous and he was right. If he knew what he was doing, he’d be nervous too.

      Down in the street there was not much movement. The few pedestrians were wrapped in heavy coats, scarfs and fur hats and walking head-bent and hunched against the cold east wind that blew steadily from Russia’s vast icy hinterland. Both sides of the street were lined with cars and vans. They were dirty: caked with the mud and grime of a European winter, a condition unknown in southern California. On the glasswork of the parked cars, frost and ice had formed elaborate swirling patterns. Any one of these vehicles would provide a secure hiding place for a surveillance team watching the building. I regretted letting the kid bring me here. It was stupid and careless. He was sure to be known to the opposition, and too tall to be inconspicuous; that’s why he’d never last as a field agent.

      After I’d cleaned up and shaved and changed into a suit, he spread a map across the table and showed me the route he proposed. He suggested that we drive through Charlie into the Eastern Sector of Berlin and then drive south and avoid the main roads and Autobahnen all the time. It was a circuitous route but the kid quoted all London’s official advisories to me and insisted that it was the best way to do it. I yielded to him. I could see he was one of those fastidious preparation fanatics, and that was a good way to be when going on a venture of this sort.

      ‘What do you think?’ the kid asked.

      ‘Tell me seriously: did London Central really say I might want restraints to drag this bruiser out even against his will?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Do you have any whisky?’

      As is so often the case with frontier crossings that inspire a nervous premonition of disaster, passing through Checkpoint Charlie went smoothly. Before driving out of the city I asked the kid to make a small detour to call at a quiet little bar in Oranienburger Strasse so I could get cigarettes and a tall glass of Saxony’s famous beer.

      ‘You must have a throat like leather to actually crave East German cigarettes,’ said the kid. He was staring at the only other people in the bar: two youngish women in fur coats. They looked up at him expectantly, but one glance was enough to tell them that he was no proposition and they went back to their whispered conversation.

      ‘What do you know about it?’ I said. ‘You don’t smoke.’

      ‘If I did smoke, it wouldn’t be those coffin nails.’

      ‘Drink your beer and shut up,’ I said.

      Behind the counter Andi Krohn had followed our exchange. He looked at the girls in the corner and stared at me as if about to smile. Andi’s had always been a place to find available women for a price: they say it was notorious even as far back as before the war. I don’t know how his predecessors had got away with it for all these years, except that the Krohn family had always known the right people to cultivate. Andi and I had been friends since we were both schoolboys and he was the school’s most cherished athlete. In those days there was talk of him becoming an Olympic miler. But it never happened. Now he was greying and portly with bifocal glasses and he took several minutes to recognize me after we came through the door.

      Andi’s grandparents had been members of Germany’s tiny ethnic minority of Sorbs, Slavs who from medieval times had retained their own culture and language. Nowadays they were mostly to be found in the extreme southeast corner of the DDR where Poland and Czechoslovakia meet. It is one of several places called the Dreiländereck – three-nation corner – a locality where they brew some of the finest beers in the world. Strangers came a long way to seek out Andi’s bar, and they weren’t all looking for women.

      We exchanged banalities as if I’d never been away. His son Frank had married a pharmacist from Dresden, and I had little alternative but to go through an album of wedding photos and make appreciative noises, and drink beer, and a few schnapps chasers, while the kid looked at his watch and fretted. I didn’t show Andi pictures of my wife and family and he didn’t ask to see any. Andi was quick on the uptake, the way all barmen become. He knew that whatever kind of job I did nowadays it wasn’t one you did with a pocketful of identification material.

      Once back on the road we made good time. ‘Smoke if you want to,’ the kid offered.

      ‘Not right now.’

      ‘I thought you were desperate for one of those East German nails?’

      ‘The feeling passed.’ I looked out at the landscape. I knew the area. Forests helped to conceal СКАЧАТЬ