Faith. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ these military camps, and so numerous, that it was not always possible to be sure where one ended and another began. Almost as abundant in the first fifty miles of our journey were the open-cast lignite mines where East Germany obtained the fuel to make electricity and to burn in a million household stoves and create the most polluted air in Europe. Winter had proved capricious this year, tightening and then loosening its grip on the landscape. The last few days had seen a premature thaw and had left snow patches to shine in the moonlight, marking the edges of the fields and higher ground. The back roads we’d chosen were icy in places and the kid kept to a sensible moderate speed. We were within fifteen miles of Magdeburg when we encountered the road-block.

      We came upon it suddenly as we rounded a bend. The kid braked in response to an agitated waving of a lighted baton of the sort used by German police on both sides of the frontier.

      ‘Papers?’ said the soldier. He was a burly old fellow in camouflage fatigues and steel helmet. ‘Switch off the engine and the main beams.’ His country accent was perfect: something to put into the archives now that all East Germany’s kids were talking like TV announcers.

      The kid switched off the car headlights, and in the sudden quiet I could hear the wind in the bare trees and subdued pop music coming from the guard hut. The man who’d spoken handed our papers over to another soldier with Leutnant’s tabs on his camouflage outfit. He examined them by means of a flashlight. It was the very hell of a place for a lengthy delay. A bleak landscape of turnip fields until, right across the horizon, like tall-stacked cruisers of the Kaiser’s coal-burning battle fleet, there stood a long line of factory chimneys, puffing out clouds of multicoloured smoke.

      ‘Get out,’ said the officer, a short slim man with a neatly trimmed moustache and steel-rimmed glasses. We got out. It was not a good sign. ‘Open the trunk.’

      When it was open the Leutnant used his flashlight and groped around the oily rags and spare wheel. He found a bottle of Swedish vodka there. It was still in a colourful fancy box they use for overpriced booze in airport duty-free shops.

      ‘You can keep it,’ the kid told him. The Leutnant gave no sign of hearing the kid’s offer. ‘A present from Sweden.’ But it was no use. The Leutnant was deaf to such bribes. He looked at our papers again, holding them close to his face so that the light reflected on to his face and made his spectacle lenses gleam. I shivered in the cold. For some reason the Leutnant didn’t seem interested in me. Maybe it was my rumpled suit with its unmistakable East German cut, or the pungent smell of Andi Krohn’s rot-gut apple-schnapps that had been repeating on me for the last half hour and was no doubt evident on my breath. But the kid was using a Swedish passport, and the identification that accompanied it described him as a Swedish engineer working for a construction company that was about to build a luxury hotel in Magdeburg. It was plausible, and anyway the kid’s German was not good enough to pass him off as a German national. The Swedes had made a corner for themselves building hotels to which only foreigners with hard currency were admitted, so it was a reasonable enough cover. But I wondered what would happen if someone started questioning him in Swedish.

      I stamped around to keep my circulation moving. The trees were tormented by the wind and the skies had cleared enough to bring the temperature drop that always accompanies a sight of the stars. I didn’t envy these men their job. As we stood there on the country road the wind had that cruel bite that dampness brings. It was more than enough excuse for becoming bad-tempered.

      The two soldiers circled the old dented Volvo, looking at it with that mixture of contempt and envy that Western luxuries so often produced in the Party faithful. Then, with the boot open, the two soldiers went back to their hut, leaving us standing there in the cold. I’d seen it all before: they were hoping we would get back into the car so that they could come back and scream at us. Or that we would close the trunk or even drive away, so that they could phone the back-up team at the next checkpoint and tell them to open fire at us. It wasn’t anything to take personally. All soldiers are inclined to get like that after too much guard duty.

      Eventually they seemed to grow weary of their game. They returned and examined the car again, wondering perhaps if it would be diverting to tear the upholstery out of its interior and then make sure there was no contraband hidden inside the tyres. The Leutnant stayed close to us, still brandishing our papers, while the old man climbed into the back seat and prodded everything proddable. When he’d completed his examination he got out and looked again at the back. There was a loud bang as he slammed the trunk. When he returned he was carrying the vodka. The Leutnant gave us our papers. ‘You can go,’ he said. The older man hugged the fancy box to his chest and watched our reaction.

      We got in the car and the kid started up the engine and switched on the lights. I turned my head. Just visible in the darkness the two men stood watching us depart. ‘We’ll be late,’ said the kid.

      ‘Take it very slowly,’ I said. ‘And if they shout “Stop”, stop.’

      ‘You bet,’ said the kid.

      ‘Militia,’ I said as we pulled away.

      ‘Yes,’ he said, suddenly turning testy now that the danger seemed past. ‘The accountant and one of the men from the packing shed playing soldiers.’

      ‘They have to do it.’

      ‘Yes, they have to do it. They started tightening up on the factory militias eighteen months ago.’

      ‘We were lucky.’

      ‘It usually goes like that nowadays,’ said the kid.

      ‘I thought we’d be sitting there all night,’ I said. ‘They like company.’

      ‘Not lately. It’s beginning to change. Lately they just like vodka.’

      We were in the outskirts of Magdeburg, and running twenty-five minutes late, by the time he spoke again. ‘I screwed up,’ he said suddenly, and with that knotted anger that we reserve for our own errors.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Do you think we’ll be back by tomorrow?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully.

      ‘I forgot to leave the key for my girlfriend. She won’t be able to feed the cat.’

      I felt like saying that Rumtopf had more than enough body fat to sustain itself over a few foodless days, but people can be very unpredictable about their pet animals, so I grunted amiably.

      ‘This colonel, this VERDI, says he knows you. Is he working for us?’

      ‘Because he has a cover name? No. They all have those if we deal with them on a regular basis, or mention them in messages. Even Stalin had a cover name.’

      ‘VERDI says he owes you a favour; a big favour.’

      I looked at him. ‘What’s he supposed to say?’ I’d had enough of this crap from Bret without more from the kid. ‘Is he supposed to say that I owe him a big favour? That would really get their attention in London Central, wouldn’t it?’

      ‘I suppose it would.’

      ‘Of course he’s going to say that he owes me a big favour. That’s the way these things are done: the person making contact always says he’s trying to repay a favour: a big favour. That way no one in London is likely to suspect that I’m going over there to bend the rules and do all kinds of things that the boys behind the desks have inscribed in their big brass-bound no-no СКАЧАТЬ