Faith. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ a bastard,’ I said.

      ‘VERDI? SO you do know him?’

      ‘He thinks I owe him a favour.’

      ‘But you don’t? Is that what you mean?’

      I thought about it. ‘He tossed an arrest certificate into the shredder instead of putting it on the teleprinter.’

      ‘That’s a favour,’ said the kid.

      ‘He had other reasons. Anyway favours done for the opposition are like money in the bank,’ I said resentfully. And then, before he thought it was a currency I stocked up on, I added: ‘For guys like that, I mean. They like being able to call in a few.’

      The kid shot a sudden glance at me. I’d gone too far. I had the feeling he’d heard in my voice that note that said that I was under some kind of obligation to the bastard. And that was something I’d not until then admitted even to myself. ‘What’s your guess?’ the kid said. ‘Do you think he wants to talk?’

      ‘We all talk,’ I said. ‘Opposing field agents all talk. You bump into these guys all the time; at airports, in bars and on the job. Sometimes we talk. It can be useful. It’s the way the job is done. But we never ask questions.’

      ‘But if VERDI wants to go on the payroll we can start asking him questions. Okay, I understand now. But will he know something we need to hear?’

      ‘There is usually something worth hearing if they want to be helpful. If he gives us a few good targets; that would be valuable.’

      ‘What are good ones?’

      ‘Cipher clerks who gamble or borrow money,’ I said. ‘Department chiefs who drink, analysts who are screwing their secretary, translators who sniff. Vulnerable people.’

      ‘This one knows you. He’ll talk only to someone he knows.’

      ‘Yes, you told me. But I’ll take a lot of convincing he’s on the level.’

      The car had slowed and the kid was looking at the street signs. ‘I know the house,’ he said. ‘I delivered a package here last month. Money I think.’

      ‘You live dangerously,’ I told him.

      ‘All this won’t last much longer,’ he said. ‘I want to get a little excitement while I can. I want to be able to tell my kids about it.’

      He must have been talking to Bret. ‘You can have my share,’ I told him, and smiled. But such highly motivated youngsters worried me: so did these people who thought it was so nearly all over. There was once an old chap at the training school who started the very first day’s lecture saying: our job here is to change gallant young gentlemen into nervous old ladies. This kid needed that lecture badly.

      2

      Magdeburg, where we were headed, is one of the most ancient German cities, a provincial capital tucked into the most westerly bend of the River Elbe at a place where the river divides into three waterways. Its commanding site at the edge of the North German plain has always made it a target for plundering armies. Devastated by the Thirty Years War, it was razed again by the Second World War and even more thoroughly by the Soviet-style city-planners and architects who came after it.

      Magdeburg has been a home to men as choosy as Otto the Great and Archbishop Burchard HI and the more refined members of the house of Brandenburg. So great was the power vested here that when they came to build the railway joining Paris to Moscow they diverted the line through Magdeburg. More than a century later, in the postwar race for growth, the city was hastily transformed into one of the world’s most polluted industrial regions, where the proletariat choked on untreated chemical waste and more than half the children were suffering from bronchitis and eczema. Now, as the Marxist empire shrank and its privileged ruling class felt threatened from all sides, the Stasi, the Party’s Moscow-styled secret police and security service, had chosen Magdeburg to make a fortified compound where its most secret and highly treasured documents and artifacts could be guarded and hidden. Even the mortal remains of Hitler and Goebbels had been secreted away in the compound.

      ‘Do you know where the Smersh compound begins?’ I asked him as we drove through the centre of town.

      I’d almost forgotten how dark and bleak East German towns became after dark. There was little traffic, fewer pedestrians and no advertising signs. Two cops standing under a street light watched us pass with interest.

      The kid glanced at me and smiled. ‘So they really call it the Smersh compound? I thought that was just something invented by the newspapers.’

      We passed slowly along a wall of billboards around a building site. At least two dozen huge posters affirmed with typographic bombast the DDR’s loyalty, obligation and friendship to the mighty USSR and the even mightier socialist brotherhood. We passed the cathedral for a second time. ‘One side is the Westring, I remember that,’ I said, as we came to the billboards again. ‘It’s a long time since I was here.’ Traffic signals brought us to a halt, and then he made a turn and said he knew where he was.

      The kid had the car window down and was staring out into the shadowy moonlit streets. ‘Our man lives off to the left.’ He slowed and having spotted Klausenerstrasse – onetime Westendstrasse – signalled a turn and we were in a quiet street, paved with neatly arranged cobblestones and darkened by mature trees. These large comfortable houses had miraculously survived the RAF night bombers, the American day bombers and all the artillery fire that came afterwards.

      It is a curious paradox that Hitler’s Third Reich and subsequent communist governments had preserved East Germany as the last remaining European country with domestic servants. Only in the DDR were such grand old households functioning in the old-fashioned way. Senior officials of the Stasi, and lucky detachments of KGB liaison officers like VERDI, had readily settled into this sort of bourgeois comfort, and now this unassailable elite occupied choice tree-lined streets of German towns complete with gardens, garages and quarters at the rear for attentive maid-servants, chauffeurs, cooks and gardeners. Only recently had chipped paintwork, untrimmed hedges and cracks in the glass signalled some tightening of the economy.

      ‘This is the house where VERDI lives,’ said the kid, reducing his voice almost to a whisper. ‘He shares it with two other officials and their families.’ The wrought-iron gates were closed. He parked at the kerbside and we got out. It was a big house: two storeys, with some of the upper rooms granted access to a long decorative balcony by means of french windows. There were no lights to be seen anywhere, but that might have been a tribute to the heavy curtains.

      The front garden of the old house was protected by a more recently installed six-feet-high chain-link fence. It was anchored to stone gateposts and a pair of ancient and elaborate gates. The kid shone his flashlight on the brass plate which bore the house number. Above it a more recent white plastic sign indicated which of two bellpushes should be used by visitors and which by delivery men. It was that kind of house.

      He unlatched the gate and we went inside without pressing either bell. In the air there was the smell of burned garden rubbish. ‘We’re only half an hour late,’ said the kid. ‘He’ll wait.’ It was very quiet in Magdeburg. There was not even the sound of traffic, just the hum of a distant plane droning steadily like a trapped wasp. In the silence every movement seemed to cause unnaturally loud noises, our footsteps crunching in the gravel like a company of soldiers marching through a bowl of cornflakes.

      Three СКАЧАТЬ