Charity

10

The best way to test Prettyman’s story was to go…

11

Even before the First World War, the joke about ‘count…

12

‘This is not going to become an inquest,’ said Bret,…

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About the Author

Other Books by Len Deighton

About the Publisher

Introduction

If you are obsessed, as I admit to being, it is not always easy to infect others with your devotion. My whole family has proved immune to my feelings about airships, Zeppelinpost, vintage fountain pens and the history of aero engines. So to introduce Charity, the final volume of the Bernard Samson series, I would like to convey to you the reasons behind my obsession with Berlin. I won’t get the same opportunity again, so here is my eye-view of Berlin’s extraordinary past.

My response to Germany and Germans is not that of a casual visitor. In Berlin the battered remains of the fabulous Adlon became my home for some time. Together with my family I lived in Germany and my children attended schools there. Following the extraordinary linguistic talent of my wife, they mastered the German language. Such consummate skills would have been useful to me when I lived in communist East Germany and learned something of the social adroitness required in a country where careless talk can bring infinite suffering. We all saw Germans at their best and at their worst. And the same amazing contrast is to be seen in German history. I do not overlook the millions who died at the orders of the Moscow communists when I say of Germany: how can a nation go from the highest of high achievements and then to the murderous barbarism of the Nazi period, and then produce the repressive inhumanity of the communist regime of which I write in the Bernard Samson stories? I don’t know the answer.

The year 1913 marked the highest time of Germany’s success. On January 27

Emperor Wilhelm II conveniently celebrated both the centenary of the Battle of Leipzig (at which Germany had played a major part in defeating Napoleon Bonaparte) and his 54

birthday. During his 25 years on the throne Germany had undergone an astonishing change. It now had the best railways in the world. It surpassed Britain in iron and steel manufacture and was not far behind Britain in merchant shipping. In applied science, such as chemistry and electricity, Germany led the world. It is true that sophisticated visitors from the glamour of Paris or the wealth of London laughed at Berliners and called them awkward country bumpkins, but Berlin’s population had far more than doubled since Wilhelm II inherited the throne. Manpower, money and growing coal production was expanding the economy, and precision engineering brought wealth and gave the Emperor a formidable army and navy. Germany was fast becoming a superpower to rival Britain. Its lead in aviation was to be seen at the Vienna Air Week in June 1914 when German aircraft won distance, duration and altitude records by large margins. And the Mercedes six-cylinder, water-cooled engine format set the pattern for many years to come.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was a dictator in all but name. Wilhelmine Germany was prosperous but its repression of political discussion and the discouragement of any intellectual exchange ensured that only shallow emotional ideas prevailed in art and literature. Compared to other European cities – such as Vienna and Paris – Berlin was a cultural backwater. Belligerent political misjudgments by Kaiser Wilhelm led to a bloody war on two fronts and to the chaos of Germany’s defeat in 1918. The Kaiser fled to Holland. Germany – now a precarious Republic – saw a series of violent revolutions and counter-revolutions. As the turmoil subsided there was a loosening of cultural restrictions. Extremes of politics, writing, painting, theatre, dance and fashion exploited sensuality. What was at first extreme soon became the general fashion. This shift is often labelled ‘Expressionism’.

Berlin has always been a military city where soldiers were respected and Prussian officers enjoyed high social prestige. At one time, everyone passing either way through the city gates paid a toll called the Akzise, which went directly to the army. Berlin never had the international financial power that London enjoyed; heavy industry and electrical plants dominated it. And it has always been a city of foreigners drawing the talented, the ambitious and the fugitives from the Eastern hinterland. A census in 1910 calculated that only forty per cent of Berliners were born there. Many of the foreigners gave Berlin its distinction as a city of art and experimentation but Germans dominated the theatre. Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill’s haunting music and Lotte Lenya’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ made the little ‘Theatre on the Schiffbauerdamm’ world famous. Max Reinhardt created unsurpassed drama. So did the man who was, to my mind, the greatest of all: Erwin Piscator, who created electrifying experimental plays. Josef von Sternberg, one of the period’s most famous film directors, was rumoured to have arrived in Berlin from London as a penniless and undistinguished film editor named Joe Stern, but Berlin provided its own magic. Von or no von, berg or no berg, his film The Blue Angel started Marlene Dietrich on the road to Hollywood and riches. Film directors such as Fritz Lang and GW Pabst were ahead of Hollywood in most respects.

The extraordinary culture of Berlin in the first three decades of the twentieth century doesn’t end there. The modern architecture of men such as Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn startled their contemporaries, and their clients too. As for photojournalism: it was invented in Berlin. Erich Salomon used an Ermanox, a tiny camera with huge 85mm f/1.8 lens to shoot verboten photos in ‘existing light’. He used this facility to get scoops on private political meetings and murder trials where light was low and flash bulbs would have attracted attention to his illicit activities. Salomon’s photos were sensational and photo-reportage became a profitable profession as illustrated periodicals were created to exploit photographic stories. Felix Mann and Alfred Eisenstaedt were among the masters of this new pictorial storytelling. The unique ferocity of Berlin’s creativity was fanned by the small numbers of artists. The Romanisches Café, sited alongside the Memorial Church, was a meeting place where ideas, insults, arguments and blows were exchanged. Here, politics met art, and intellectuals met actors. Zeppelins cruised overhead and just down the street, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, Albert Einstein was preparing to turn the world inside out.

The coming to power of Hitler and his Nazi Party in 1933 brought a new and twisted version of the strict Wilhelmine dictates and abruptly ended Berlin’s free-wheeling culture. The Nazis despised art and considered drama, films and journalism of any sort to be potential and dangerous enemies. Media were placed under the direct control of Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister. Many creative people fled, and those who didn’t were apt to have their lives abruptly ended in the gas chambers of an extermination camp. Erich Salomon died in Auschwitz. Some of the star actors and actresses escaped to find new careers in New York, Hollywood and London. Photo magazines such as Life in America and Picture Post in Britain benefited from this German exodus.

The centre of Berlin is indisputably the Brandenburg Gate. It has always been more important than any of the other contenders, including the Royal Palace. Yet it was only by chance (in a wartime decision by Allied bureaucrats in London) that in 1945 the Gate became the barrier between the two postwar worlds. Surmounting the arch there is the ‘quadriga’ Viktoria, the goddess of victory, in a chariot drawn by four horses. This great copper icon was stolen by Napoleon, subsequently recovered after Bonaparte’s defeat (by combined German and British armies) only to be destroyed in a World War Two bombing raid. The joy of all Berliners when the moulds were discovered in a Berlin cellar, and the quadriga re-cast and returned to the arch, can be imagined. But Viktoria now looked down upon the sector of Berlin where communists, backed by their Russian masters, inflicted upon the inhabitants of the East Germany the rule of the so-called German Democratic Republic.

Berlin is like an ever-present character in all my Bernard Samson books. It hovers over the action like a storm cloud even when the action moves to a different locale. But Berlin has no speaking part. It is the action and inter-action that must always dominate stories of the sort that I write. Berlin is the backdrop but the people who strut and posture on the stage together create a mood of drama, farce, horror or knockabout comedy that must be maintained throughout all the stories. When I wrote Winter, a story of Berlin in the first half of the twentieth century, and the prelude to the Bernard Samson stories, the ghosts danced in my head.

The critics of Britain and the USA (I can’t effectively read the others) have been generous to me and I offer them a belated thank you for the confidence that an experienced critic can provide to a working author. But I have always been a little puzzled by the way the critics have categorized the stories. Now, let me say immediately, that few, if any, writers can evaluate their work with any semblance of accuracy. I suspect that Proust intended to write a family saga and Tolstoy thought War and Peace was a travel guide, but surely the Bernard Samson stories are comedy thrillers – boardroom dramas perhaps – about a man in love with two women. Bernard’s emotional dilemma and the effect it has on both Fiona and Gloria was the driving force behind writing this continuing drama. But neither the love nor the comedy has, over the years, provoked the sort of comment I expected.

When writing just one book, a handful of notes and a good memory is all that is required to monitor your characters. But when planning ten books one becomes a personnel manager. Right from Berlin Game, the first book in the first trilogy, I created a wall chart plus a file index for the major roles. But for changes over a long period of time character notes would not be enough. So for the major characters in the Bernard Samson series I used real people as my reference. I don’t mean that each is an exact portrait of someone I know; each is an assembly of several people I know, or ones I met a few times. The Germans had to be German in thought and action; their clothes and mannerisms, their shape and syntax are rooted in observations. But in appearance, both the avuncular Frank Harrington and formal Bret Rensselaer are slightly aged versions of old friends. Werner is a fondly recalled business partner of long-ago and Lisl Hennig’s hurried judgment and rather oblique reasoning is sometimes that of my dear Irish mother. As for George Kosinski, his characterization was simple. At grammar school, at art school and again at college I had many cherished Polish friends. George was the unforgettable father of one of them. The origin of that modest charmer Dicky Cruyer and his arriviste nature is best left unaccounted for. Fiona and Gloria are two contrasting facets of my wife, Ysabele. But these are also modified and changed by the addition of other observations. Along with passing time, plot development brings stresses and strains and changes in character so that each person soon became quite different to the original description. Everything changes as writing continues, as Napoleon is said to have declared about battle. I didn’t mean to fall in love with the character of Gloria. I fought against it every step of the way. I gave her plenty of faults and failings but it was no use, she came through every test with a radiant glow. I loved Fiona too; she has the sophistication, gravitas and intellect that Bernard respects so much. But Gloria wears my wife’s clothes – that fur hat and brown suede overcoat from Paris – and flaunts them with youthful abandon. Who can resist her? And yet these were not my characterizations. Like everyone and everything in the stories, each was seen through the eyes of Bernard Samson, whose sceptical bite is the essence of the whole series.

It wasn’t just the characters; I also kept a file index for the places in the story. As with the people, photographs and my own sketches supplemented the on-going material. The Hennig Hotel goes through several changes in the Samson years and its origin, as family residence in the early years of the 20

century, was described in Winter. The furniture and furnishings of the Berlin home and office of Frank Harrington had pages of notes devoted to them. So did Dicky Cruyer’s home, changing frequently to the dictates of fashion, and more records were kept describing the offices and safe houses used by the SIS in London.

One reader told me that the Bernard Samson books were a social chronicle of the final years of the communist empire seen from London, Berlin and Warsaw. I had never thought of them in that way and that certainly was never my primary intention. Only here and there have I touched upon the historical background. I didn’t want the books to become a political record so did not refer to such events as the travels and speeches of people such as President Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev, all of whom played a vital part in the eventual fall of Russia’s communist empire, and thus in the lives of my characters.

But history cannot be denied and finally the rumour mills proved right. The daily sequence of hints and tips we all received constantly, from both sides, came to fruition step by step. With no warning from the expensive intelligence organizations of the West, the Wall went down as it had gone up; in a muddled scramble of incompetence and confusion. But with that fine sense of proportion with which all apparatchiks are equipped, the Stasi, the Grepo, the East German politicians and all those who had manned the murder machines of the DDR got their pensions guaranteed in Western marks. In England and America people winked at me and said I’d forecast the most unexpected development. But few Germans hailed me as a prophet; they had seen what was coming and those who were surprised said I was lucky.

Just as with the collapse of communism in Poland, Germany’s intellectuals and academics who had energetically supported the repressive regime to the very end, were the first to declare themselves the victors in a struggle for freedom and democracy. And because substantial numbers of these people spoke English, the news reporters and historians who flooded in to tell the story of freedom’s triumph gave them the role of heroes. The story of the Church, its valour, sacrifices and triumphs, was belittled by these belligerent secularists.

It was Russia’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, (who remained a dedicated communist) who had the last word on the subject; ‘If there is one man responsible for the collapse of communism it is Pope John Paul II.’

Len Deighton, 2011

1

January 1988. The Moscow-Paris express train

A bloated vampire moon drained all life and colour from the world. The snow-covered land came speeding past the train. It was grey and ill-defined, marked only by a few livid cottages and limitless black forest grizzled with snow. No roads; the railway did not follow any road, it cut through the land like a knife. I had seen enough of this cheerless country. I tugged the window-blind down, grabbing at a brass rubbish bin to keep my balance as the clattering train argued with a badly maintained section of track.

Sometimes, at night, people also succumbed. Jim Prettyman’s complexion, which had always been pale, was ashen under the dim overhead light. Inert on the top berth, a rosary dangling from his white-skinned hand; on the other a gold wedding ring and a massive gold Rolex wrist-watch indicating nine-thirty in the morning. It wasn’t nine-thirty here for us. His watch had stopped. Or perhaps that was the right time in Moscow. We were a long way from Moscow, and for us it was still night.

Jim stirred, as if my stare had disturbed his sleep. But his eyelids didn’t move. He made a noise; a deep breath and then a stifled groan that ended in a subdued nasal snort as he snatched his arm down under the blanket and resumed his sleep. Jim was tough and wiry but his appearance had never been athletic. Now his white face, with the vestigial eyebrows, made him look like a corpse prettified and readied for the relatives.

Jim had picked up some kind of infection of the liver, or maybe it was the kidneys. The Russian hospital doctors said they could treat it, but, since their diagnosis varied from day to day according to what they were drinking with lunch, no one believed them. Some doctor the American embassy had on call wouldn’t give a diagnosis; he just advised that Jim shouldn’t be subjected to a plane trip. Rather than have him face any more treatment by Moscow’s medics, Jim’s American wife had wired the money for him to be evacuated by train and attended by a nurse. Jim’s wife was a woman with considerable influence. She had arranged that her father in the State Department sent a night-action fax to make sure the embassy people jumped to it. She wasn’t with us; she had to host a Washington dinner party for her father.

Although the paperwork for Jim’s passage was being handled by the Americans, someone in London Central ordered that I should accompany him as far as Berlin. I was in Moscow at the time, and their message said it simply meant delaying my return by twenty-four hours. But going from Moscow to West Berlin by air was quite different to doing the same trip by train. By train I was going to encounter whole armies of nosy customs officials, security men and frontier police. Jim had a US passport nowadays, the nurse was Canadian and I was stuck with the German passport that I had used for my entry. With this cosmopolitan party I would have to cross Poland, and then travel across a large section of the German Democratic Republic, before getting to anywhere I could call home. Perhaps the people in London didn’t appreciate that. There was sometimes good reason to think pen-pushers in the Foreign Office in Whitehall were still using nineteenth-century maps.

I was looking at Jim, trying to decide how ill he really was, when there came a sudden sound, like a shovelful of heavy mud hitting a wall. The compartment rocked slightly. With no lessening of speed, the express thudded the air and sped between some empty loading platforms, leaving behind no more than an echoed gasp and a whiff of burned diesel. The train was packed. You could feel the weight of it as it swayed, and hear the relentless pounding of the bogies. The compartments of the wagon-lit had been booked for weeks. The cheaper coach seats were all filled and there were people sleeping amid the litter on the floor and propped between baggage in the corridors. Five rail cars were reserved for the army: hardy teenagers with cropped heads and pimples. Their kitbags and rifles were under guard in the freight car. Returning to training camps after playing the sort of war games that didn’t include time for sleep. Exhausted draftees. The fighting battalions had forsaken rifles long ago. Rifles were only for clumsy youngsters learning to drill.

Further back in the train there were East European businessmen in plastic suits and clip-on ties; shrivelled old women with baskets heavy with home-made vodka and smoked pork sausage; stubble-chinned black-market dealers with used TV sets crammed into freshly printed cardboard boxes.

Coming half-awake, Jim stretched out a red bony foot so that his toes pressed upon the metal divider that formed the side of a tiny clothes closet. Then he grabbed the edge of the blanket, turned away and curled up small. ‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ he growled drowsily. So he wasn’t asleep and dreaming; he simply had his eyes closed. Perhaps that was the way Jim Prettyman had always fooled me. Long ago we’d been very close friends, one of a foursome made up with his petulant first wife Lucinda and my wife Fiona. We’d all worked for the Department in those days. Then Jim had been selected for special jobs and sent to work in corporate America as a cover for his real tasks. He’d changed jobs and changed wives, changed nationality and changed friends in rapid succession. He was not the sort of wavering wimp who let a good opportunity slip past while worrying who might get hurt.

‘There’s someone standing outside in the corridor,’ I told him.

‘The conductor.’

‘No, not him. Our bad-tempered conductor has assumed tenancy of compartment number fifteen. And he’s stinking fall-down drunk and will soon be unconscious.’

‘Slide open the door and look,’ Jim suggested. ‘Or is that too easy?’ His voice was croaky.

‘You’re the one who’s dying,’ I said. ‘I’m the security expert. Remember?’

‘Was there someone at the railway terminal?’ he asked, before remembering to try and smile at my joke. When I made no move to investigate the corridor noise he repeated the question.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Someone you recognized?’

‘I’m not sure. It could be the same goon I had sitting in the lobby of my hotel.’