London Match

‘I’ll give you the names and addresses. I’ll tell you everything I know.’ She leaned forward. ‘I don’t want to go to prison. Will it all have to be in the newspapers?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘My married daughter is living in Canada. She’s married to a Spanish boy she met on holiday. They’ve applied for Canadian citizenship but their papers haven’t come through yet. It would be terrible if this trouble I’m in ruined their lives; they’re so happy together.’

‘And this overnight accommodation you were providing for your Russian friends – when did that all stop?’

She looked up sharply, as if surprised that I could guess that it had stopped.

‘The two jobs don’t mix,’ I said. ‘The accommodation was just an interim task to see how reliable you were.’

She nodded. ‘Two years ago,’ she said softly, ‘perhaps two and a half years.’

‘Then?’

‘I came to Berlin for a week. They paid my fare. I went through to the East and spent a week in a training school. All the other students were German, but as you see I speak German well. My father always insisted that I kept up my German.’

‘A week at Potsdam?’

‘Yes, just outside Potsdam, that’s right.’

‘Don’t miss out anything important, Mrs Miller,’ I said.

‘No, I won’t,’ she promised nervously. ‘I was there for ten days learning about shortwave radios and microdots and so on. You probably know the sort of thing.’

‘Yes, I know the sort of thing. It’s a training school for spies.’

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘You’re not going to tell me you came back from there without realizing you were a fully trained Russian spy, Mrs Miller?’

She looked up and met my stare. ‘No, I’ve told you, I was an enthusiastic Marxist. I was perfectly ready to be a spy for them. As I saw it, I was doing it on behalf of the oppressed and hungry people of the world. I suppose I still am a Marxist-Leninist.’

‘Then you must be an incurable romantic,’ I said.

‘It was wrong of me to do what I did; I can see that, of course. England has been good to me. But half the world is starving and Marxism is the only solution.’

‘Don’t lecture me, Mrs Miller,’ I said. ‘I get enough of that from my office.’ I got up so that I could unbutton my overcoat and find my cigarettes. ‘Do you want a cigarette?’ I said.

She gave no sign of having heard me.

‘I’m trying to give them up,’ I said, ‘but I carry the cigarettes with me.’

She still didn’t answer. Perhaps she was too busy thinking about what might happen to her. I went to the window and looked out. It was too dark to see very much except Berlin’s permanent false dawn: the greenish white glare that came from the floodlit ‘death strip’ along the east side of the Wall. I knew this street well enough; I’d passed this block thousands of times. Since 1961, when the Wall was first built, following the snaky route of the Landwehr Canal had become the quickest way to get around the Wall from the neon glitter of the Ku-damm to the floodlights of Checkpoint Charlie.

‘Will I go to prison?’ she said.

I didn’t turn round. I buttoned my coat, pleased that I’d resisted the temptation to smoke. From my pocket I brought the tiny Pearlcorder tape machine. It was made of a bright silver metal. I made no attempt to hide it. I wanted her to see it.

‘Will I go to prison?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I hope so.’

It had taken no more than forty minutes to get her confession. Werner was waiting for me in the next room. There was no heating in that room. He was sitting on a kitchen chair, the fur collar of his coat pulled up round his ears so that it almost touched the rim of his hat.

‘A good squeal?’ he asked.

‘You look like an undertaker, Werner,’ I said. ‘A very prosperous undertaker waiting for a very prosperous corpse.’

‘I’ve got to sleep,’ he said. ‘I can’t take these late nights any more. If you’re going to hang on here, to type it all out, I’d rather go home now.’

It was the drink that had got to him, of course. The ebullience of intoxication didn’t last very long with Werner. Alcohol is a depressant and Werner’s metabolic rate had slowed enough to render him unfit to drive. ‘I’ll drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll make the transcription on your typewriter.’

‘Sure,’ said Werner. I was staying with him in his apartment at Dahlem. And now, in his melancholy mood, he was anticipating his wife’s reaction to us waking her up by arriving in the small hours of the morning. Werner’s typewriter was a very noisy machine and he knew I’d want to finish the job before going to sleep. ‘Is there much of it?’ he asked.

‘It’s short and sweet, Werner. But she’s given us a few things that might make London Central scratch their heads and wonder.’

‘Such as?’

‘Read it in the morning, Werner. We’ll talk about it over breakfast.’

It was a beautiful Berlin morning. The sky was blue despite all those East German generating plants that burn brown coal so that pale smog sits over the city for so much of the year. Today the fumes of the Braunkohle were drifting elsewhere, and outside the birds were singing to celebrate it. Inside, a big wasp, a last survivor from the summer, buzzed around angrily.

Werner’s Dahlem apartment was like a second home to me. I’d known it when it was a gathering place for an endless stream of Werner’s oddball friends. In those days the furniture was old and Werner played jazz on a piano decorated with cigarette burns, and Werner’s beautifully constructed model planes were hanging from the ceiling because that was the only place where they would not be sat upon.

Now it was all different. The old things had all been removed by Zena, his very young wife. Now the flat was done to her taste: expensive modern furniture and a big rubber plant, and a rug that hung on the wall and bore the name of the ‘artist’ who’d woven it. The only thing that remained from the old days was the lumpy sofa that converted to the lumpy bed on which I’d slept.

The three of us were sitting in the ‘breakfast room’, a counter at the end of the kitchen. It was arranged like a lunch counter with Zena playing the role of bartender. From here there was a view through the window, and we were high enough to see the sun-edged treetops of the Grunewald just a block or two away. Zena was squeezing oranges in an electric juicer, and in the automatic coffee-maker the coffee was dripping, its rich aroma floating through the room.

We were talking about marriage. I said, ‘The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change. Both are invariably disappointed.’

‘What rot,’ said Zena as she poured the juice into three glasses. ‘Men do change.’

She bent down to see better the level of the juice and ensure that we all got precisely the same amount. It was a legacy of the Prussian family background of which she was so proud, despite the fact that she’d never even seen the old family homeland. For Prussians like to think of themselves not only as the conscience of the world, but also its final judge and jury.

‘Don’t encourage him, Zena darling,’ said Werner. ‘That contrived Oscar Wilde-ish assertion is just Bernard’s way of annoying wives.’

Zena didn’t let it go; she liked to argue with me. ‘Men change. It’s men who usually leave home and break up the marriage. And it’s because they change.’

‘Good juice,’ I said, sipping some.

‘Men go out to work. Men want promotion in their jobs and they aspire to the higher social class of their superiors. Then they feel their wives are inadequate and start looking for a wife who knows the manners and vocabulary of that class they want to join.’

‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I meant that men don’t change in the way that their women want them to change.’

She smiled. She knew that I was commenting on the way she had changed poor Werner from being an easygoing and somewhat bohemian character into a devoted and obedient husband. It was Zena who had stopped him smoking and made him diet enough to reduce his waistline. And it was Zena who approved everything he bought to wear, from swimming trunks to tuxedo. In this respect Zena regarded me as her opponent. I was the bad influence who could undo all her good work, and that was something Zena was determined to prevent.

She climbed up onto the stool. She was so well proportioned that you only noticed how tiny she was when she did such things. She had long, dark hair and this morning she’d clipped it back into a ponytail that reached down to her shoulder blades. She was wearing a red cotton kimono with a wide black sash around her middle. She’d not missed any sleep that night and her eyes were bright and clear; she’d even found time enough to put on a touch of makeup. She didn’t need makeup – she was only twenty-two years old and there was no disputing her beauty – but the makeup was something from behind which she preferred to face the world.