London Match

The coffee was very dark and strong. She liked it like that, but I poured a lot of milk into mine. The buzzer on the oven sounded and Zena went to get the warm rolls. She put them into a small basket with a red-checked cloth before offering them to us. ‘Brötchen,’ she said. Zena was born and brought up in Berlin, but she didn’t call the bread rolls Schrippe the way the rest of the population of Berlin did. Zena didn’t want to be identified with Berlin; she preferred keeping her options open.

‘Any butter?’ I said, breaking open the bread roll.

‘We don’t eat it,’ said Zena. ‘It’s bad for you.’

‘Give Bernie some of that new margarine,’ said Werner.

‘You should lose some weight,’ Zena told me. ‘I wouldn’t even be eating bread if I were you.’

‘There are all kinds of other things I do that you wouldn’t do if you were me,’ I said. The wasp settled in my hair and I brushed it away.

She decided not to get into that one. She rolled up a newspaper and aimed some blows at the wasp. Then with unconcealed ill-humour she went to the refrigerator and brought me a plastic tub of margarine. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m catching the morning flight. I’ll get out of your way as soon as I’m shaved.’

‘No hurry,’ said Werner to smooth things over. He had already shaved, of course; Zena wouldn’t have let him have breakfast if he’d turned up unshaven. ‘So you got all your typing done last night,’ he said. ‘I should have stayed up and helped.’

‘It wasn’t necessary. I’ll have the translation done in London. I appreciate you and Zena giving me a place to sleep, to say nothing of the coffee last night and Zena’s great breakfast this morning.’

I overdid the appreciation I suppose. I’m prone to do this when I’m nervous, and Zena was a great expert at making me nervous.

‘I was damned tired,’ said Werner.

Zena shot me a glance, but when she spoke it was to Werner. ‘You were drunk,’ she said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be working last night.’

‘We were, darling,’ said Werner.

‘There wasn’t much drinking, Zena,’ I said.

‘Werner gets drunk on the smell of a barmaid’s apron,’ said Zena.

Werner opened his mouth to object to this put-down. Then he realized that he could only challenge it by claiming to have drunk a great deal. He sipped some coffee instead.

‘I’ve seen her before,’ said Werner.

‘The woman?’

‘What’s her name?’

‘She says it’s Müller, but she was married to a man named Johnson at one time. Here? You’ve seen her here? She said she lives in England.’

‘She went to the school in Potsdam,’ said Werner. He smiled at my look of surprise. ‘I read your report when I got up this morning. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Of course not. I wanted you to read it. There might be developments.’

‘Was this to do with Erich Stinnes?’ said Zena. She waved the wasp away from her head.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was his information.’

She nodded and poured herself more coffee. It was difficult to believe that not so long ago she’d been in love with Erich Stinnes. It was difficult to believe that she’d risked her life to protect him and that she was still having physiotherapy sessions because of injuries she’d suffered in his defence.

But Zena was young; and romantic. For both of those reasons, her passions could be of short duration. And for both those reasons, it could well be that she had never been in love with him, but merely in love with the idea of herself in love.

Werner seemed not to notice the mention of Erich Stinnes’s name. That was Werner’s way – honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil to him who evil thinks – that could well be Werner’s motto, for Werner was too generous and considerate to ever think the worst of anyone. And even when the worst was evident, Werner was ready to forgive. Zena’s flagrant love affair with Frank Harrington – the head of our Berlin Field Unit, the Berlin Resident – had made me angrier with her than Werner had been.

Some people said that Werner was the sort of masochist who got a perverse pleasure from the knowledge that his wife had gone off to live with Frank, but I knew Werner too well to go in for that sort of instant psychology. Werner was a tough guy who played the game by his own rules. Maybe some of his rules were flexible, but God help anyone who overstepped the line that Werner drew. Werner was an Old Testament man, and his wrath and vengeance could be terrible. I know, and Werner knows I know. That’s what makes us so close that nothing can come between us, not even the cunning little Zena.

‘I’ve seen that Miller woman somewhere,’ said Werner. ‘I never forget a face.’ He watched the wasp. It was sleepy, crawling slowly up the wall. Werner reached for Zena’s newspaper, but the wasp, sensing danger, flew away.

Zena was still thinking of Erich Stinnes. ‘We do all the work,’ she said bitterly. ‘Bernard gets all the credit. And Erich Stinnes gets all the money.’ She was referring to the way in which Stinnes, a KGB major, had been persuaded to come over to work for us and given a big cash payment. She reached for the jug, and some coffee dripped onto the hotplate making a loud, hissing sound. When she’d poured coffee for herself, she put the very hot jug onto the tiles of the counter. The change of temperature must have made the jug crack, for there was a sound like a pistol shot and the hot coffee flowed across the counter top so that we all jumped to our feet to avoid being scalded.

Zena grabbed some paper towels and, standing well back from the coffee flowing onto the tiled floor, dabbed them around. ‘I put it down too hard,’ she said when the mess was cleared away.

‘I think you did, Zena,’ I said.

‘It was already cracked,’ said Werner. Then he brought the rolled newspaper down on the wasp and killed it.

2 (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)

It was eight o’clock that evening in London when I finally delivered my report to my immediate boss, Dicky Cruyer, Controller German Stations. I’d attached a complete translation too, as I knew Dicky wasn’t exactly bilingual.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘One up to Comrade Stinnes eh?’ He shook the flimsy pages of my hastily written report as if something might fall from between them. He’d already heard my tape and had my oral account of the Berlin trip so there was little chance that he’d read the report very thoroughly, especially if it meant missing his dinner.

‘No one in Bonn will thank us,’ I warned him.

‘They have all the evidence they need,’ said Dicky with a sniff.

‘I was on the phone to Berlin an hour ago,’ I said. ‘He’s pulling all the strings that can be pulled.’

‘What does his boss say?’

‘He’s spending his Christmas vacation in Egypt. No one can find him,’ I said.

‘What a sensible man,’ said Dicky with admiration that was both sincere and undisguised. ‘Was he informed of the impending arrest of his secretary?’

‘Not by us, but that would be the regular BfV procedure.’

‘Have you phoned Bonn this evening? What do BfV reckon the chances of a statement from him?’

‘Better we stay out of it, Dicky.’

Dicky looked at me while he thought about this and then, deciding I was right, tried another aspect of the same problem. ‘Have you seen Stinnes since you handed him over to London Debriefing Centre?’

‘I gather the current policy is to keep me away from him.’

‘Come along,’ said Dicky, smiling to humour me in my state of paranoia. ‘You’re not saying you’re still suspect?’ He stood up from behind the rosewood table that he used instead of a desk and got a transparent plastic folding chair for me.

‘My wife defected.’ I sat down. Dicky had removed his visitors’ chairs on the pretext of making more space. His actual motive was to provide an excuse for him to use the conference rooms along the corridor. Dicky liked to use the conference rooms; it made him feel important and it meant that his name was exhibited in little plastic letters on the notice board opposite the top-floor lifts.

His folding chairs were the most uncomfortable seats in the building, but Dicky didn’t worry about this as he never sat in them. And anyway, I didn’t want to sit chatting with him. There was still work to clear up before I could go home.