"London Match" - читать интересную книгу автора (Deighton Len)

1

'Cheer up, Werner. It will soon be Christmas,' I said.

I shook the bottle, dividing the last drips of whisky between the two white plastic cups that were balanced on the car radio. I pushed the empty bottle under the seat. The smell of the whisky was strong. I must have spilled some on the heater or on the warm leather that encased the radio. I thought Werner would decline it. He wasn't a drinker and he'd had far too much already, but Berlin winter nights are cold and Werner swallowed his whisky in one gulp and coughed. Then he crushed the cup in his big muscular hands and sorted through the bent and broken pieces so that he could fit them all into the ashtray. Werner's wife Zena was obsessionally tidy and this was her car.

'People are still arriving,' said Werner as a black Mercedes limousine drew up. Its headlights made dazzling reflections in the glass and paintwork of the parked cars and glinted on the frosty surface of the road. The chauffeur hurried to open the door and eight or nine people got out. The men wore dark cashmere coats over their evening suits, and the women a menagerie of furs. Here in Berlin Wannsee, where furs and cashmere are everyday clothes, they are called the Hautevolee and there are plenty of them.

'What are you waiting for? Let's barge right in and arrest him now.' Werner's words were just slightly slurred and he grinned to acknowledge his condition. Although I'd known Werner since we were kids at school, I'd seldom seen him drunk, or even tipsy as he was now. Tomorrow he'd have a hangover, tomorrow he'd blame me, and so would his wife, Zena. For that and other reasons, tomorrow, early, would be a good time to leave Berlin.

The house in Wannsee was big; an ugly clutter of enlargements and extensions, balconies, sun deck and penthouse almost hid the original building. It was built on a ridge that provided its rear terrace with a view across the forest to the black waters of the lake. Now the terrace was empty, the garden furniture stacked, and the awnings rolled up tight, but the house was blazing with lights and along the front garden the bare trees had been garlanded with hundreds of tiny white bulbs like electronic blossom.

'The BfV man knows his job,' I said. 'He'll come and tell us when the contact has been made.'

'The contact won't come here. Do you think Moscow doesn't know we have a defector in London spilling his guts to us? They'll have warned their network by now.'

'Not necessarily,' I said. I denied his contention for the hundredth time and didn't doubt we'd soon be having the same exchange again. Werner was forty years old, just a few weeks older than I was, but he worried like an old woman and that put me on edge too. 'Even his failure to come could provide a chance to identify him,' I said. 'We have two plainclothes cops checking everyone who arrives tonight, and the office has a copy of the invitation list.'

'That's if the contact is a guest,' said Werner.

'The staff are checked too.'

'The contact will be an outsider,' said Werner. 'He wouldn't be dumm enough to give us his contact on a plate.'

'I know.'

'Shall we go inside the house again?' suggested Werner. 'I get a cramp these days sitting in little cars.'

I opened the door and got out.

Werner closed his car door gently; it's a habit that comes with years of surveillance work. This exclusive suburb was mostly villas amid woodland and water, and quiet enough for me to hear the sound of heavy trucks pulling into the Border Control point at Drewitz to begin the long haul down the autobahn that went through the Democratic Republic to West Germany. 'It will snow tonight,' I predicted.

Werner gave no sign of having heard me. 'Look at all that wealth,' he said, waving an arm and almost losing his balance on the ice that had formed in the gutter. As far as we could see along it, the whole street was like a parking lot, or rather like a car showroom, for the cars were almost without exception glossy, new, and expensive. Five-litre V-8 Mercedes with car-phone antennas and turbo Porsches and big Ferraris and three or four Rolls-Royces. The registration plates showed how far people will travel to such a lavish party. Businessmen from Hamburg, bankers from Frankfurt, film people from Munich, and well-paid officials from Bonn. Some cars were perched high on the pavement to make room for others to be double-parked alongside them. We passed a couple of cops who were wandering between the long lines of cars, checking the registration plates and admiring the paintwork. In the driveway – stamping their feet against the cold – were two Parkwächter who would park the cars of guests unfortunate enough to be without a chauffeur. Werner went up the icy slope of the driveway with arms extended to help him balance. He wobbled like an overfed penguin.

Despite all the double-glazed windows, closed tight against the cold of a Berlin night, there came from the house the faint syrupy whirl of Johann Strauss played by a twenty-piece orchestra. It was like drowning in a thick strawberry milk shake.

A servant opened the door for us and another took our coats. One of our people was immediately inside, standing next to the butler. He gave no sign of recognition as we entered the flower-bedecked entrance hall. Werner smoothed his silk evening jacket self-consciously and tugged the ends of his bow tie as he caught a glimpse of himself in the gold-framed mirror that covered the wall. Werner's suit was a hand-stitched custom-made silk one from Berlin 's most exclusive tailors, but on Werner's thickset figure all suits looked rented.

Standing at the foot of the elaborate staircase there were two elderly men in stiff high collars and well-tailored evening suits that made no concessions to modern styling. They were smoking large cigars and talking with their heads close together because of the loudness of the orchestra in the ballroom beyond. One of the men stared at us but went on talking as if we weren't visible to nun. We didn't seem right for such a gathering, but he looked away, no doubt thinking we were two heavies hired to protect the silver.

Until 1945 the house – or Villa, as such local mansions are known – had belonged to a man who began his career as a minor official with the Nazi farmers organization – and it was by chance that his department was given the task of deciding which farmers and agricultural workers were so indispensable to the economy that they would be exempt from service with the military forces. But from that time onwards – like other bureaucrats before and since – he was showered with gifts and opportunities and lived in high style, as his house bore witness.

For some years after the war the house was used as transit accommodation for US Army truck drivers. Only recently had it become a family house once more. The panelling, which so obviously dated back to the original nineteenth-century building, had been carefully repaired and reinstated, but now the oak was painted light grey. A huge painting of a soldier on a horse dominated the wall facing the stairs and on all sides there were carefully arranged displays of fresh flowers. But despite all the careful refurbishing, it was the floor of the entrance hall that attracted the eye. The floor was a complex pattern of black, white and red marble, a plain white central disc of newer marble having replaced a large gold swastika.

Werner pushed open a plain door secreted into the panelling and I followed him along a bleak corridor designed for the inconspicuous movement of servants. At the end of the passage there was a pantry. Clean linen cloths were arranged on a shelf, a dozen empty champagne bottles were inverted to drain in the sink and the waste bin was filled with the remains of sandwiches, discarded parsley, and some broken glass. A white-coated waiter arrived carrying a large silver tray of duty glasses. He emptied them, put them into the service elevator together with the empty bottles, wiped the tray with a cloth from under the sink, and then departed without even glancing at either of us.

'There he is, near the bar,' said Werner, holding open the door so we could look across the crowded dance floor. There was a crush around the tables where two men in chef's whites dispensed a dozen different sorts of sausages and foaming tankards of strong beer. Emerging from the scrum with food and drink was the man who was to be detained.

'I hope like hell we've got this right,' I said. The man was not just a run-of-the-mill bureaucrat; he was the private secretary to a senior member of the Bonn parliament.

I said, 'If he digs his heels in and denies everything, I'm not sure we'll be able to make it stick.'

I looked at the suspect carefully, trying to guess how he'd take it. He was a small man with crew-cut hair and a neat Vandyke beard. There was something uniquely German about that combination. Even amongst the over-dressed Berlin social set his appearance was flashy. His jacket had wide silk-faced lapels, and silk also edged his jacket, cuffs and trouser seams. The ends of his bow tie were tucked under his collar and he wore a black silk handkerchief in his top pocket.

'He looks much younger than thirty-two, doesn't he?' said Werner.

'You can't rely on those computer printouts, especially with listed civil servants or even members of the Bundestag. They were all put onto the computer when it was installed, by copy typists working long hours of overtime to make a bit of spare cash.'

'What do you think?' said Werner.

'I don't like the look of him,' I said.

'He's guilty,' said Werner. He had no more information than I did, but he was trying to reassure me.

'But the uncorroborated word of a defector such as Stinnes won't cut much ice in an open court, even if London will let Stinnes go into a court. If this fellow's boss stands by him and they both scream blue murder, he might get away with it.'

'When do we take him, Bernie?'

'Maybe his contact will come here,' I said. It was an excuse for delay.

'He'd have to be a real beginner, Bernie. Just one look at this place – lit up like a Christmas tree, cops outside, and no room to move – no one with any experience would risk coming into a place like this.'

'Perhaps they won't be expecting problems,' I said optimistically.

' Moscow know Stinnes is missing and they've had plenty of time to alert their networks. And anyone with experience will smell this stakeout when they park outside.'

'He didn't smell it,' I said, nodding to our crew-cut man as he swigged at his beer and engaged a fellow guest in conversation.

' Moscow can't send a source like him away to their training school,' said Werner. 'But that's why you can be quite certain that his contact will be Moscow-trained: and that means wary. You might as well arrest him now.'

'We say nothing; we arrest no one,' I told him once again. 'German security are doing this one; he's simply being detained for questioning. We stand by and see how it goes.'

'Let me do it, Bernie.' Werner Volkmann was a Berliner by birth. I'd come to school here as a young child, my German was just as authentic as his, but because I was English, Werner was determined to hang on to the conceit that his German was in some magic way more authentic than mine. I suppose I would feel the same way about any German who spoke perfect London-accented English, so I didn't argue about it.

'I don't want him to know any non-German service is involved. If he tumbles to who we are, he'll know Stinnes is in London.'

'They know already, Bernie. They must know where he is by now.'

'Stinnes has got enough troubles without a KGB hit squad searching for him.'

Werner was looking at the dancers and smiling to himself as if at some secret joke, the way people sometimes do when they've had too much to drink. His face was still tanned from his tune in Mexico and his teeth were white and perfect. He looked almost handsome despite the lumpy fit of his suit. 'It's like a Hollywood movie,' he said.

'Yes,' I said. The budget's too big for television.' The ballroom was crowded with elegant couples, all wearing the sort of clothes that would have looked all right for a ball at the turn of the century. And the guests weren't the desiccated old fogies I was expecting to see at this fiftieth birthday party for a manufacturer of dishwashers. There were plenty of richly clad young people whirling to the music of another time in another town. Kaiserstadt – isn't that what Vienna was called at a time when there was only one Emperor in Europe and only one capital for him?

It was the makeup and the hair-dos that sounded the jarring note of modernity, that and the gun I could see bulging under Werner's beautiful silk jacket. I suppose that's what was making it so tight across the chest.

The white-coated waiter returned with another big tray of glasses. Some of the glasses were not empty. There was the sudden smell of alcohol as he tipped cherries, olives, and abandoned drinks into the warm water of the sink before putting the glasses into the service lift. Then he turned to Werner and said respectfully, 'They've arrested the contact, sir. Went to the car just as you said.' He wiped the empty tray with a cloth.

'What's all this, Werner?' I said.

The waiter looked at me and then at Werner and, when Werner nodded assent, said, 'The contact went to the suspect's parked car… a woman at least forty years old, maybe older. She had a key that fitted the car door. She unlocked the glove compartment and took an envelope. We've taken her into custody but the envelope has not yet been opened. The captain wants to know if he should take the woman back to the office or hold her here in the panel truck for you to talk to.'

The music stopped and the dancers applauded. Somewhere on the far side of the ballroom a man was heard singing an old country song. He stopped, embarrassed, and there was laughter.

'Has she given a Berlin address?'

'Kreuzberg. An apartment house near the Landwehr Canal.'

'Tell your captain to take the woman to the apartment. Search it and hold her there. Phone here to confirm that she's given the correct address and we'll come along later to talk to her,' I said. 'Don't let her make any phone calls. Make sure the envelope remains unopened; we know what's in it. I'll want it as evidence, so don't let everybody maul it about.'

'Yes, sir,' said the waiter and departed, picking his way across the dance floor as the dancers walked off it.

'Why didn't you tell me he was one of our people?' I asked Werner.

Werner giggled. 'You should have seen your face.'

'You're drunk, Werner,' I said.

'You didn't even recognize a plainclothes cop. What's happening to you, Bernie?'

'I should have guessed. They always have them clearing away the dirty dishes; a cop doesn't know enough about food and wine to serve anything.'

'You didn't think it was worth watching his car, did you?'

He was beginning to irritate me. I said, 'If I had your kind of money, I wouldn't be dragging around with a lot of cops and security men.'

'What would you be doing?'

'With money? If I didn't have the kids, I'd find some little pension in Tuscany, somewhere not too far from the beach.'

'Admit it; you didn't think it was worth watching his car, did you?'

'You're a genius.'

'No need for sarcasm,' said Werner. 'You've got him now. Without me you would have ended up with egg on your face.' He burped very softly, holding a hand over his mouth.

'Yes, Werner,' I said.

'Let's go and arrest the bastard… I had a feeling about that car – the way he locked the doors and then looked round like someone might be waiting there.' There had always been a didactic side to Werner; he should have been a school-teacher, as his mother wanted.

'You're a drunken fool, Werner,' I said.

'Shall I go and arrest him?'

'Go and breathe all over him,' I said.

Werner smiled. Werner had proved what a brilliant field agent he could be. Werner was very very happy.

He made a fuss of course. He wanted his lawyer and wanted to talk to his boss and to some friend of his in the government. I knew the type only too well; he was treating us as if we'd been caught stealing secrets for the Russians. He was still protesting when he departed with the arrest team. They were not impressed; they'd seen it all before. They were experienced men, brought in from the BfV's 'political office' in Bonn.

They took him to the BfV office in Spandau, but I decided they'd get nothing but indignation out of him that night. Tomorrow perhaps he'd simmer down a little and get nervous enough to say something worth hearing before the time came when they'd have to charge him or release him. Luckily it was a decision I wouldn't have to make. Meanwhile, I decided to go and see if there was anything to be got out of the woman.

Werner drove. He didn't speak much on the journey back to Kreuzberg. I stared out of the window. Berlin is a sort of history book of twentieth-century violence, and every street corner brought a recollection of something I'd heard, seen, or read. We followed the road alongside the Landwehr Canal, which twists and turns through the heart of the city. Its oily water holds many dark secrets. Back in 1919, when the Spartakists attempted to seize the city by an armed uprising, two officers of the Horse Guards took the badly beaten Rosa Luxemburg – a Communist leader – from their headquarters at the Eden Hotel, next to the Zoo, shot her dead and threw her into the canal. The officers pretended that she'd been carried off by angry rioters, but four months later her bloated corpse floated up and got jammed into a lock gate. Now, in East Berlin, they name streets after her.

But not all the ghosts go into this canal. In February 1920 a police sergeant pulled a young woman out of the canal at the Bendler Bridge. Taken to the Elisabeth Hospital in Lützowstrasse, she was later identified as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Czar of All the Russias and only survivor of the massacre.

This is it,' said Werner, pulling into the kerb. 'Good job there's a cop on the door, or we'd come back to find the car stripped to the chassis.'

The address the contact had given was a shabby nineteenth-century tenement in a neighbourhood virtually taken over by Turkish immigrants. The once imposing grey stone entrance, still pitted with splinter damage from the war, was defaced by brightly coloured graffiti sprays. Inside the gloomy hallway there was a smell of spicy food and dirt and disinfectant.

These old houses have no numbered apartments, but we found the BfV men at the very top. There were two security locks on the door, but not much sign of anything inside to protect. Two men were still searching the hallway when we arrived. They were tapping the walls, prizing up floorboards, and poking screwdrivers deep into the plaster with that sort of inscrutable delight that comes to men blessed by governmental authority to be destructive.

It was typical of the overnight places the KGB provided for the faithful. Top floors: cold, cramped and cheap. Perhaps they chose these sleazy accommodations to remind all concerned about the plight of the poor in the capitalist economy. Or perhaps in this sort of district there were fewer questions asked about comings and goings by all kinds of people at all kinds of hours.

No TV, no radio, no soft seats. Iron bedstead with an old grey blanket, four wooden chairs, a small plastic-topped table and upon it black bread roughly sliced, electric ring, dented kettle, tinned milk, dried coffee, and some sugar cubes wrapped to show they were from a Hilton hotel. There were three dog-eared German paperback books – Dickens, Schiller, and a collection of crossword puzzles, mostly completed. On one of the two single beds a small case was opened and its contents displayed. It was obviously the woman's baggage: a cheap black dress, nylon underwear, low-heeled leather shoes, an apple and orange, and an English newspaper – the Socialist Worker.

A young BfV officer was waiting for me there. We exchanged greetings and he told me the woman had been given no more than a brief preliminary questioning. She'd offered to make a statement at first and then said she wouldn't, the officer said. He'd sent a man to get a typewriter so it could be taken down if she changed her mind again. He handed me some Westmarks, a driving licence, and a passport; the contents of her handbag. The licence and passport were British.

'I've got a pocket recorder,' I told him without lowering my voice.

'We'll sort out what to type and have it signed after I've spoken with her. I'll want you to witness her signature.'

The woman was seated in the tiny kitchen. There were dirty cups on the table and some hairpins that I guessed had come from a search of the handbag she now held on her lap.

'The captain tells me that you want to make a statement,' I said in English.

'Are you English?' she said. She looked at me and then at Werner. She showed no great surprise that we were both in dinner suits complete with fancy cuff links and patent-leather shoes. She must have realized we'd been on duty inside the house.

'Yes,' I said. I signalled with my hand to tell Werner to leave the room.

'Are you in charge?' she asked. She had the exaggerated upper-class accent that shop girls use in Knightsbridge boutiques. 'I want to know what I'm charged with. I warn you I know my rights. Am I under arrest?'

From the side table I picked up the bread knife and waved it at her. 'Under Law 43 of the Allied Military Government legislation, still in force in this city, possession of this bread knife is an offence for which the death sentence can be imposed.'

'You must be mad,' she said. 'The war was almost forty years ago.'

I put the knife into a drawer and slammed it shut. She was startled by the sound. I moved a kitchen chair and sat on it so that I was facing her at a distance of only a yard or so. 'You're not in Germany,' I told her. 'This is Berlin. And Decree 511, ratified in 1951, includes a clause that makes information gathering an offence for which you can get ten years in prison. Not spying, not intelligence work, just collecting information is an offence.'

I put her passport on the table and turned the pages as if reading her name and occupation for the first time. 'So don't talk to me about knowing your rights; you've got no rights.'

From the passport I read aloud: 'Carol Elvira Miller, born in London 1930, occupation: schoolteacher.' Then I looked up at her. She returned my gaze with the calm, flat stare that the camera had recorded for her passport. Her hair was straight and short in pageboy style. She had clear blue eyes and a pointed nose, and the pert expression came naturally to her. She'd been pretty once, but now she was thin and drawn and – in dark conservative clothes and with no trace of makeup – well on the way to looking like a frail old woman. 'Elvira. That's a German name, isn't it?'

She showed no sign of fear. She brightened as women so often do at personal talk. 'It's Spanish. Mozart used it in Don Giovanni.'

I nodded. 'And Miller?'

She smiled nervously. She was not frightened, but it was the smile of someone who wanted to seem cooperative. My hectoring little speech had done the trick. 'My father is German… was German. From Leipzig. He emigrated to England long before Hitler's time. My mother is English… from Newcastle,' she added after a long pause.

'Married?'

'My husband died nearly ten years ago. His name was Johnson, but I went back to using my family name.'

'Children?'

'A married daughter.'

'Where do you teach?'

'I was a supply teacher in London, but the amount of work I got grew less and less. For the last few months I've been virtually unemployed.'

'You know what was in the envelope you collected from the car tonight?'

'I won't waste your time with excuses. I know it contained secrets of some description.' She had the clear voice and pedantic manner of schoolteachers everywhere.

'And you know where it was going?'

'I want to make a statement. I told the other officer that. I want to be taken back to England and speak to someone in British security. Then I'll make a complete statement.'

'Why?' I said. 'Why are you so anxious to go back to England? You're a Russian agent; we both know that. What's the difference where you are when you're charged?'

'I've been stupid,' she said. 'I realize that now.'

'Did you realize it before or after you were taken into custody?'

She pressed her lips together as if suppressing a smile. 'It was a shock.' She put her hands on the table. They were white and wrinkled with the brown freckle marks that come with middle age. There were nicotine stains, and the ink from a leaky pen had marked finger and thumb. 'I just can't stop trembling. Sitting here watching the security men searching through my luggage, I've had enough time to consider what a fool I've been. I love England. My father brought me up to love everything English.'

Despite this contention she soon slipped back into speaking German. She wasn't German; she wasn't British. I saw the rootless feeling within her and recognized something of myself.

I said, 'A man was it?' She looked at me and frowned. She'd been expecting reassurance, a smile in return for the smiles she'd given me and a promise that nothing too bad would happen to her. 'A man… the one who enticed you into this foolishness?'

She must have heard some note of scorn in my voice. 'No,' she said. 'It was all my own doing. I joined the Party fifteen years ago. After my husband died I wanted to keep myself occupied. So I became a very active worker for the teachers union. And one day I thought, well, why not go the whole hog.'

'What was the whole hog, Mrs Miller?'

'My father's name was Müller; I may as well tell you that because you will soon find out. Hugo Müller. He changed it to Miller when he was naturalized. He wanted us all to be English,' Again she pressed her hands flat on the table and looked at them while she spoke. It was as if she was blaming her hands for doing things of which she'd never really approved.

'I was asked to collect parcels, look after things, and so on. Later I began providing accommodation in my London flat. People were brought there late at night – Russians, Czechs, and so on – usually they spoke no English and no German either. Seamen sometimes, judging by their clothing. They always seemed to be ravenously hungry. Once there was a man dressed as a priest. He spoke Polish, but I managed to make myself understood. In the morning someone would come and collect them.'

She sighed and then looked up at me to see how I was taking her confession. 'I have a spare bedroom,' she added, as if the propriety of their sleeping arrangements was more important than her services to the KGB.

She stopped talking for a long time and looked at her hands.

'They were fugitives,' I said, to prompt her into talking again.

'I don't know who they were. Afterwards there was usually an envelope with a few pounds put through my letterbox, but I didn't do it for the money.'

'Why did you do it?'

'I was a Marxist; I was serving the cause.'

'And now?'

'They made a fool of me,' she said. 'They used me to do their dirty work. What did they care what happened to me if I got caught? What do they care now? What am I supposed to do?'

It sounded more like the bitter complaint of a woman abandoned by her lover than of an agent under arrest. 'You're supposed to enjoy being a martyr,' I said. That's the way the system works for them.'

'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 run 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.

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 soil 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.