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

5

'Why does anyone have to go to Berlin,' I asked Dicky resentfully. I was at home: warm and comfortable and looking forward to Christmas Day.

'Be sensible,' Said Dicky. 'They're getting this Miller woman's body out of the Hohenzollern Canal. We can't leave it to the Berlin cops, and a lot of questions will have to be answered. Why was she being moved? Who authorized the ambulance? And where the hell was she being moved to?'

'It's Christmas, Dicky,' I said.

'Oh, is it?' said Dicky feigning surprise. 'That accounts for the difficulty I seem to be having getting anything done.'

'Don't Operations know that we have something called the Berlin Field Unit?' I said sarcastically. 'Why isn't Frank Harrington handling it?'

'Don't be peevish, old boy,' said Dicky, who I think was enjoying the idea of ruining my Christmas. 'We showed Frank how important this was by sending you over to supervise the arrest. And you interrogated her. We can't suddenly decide that BFU must take over. They'll say we're unloading this one onto them because it's the Christmas holiday. And they'd be right.'

'What does Frank say?'

'Frank isn't in Berlin. He's gone away for Christmas.'

'He must have left a contact number,' I said desperately.

'He's gone to some relatives in the Scottish Highlands. There have been gales and the phone lines are down. And don't say send the local constabulary to find him because when I track him down, Frank will point out that he has a deputy on duty in Berlin. No, you'll have to go, Bernard. I'm sorry, but there it is. And after all, you're not married.'

'Hell, Dicky. I've got the children with me and the nanny has gone home for Christmas with her parents. I'm not even on standby duty. I've planned all sorts of things over the holiday.'

'With gorgeous Gloria, no doubt. I can imagine what sort of things you planned, Bernard. Bad luck, but this is an emergency.'

'Who I spend my Christmas with is my personal business,' I said huffily.

'Of course, old chap. But let me point out that you introduced the personal note into this conversation. I didn't.'

'I'll phone Werner,' I said.

'By all means. But you'll have to go, Bernard. You are the person the BfV knows. I can't get all the paperwork done to authorize someone else to work with them.'

'I see,' I said. That was the real reason, of course. Dicky was determined that he would not go back into the office for a couple of hours of paperwork and phoning.

'And who else could I send? Tell me who could go and see to it.'

'From what you say, it's only going to be a matter of identifying a corpse.'

'And who else can do that?'

'Any of the BfV men who were in the arrest team.'

'That would look very good on the documentation, wouldn't it,' said Dicky with heavy irony. 'We have to rely on a foreign police service for our certified identification. Even Coordination would query that one.'

'If it's a corpse, Dicky, let it stay in the icebox until after the holiday.'

There was a deep sigh from the other end. 'You can wriggle and wriggle, Bernard, but you're on this hook and you know it. I'm sorry to wreck your cosy little Christmas, but it's nothing of my doing. You have to go and that's that. The ticket is arranged, and cash and so on will be sent round by security messenger tomorrow morning.'

'Okay,' I said.

'Daphne and I will be pleased to entertain the children round here, you know. Gloria can come round too, if she'd like that.'

'Thanks, Dicky,' I said. 'I'll think about it.'

'She'll be safe with me, Bernard,' said Dicky, and did nothing to disguise the smirk with which he said it. He'd always lusted after Gloria. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I think Daphne, his wife, knew it too. I hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

And so it was that, on Christmas Eve, when Gloria was with my children, preparing them for early bed so that Santa Claus could operate undisturbed, I was standing watching the Berlin police trying to winch a wrecked car out of the water. It wasn't exactly the Hohen-zollern Canal. Dicky had got that wrong; it was Hakenfelde, that industrialized section of the bank of the Havel River not far from where the Hohenzollern joins it.

Here the Havel widens to become a lake. It was so cold that the police doctor insisted the frogmen must have a couple of hours' rest to thaw out. The police inspector had argued about it, but in the end the doctor's opinion prevailed. Now the boat containing the frogmen had disappeared into the gloom and I was left with only the police inspector for company. The two policemen left to guard the scene had gone behind the generator truck, the noise of which never ceased. The police electricians had put flood lamps along the wharf to make light for the winch crew, so that the whole place was lit with the bright artificiality of a film set.

I stepped through the broken railing at the place where the car had gone into the water. Looking down over the edge of the jetty I could just make out the wobbling outline of the car under the dark oily surface. The winch, and two steadying cables, held it suspended there. For the time being, the car had won the battle. One steel cable had broken, and the first attempts to lift the car had ripped its rear off. That was the trouble with cars, said the inspector – they filled with water, and water weighs a ton per cubic metre. And this was a big car, a Citroen ambulance. To make it worse, its frame was bent enough to prevent the frogmen from getting its doors open.

The inspector was in his mid-fifties, a tall man with a large white moustache, its ends curling in the style of the Kaiser's soldiers. It was the sort of moustache a man grew to make himself look older. 'To think,' said the inspector, 'that I transferred out of the Traffic Department because I thought standing on point duty was too cold.' He stamped his feet. His heavy jackboots made a crunching sound where ice was forming in the cracks between the cobblestones.

'You should have kept to traffic,' I said, 'but transferred to the Nice or Cannes Police Department.'

'Rio,' said the inspector, 'I was offered a job in Rio. There was an agency here recruiting ex-policemen. My wife was all in favour, but I like Berlin. There's no town like it. And I've always been a cop; never wanted to be anything else. I know you from somewhere, don't I? I remember your face. Were you ever a cop?'

'No,' I said. I didn't want to get into a discussion about what I did for a living.

'Right from the time I was a child,' he continued. Tm going back a long time now to the war and even before that. There was a traffic cop, famous all over Berlin. Siegfried they called him; I don't know if that was his real name but everyone knew Siegfried. He was always on duty at the Wilhelmplatz, the beautiful little white palace where Dr Goebbels ran his Propaganda Ministry. There were always crowds of tourists there, watching the well-known faces that went in and out, and if there was any kind of crisis, big crowds would form there to try and guess what was going on. My father always pointed out Siegfried, a tall policeman in a long white coat. And I wanted a big white coat like the traffic police wear. And I wanted to have the ministers and the generals, the journalists and the film stars, say hello to me in that friendly way they always greeted him. There was a kiosk there on the Wilhelmplatz which sold souvenirs and they had postcard photos of all the Nazi bigwigs and I asked my father why there wasn't a photo card of Siegfried on sale there. I wanted to buy one. My father said that maybe next week there would be one of Siegfried, and every week I looked but there wasn't one. I decided that when I grew up I'd be the policeman in the Wilhelmplatz and I'd make sure they had my photo on sale in the kiosk. It's silly, isn't it, how such unimportant things change a man's life?'

'Yes,' I said.

'I know you from somewhere,' he said, looking at my face and frowning. I passed the police inspector my hip flask of brandy. He hesitated and took a look round the desolate yard. 'Doctor's orders,' I joked. He smiled, took a gulp, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

'My God, it's cold,' he said as if to explain his lapse from grace.

'It's cold and it's Christmas Eve,' I said.

'Now I remember,' he said suddenly. 'You were in that football team that played on the rubble behind the Stadium. I used to take my kid brother along. He was ten or eleven; you must have been about the same age.' He chuckled at the recollection and with the satisfaction of remembering where he'd seen me before. 'The football team; yes. It was run by that crazy English colonel – the tall one with glasses. He had no idea about how to play football; he couldn't even kick the ball straight, but he ran round the pitch waving a walking stick and yelling his head off. Remember?'

'I remember,' I said.

'Those were the days. I can see him now, waving that stick in the air and yelling. What a crazy old man he was. After the match he'd give each boy a bar of chocolate and an apple. Most of the kids only went to get the chocolate and apple.'

'You're right,' I said.

'I knew I'd seen you somewhere before.' He stood looking across the water for a long time and then said, 'Who was in the ambulance? One of your people?' He knew I was from London and guessed the rest of it. In Berlin you didn't have to be psychic to guess the rest of it.

'A prisoner,' I said.

It was already getting dark. Daylight doesn't last long on clouded Berlin days like this in December. The warehouse lights made little puff balls in the mist. Around here there were only cranes, sheds, storage tanks, crates stacked as high as tenements, and rusty railway tracks. Facing us far across the water were more of the same. There was no movement except the sluggish current. The great city around us was almost silent and only the generator disturbed the peace. Looking south along the river I could see the island of Eiswerder. Beyond that, swallowed by the mist, was Spandau – world-famous now, not only for its machine guns but for the fortress prison inside which the soldiers of four nations guarded one aged and infirm prisoner: Hitler's deputy.

The police inspector followed my gaze. 'Not Hess,' he joked. 'Don't say the poor old fellow finally escaped?'

I smiled dutifully. 'Bad luck getting Christmas duty,' I said. 'Are you married?'

'I'm married. I live just round the corner from here. My parents lived in the same house. Do you know I've never been out of Berlin in all my life?'

'All through the war too?'

'Yes, all through the war I was living here. I was thinking of that just now when you gave me the drink.' He turned up the collar of his uniform greatcoat. 'You get old and suddenly you find yourself remembering things that you haven't recalled in about forty years. Tonight for instance, suddenly I'm remembering a time just before Christmas in 1944 when I was on duty very near here: the gasworks.'

'You were in the Army?' He didn't look old enough.

'No. Hitler Youth. I was fourteen and I'd only just got my uniform. They said I wasn't strong enough to join a gun crew, so they made me a messenger for the air defence post. I was the youngest kid there. They only let me do that job because Berlin hadn't had an air raid for months and it seemed so safe. There were rumours that Stalin had told the Western powers that Berlin mustn't be bombed so that the Red Army could capture it intact.' He gave a sardonic little smile. 'But the rumours were proved wrong, and on December fifth the Americans came over in daylight. People said they were trying to hit the Siemens factory, but I don't know. Siemensstadt was badly bombed, but bombs hit Spandau, and Pankow and Oranienburg and Weissensee. Our fighters attacked the Amis as they came in to bomb – it was a thick overcast but I could hear the machine guns – and I think they just dropped everything as soon as they could and headed home.'

'Why do you remember that particular air raid?'

'I was outside and I was blown off my bicycle by the bomb that dropped in Streitstrasse just along the back of here. The officer at the air-raid post found another bike for me and gave me a swig of schnapps from his flask, like you did just now. I felt very grown up. I'd never tasted schnapps before. Then he sent me off on my bike with a message for our headquarters at Spandau station. Our phones had been knocked out. Be careful, he said, and if another lot of bombers come, you take shelter. When I got back from delivering the message there was nothing left of them. The air defence post was just rubble. They were all dead. It was a delayed action bomb. It must have been right alongside us when he gave me the schnapps, but no one felt the shock of it because of all the racket.'

Suddenly his manner changed, as if he was embarrassed at having told me his war experiences. Perhaps he'd been chafed about his yarns by men who'd come back from the Eastern Front with stories that made his air-raid experiences seem no more than minor troubles.

He tugged at his greatcoat like a man about to go on parade. And then, looking down into the water at the submerged car again, he said, 'If the next go doesn't move it, we'll have to get a big crane. And that will mean waiting until after the holiday; the union man will make sure of that.'

'I'll hang on,' I said. I knew he was trying to provide me with an excuse to leave.

'The frogmen say the car is empty.'

'They wanted to go home,' I said flippantly.

The inspector was offended. 'Oh, no. They are good boys. They wouldn't tell me wrong just to avoid another dive.' He was right, of course. In Germany there was still a work ethic.

I said, 'They can't see much, with the car covered in all that oil and muck. I know what it's like in this sort of water; the underwater lamps just reflect in the car's window glass.'

'Here's your friend,' said the inspector. He strolled off towards the other end of the wharf to give us a chance to talk in private.

It was Werner Volkmann. He had his hat dumped on top of his head and was wearing his long heavy coat with the astrakhan collar. I called it his impresario's coat, but today the laugh was on me, freezing to death in my damp trench coat. 'What's happening?' he said.

'Nothing,' I said. 'Nothing at all.'

'Don't bite my head off,' said Werner. 'I'm not even getting paid.'

'I'm sorry, Werner, but I told you not to bother to drag out here.'

'The roads are empty, and to tell you the truth, being a Jew I feel a bit of a hypocrite celebrating Christmas.'

'You haven't left Zena alone?'

'Her sister's family are with us – four children and a husband who works in the VAT office.'

'I can see why you came.'

'I like it all up to a point,' said Werner. 'Zena likes to do the whole thing right. You know how it is in Germany. She spent all the afternoon decorating the tree and putting the presents out, and she has real candles on it.'

'You should be with them,' I said. In Germany the evening before Christmas Day – heiliger Abend – is the most important time of the holiday. 'Make sure she doesn't burn the house down.'

'I'll be back with them in time for the dinner. I told them you'd join us.'

'I wish I could, Werner. But I'll have to be here when it comes out of the water. Dicky put that in writing and you know what he's like.'

'Are you going to try again soon?'

'In about an hour. What did you find out at the hospital this morning?'

'Nothing very helpful. The people who took her away were dressed up to be a doctor and hospital staff. They had the Citroen waiting outside. From what the people in the reception office say, the ambulance was supposed to be taking her to a private clinic in Dahlem.'

'What about the cop guarding her?'

'For him they had a different story. They told him they were clinic staff. They said they were just taking her downstairs for another X-ray and would be back in about thirty minutes. She was very weak and complained bitterly about being moved. She probably didn't realize what was going to happen.'

'That she was going into the Havel, you mean?'

'No. That they were a KGB team, there to get her away from police custody.'

I said, 'Why didn't the clinic reception phone the police before releasing her?'

'I don't know, Bernie. One of them said that she was taken out using the papers of a patient who was due to be moved that day. Another one said there was a policeman outside with the ambulance, so it seemed to be all in order. We'll probably never find out exactly what happened. It's a hospital, not a prison; the staff don't worry too much about who's going in and out.'

'What do you make of it, Werner?'

'They knew she was talking, I suppose. Somehow what she was telling us got back to Moscow and they decided there was only one way of handling it.'

'Why not take her straight back into East Berlin?' I said.

'In an ambulance? Very conspicuous. Even the Russians are not too keen on that sort of publicity. Snatching a prisoner from police custody and taking her across the wire would not look good at a time when the East Germans are trying to show the world what good neighbours they can be.' He looked at me. I pulled a face. 'It's easier this way,' added Werner. 'They got rid of her. They were taking no chances. If she had talked to us already, they'd be making sure she couldn't give evidence.'

'But it's a drastic remedy, Werner. What made them get so excited?'

'They knew she was handling the radio traffic your wife provided.'

'Right,' I said. 'And Fiona is over there. So why would they be worried about what she might tell us?'

'Fiona is behind it? Is that what you mean?'

'It's difficult not to suspect her hand is in it.'

'But Fiona is safe and sound. What has she got to worry about?'

'Nothing, Werner, she's got nothing to worry about.'

He looked at me as if puzzled. Then he said, The radio traffic then. What did Dicky think about the multiple codes?'

'Dicky didn't seem to be listening. He was hoping the Miller woman would just fade away, and he's forbidden me to speak with Stinnes.'

'Dicky was never one to go looking for extra work,' said Werner.

'No one is interested,' I said. 'I went down to talk to Silas Gaunt and von Munte and neither of them were very interested. Silas waggled his finger at me when I brought the matter up with von Munte. And he told me not to rock the boat. Don't start digging into all that again, he said.'

'I don't know old Mr Gaunt the way you do. I just remember him in the Berlin office at the time when your dad was Resident. We were about eighteen years old. Mr Gaunt bet me that the Wall would never go up. I won fifty marks from him when they built the Wall. And fifty marks was a lot of money in those days. You could have an evening out with all the trimmings for fifty marks.'

'I wish I had one mark for every time you've told me that story, Werner.'

'You're in a filthy mood, Bernie. I'm sorry you got this rotten job, but it's not my fault.'

'I'd really looked forward to a couple of days with the kids. They're growing up without me, Werner. And Gloria is there too.'

'I'm glad that's going well… you and Gloria.'

'It's bloody ridiculous,' I said. 'I'm old enough to be her father. Do you know how old she is?'

'No, and I don't care. There's an age difference between me and Zena, isn't there? But that doesn't stop us being happy.'

I turned to Werner so that I could look at him. It was dark. His face was visible only because it was edged with light reflected from the array of floodlights. His heavy-lidded eyes were serious. Poor Werner. Was he really happy? His marriage was my idea of hell. 'Zena is older than Gloria,' I said.

'Be happy while you can, Bernie. It's nothing to do with Gloria's age. You still feel bad about losing Fiona. You haven't got over her running away yet. I know you, and I can tell. She was a sort of anchor for you, a base. Without her you are restless and unsure of yourself. But that's only temporary. You'll get over it. And Gloria is just what you need.'

'Maybe.' I didn't argue with him; he was usually very perceptive about people and their relationships. That was why he'd been such a good field agent back in the days when we were young and carefree, and enjoyed taking risks.

'What's really on your mind? Code names are just for the analysts and Coordination staff. Why do you care how many code names Fiona used?'

'She used one,' I snapped. 'They all use one. Our people have one name per source and so do their agents. That's what von Munte confirmed. Fiona was Eisenguss – no other names.'

'How can you be so sure?'

'I'm not one hundred per cent sure,' I told him. 'Special circumstances come up in this business; we all know that. But I'm ninety-nine per cent sure.'

'What are you saying, Bernie?'

'Surely it's obvious, Werner.'

'It's Christmas, Bernie. I had a few drinks just to be sociable. What is it you're saying?'

'There are two major sources of material that the Miller woman handled. Both top-grade intelligence. Only one of them was Fiona.'

Werner pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger and closed his eyes. Werner did that when he was thinking hard. 'You mean there's someone else still there? You mean the KGB still have someone in London Central?'

'I don't know,' I said.

'Don't just shrug it off,' said Werner. 'Don't hit me in the face with that kind of custard pie and then say you don't know.'

'Everything points to it,' I said. 'But I've told them at London Central. I've done everything short of drawing a diagram and no one gives a damn.'

'It might just be a stunt, a KGB stunt.'

'I'm not organizing a lynching party, Werner. I'm just suggesting that it should be checked out.'

'The Miller woman might have got it wrong,' said Werner.

'She might have got it wrong, but even if she got it wrong, that still leaves a question to be answered. And what if someone reads the Miller transcript and starts wondering if I might be the other source?'

'Ahh! You're just covering your arse,' said Werner. 'You don't really think there's another KGB source in London Central, but you realized that you'd have to interpret it that way in case anyone thought it was you and you were trying to protect yourself.'

'Don't be stupid.'

'I'm not stupid, Bernard. I know London Central and I know you. You're just running round shouting fire in case someone accuses you of arson.'

I shook my head to say no, but I was wondering if perhaps he was right. He knew me better than anyone, better even than Fiona knew me.

'Are you really going to hang on until they get that motor car out of the water?'

That's what I'm going to do.'

'Come back for a bite of dinner. Ask the police inspector to phone us when they start work again.'

'I mustn't, Werner. I promised Lisl I'd have dinner with her at the hotel in the unlikely event of my getting away from here in time.'

'Shall I phone her to say you won't make it?'

I looked at my watch. 'Yes, please, Werner. She's having some cronies in to eat there – old Mr Koch and those people she buys wine from – and they'll get fidgety if she delays dinner for me.'

'I'll phone her. I took her a present yesterday, but I'll phone to say Happy Christmas.' He pulled the collar of his coat up and tucked his white silk scarf into it. 'Damned cold out here on the river.'

'Get back to Zena,' I told him.

'If you're sure you're not coming… Shall I bring you something to eat?'

'Stop being a Jewish mother, Werner. There are plenty of places where I can get something. In fact, I'll walk back to your car with you. There's a bar open on the corner. I'll get myself sausage and beer.'

It was nearly ten o'clock at night when they dragged the ambulance out of the Havel. It was a sorry sight, its side caked with oily mud where it had rested on the bottom of the river. One tyre was torn off and some of the bodywork ripped open where it had collided with the railings that were there to prevent such accidents.

There was a muffled cheer as the car came to rest. But there was no delay in finishing the job. Even while the frogmen were still packing their gear away, the car's doors had been levered open and a search was being made of its interior.

There was no body inside – that was obvious within the first two or three minutes – but we continued to search through the car in search of other evidence.

By eleven-fifteen the police inspector declared the preliminary forensic examination complete. Although they'd put a number of oddments into clear-plastic evidence bags, nothing had been discovered that was likely to throw any light on the disappearance of Carol Elvira Miller, self-confessed Russian agent.

We were all very dirty. I went with the policemen into the toilet facilities at the wharfside. There was no hot water from the tap, and only one bar of soap. One of the policemen came back with a large pail of boiling water. The rest of them stood aside so that the inspector could wash first. He indicated that I should use the other sink.

'What do you make of it?' said the inspector as he rationed out a measure of the hot water into each of the sinks.

'Where would a body turn up?' I asked.

' Spandau locks, that's where we fish them out,' he said without hesitation. 'But there was no one in that car when it went into the water.' He took off his jacket and shirt so that he could wash his arms where mud had dribbled up his sleeve.

'You think not?' I stood alongside him and took the soap he offered.

'The front doors were locked, and the back door of the ambulance was locked too. Not many people getting out of a car underwater remember to lock the doors before swimming away.' He passed me some paper towels.

'It went into the water empty?'

'So you don't want to talk about it. Very well.'

'No, you're right,' I said. 'It's probably just a stunt. How did you get the information about where to find it?'

'I looked at the docket. An anonymous phone call from a passerby. You think it was a phony?'

'Probably.'

'While the prisoner was taken away somewhere else.'

'It would be a way of getting our attention.'

'And spoiling my Christmas Eve,' he said. 'I'll kill the bastards if I ever get hold of them.'

'Them?'

'At least two people. It wasn't in gear, you notice, it was in neutral. So they must have pushed it in. That needs two people; one to push and one to steer.'

'Three of them, according to what we heard.'

He nodded. 'There's too much crime on television,' said the police inspector. He signalled to the policeman to get another bucket of water for the rest of them to wash with. 'That old English colonel with the kids' football team… he was your father, wasn't he?'

'Yes,' I said.

'I realized that afterwards. I could have bitten my tongue off. No offence. Everyone liked the old man.'

'That's okay,' I said.

'He didn't even enjoy the football. He just did it for the German kids; there wasn't much for them in those days. He probably hated every minute of those games. At the time we didn't see that; we wondered why he took so much trouble about the football when he couldn't even kick the ball straight. He organized lots of things for the kids, didn't he. And he sent you to the neighbourhood school instead of to that fancy school where the other British children went. He must have been an unusual man, your father.'

Washing my hands and arms and face had only got rid of the most obvious dirt. My trench coat was soaked and my shoes squelched. The mud along the banks of the Havel at that point is polluted with a century of industrial waste and effluents. Even my newly washed hands still bore the stench of the riverbed.

The hotel was dark when I let myself in by means of the key that certain privileged guests were permitted to borrow. Lisl Hennig's hotel had once been her grand home, and her parents' home before that. It was just off Kantstrasse, a heavy grey stone building of the sort that abounds in Berlin. The ground floor was an optician's shop and its bright facade partly hid the pockmarked stone that was the result of Red Army artillery fire in 1945. My very earliest memories were of Lisl's house – it was not easy to think of it as a hotel – for I came here as a baby when my father was with the British Army. I'd known the patched brown carpet that led up the grand staircase when it had been bright red.

At the top of the stairs there was the large salon and the bar. It was gloomy. The only illumination came from a tiny Christmas tree positioned on the bar counter. Tiny green and red bulbs flashed on and off in a melancholy attempt to be festive. Intermittent light fell upon the framed photos that covered every wall. Here were some of Berlin 's most illustrious residents, from Einstein to Nabokov, Garbo to Dietrich, Max Schmeling to Grand Admiral Donitz, celebrities of a Berlin now gone for ever.

I looked into the breakfast room; it was empty. The bentwood chairs had been put up on the tables so that the floor could be swept. The cruets and cutlery and a tall stack of white plates were ready on the table near the serving hatch. There was no sign of life anywhere. There wasn't even the smell of cooking that usually crept up through the house at night-time.

I tiptoed across the salon to the back stairs. My room was at the top – I always liked to occupy the little garret room that had been my bedroom as a child. But before reaching the stairs I passed the door of Lisl's room. A strip of light along the door confirmed that she was there.

'Who is it?' she called anxiously. 'Who's there?'

'It's Bernd,' I said.

'Come in, you wretched boy.' Her shout was loud enough to wake everyone in the building.

She was propped up in bed; there must have been a dozen lace-edged pillows behind her. She had a scarf tied round her head, and on the side table there was a bottle of sherry and a glass. All over the bed there were newspapers; some of them had come to pieces so that pages had drifted across the room as far as the fireplace.

She'd snatched her glasses off so quickly that her dyed brown hair was disarranged. 'Give me a kiss,' she demanded. I did so and noticed the expensive perfume and the makeup and false eyelashes that she applied only for very special occasions. The heiliger Abend with her friends had meant a lot to her. I guessed she'd waited for me to come home before she'd remove the makeup. 'Did you have a nice time?' she asked. There was repressed anger in her voice.

'I've been working,' I said. I didn't want to get into a conversation. I wanted to go to bed and sleep for a long time.

'Who were you with?'

'I told you, I was working.' I tried to assuage her annoyance. 'Did you have dinner with Mr Koch and your friends? What did you serve them – carp?' She liked carp at Christmas; she'd often told me it was the only thing to serve. Even during the war they'd always somehow managed to get carp.

'Lothar Koch couldn't come. He had influenza and the wine people had to go to a trade party.'

'So you were all alone,' I said. I bent over and kissed her again. 'I'm so sorry, Lisl.' She'd been so pretty. I remember as a child feeling guilty for thinking she was more beautiful than my mother. 'I really am sorry.'

'And so you should be.'

'There was no way of avoiding it. I had to be there.'

'Had to be where – Kempinski or the Steigenberger? Don't lie to me, Liebchen. When Werner phoned me I could hear the voices and the music in the background. So you don't have to pretend you were working.' She gave a little hoot of laughter, but there was no joy in it.

So she'd been in bed here working herself up into a rage about that. 'I was working,' I repeated. 'I'll explain tomorrow.'

'There's nothing you have to explain, Liebchen. You are a free man. You don't have to spend your heiliger Abend with an ugly old woman. Go and have fun while you are young. I don't mind.'

'Don't upset yourself, Lisl,' I said. 'Werner was phoning from his apartment because I was working.'

By this time she'd noticed the smell of the mud on my clothes, and now she pushed her glasses into place so that she could see me more clearly. 'You're filthy, Bernd. Whatever have you been doing? 'Where have you been?' From her study there came the loud chimes of the ornate ormolu clock striking two-thirty.

'I keep telling you over and over again, Lisl. I've been with the police on the Havel getting a car from the water.'

'The times I've told you that you drive too fast.'

'It wasn't anything to do with me,' I said.

'So what were you doing there?'

'Working. Can I have a drink?'

'There's a glass on the sideboard. I've only got sherry. The whisky and brandy are locked in the cellar.'

'Sherry will be just right.'

'My God, Bernd, what are you doing? You don't drink sherry by the tumblerful.'

'It's Christmas,' I said.

'Yes. It's Christmas,' she said, and poured herself another small measure. 'There was a phone message, a woman. She said her name was Gloria Kent. She said that everyone sent you their love. She wouldn't leave a phone number. She said you'd understand.' Lisl sniffed.

'Yes, I understand,' I said. 'It's a message from the children.'

'Ah, Bernd. Give me a kiss, Liebchen. Why are you so cruel to your Tante Lisl? I bounced you on my knee in this very room, and that was before you could walk.'

'Yes, I know, but I couldn't get away, Lisl. It was work.'

She fluttered her eyelashes like a young actress. 'One day you'll be old, darling. Then you'll know what it's like.'