The men waiting at the white line on the Alexanderbrucke had dour expressions. They had watched the Hilton charade on television, and they were not sure that they were particularly pleased. Delahaye had escaped, and made a fool of the Americans, once again, but the publicity had been wildly excessive, and the word ‘vanity’ had been much used. General Witkowski had sworn quite a few curses, and Moscow had made some angry noises. The sooner the affair was forgotten the better.
They watch Delahaye and his Russians disembark from the bus, and stared suspiciously at a man in a well-cut blue silk suit following them. They had never seen him before, but he had the air of an Englishman, and they wondered what the hell he was doing there: the English belonged on the far side of the white line.
Delahaye noted the collective doubt and put his hand on Lindsay’s arm. ‘Not a word.’ He spoke in English, just in case listening ears were sharp. ‘This might be a little tricky.’ He winked, though he had a feeling in his heart that trickiness might prove a very small word by way of description.
Lindsay nodded, tightlipped. He could sense collective disapproval stretching out towards him, and did not feel at all comfortable.
The two men in civilian clothes advanced on Delahaye like vultures moving in on a prey. He knew both well. One was Staff Colonel Friedrich Koppel, secretary of the German Democratic Republic’s Committee for External Intelligence, Witkowski’s political shadow, the second was Colonel Grigor Semionovich Bogdanov, ostensibly responsible for intelligence liaison between East Berlin and Moscow, but in reality a powerful figure shaping many of Witkowski’s plans.
Koppel shook hands coolly with Delahaye, pointedly ignoring Lindsay. Bogdanov was impassive.
Delahaye placed an avuncular arm around Lindsay’s shoulders. ‘This is Mr. Lindsay, an Englishman who took Roswirtha’s place at great personal risk.’ He used the English designation, although he spoke in German.
Koppel eyed Lindsay suspiciously. ‘Schulz was a good agent.’ His voice was gloomy. He had often dreamed of entertaining VKAN’s copperhaired star, but had never managed to pluck up sufficient courage to make a pass at her – though he knew that she had recognised his interest. Now his hopes would never come to pass. Bogdanov’s mouth turned down at the corners in sepulchral assent. Russian colonels had also dreamed.
‘Wotan arrested him, and let him go. I could not leave him behind.’
For a moment Koppel was interested. He looked at Lindsay curiously. ‘Ah, did you meet the Grand Master?’ He spoke in English.
Lindsay nodded. He can be as economical with words as any man.
‘You are lucky.’ Koppel paused, as though chasing an errant thought. ‘What are you doing here in Berlin?’
Lindsay decided to embroider a little. ‘I write travel articles. I’m here for The Times.’
His
words might have been a bombshell. Koppel and Bogdanov both suddenly twitched,
and backed away a little in unison with looks of deep mistrust - Lindsay might
as well have said that he had been sent by the Devil.
Koppel scowled. ‘Wait here.’
He drew Delahaye away, until they were out of earshot, and then began to speak angrily. ‘What, in the name of all heaven, do you think you’re playing at?’
Delahaye was stonyfaced. He was a man of honour, and he was always true to hisfriends. Lindsay had taken Roswirtha’s part, and merited the same protection. ‘He delivered the film.’
Koppel was silent for a moment. His mind raced, weighing and balancing openings and possibilities. Delahaye was right; he would probably have done the same, and the Tommies had provided the film in the first place. But it would be hard convincing Moscow. The Russians would smell connivance, and start scenting betrayal. Koppel knew Bogdanov well. Grigor Semionovich was a World War II veteran, and distrusted all Germans, West and East alike. Messages would wing their way to Central Military Intelligence, and messages would wing their way back, and a firing squad might well line up, because firing squads could solve all intelligence mishaps in the the neatest possible way. He took a deep breath, a plan forming in his mind.
‘What do you want to do with him?’
Delahaye hesitated. He had no plans at all, beyond a good meal, and plenty of wine, a night out to celebrate, and perhaps serve as a wake. ‘I don’t know. Take him out and get him drunk. I promised him a celebration. I haven’t thought beyond that.’
Koppel smiled. It was a devious smile, a sly kind of smile, for now he did have a plan, and it quite melted all thoughts of firing squads away. ‘Ask him if he’ll do the courier run to Brussels.’ The East German government was busy cultivating the European Economic Commmission in a bid to secure diplomatic recognition in the West, and had been sending a diplomatic bag to its Brussels mission every weekend. It would be no bother at all to send two cars, instead of one, and perhaps quietly tip off the CIA at the same time, so that the driver of the second car discreetly vanished from the face of the earth.
Delahaye stared at him, trying to read his thoughts, and nodded. ‘He will have to hide if he goes back to the West.’
‘Give him some money.’ Koppel tried to remember how much VKAN had in cash dollars at its underground bunker. ‘I’ll arrange a nice little package for him.’
Delahaye nodded again. There was no reason for him to mention Roswirtha’s envelope. Lindsay would need all the help he could muster if he returned to the West.
‘Good. Now get him out of Bogdanov’s sight.’ Koppel’s voice was sharp. ‘And don’t get into any drunken brawls. We’ve had enough scandals for one day.’
He watched Delahaye and his Englishman walk towards the eastern end of the Alexanderbrucke, and then rejoined the Russian.
Bogdanov sniffed. ‘Why didn’t you send him back?’
‘The Englishman?’ Koppel smiled, a tight little smile. ‘I’m going to deal with him tomorrow.’
The Russian was not convinced. ‘Delahaye was too flashy.’
Koppel’s
smile grew. ‘I’ve got a plan for him as well. The Cubans have been asking us
for help in sprucing up their intelligence operations. I think he’ll enjoy the
sun.’
For a moment a strange, almost wistful, light shone in Bogdanov’s eyes. ‘They have nice cigars, nice rum.’
Koppel nodded. He understood exactly. He had also seen pictures of Cuban girls. A whole nation of Roswirthas. ‘No doubt he’ll enjoy himself.’
‘No doubt.’ Bogdanov bit the words off, and turned on his heel. He must get back to Pankow and file his report, before too many rumours started winging their way home. The two Russian officers followed him, and one lit a papirossi. They had a car waiting, and they would return to barracks. They ignored their East German counterparts. All Germans should have been forced into slave labour at the end of the war.
Delahaye eyed the East German officers. ‘Can you run us to the Moskva?’
The one responsible for guiding the West German police bus to the white line shook his head. ‘We have a military vehicle.’ It was a very blunt refusal, and he turned on his heel, followed by his companion. Delahaye worked for the Russians, and all Russians were bastards.
Delahaye shrugged, and put a hand on Lindsay’s arm. ‘Uniforms turn people like that into officious shits.’ He kicked morosely at a stray plant sprouting from the tarmac. ‘Life, my friend, is a constant struggle. Most people are sheep, they just browse along. But for us, the watchdogs, we have to face challenges. And you, Englishman?’ He was staring at Lindsay, and his gaze demanded an answer.
Lindsay shrugged. He was sober, and it was not the right time to ask deep questions. ‘I’m a freelance. I’ll do anything for a thrill.’
‘But Wotan could have killed you.’
‘I know. But I only realised when they grabbed me.’
‘And then?’
Lindsay shrugged again. This was a bore. He had been promised caviar and vodka, and valuable drinking time was slipping away. ‘I had to talk my way out of it.’ He began to walk away from the white line. He had diced with the Devil, and he had won, and he deserved a reward. ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake.’ Now he was speaking in English. ‘Let’s get out of here. I need a drink.’
The Moskva was a pool of bright light in a street of depressing apartment buildings, the smartest place to dine and wine in East Berlin. It was dark now, and a patient queue stretched away to the end of the block, watched by two bored volkspolizei in a discreetly parked green and white police car. A big, beefy doorman guarded the entrance from behind a plate glass door.
Delahaye ignored the waiting queue and went straight to the plate glass door, to rap on the glass, and hold up a browny-green fifty deutschemark note. The doorman peered at it through the glass, and was obviously interested. But then he shook his head firmly, and gestured for Delahaye to wait his turn. Fifty deutschemarks was two hundred and fifty ostmarks, East German money, at the current unofficial exchange rate. But it was plainly not enough of a bribe to buy a move up a really very long queue, especially when two policemen are watching. Both would also want some kind of a cut, and fifty could not be equally divided by three.
Delahaye rummaged in his wallet, to add four tens, because he understood perfectly. Thirty for the doorman, and thirty for each of the policemen. The doorman looked at them, and his eyes were greedy. He opened the glass door just a fraction, just enough to reach out his hand, palm upward. But Delahaye had travelled this road before, and held his money tantalisingly just out of the doorman’s reach. A man in the waiting queue began to grumble, and the driver of the police car switched on his engine.
The doorman glowered, and swore explosively, and suddenly opened the door, grabbing at Delahaye and dragging him inside. Lindsay had been waiting for action, and stuck to Delahaye like glue. The door slammed shut, and it had taken no more than a couple of seconds. The man stuff Delahaye’s banknotes into his pocket, and glared at Lindsay. ‘He pays the same.’
Delahaye held out another fifty. He knew the policemen could not see past the plate glass. ‘He’s with me.’
It was a confrontation. An elegant man came up behind the doorman, and he gave way. Eighty westmarks, four hundred ostmarks after bribing the two volkspolizei, was more than a week’s wages.
The elegant man was the head waiter, and most deferential. He had seen deutschemarks change hands, and he knew more would come his way. He ushered Delahaye and Lindsay across the restaurant lobby to a curtained doorway, and swept the curtains open with a flourish. They stood at the top of a couple of steps leading down into a very large room filled with tables crammed with men and women eating and drinking, flirting and arguing and laughing. The air was thick with cigar and cigarette smoke, and Lindsay made out a small dance floor through the haze. A band began to play as he watched, but the music was almost drowned. East Berlin was having a Saturday night out, and East Berlin was having the time of its life.
‘We are very busy, sir, as you can see.’ The head waiter’s voice was apologetic. ‘I might be able to find you a couple of seats at the bar, and you could probably have a table somewhere by the kitchen entrance in an hour or so.’ He smiled hopefully at Delahaye, for he could see that this silverhaired man was neither a man to wait at a bar, nor a man to sit by a kitchen entrance. But he was too polite to hold out an open hand.
Delahaye grinned. He was a wheeler-dealer at heart, as well as an intelligence agent, and enjoyed this sort of engagement. He pulled out his wallet again, and it was fat with deutschemark banknotes. He pulled a blue hundred mark note free.
The head waiter made a face. ‘It’s Saturday night, sir.’ He had already taken a hundred marks from a West German businessman and his East German girlfriend, and had just one good table free. ‘I’ve got one table down by the dance floor. But it’s still quite early.’
Delahaye hesitated for a just a moment, to whet the man’s appetite, and then pulled a second blue note free, to place both banknotes in a hand that appeared, and vanished, like lightning.
The head waiter beamed. ‘You are most generous, sir, most very generous.’ He bowed several times, his head rising and falling in little jerks. Then he remembered himself. ‘This way, sir.’ He led the way between the crowded tables, turning every few steps to make sure that he had Delahaye and Lindsay safely in tow, and then pulled out a chair for Delahaye, and another for Lindsay, and fussed about them so attentively that other diners in the restaurant stopped talking to stare, because the man’s body language made it clear that these two new arrivals were really very valued guests indeed.
He also proffered a menu, but Delahaye waved it away. ‘Caviar and vodka, to start.’ The silverhaired man thought for a moment. ‘Then borscht, maybe, with champagne, and shashlik, with more champagne, and then…’ A second moment of hesatation, and he grinned at Lindsay. ‘I hope you are hungry?’ He spoke in English, but it was a rhetorical question, for he was already waving the head waiter away. ‘We are both hungry. Feed us well, and we will be grateful.’
The head waiter was a picture of action. Waiters appeared, bringing a silver bowl filled with small slices of black and brown bread. Caviar came in little crystal dishes bedded in crushed ice. Vodka arrived in small glasses frosted with ice, with a bottle in a cooler packed with more ice positioned close at hand.
Lindsay spooned up caviar, and flung back little glassfuls of vodka, with happy abandon. Now he could celebrate. Delahaye had also shaken off his earlier introspection, and talked of Roswirtha with a kind of benevolent wistfulness, of adventures at the Hotel Crillon in Paris, and hair-raising escapes from Wotan’s men, forays across the Atlantic, and many, many confrontations with death.
‘It comes to us all.’ He shrugged, tugging the vodka bottle from its ice to pour fresh little glassfuls. ‘She was a star, but none of us can go on forever.’
Lindsay felt a little tight, but a good tightness, a tightness that came from winning. He had also closed with danger, and come through, and he was a younger man than Delahaye, living in a less dangerous world, and he would last longer.
Delahaye listene, and made a face. ‘I wouldn’t like to be a journalist – much too dull. Journalists just sit and listen to people, and pound typewriters, very boring. I go out and mop up the CIA.’ He stopped at the name, checking himself, and raised a warning forefinger, as if he knew that he was starting to talk too much. ‘But we will forget about that. Too high profile.’ He looked at Lindsay, a hard, searching look. ‘What will you do now, Englishman?’
Lindsay shrugged. The caviar had gone, and now they both had bowls of blood red borscht, with pretty pools of sour cream swimming in the middle, and champagne had taken the place of vodka, and the soup was bringing him back from the fringes of a vodka folly. ‘Don’t know. I’m supposed to be catching a plane to the Bahamas next week. That should keep me out of the way for a while.’
‘Bahamas?’
‘I’ve got another trip.’
‘Be careful.’ Delahaye lowered his voice. ‘Some of the bad men have an island there.’
‘I’ll stay out of their way.’ Lindsay thought of the wads of dollars and Swiss francs in his inner pocket, and remembered Lester’s promises. ‘I’m supposed to be going to Puerto Rico and Hawaii as well. I think I’ll take some time off.’
Delahaye remembered Koppel’s courier run. ‘We’ll help you back to London. Planes might not be good.’
He did not use the word ‘safe’. But Lindsay understood, and found his understanding depressing, because he disliked long journeys, unless behind the wheel of a fast car, on motorway class roads.
‘You’ll get your fast car.’ Delahaye beamed. The borscht had gone, and now a waiter was bringing shashlik, great chunks of pork fillet, the very best, sandwiched between grilled peppers and onions on long sword blades, bedded on a downy pillow of rice, and they were into their second bottle of Russian champagne. ‘I will fix something for you.’ He knew that VKAN used big Mercedes for the run, because sometimes the cars carried important officials as well, and he was confident that this Englishman would not be disappointed.
They ate together, and drank together, and both leered at a girl who stood in front of the band, singing heavily accented covers of Western hits, because she was a big girl, with generous proportions. The girl singer completed her set, and the diners applauded in a fairly desultory sort of way, and then the band started up again. But suddenly Lindsay realised that a couple had stopped by their table, and that a woman was staring down at him. He stared back, a bit out of focus, because champagne and more champagne on top of vodka was a heady combination. He recognised the woman from somewhere, a newspaper, but his memory was befogged. She was with a man, but the man did not register with him at all. His suit was ill-fitting, and he lookeds like an East German.
‘You’re Richard Lindsay.’ The woman looked at him very hard, and then sideways at Delahaye, with an attentive look in her eyes for the silverhaired man, and Delahaye was suddenly alert, like a gundog pointing.
Lindsay remembered a name. ‘You’re Alison?’ A girl from The Observer, a bit of a travel writer, but nothing very special. She had dark hair, to her shoulders, and quite a chubby build. She held herself away from her companion, as though keen to escape.
She smiled, but was not smiling for him, and now Delahaye was most attentive, signalling to a waiter, and making signs for a fresh chair.
‘I’m writing a piece about East Berlin.’ She nodded at the man with her. ‘Fritz here works for Berolina, the East German travel people.’
A waiter arrived. But he was an astute man, with a nose for a good tip, and he only brought a single chair, holding it high above his head as he threaded his way amongst the tables.
Delahaye filled his glass, holding it out in welcome. ‘You must join us.’ But he totally ignored her companion.
‘I’m not sure I should.’ Her voice was regretful. But she had Delahaye’s glass firmly targetted. ‘I’ve been drinking white plonk.’
It was a very blunt criticism, and suddenly the East German was gone, quite melted away. The girl sat, and sipped at Delahaye’s glass, and Lindsay had a feeling that she would also sit on his lap if she could.
A fresh plate arrived, with a fresh swordful of shashlik, and she began to eat hungrily. ‘This is good.’ She paused, with her fork poised in mid-air. ‘We had to queue for hours, and then they put us at a dreadful table, hidden away by the door to the kitchen. We were four, with a spotty man from the Morning Star – he tried to play footsy with me, and a girl from The Scotsman, I think she said, she told Fritz she was TT.’
Delahaye looked concerned. ‘TT?’
‘Non-alcoholic.’
‘And you?’
Lindsay had a feeling that he better sink as much champagne as he could, because he could see – from the way Alison and Delahaye were closing on each other – that he would soon be de trop.
Me?’ Alison giggled, leaning forward a little, so that Delahaye could see into her cleavage, which was really quite generous. ‘I like champagne.’
Lindsay’s evening floated away after that in a champagne bottle. He danced with Alison, hazily, but he very much had a feeling that it was merely a courtesy circuit. He ate small wild strawberries, bedded into cream, and drank Russian cognac, whilst Delahaye and Alison glued themselves, one to the other, in slow dances that bore all the hallmarks of a pathway to coition. He watched benevolently as Delahaye filled the head waiter’s hands with banknotes, and swayed gently as two waiters helped him to the door, where Alison and Delahaye manoeuvred him into a waiting taxi. And then he slept.