being measured by the valuable encouragement she’d given to the Church in its opposition to the communists. Only I could see the price she had paid. In the last couple of weeks she’d been confident and more vivacious than I could remember her being for a very long time. Of course she was never again going to be like the Fiona I’d first met, that eager young Oxford-educated adventurer who had crewed an oceangoing yacht and could argue dialectical materialism in almost perfect French while cooking a souffle. But if she was not the same person she’d once been, then neither was I. No one could be blamed for that. We’d chosen to deal in secrets. And if her secret task had been so secret that it had been kept concealed even from me then I would have to learn not to resent that exclusion.
When the flight attendant brought champagne and a liver compound spread on tiny circles of toast I gobbled everything down as I always do, because my mind was elsewhere. I still couldn’t help thinking about Honecker and Bret and the Wall. It’s true that things were slowly changing over there; financial loans and political pressure had persuaded them to make the Stasi dig up and discard a few of the land-mines and automatic firing devices from the ‘death-strip’ along the Wall. But the lethal hardware remaining was more than enough to discourage spontaneous emigration. I suppose Western intelligence was changing equally slowly: people like me and ‘Tiny’ were no longer travelling First Class. As I drifted off to sleep I was wondering how long it would be before that professional egalitarian Erich Honecker found himself adjusting to the rigours of flying Economy.
‘Did you manage to sleep on the plane?’ said the young Englishman who met me at the airport in Berlin and took me to his apartment. He put my luggage down and closed the door. He was a tall thin thirty-year-old with an agreeable voice, a pale face, uneven teeth and a certain diffident awkwardness that sometimes afflicts tall people. I followed him into the kitchen of his apartment in Moabit, near Turmstrasse U-Bahn. It was the sort of grimy little place that young people will endure in order to be near the bright lights. As a long-time resident of the city I knew it as one of the apartment blocks hastily built in the ruins soon after the war, and nowadays showing their age.
‘I’m all right.’
‘I’ll make some tea, shall I?’ he said as he filled the electric kettle. I reached the teapot from the shelf for him and found on its lid a sticky label with a message scrawled across it in a feminine hand: ‘Don’t forget the key, Kinkypoo. See you at the weekend.’
‘There’s a message here,’ I said and gave it to him. He smiled self-consciously and said: ‘She knows I always make tea as soon as I get home. That reminds me – I was told to give you something too.’
He went to a cupboard, found a box and got from it a slip of paper with typed dates, times and numbers. It was a good example of the bullshit that the people behind desks in London Central wasted their time with: radio wavelengths.
‘Okay?’ said the kid, watching me.
‘Typed on a 1958 Adler portable by a small dark curly-haired guy with a bandaged middle finger.’
‘Are you kidding?’ said the kid, reserving a margin of awe in case I was serious.
I tossed the paper into the kitchen bin, where it fluttered to rest among the dead teabags and accumulated strata of half-eaten frozen TV dinners, their seams marked by the azoic ooze of brightly coloured sauces. This was not a place to stay on full pension. ‘If we get into trouble over there,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to be wasting a lot of time trying to contact London by radio.’ I opened my suitcase and laid my suit across the back of the sofa.
A large fluffy cat came in to investigate the kitchen garbage, sniffing to make sure that the discarded message was not edible. ‘Rumtopf!’ said the kid. ‘Come over here and eat your fish!’ The cat looked at him but forsaking the fish strolled over to the sofa, jumped up on to its favourite cushion, collapsed elegantly and went to sleep. ‘He likes you,’ said the kid.
‘I’m too old for making new friends,’ I said, moving my suit so it didn’t pick up cat hairs.
‘There’s no hurry,’ said the kid as he poured tea for us both. ‘I know the route and the roads and everything. I’ll get you there on time.’
‘That’s good.’ It was still daylight in Berlin, or as near daylight as it gets in winter. It wasn’t snowing but the air shimmered with snowflakes that only became visible as they twisted and turned, while dark grey cloud clamped upon the rooftops like an old iron saucepan lid.
He looked at my red eyes and unshaven face. ‘The bathroom is the door with the sign.’ He pointed at an old enamel Ausgang sign, no doubt prised from one of Berlin’s abandoned railway stations. The apartment had many such notices, together with advertisements and battered American licence plates and some lovingly framed covers from ancient Popular Mechanics magazines. There were other curious artifacts: strange weapons and even stranger hats from far parts of the world. The collection belonged to a young German art director who shared the rent here but was temporarily living with a redheaded Irish model girl who was depicted in a large coloured photo doing handstands on the beach at Wannsee. ‘London said I was to give you anything you needed.’
‘Not just tea?’
‘Clothes, a gun, money.’
‘You don’t expect me to go across there carrying a gun?’
‘They said you’d find a way if you wanted to.’ He looked at me as if I was something out of the zoo. I wondered what he had been told about me; and who had been telling him.
‘Half a dozen different identity documents for you to choose from. And a gas-gun, handcuffs and sticky-tape and restraints.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We won’t need any of it,’ he hastened to assure me as he prodded at the discarded list of radio wavelengths to push it deeper into the garbage. ‘He just wants to talk to someone he knows; someone from the old days, he said. London thinks he’ll probably offer us paperwork; they want to know what it is.’ When I made no response he went on: ‘He’s a Stasi colonel … Moscow-trained. Nowadays we can be choosy who we take.’
‘Restraints?’ I said.
‘London said you might want handcuffs and things.’
‘London said that? Are they going crazy?’
He preferred not to answer that question. I said: ‘You’ve met this “Stasi colonel”? Seen him close up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Young? Old? Clever? Aggressive?’
‘Certainly not young,’ he said emphatically.
‘Older than me?’
‘About your age. Medium build. We talk to him in Magdeburg. And check the material if he has anything to show us. But if he arrives panting and ready to go, London said we must have everything prepared. It is prepared – a safe house and an escape line and so on. I’ll show you on the map.’
‘I know where Magdeburg is.’ It was useful to know that I was now officially in the ‘certainly not young’ category.
‘A back-up team will take him from us. They’ll do the actual crossing.’
‘Have you had a briefing from Berlin Field Unit? What does Frank Harrington say about all
