quietly.
I was surprised. Stok was a Red Army colonel in State Security.1
‘It’s official then?’ I asked. ‘An official exchange.’
Vulkan chuckled and glanced at the major.
‘It’s more what you might call extra-curricular. Official but extra-curricular,’ he said again, loud enough for the American to hear. The American laughed and went back to his shoelace.
‘The way we hear it, there is a lot of extra-curricular activity here in Berlin.’
‘Dawlish been complaining?’ Vulkan asked, captiously.
‘Hinting.’
‘Well, you tell him I’ll have to have more than my present lousy two thousand a month if it’s exclusive service he’s after.’
‘You tell him,’ I said. ‘He’s on the phone.’
‘Look,’ said Vulkan, his solid gold wristwatch peeping out from the pristine cuff. ‘Dawlish has no idea of the situation here. My contact with Stok is …’ Vulkan made a movement with his cupped hand to indicate a superlative.
‘Stok is one thousand times brighter than Dawlish and he runs his show from on the spot, not from an office desk hundreds of miles away. If I can bring Semitsa over the wire it will be because I personally know some important people in this town. People I can rely on and who can rely on me. All Dawlish has to do is collect the kudos and leave me alone.’
‘What I think Dawlish needs to know,’ I said, ‘is what Colonel Stok will require in return if he delivers Semitsa – what you call – over the wire.’
‘Almost certainly cash.’
‘I had a premonition it would be.’
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Vulkan, loud enough to bring the American out of his reverie. ‘Major Bailis is the official US Army observer for this transaction. I don’t have to put up with dirty talk like that.’
The American took off his sun-glasses and said, ‘Yes, siree. That’s the size of it.’ Then he put his glasses back on again.
I said, ‘Just to make quite sure that you don’t promise anything we wouldn’t like: make sure I’m there at your next meeting with comrade Colonel Stok, eh?’
‘Difficult,’ said Johnnie.
‘But you’ll manage it,’ I said, ‘because that’s what we pay you for.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Vulkan.
1 KGB (see Appendix 4).
When a player offers a piece for exchange or sacrifice then surely he has in mind a subsequent manœuvre which will end to his advantage.
Monday, October 7th
Brassieres and beer; whiskies and worsteds; great words carved out of coloured electricity and plastered along the walls of the Ku-damm. This was the theatre-in-the-round of western prosperity: a great, gobbling, yelling, laughing stage crowded with fat ladies and dwarfs, marionettes on strings, fire-eaters, strong men and lots of escapologists. ‘Today I joined the cast,’ I thought. ‘Now they’ve got an illusionist.’ Beneath me the city lay in huge patches of light and vast pools of darkness where rubble and grass fought gently for control of the universe.
Inside my room the phone rang. Vulkan’s voice was calm and unhurried.
‘Do you know the Warschau restaurant?’
‘Stalin Allee,’ I said; it was a well-known bourse for information pedlars.
‘They call it Karl Marx Allee now,’ said Vulkan sardonically. ‘Have your car facing west in the car park across the Allee. Don’t get out of your car, flash your lights. I’ll be ready to go at 9.20. OK?’
‘OK,’ I said.
I followed the line of the canal from the Berlin Hilton to Hallesches Tor U-Bahnstation, then turned north on to Friedrichstrasse. The control point is a few blocks north. I flipped a passport to the American soldier and an insurance card to the West German policeman, then in bottom gear I moved across the tram tracks of Zimmerstrasse that bump you into a world where ‘communist’ is not a dirty word.
It was a warm evening and a couple of dozen transients sat under the blue neon light in the checkpoint hut; stacked neatly on tables were piles of booklets and leaflets with titles like ‘Science of the GDR in the service of Peace’, ‘Art for the People’ and ‘Historic Task of the GDR and the future of Germany’.
‘Herr Dorf.’ A very young frontier policeman held my passport and riffed the corners. ‘How much money are you carrying?’
I spread the few Westmarks and English pounds on the desk. He counted them and endorsed my papers.
‘Cameras or transistor radio?’
At the other end of the corridor a boy in a leather jacket with ‘Rhodesia’ painted on it shouted, ‘How much longer do we have to wait here?’
I heard a Grepo say to him, ‘You’ll have to take your turn, sir – we didn’t send for you, you know.’
‘Just the car radio,’ I said.
The Grepo nodded.
He said, ‘The only thing we don’t allow is East German currency.’ He gave me my passport,1 smiled and saluted. I walked down the long hut. The Rhodesian was saying, ‘I know my rights,’ and rapping on the counter but everyone else was staring straight ahead.
I walked across to the parking bay. I drove around the concrete blocks, a Vopo gave a perfunctory glance at my passport and a soldier swung the red-and-white striped barrier skywards. I drove forward into East Berlin. There were crowds of people at Friedrichstrasse station. People coming home from work, going to work or just hanging around waiting for something to happen. I turned right at Unter den Linden – where the lime trees had been early victims of Nazidom; the old Bismarck Chancellery was a cobweb of rusty ruins facing the memorial building where two green-clad sentries with white gloves were goose-stepping like Bismarck was expected back. I drove around the white plain of Marx-Engels Platz and, at the large slab-sided department store at Alexanderplatz, took the road that leads to Karl Marx Allee.
I recognized the car park and pulled into it. Karl Marx Allee was still the same as when it had been Stalin Allee. Miles of workers’ flats and state shops housed in seven-storey Russian-style architecture, thirty-foot-wide pavements and huge grassy spaces and cycle tracks like the M1.
In the open-air café across the road, lights winked under the trees and
