LITMIR.BIZ

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he wanted to come to us was because his life was in danger from whoever murdered him.’

      ‘Exactly,’ I said. I got up to go.

      ‘I know I can’t stop you visiting Werner,’ said Frank, ‘but you’d better guard your tongue when you are with him. If London gets to hear that you’ve been sharing Departmental secrets with him – even low-grade ones – they will throw the book at you.’

      ‘I’ll be careful, Frank. I really will.’

      As I was going to the door, he undid the pouch and put his empty pipe into his mouth while fingering the tobacco. The smell of it reached me as he grabbed a handful of it. I watched him, thinking he was going to fill the pipe, but he didn’t. He opened the door of the stove and thrust the entire contents of the pouch into the fire. The tobacco flared and hissed and a snake of pungent grey smoke coiled out into the room. ‘I’m determined this time,’ said Frank, looking over his shoulder at me, his eyes wide and birdlike.

      I was outside the door, and about to push it closed, when Frank called out to me and I looked back inside.

      ‘The pistol, Bernard. I haven’t asked you about the pistol.’ He pursed his lips. In Frank’s view anyone using a gun betrayed the Department and all it stood for. ‘You shot the tyres out, it said in the report. But where did the hand-gun come from?’

      ‘I thought the kid told you about that,’ I said warily.

      ‘No, he was as puzzled as we were,’ said Frank, watching me with great interest.

      ‘I found it on the body,’ I said.

      ‘Fully loaded?’ said Frank formally, as if he was about to write it down and ask me to sign.

      ‘That’s right, fully loaded. A Makarov – German manufacture: a Pistole M to be precise – I put it in my pocket and that’s what I used when they chased us in the car.’

      ‘I don’t remember anything of that in your report.’

      ‘I thought the kid would have covered those sort of details.’

      ‘Write the whole thing again,’ suggested Frank. ‘Fill in a few of those missing details … the Pistole M, how glass bends and so on. You know what those people in London are like. They might think you collected the gun from one of your East Berlin cronies. And then they won’t give me any peace until I find out who it might have been.’

      ‘You’re right, Frank,’ I said, wondering how quickly I could close the door and get out of there without offending him, and how soon Dicky would return with a thousand more questions.

      ‘Smell that tobacco,’ said Frank, wallowing in the smoke coming out of the stove top. ‘I’m beginning to think it’s better than smoking.’

      4

      ‘You just leave it to me, Mr Samson,’ said the cheerful ordnance lieutenant.

      The army is always there when you need it. My father’s loyalty to the army remained no matter how long after his army service he worked for the Foreign Office. And Frank Harrington’s devotion to the army was renowned. The army looks after its own and was always ready to take under its wing those who understood the obligations this entailed. And now it was a young army lieutenant who, without any up-to-date paperwork or even a telephone call, had put me into the cab of one of his trucks heading down the Autobahn. The soldiers were posted back to their depot. They were in convoy for Holland, and the ferry to Harwich in England. But I was on my way to Switzerland.

      ‘We’re getting near to the place you’re wanting, sir,’ said the driver without preamble. ‘You’ll hitchhike south from there.’ He had a Newcastle accent you could cut with a knife, and my German upbringing had left me unable to comprehend the more pronounced British regional voices. ‘Going home,’ he added, doing his best to make me understand. ‘We’re all going home.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. You could see the joy of it written in the faces of all these soldiers.

      ‘What about you, sir?’

      ‘Yes, I’ll soon be going home too,’ I said mechanically. The truth was I had no home; not in the sense that these men had their homes in Britain. My English parents had brought me up in Berlin and sent me to the neighbourhood school, frequently reminding me how lucky I was to have two languages and two countries; two lands in which I could pass myself off as a national. But as I got older I discovered just how tragically wrong they were. In fact even my most intimate German friends – boys who’d been close chums at school – had never regarded me as anything except a foreigner. While the British – not the least those men who sat behind the desks at London Central – regarded me as an unreliable outsider. I had none of the credentials essential for anyone who wanted to join their ranks. I wore no school or university tie, nor that of any smart regiment. I rode with no hunt, loitered in no Jermyn Street club, had no well-known tailor chasing me for payment. I couldn’t even name a seedy local pub where I regularly played darts and could get a pint of beer on credit.

      ‘You’ll need money,’ the corporal warned me. ‘Hitchhikers are expected to pay their fare nowadays. It’s the way things are.’

      ‘I’ve got enough.’

      ‘You should have bought a couple of bottles of duty-free booze. That’s what most of the boys do. Do you understand me?’

      ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I wish I’d thought of it.’

      The army in Germany – squeezed tighter and tighter by a German prosperity that shrank the pound sterling – had learned a great deal about saving money. The driver knew all about picking up a lift from one of the endless streams of heavy trucks that head south from Holland through Switzerland to deliver their freight to the Euro-Community warehouses in Italy. ‘Good luck,’ said the corporal. ‘And persevere. It won’t be easy. They’ll think you are a soldier, and these fat civvies all despise squaddies until there’s a bomb needs defusing or their plane gets hijacked. Keep asking; you’ll get a lift eventually.’

      It was a frosty night with a wind that cut through the moth-eaten lining of my old trenchcoat. I regretted for a moment leaving all my personal baggage – shaving kit, linen and change of clothes – behind in the kid’s apartment, but it was a necessary part of giving the Berlin office the slip. My airline seat reservation would keep them content until morning: they were endearingly simple souls in the Berlin office.

      The night was cold and dark. The sky moonless, starless and unremittingly black. ‘It’s good weather,’ the corporal added. ‘You’ll be in Italy in no time. But get yourself cleaned up; you’ll never get a lift if you’re scruffy.’ I suppose it was good weather from a driver’s point of view. A dry road, without the prospect of ice or snow, and visibility as far as the headlight’s beam stretched.

      The corporal had dropped me off at what he said was his favourite interchange: two great cross-Europe highways meeting and intertwining in a desolate reach of rural Germany. The complex was lit like a football stadium, the ferocious glare illuminating a white haze of diesel pollution that wound in and out of the gas pumps and buildings like skeins of silk. From a distance the interchange looked like some huge and malevolent interplanetary vehicle forced-landed upon the empty black German countryside. But upon arrival it proved no more than a plastic oasis, a limbo land occupied by drowsy downcast Gastarbeiter. No one lived here, no one slept here, no pedestrian would be mad enough even to attempt to get here. It was simply a ‘stop’; a place where cramped and weary travellers paid extortionate prices for the basic essentials of the travelling life – fuel, hot food, cigarettes and aspirin – before resuming their trip.

      After buying soap, a disposable plastic razor, toothbrush, clean underclothes and a tee-shirt in the silent fluorescent-lit shop, I purchased a shiny plastic shoulder bag emblazoned, for reasons known only to the tortuous minds of the merchandising experts, with a crudely drawn skyscraper and the words New York New York. I went and shaved and changed. Then, following the corporal’s advice, I walked into the special canteen reserved for long-distance

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