LITMIR.BIZ

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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 this?’ Frank Harrington ran our West Berlin office, doing the job my father once did.

      ‘Frank is being kept informed but the operation is controlled directly from London Central.’

      ‘From London Central,’ I repeated softly. It was getting worse every minute.

      The kid tried to cheer me up: ‘If there is any problem we also have a safe house in Magdeburg.’

      ‘There’s no such thing as a safe house in Magdeburg,’ I said. ‘Magdeburg is home town for those people. They operate out of Magdeburg, it’s their alma mater. There are more Stasi men running around the Westendstrasse security compound in Magdeburg than in the whole of the rest of the DDR.’

      ‘I see.’ We finished our tea in silence, then I picked up the phone and dialled the number for Tante Lisl, a woman who’d been a second mother to me. I wanted to pass on to her Bret’s message of encouragement, and if surgery for her arthritis was going to prove costly I wanted to see the hospital and make my own financial arrangements with them. Meanwhile I planned to buy a big bunch of flowers and go round to her funny little hotel to hold her hand and read to her. But when I got through, someone at reception said she had flown to Miami and joined a winter cruise in the Caribbean. So much for my visions of Tante Lisl expiring on a couch; she was probably playing deck tennis and winning the ship’s amateur talent competition with her inimitable high-kick routine of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’.

      ‘I’ll shave, shower and change my clothes,’ I said as I sorted through my suitcase. To make conversation I added: ‘I’m putting on too much weight.’

      ‘You should work out,’ he said solemnly. ‘The older you get the more you need exercise.’

      I nodded. Thanks, kid, I’ll make a note of it. Well that was great. While I was nursemaiding this kid he was going to be second-guessing everything I did because he thought I was out of condition and past it.

      The bathroom was in chaos. I’d almost forgotten what the habitat of the young single male looked like: on a chair there was draped a dirty tee-shirt, a heavy sweater and a torn denim jacket – he’d obviously donned his one and only suit in my honour. Three kinds of shampoo, two flavours of expensive after-shaves and an illuminated magnifying mirror to examine spots.

      I went to the bathroom window, an old-fashioned double-glazed contraption, the brass handles tightly closed and tarnished with a green mottle as if it had not been opened in decades. Along the bottom ledge, between the dusty sheets of glass, lay dozens of dead moths and shrivelled flies of all shapes and sizes. How did they get inside, if they couldn’t get out alive? Maybe there was a message there for me if only I could work it out.

      The view from the window brought mixed feelings. I had grown up here; it was the only place I could think of as home. Not so long ago, in California, I had continually ached to be back in Berlin. I had been homesick for this town in a way I had never thought possible. Now that I was here there were no feelings of happiness or satisfaction. Something inexplicable had happened, unless of course I was frightened of going once more to the other side, which once I’d regarded as no more demanding than walking to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes. The kid thought I was nervous and he was right. If he knew what he was doing, he’d be nervous too.

      Down in the street there was not much movement. The few pedestrians were wrapped in heavy coats, scarfs and fur hats and

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