LITMIR.BIZ

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of their game. They returned and examined the car again, wondering perhaps if it would be diverting to tear the upholstery out of its interior and then make sure there was no contraband hidden inside the tyres. The Leutnant stayed close to us, still brandishing our papers, while the old man climbed into the back seat and prodded everything proddable. When he’d completed his examination he got out and looked again at the back. There was a loud bang as he slammed the trunk. When he returned he was carrying the vodka. The Leutnant gave us our papers. ‘You can go,’ he said. The older man hugged the fancy box to his chest and watched our reaction.

      We got in the car and the kid started up the engine and switched on the lights. I turned my head. Just visible in the darkness the two men stood watching us depart. ‘We’ll be late,’ said the kid.

      ‘Take it very slowly,’ I said. ‘And if they shout “Stop”, stop.’

      ‘You bet,’ said the kid.

      ‘Militia,’ I said as we pulled away.

      ‘Yes,’ he said, suddenly turning testy now that the danger seemed past. ‘The accountant and one of the men from the packing shed playing soldiers.’

      ‘They have to do it.’

      ‘Yes, they have to do it. They started tightening up on the factory militias eighteen months ago.’

      ‘We were lucky.’

      ‘It usually goes like that nowadays,’ said the kid.

      ‘I thought we’d be sitting there all night,’ I said. ‘They like company.’

      ‘Not lately. It’s beginning to change. Lately they just like vodka.’

      We were in the outskirts of Magdeburg, and running twenty-five minutes late, by the time he spoke again. ‘I screwed up,’ he said suddenly, and with that knotted anger that we reserve for our own errors.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Do you think we’ll be back by tomorrow?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully.

      ‘I forgot to leave the key for my girlfriend. She won’t be able to feed the cat.’

      I felt like saying that Rumtopf had more than enough body fat to sustain itself over a few foodless days, but people can be very unpredictable about their pet animals, so I grunted amiably.

      ‘This colonel, this VERDI, says he knows you. Is he working for us?’

      ‘Because he has a cover name? No. They all have those if we deal with them on a regular basis, or mention them in messages. Even Stalin had a cover name.’

      ‘VERDI says he owes you a favour; a big favour.’

      I looked at him. ‘What’s he supposed to say?’ I’d had enough of this crap from Bret without more from the kid. ‘Is he supposed to say that I owe him a big favour? That would really get their attention in London Central, wouldn’t it?’

      ‘I suppose it would.’

      ‘Of course he’s going to say that he owes me a big favour. That’s the way these things are done: the person making contact always says he’s trying to repay a favour: a big favour. That way no one in London is likely to suspect that I’m going over there to bend the rules and do all kinds of things that the boys behind the desks have inscribed in their big brass-bound no-no book.’

      ‘I didn’t think of it like that,’ said the kid.

      ‘He’s a bastard,’ I said.

      ‘VERDI? SO you do know him?’

      ‘He thinks I owe him a favour.’

      ‘But you don’t? Is that what you mean?’

      I thought about it. ‘He tossed an arrest certificate into the shredder instead of putting it on the teleprinter.’

      ‘That’s a favour,’ said the kid.

      ‘He had other reasons. Anyway favours done for the opposition are like money in the bank,’ I said resentfully. And then, before he thought it was a currency I stocked up on, I added: ‘For guys like that, I mean. They like being able to call in a few.’

      The kid shot a sudden glance at me. I’d gone too far. I had the feeling he’d heard in my voice that note that said that I was under some kind of obligation to the bastard. And that was something I’d not until then admitted even to myself. ‘What’s your guess?’ the kid said. ‘Do you think he wants to talk?’

      ‘We all talk,’ I said. ‘Opposing field agents all talk. You bump into these guys all the time; at airports, in bars and on the job. Sometimes we talk. It can be useful. It’s the way the job is done. But we never ask questions.’

      ‘But if VERDI wants to go on the payroll we can start asking him questions. Okay, I understand now. But will he know something we need to hear?’

      ‘There is usually something worth hearing if they want to be helpful. If he gives us a few good targets; that would be valuable.’

      ‘What are good ones?’

      ‘Cipher clerks who gamble or borrow money,’ I said. ‘Department chiefs who drink, analysts who are screwing their secretary, translators who sniff. Vulnerable people.’

      ‘This one knows you. He’ll talk only to someone he knows.’

      ‘Yes, you told me. But I’ll take a lot of convincing he’s on the level.’

      The car had slowed and the kid was looking at the street signs. ‘I know the house,’ he said. ‘I delivered a package here last month. Money I think.’

      ‘You live dangerously,’ I told him.

      ‘All this won’t last much longer,’ he said. ‘I want to get a little excitement while I can. I want to be able to tell my kids about it.’

      He must have been talking to Bret. ‘You can have my share,’ I told him, and smiled. But such highly motivated youngsters worried me: so did these people who thought it was so nearly all over. There was once an old chap at the training school who started the very first day’s lecture saying: our job here is to change gallant young gentlemen into nervous old ladies. This kid needed that lecture badly.

      2

      Magdeburg, where we were headed, is one of the most ancient German cities, a provincial capital tucked into the most westerly bend of the River Elbe at a place where the river divides into three waterways. Its commanding site at the edge of the North German plain has always made it a target for plundering armies. Devastated by the Thirty Years War, it was razed again by the Second World War and even more thoroughly by the Soviet-style city-planners and architects who came after it.

      Magdeburg has been a home to men as choosy as Otto the Great and Archbishop Burchard HI and the more refined members of the house of Brandenburg. So great was the power vested here that when they came to build the railway joining Paris to Moscow they diverted the line through Magdeburg. More than a century later, in the postwar race for growth, the city was hastily transformed into one of the world’s most polluted industrial regions, where the proletariat choked on untreated chemical waste and more than half the children were suffering from bronchitis and eczema. Now, as the Marxist empire shrank and its privileged ruling class felt threatened from all sides, the Stasi, the Party’s Moscow-styled secret police and security service, had chosen Magdeburg to make a fortified compound where its most secret and highly treasured documents and artifacts could be guarded and hidden. Even the mortal remains of Hitler and Goebbels had been secreted away in the compound.

      ‘Do you know where the Smersh compound begins?’ I asked him as we drove through the centre of town.

      I’d almost forgotten how dark and bleak East German towns became after dark. There was little traffic, fewer pedestrians and no advertising signs. Two cops standing under a street light watched us pass with

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