Funeral in Berlin - Len Deighton

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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.

      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 a few people danced between the striped parasols while a small combo walked their baby back home with lots of percussion. ‘Warschau’, the lights spelled out and under them I saw Vulkan get to his feet. He waited patiently until the traffic lights were in his favour before walking towards the car park. A careful man, Johnnie; this was no time to collect a jaywalking ticket. He got into a Wartburg, pulled away eastward down Karl Marx Allee. I followed keeping one or two cars between us.

      Johnnie parked outside a large granite house in Köpenick. I edged past his car and parked under a gas lamp around the corner. It was not a pretty house but it had that mood of comfort and complacency that middle-class owners breathe into the structure of a house along with dinner-gong echoes and cigar smoke. There was a large garden at the back and here near the forests and the waters of Müggelsee the air smelled clean.

      There was just one name-plate on the door. It was of neat black plastic: ‘Professor Eberhard Lebowitz’, engraved in ornate Gothic lettering. Johnnie rang and a maid let us into the hall.

      ‘Herr Stok?’ said Johnnie.

      He gave her his card and she tiptoed away into the interior.

      In the dimly lit hall there stood a vast hallstand with some tricky inlaid ivory, two clothes-brushes and a Soviet officer’s peaked hat. The ceiling was a complex pattern of intaglio leaves and the floral wallpaper looked prehensile.

      The maid said, ‘Will you please come this way?’ and led us into Stok’s drawing-room. The wallpaper was predominantly gold and silver but there were plenty of things hiding the wallpaper. There were aspidistras, fussy lace curtains, shelves full of antique Meissen and a cocktail cabinet like a small wooden version of the Kremlin. Stok looked up from the 21-inch baroque TV. He was a big-boned man, his hair was cropped to the skull and his complexion was like something the dog had been playing with. When he stood up to greet us his huge hands poked out of a bright red silk smoking-jacket with gold-braid frogging.

      Vulkan said, ‘Herr Stok; Herr Dorf,’ and then he said, ‘Herr Dorf; Herr Stok,’ and we all nodded at each other, then Vulkan put a paper bag down on the coffee table and Stok drew an eight-ounce tin of Nescafé out of it, nodded, and put it back again.

      ‘What will you drink?’ Stok asked. He had a musical basso voice.

      ‘Just before we move into the chat,’ I said, ‘can I see your identity card?’

      Stok pulled his wallet out of a hip pocket, smiled archly at me and then peeled loose the stiff white card with a photo and two rubber stamps that Soviet citizens carry when abroad.

      ‘It says that you are Captain Maylev here,’ I protested as I laboriously pronounced the Cyrillic script.

      The servant girl brought a tray of tiny glasses and a frosted bottle of vodka. She set the tray down. Stok paused while she withdrew.

      ‘And your passport says that you are Edmond Dorf,’ said Stok, ‘but we are both victims of circumstance.’

      Behind him the East German news commentator was saying in his usual slow voice, ‘… sentenced to three years for assisting in the attempt to move his family to the West.’ Stok walked across to the set and clicked the switch to the West Berlin channel where a cast of fifty Teutonic minstrels sang ‘See them shuffle along’ in German. ‘It’s never a good night, Thursday,’ Stok said apologetically. He switched the set off. We broke the wax on the fruit-flavoured vodka and Stok and Vulkan began discussing whether twenty-four bottles of Scotch whisky were worth a couple of cameras. I sat around and drank vodka until they had ironed out some sort of agreement. Then Stok said, ‘Has Dorf got power to negotiate?’ – just like I wasn’t in the room.

      ‘He’s a big shot in London,’ said Vulkan. ‘Anything he promises will be honoured. I’ll guarantee it.’

      ‘I want lieutenant-colonel’s pay,’ Stok said, turning to me, ‘for life.’

      ‘Don’t we all?’ I said.

      Vulkan was looking at the evening paper; he looked up and said, ‘No, he means that he’d want the UK Government to pay him that as a salary if he comes over the wire. You could promise that, couldn’t you?’

      ‘I don’t see why not,’ I said. ‘We’ll say you’ve been in a few years, that’s five pounds four shillings a day basic. Then there’s ration allowance, six and eight a day, marriage allowance, one pound three and something a day, qualification pay five shillings a day if you get through Staff College, overseas pay fourteen and three and … you would want overseas pay?’

      ‘You are not taking me seriously,’ Stok said, a big smile across his white moon of a face. Vulkan was shifting about on his seat, tightening his tie against his Adam’s apple and cracking his finger joints.

      ‘All systems go,’ I said.

      ‘Colonel Stok puts up a very convincing case,’ said Vulkan.

      ‘So does the “find the lady” mob in Charing Cross Road,’ I said, ‘but they never come through with the QED.’

      Stok threw back two vodkas in quick succession and stared at me earnestly. He said, ‘Look, I don’t favour the capitalist system. I don’t ask you to believe that I do. In fact I hate your system.

      ‘Great,’ I said. ‘And you are in a job where you can really do something about it.’

      Stok and Vulkan exchanged glances.

      ‘I wish you would try to understand,’ said Stok. ‘I am really sincere about giving you my allegiance.’

      ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I bet you say that to all the great powers.’

      Vulkan said, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time and money in setting this up. If you are so damn clever why did you bother to come to Berlin?’

      ‘OK,’ I told them.

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