Charity - Len Deighton

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of my body was singing with pain. Under me I could feel coarse matting, and, reaching beyond its edge, smooth pavement. I moved enough to press my face against the cold stone. I vomited and tasted blood in my mouth.

      The two men stood over me watching; I could see a glint of light, and their shoes. Then they went away, satisfied no doubt with the job they’d done. I heard their footsteps fade but I didn’t try to get up. I pressed my head against a bag of onions. At the bottom of the sack, rotten onions had fermented to become a foul-smelling liquid that oozed through the sacking. I blacked out and then came conscious several times. Despite the stench I remained there full-length for a long time before very very slowly rolling and snaking across the floor, slowly getting my back against the wall and inch by inch sitting up. No bones were broken; no bruises or permanent marks on my face. Theirs was not a spontaneous act of brutality or spite. They had been assigned to hurt me, but not permanently cripple me, and they’d done their job nicely. No hard feelings, chaps, it’s all in a day’s work for a soldier serving in a land ruled by generals. Lucky me that they hadn’t been told to tear me limb from limb, for I’m confident they would have done it with the same inscrutable proficiency. Having decided that, I lost consciousness again.

      Someone must have carried me up to the room in the tower. I don’t remember anything of it but I certainly didn’t get there unassisted. But why, after a week of Mister Nice-guy, suddenly take me out of my bed and beat the daylights out of me without interrogation or promises? There was only one explanation and it slowly became clear to me. Some higher authority had ordered my release. This was Mr Reynolds’s tacit way of protesting that decision, and saying farewell to me.

      Higher authority was satisfied, I suppose. The generals in Warsaw were not trying to provoke World War Three. They just wanted to show their opposite numbers in London that they didn’t like nosy strangers coming into their territory and doing the sort of things I’d done last Christmas at Rastenburg. They didn’t want me demonstrating short-take-off-and-landing aircraft after dark, and kidnapping useful Polish spies. They didn’t like me torching shiny new government-owned Volvo motor-cars which were in short supply in Poland in 1987. And they didn’t like the way I’d shot and wounded Polish security men who, having failed to stop me, had made sure that arrest-and-detain notices were posted throughout the land.

      Well, that was my mistake; I should have killed the bastards.

      Reynolds put me on the train the next night. He took me to the station in a car, talking all the time about his sister in America and pretending not to notice that his men had almost beaten the life out of me. It was the same Moscow-to-Paris express train, on the same day of the week. They even put me back into a compartment with the same number. My overcoat – which I’d not seen during my incarceration – was folded and stowed on the rack. Pointedly my passport was balanced on the small basket the railway provides for rubbish. Everything was the same, except that Jim and his nurse were not there.

      The train compartment was warm. Outside it was snowing again. Wet dollops of it were sliding down the window glass. I slumped on the berth and stretched out. The pain of my beating had not abated and my clothes still had the sickening odour of putrid onions. My bruises and grazes were at that stage of development when the pain is at its most acute. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t even raise enough strength to get up and slide the door closed. From the compartment next door I heard the raised voices of a young American couple arguing with a soldier. They say it’s a political magazine,’ said the woman. She had a nice voice, with the sort of musical Boston accent that the Kennedy family made patrician.

      ‘I never saw it before,’ said the man. Then he repeated his denial loudly and in German.

      There was a moment of silence, then the woman coughed and the man gave a short angry laugh.

      I heard my door slide open. I half-opened my eyes and a Polish officer stepped inside to stare down at me. Then the sergeant joined him and the two of them moved on along the corridor. I suppose the American couple had picked up the local traditions without my assistance.

      Some extra railway coaches were shunted and coupled to our train with a rattle and a jarring that shook me to the core. Then, after a great deal of whistling and shouted orders, the train clattered forward. I pulled the pillow over my ears.

      2

      The SIS residence, Berlin

      ‘That bloody man Kohl,’ said Frank Harrington, speaking with uncustomary bitterness about the German Federal Republic’s Chancellor. ‘It’s all his doing. Inviting that bastard Honecker to visit the Republic has completely demoralized all decent Germans – on both sides of the Wall.’

      I nodded. Frank was probably right, and even if he hadn’t been right I would have nodded just as sagely; Frank was my boss. And everywhere I went in Berlin I found despondency about any chance of reforming the East German State, or replacing the stubbornly unyielding apparatchiki who ran it. Just a few months before – in September 1987 – Erich Honecker, Chairman of East Germany’s Council of State, Chairman of its National Defence Council and omnipotent General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, had been invited on a State visit to West Germany. Few Germans – East or West – had believed that such a shameless tyrant could ever be granted such recognition.

      ‘Kohl’s a snake in the grass,’ said Frank. ‘He knows what everyone here thinks about that monster Honecker but he’ll do anything to get re-elected.’

      Kohl had certainly played his cards with skill. Inviting Honecker to visit the West had been a political bombshell that Kohl’s rivals found difficult to handle. The Saarland premier – Oskar Lafontaine – had been misguided enough to pose with the despised Honecker for a newspaper photo. The resulting outcry dealt Lafontaine’s Social Democrats a political setback. This, plus some clever equivocations, patriotic declarations and vague promises, revived the seemingly dead Chancellor Kohl and reaffirmed him in power.

      Those who still hoped that Honecker’s visit to the West would be marked by some reduction of tyranny at home asked him to issue orders to stop his border guards shooting dead anyone who tried to escape from his bleak domain. ‘Fireside dreams are far from our minds,’ he said. ‘We take the existence of two sovereign states on German soil for granted.’

      ‘Kohl and his cronies have taken them all for a ride,’ I said. The ‘Wessies’ viewed Kohl’s political manipulation of the Honecker visit with that mixture of bitter contempt and ardent fidelity that Germans have always given to their leaders. On the other side of the Wall the ‘Ossies’, confined in the joyless DDR, were frustrated and angry. Grouped around TV sets, they had watched Kohl, and other West German politicians, being unctuous and accommodating to their ruthless dictator, and blithely proclaiming that partition was a permanent aspect of Germany’s future.

      ‘It aged Strauss ten years, that visit,’ said Frank. I could never tell when he was joking; Frank was not noted for his humour but his jokes were apt to be cruel and dark ones. From his powerbase in Munich, Franz Josef Strauss had proclaimed something he’d said many times before: ‘The German Reich of 1945 has legally never been abolished; the German question remains open.’ It was not what Honecker wanted to hear. He might have won Kohl over, but Strauss remained Honecker’s most effective long-term critic.

      We were downstairs in Frank’s house in Grunewald, the home that came with the post of Head of Station in Berlin. It was late afternoon, and the dull cloudy sky did little to make the large drawing-room less sombre. Yellow patches of light from electric table-lamps fell upon a ferocious carpet of bright red and green flowers. A Bechstein grand piano glinted in one corner. Upon its polished top, rank upon rank of family photos paraded in expensive frames. Playing centre-forward for this team stood a silver-framed photo of Frank’s son, a one-time airline pilot who had found a second career as a publisher of technical aviation books. Behind the serried relatives there was a cut-glass vase of long-stem roses imported from some foreign climate to help forget that Berlin’s gardens were buried deep under dirt-encrusted snow. All around the room there were Victorian paintings of a sooty and hazy London: Primrose Hill, the Crystal Palace and Westminster Abbey all in heavy gilt frames and disappearing behind cracked and darkening coach varnish.

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