Len Deighton - Berlin Game

'Follow you, I'm way ahead of you. Frank helps you to get rid of Bret Rensselaer. Then you get Bret's job and Frank gets yours – except that Frank won't get yours.'

'You've got an evil mind,' said Dicky without rancour. 'You always think the worst of everyone around you.'

'And the distressing tiling about that is the way I'm so often proved right.'

'Well, take it easy on Frank. He's shaken.'

Dicky was of course exaggerating wildly, both about the disintegration of the Brahms net and about Frank Harrington's morale. Frank came downstairs ten minutes later. He looked no worse than I would have looked after sitting up with Dicky all night. He was freshly shaved, with two tiny cuts where he'd trimmed the edges of his blunt-ended moustache. He wore a chalk-stripe three-piece suit, clean shirt and oxford shoes polished to a glasslike finish, and he was waving that damned pipe in the air. Frank was tired and hoarse with talking, but he was an expert at making the best of himself and I knew he'd display no sign of weakness in front of Dicky and me.

Frank seemed pleased to see me. 'I'm glad you're here, Bernard. Has Dicky put you in the picture?'

'I've told him nothing,' said Dicky. 'I wanted him to hear it from you. Drinking chocolate, Frank?'

Frank looked quickly at his gold wristwatch. 'A small gin and tonic wouldn't go amiss, Dicky, if it's all the same to you.'

'It's cocoa, Frank,' I said. 'Made the way they drink it in Mexico.'

'You said you liked it,' said Dicky defensively.

'I loved it,' I said. 'I drank two of them, didn't I.'

'If you've got Plymouth gin,' said Frank, 'I'll have it straight or with bitters.' He went over to the fireplace and knocked out his pipe.

When Dicky came back from the drinks wagon and saw the charred tobacco ashes in the hearth, he said, 'Christ, Frank! Can't you see that that's a gas fire.' He handed Frank the gin and then went down on his knees at the fireplace.

'I'm awfully sorry,' said Frank.

'It looks just like a real open fire,' said Dicky as he used one of Daphne's discarded breakfast-food roughs to marshal the pipe dottle into a tiny heap that could be hidden under the artificial log.

'I'm sorry, Dicky. I really am,' said Frank as he sat back on the sofa with a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch on his knees. He looked at me and nodded before sipping his gin. Then, in a different sort of voice, he said, 'It could become bad, Bernard. If you're going over there, this would be the time to do it.'

'How bad?'

Dicky got to his feet and slapped his hands against his legs to get rid of any ash on his fingers. 'Bloody bad,' said Dicky. 'Tell him how you first found out what was going on.'

'I'm not sure I know what is going on yet,' said Frank. 'But the first real sign of trouble came when I had a call from the police liaison chap in Bonn. The border guards at Hitzacker in Lower Saxony had fished a fellow out of the Elbe. He'd got over the Wall and across all those damned minefields and border obstacles and into the river. He was just about done in, but he wasn't injured in any way. From the West German police report I gather there'd been no sounds of shooting or anything from the other side. It was as near as you can get to a perfect escape.'

'Lucky man,' said Dicky.

'Or a well-informed one,' said Frank. 'The border runs along the northeast bank of the river there, so the East Germans can't put obstacles and mantraps in the water. That's why the DDK keep bellyaching about the way the border should run along the middle of the Elbe. Meanwhile it's a good place to try an escape.'

'A border crossing? Why did Bonn get involved and why did anyone call you?'

' Bonn got interested when the interrogator at the reception centre found that the escapee was an East German customs official.'

Frank looked at me as if expecting a reaction. When I gave none, he spent a few moments trying to light his pipe. 'An East German customs official,' he said again, and waved the match in the air to extinguish it. He almost tossed the dead match into the fireplace but remembered in time and placed it on the large Cinzano ashtray that Dicky had put at his elbow. 'Max Binder. One of our people. A Brahms network man.'

Dicky had had a whole night of Frank's measured story-telling and now he tried to hurry things along. 'When Frank put in the usual "contact string" for the rest of the Brahms network next morning, he got no response from anyone.'

'I didn't say that, Dicky,' said Frank pedantically. 'I got messages from two of them.'

'You didn't get messages,' said Dicky even more pedantically. 'You got two "out of contact" signals.' Dicky had decided that the failure of the Brahms network was his big chance, and he was determined to write the story his own way.

Frank grunted and sipped his gin.

Dicky said, 'Those bastards have been working a racket with the import bank credits, and making a fortune out of it. And Bret's probably been authorizing false papers and the contacts and everything they needed.'

'Werner keeps complaining about the false papers,' I said.

'That was just to put us off the scent,' said Frank. 'The false papers were what they needed more than anything else.'

'We've had a lot of unofficial complaints from the DDR about "antisocial elements given aid and assistance",' I said.

Frank looked up from his pipe and said sharply, 'I resent that, Bernard. You know only too well that those East Germans keep up a regular bombardment of complaints along those lines. How the hell was I to know that this time their cocktail-party diatribes were based on fact?'

Dicky could not restrain a grim smile, and he turned away to hide it. The Brahms network being no more than a criminal gang manipulating the Department for its own profit must surely be enough to bring Bret Rensselaer crashing to the ground. And into the bargain Bret would lose his Brahms Four source. 'Frank says he expects the DDR to prefer murder charges against them,' Dicky added.

'Who? Where?' I said. I immediately thought of Rolf Mauser and was sufficiently surprised to allow my consternation to show. I'd been worrying about the way I'd urged Bret to okay a rollover loan for Werner. Would he suspect that I was a part of this racket? To cover myself, I got up and went over to the drinks wagon. 'Okay if I pour myself a drink, Dicky?'

'Has anyone been in touch with you?' Frank asked me. 'Rolf Mauser's son thinks he went to Hamburg. My bet would be London.'

'Anyone else?' I said, holding up the gin bottle. 'No. No one's contacted me up to now.'

Frank returned my gaze for a moment before shaking his head. 'No,' he said, 'I only said that murder charges would be the next step if the net's been penetrated. It's a device the DDR use for fugitives,' he explained. 'A murder charge automatically makes a fugitive Category One. It gets their descriptions circulated by teleprinter and the call goes out to the armed forces, as well as all the police services and the border guards. And of course there is always more chance of a murderer being reported by the public. These days the man in the East German street has become rather tolerant of black marketeers.' Frank looked at me again. 'Right, Bernard?'

I sipped a little of the gin I'd poured for myself and wondered to what extent Frank guessed that I'd seen Rolf or one of the network. Dicky wasn't suspicious; he could obviously think of nothing except how to use this new situation for his own advancement, but Frank had known me since I was a child. It was not so easy to fool Frank. 'It had to come,' said Frank. 'Brahms have been no use to us except to channel back material from Brahms Four. They've got into mischief, and now they're in trouble. We've seen it happen before, haven't we?'

'You say they're running, without backup or any support or anything from us?'