Len Deighton - Berlin Game

'Not me,' he said, looking me in the eyes. Confidence or no confidence, he was still as ferocious as ever. 'I deal with problems as they come up. I don't go swimming across the Elbe and leaving my wife and kids to face the music.'

'The rest of Brahms all in place? London are worried.'

'A slight hiccup,' he said. 'Brahms had that slight hiccup that the economists talk about when their miscalculations have thrown half a million people out of work.' It was the sort of bitter joke for which he permitted himself a twisted smile.

'Let's hope the hiccup doesn't become whooping cough.'

It was 'gasping cough' in German. Rolf Mauser nodded. 'We took precautions,' he said. 'We've long ago learned that London cannot protect us.'

I let the criticism go. The Brahms net was old and tired. It should have been dismantled years before. Just as the information from Brahms Four was all that made them worthwhile to London, so this damned import-export racket was their sole reason to continue going through the motions. It was a marriage of convenience and, like all such marriages, it depended upon the self-interest of both parties.

Rolf helped himself to another drink – a large one. Then he got to his feet, buttoned up his coat and announced his departure.

'Don't stop and ask a cop which way to go,' I advised. 'Breathe that booze over him and you'll end up in a police cell.'

'I'll take my chances,' he said. 'I like being on my own, Bernd. I never did like doing things the way it's written in the book. Your father knew that.'

'Have you got English money?'

'Go back to your TV,' he said. 'And tell your wife I'm sorry I couldn't stay.'

'Shell understand,' I said.

He smiled his twisted little smile again. Even from before I married her, he'd never been able to get along with Fiona.

Rolf had been gone three hours or more by the time the phone rang with the call from Dicky. 'Where are you?' he said.

'Where am I? Where the hell do you think I am? I'm at home. I'm sitting in front of the TV trying to decide whether to switch the heating back on and watch the late-night movie.'

'The way they patch these calls, you can't be sure where anyone is these days,' grumbled Dicky vaguely.

'What is it?' I said. The film had already started and I didn't want a long chat with him about my Berlin expenses or the new car.

'Has anyone been in touch with you?' he asked. On the TV screen the titles gave place to a small steamer chugging across a bright blue lake.

'No one.'

'You called someone from Security to take Giles Trent back to his home today.'

At the bow of the steamer were three men in white suits leaning over the rail peering into the water. ' Trent had been drinking,' I said. 'He was being abusive and accusing us of arresting Chlestakov, his Embassy contact.'

'Who answered the phone?'

'In the security office? That kid with the moustache – Peter. I don't know his last name.'

'Did he have any trouble with Trent?'

'Look, Dicky,' I said. 'I decide when someone with an orange file needs to be picked up and taken home. Trent can complain to the D-G if he wants, but if I get any more flak from that bastard I'll lock him up again. And there's nothing anyone can do about that except take me off it. And that's a development I wouldn't mind at all. I don't enjoy it, you know.'

'I know all that,' said Dicky.

'And if they move me it will be egg on your face, Dicky.'

'Don't get hot under the collar,' said Dicky placatingly. 'No one is blaming you. You did everything that could be done, everyone is agreed on that.'

'What are you talking about, Dicky?'

'This fiasco with Trent. The bloody newspapers will start implying that we did it. You know that. And the only way we can argue with them is by telling them more than we want Moscow to know.'

'Would you start again, please?' I said.

'Didn't anyone phone to tell you that Trent 's been killed?'

'When? How?'

'Late this afternoon or early evening. Someone climbed over the garden wall at the back and shinned up the drainpipe to get into an upstairs window that had been left unlocked. Special Branch let us have someone to write up a preliminary docket.'

' Trent is dead?'

'Shot. He was in the shower. The curtain was drawn across to save any chance of blood splashing on the killer, or at least that's what the Special Branch detective says. None of the neighbours heard the shot. With the television showing nothing but cops and robbers, you could use a machine gun nowadays without anyone noticing the noise.'

'Any idea who did it?'

Dicky gave a tiny derisive hoot. 'Are you joking? The report says the bullets hit the bathroom wall with abnormally low velocity. The ballistics boys say the bullets had been specially prepared by experts – they'd had a proportion of their powder removed. Well, that sounds like a laboratory job, eh? That's our KGB friends, I think. Why do they do that, Bernie?'

'So they don't go through the next two or three houses and spoil the neighbours' television. Who found him?'

'His sister. She let herself in with her own key. She'd come to see if he was okay after that business with the sleeping pills. If it hadn't been for that, we wouldn't have discovered the body until tomorrow morning. I'd always suspected that Trent was queer, didn't you? I mean, him never being married. But giving the sister a key to the house makes that unlikely, wouldn't you say?'

'Anything else, Dicky?'

'What? No. But I thought I should ask you if he was acting normally when he left you this morning.'

'I can't help you, Dicky,' I said.

'Well, I know you've got an early start in the morning. Frank says wrap up well. It's cold in Berlin.'

After I rang off, I returned to my desk. When I unwrapped the pistol, I found a series of holes in the woollen scarf. Rolf Mauser had wrapped the gun in it before shooting Trent. A revolver can't be silenced any other way. I had to use a magnifying glass for a clear sight of the marks left on the bullet cases by the process of hand-loading. There was no doubt that the bullets had been specially prepared by someone with gunsmith's tools and powder measure.

I sat down and looked at the TV before switching off. The steamer was sinking; the men were drowning. I suppose it was some kind of comedy.

It was very very dark and Frank Harrington was being ultra cautious, using the electric lamp only to show me a safety well into which I might fall, or large puddles, or the rails when we had to get across to the other side of the railway track.

There is a curious smell in Berlin 's underground railway system. It brings to mind the stories about engineers blasting the locks of the canal between Schöneberger and Möckern bridges in those final hours of the war, so that the tunnels flooded to drown civilians, German soldiers and Russians alike. Some say there was no flooding – just leaks and water that came through the damaged bulkhead that guards the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn station from the cold waters of the Spree. But don't deny those nightmares to anyone who has picked his way over the cross-ties in the darkness after the trains have stopped, for he will tell you about the ghosts down there. And the curious smell remains.

Frank moved forward very slowly, talking softly all the while so that I would know where he was. 'Half the passengers on the underground trains going from Moritzplatz to Voltastrasse don't even realize that they actually go under East Berlin and back into the West again.'

'Are we under the East Sector yet?' I asked.

'On this section of line, they do know of course. The trains stop at Friedrichstrasse station and the passengers are checked.' He stopped and listened, but there was only the sound of dripping water and the distant hum of the electric generators. 'You'll see the marks on the tunnel wall when we get that far. There's red paint on the wall to mark the boundary.' He flashed his light on the side of the tunnel to show me where the marks would be. There was nothing there except bundles of wires sagging from support to support and blackened with decades of filth. As he switched off his lamp, Frank stumbled into a piece of broken drain and cursed. It was all right for him; he had rubber boots on, and wore old clothes under his railway-engineer's overalls. The clothes I wore under my overalls were all I had for my time in East Berlin. And we'd both decided that carrying case or a parcel in the small hours was asking to be stopped and searched.