Len Deighton - Berlin Game

'For God's sake,' I said angrily. I wanted to shout at him, but I kept my voice low. 'What do you care how extraordinary such actions are? What do you care how suspicious anyone gets? We're talking about one last thing you do before we get you out of here.'

'Yes, you're talking about it,' he said. 'But suppose you see this document and decide it's not something you want. Then you say thank you, and leave me to go back into the office and face the music, while you return to London and tell them I had nothing worthwhile to offer.'

'Very well,' I said. 'But I can't give you an absolutely firm undertaking to get you out until London agree to my request. I can't get you out on my own, you know that. I could tell you a pack of lies but I'm telling you the truth.'

'And how long will that take?'

I shrugged.

'The slow wheels of Western bureaucracy?' he asked sarcastically. He was angry. Fear does that to some people, especially to such introspective sober-faced old men as Munte. It was odd to think of him fearlessly enduring all the dangers of spying for years and then getting so frightened at the idea of living in the West. I'd seen it in other men: the prospect of facing a highly competitive, noisy, quick-moving, kaleidoscopic society and braving its dangers – sickness, crime, poverty – could be traumatic. He needed reassurance. And if I did not reassure him quickly and properly he might suddenly decide he didn't want to go to the West after all. Such things had happened before, not once but many times.

'Preparations must be made,' I said. 'You and your wife will not go to a reception centre for refugees. You'll be VIPs, looked after properly, so that you have no worries. You'll go to Gatow, the military airport, and fly directly to London on an RAF plane – no customs or immigration nonsense. But for all that you'll need documentation, and such things take time.' I said nothing of the dangers of crossing the Wall.

'I'll get it tomorrow,' he said. 'Will Silas Gaunt be there?'

'He'll be there, I'm sure.'

'We were close friends in the old days. I knew your father too.'

'Yes, I know.' Next door there was a pause in the music before the slow movement began.

'Haydn speaks an everlasting truth,' he said.

'You'll be all right once you're there,' I said. 'You'll see old friends and there will be a lot to do.'

'And I will see my son.'

I knew they wouldn't let Munte go to Brazil so readily. There would be long debriefings, and even after six months or so, when trips abroad are sometimes permitted, they wouldn't want him to go to Brazil, with its German colony so infiltrated by East German agents. 'We might be able to get your son to London for you,' I said.

'One step at a time,' he replied. 'I'm not even in London yet.'

'You'll soon be there.' I said it glibly while wondering which route to take back to the centre of the city.

'Will I?' said Munte in a voice that made me give him my whole attention. 'You've told London that I want to get out. And, guessing the real meanings behind the conversation you had with your wife on my phone, they now know about the evidence I'm providing for you to pinpoint the traitor there.'

'Yes?' I said doubtfully. From the next room there came the solemn melodies of the quartet, the first violin wringing a plaintive song from under his stiffening fingers.

'Are you really such a fool? Someone in London is worrying what you will discover here. They will make quite certain that they hear any news you supply to London. They will then take measures to eliminate both of us.'

'You worry too much,' I said. 'There will be no official report of what I told my wife.'

'I don't believe you. Someone will have to take responsibility for the task of getting us out.'

'My immediate superior. He'll be the only person told. Rest assured that he is not the man we are after.'

'I'm not going home tonight.'

'Then where are you going?'

'We've got a Laube . It's just two tiny rooms and a kitchen but we have electricity, and I won't lie awake all night worrying about policemen knocking on the door. My wife went out there earlier today. She will have some hot soup waiting.'

'Where?'

'At Buchholz, behind the church. It's a huge spread of allotments. Hundreds of people go out there at the weekend even at this time of year.'

'Tonight? It's a long journey to Buchholz. Do you want a ride? I've got a car.'

'You're very kind. It's not such an easy journey by bus and the S-Bahn is quite far away from us.'

I realized that Munte had deliberately introduced the topic with the hope of getting a ride there. 'How soon will you be ready?'

'I must wait for the end of the Haydn. I must tell my friend that his fingers are getting better. It's not true of course, but it's the sort of lie one expects from a good friend.' He smiled bleakly. 'And I will not see any of my friends again, will I?'

First I took Munte to his home in Erkner, a village surrounded by lakes and forests on the extreme eastern edge of the city. I waited in the car ten minutes or more. He returned carrying a small case.

'Family photos, old letters and my father's medals,' he explained apologetically. 'I suddenly realized that I will never return here.'

'Don't take too much with you,' I cautioned.

'I'll throw most of it away,' he promised. 'I should have done that years ago but I never seemed to have enough time.'

I drove north from Erkner on the autobahn with which Fritz Todt – Hitler's chief engineer – had ringed Berlin. The road was in poor condition and more than once the traffic was diverted to single-lane working. Near the Blumberg exit we were waved down by an army motorcyclist, and military policemen signalled frantically with their special flashlight-batons and ran about shouting in the imperious way that all military policemen learn at training school. Civilian traffic was halted while a Russian Army convoy passed us. It took ten minutes for the heavy trucks – some carrying tanks and others with missiles – to pick their way around the broken sections of roadway. It was during this delay that Munte told me a joke. He not only told me a joke, he told me it was a joke before he started it.

'There is a joke that East Berliners have about these neglected autobahns,' he said. 'People say why can't those verdammten Nazis come back and keep their Autobahnen in good order.'

'It's a good joke,' I said.

We waited a long time while the Russian trucks splashed through the rain puddles and thumped their suspensions on the potholes. Munte watched them with unseeing eyes. 'I was driving along here during the Berlin fighting,' he said suddenly. 'It was towards the end of April 1945. The reports said that tanks of the 1st White Russian Front were moving into the northwest part of Charlottenburg and had halted at Bismarckstrasse. And there were unconfirmed reports of Red Army infantry in Moabit. In the car with me I had my younger brother and two of his schoolfriends. We were trying to get to my parents' home near Wannsee before the Russians got that far south. What an idiot I must have been! We didn't know the Russians coming from the southwest had already got to Wannsee. They were past Grunewald and fighting in the streets of Friedenau by that time.'

He was silent until I finally said, 'Did you get there?'

'I was on this same road, this same piece of autobahn. Stopped, just as we're stopped, but by some motorized SS unit. They drained every last drop of gas from my car and pushed it off the road. They were doing that with every car and truck that came along here. I even saw them commandeer two Luftwaffe fuel tankers at gunpoint.'

'You walked home?'

'When the SS men got us out of my car, they looked at our papers. I had my Reichsbank pass and they accepted that without comment. But the three children were ordered to join an assorted collection of soldiers who were being pressed into battle. I objected but they shut me up by threatening to send me into the fighting too.' He cleared his throat. 'I never saw any of those boys again.'