Len Deighton - Berlin Game

'It will be all right,' I promised vaguely.

'Our presence will remind him of his obligation, and he will resent that. Then he'll start feeling guilty about such feelings and associate us with that guilt.' She drank more coffee. She'd obviously been thinking about it a great deal. 'I'm always a pessimist. Is your wife a pessimist?'

'She had to be an optimist to marry me,' I said.

'You haven't told me how you met,' said Mrs Munte.

I mumbled something about meeting her at a party, and went over to look out the window. She'd arrived with two other girls. Dicky Cruyer knew her name, and so I immediately approached her with a bottle of Sancerre and two empty glasses. We'd danced to music from an old broken record player and discussed our host, a Foreign Office junior clerk who was celebrating a posting to Singapore.

Fiona was typing letters for a travel company in Oxford Street. It was a temporary job, due to finish the next week. She asked me if I knew of any really interesting work for someone with a good degree who could type and take shorthand in three languages. I didn't think she was serious at first. Her clothes and jewellery made her look anything but desperate for employment.

'She told me she was out of work,' I said.

At the time, Bret Rensselaer was setting up an undercover operation that worked out of an office block in Holborn and processed selected data from the Berlin office. We needed staff and Bret had already decided that we would not go through the normal civil-service recruitment procedure. It took too long and involved too much form-filling and interviewing; to make matters worse, the civil service only sent us applicants that the Foreign Office had already decided were not good enough for them.

'What was she wearing?' said Mrs Munte.

'Nothing special,' I said. It was a tight sweater of angora wool. I remember it because it took two dry cleanings and a lot of brushing to remove the final fluffs of wool from my only good suit. I asked her where she'd learned shorthand and typing and she cracked some silly joke that made it clear that she was an Oxford graduate, and I pretended not to understand such subtlety. Dicky Cruyer tried to cut in on our dancing at that point, but Fiona said couldn't he see that she was dancing with the most handsome man in the room?

'But you saw her again?' said Mrs Munte.

I had a date with her the very next evening. And I wanted to be able to say I had a job for her. It was an attractive idea to have her in the same office with me. Bret Rensselaer didn't much like the idea of taking on someone we hadn't properly vetted, but when we found out that she was related to Silas Gaunt – who'd become something of a legend in the Department – he gave me a grudging okay. At first it was conditional on her working only out of my office, and not having access to the really sensitive material or any contact with our Berlin people. But in a few years, hard work and long hours gave her a series of promotions that put her in line for an Operations desk.

'I got her a job,' I said.

'Perhaps it was the job, rather than you, she was after,' said Mrs Munte, tilting her head on one side to show me it was not a serious suggestion.

'Perhaps it was,' I said.

I was watching two men at the far end of the narrow lane that led up from the Buchholz church. They were both in civilian clothes, but unmistakably Stasis. It was government policy that the secret police never wore beards or moustaches, and dressed in plain clothes of a type that made them immediately recognizable to every East German who saw them. Everyone except the most naive realized that there were other plainclothes policemen who weren't so easy to spot, but where the hell were they? Frau von Munte,' I said matter of factly, 'there are a couple of policemen coming up the lane checking each of the houses in turn.' I kept watching them. Now I could see that there were two more men – one in police uniform – and, behind them, a black Volvo negotiating the narrow lane with great care. Beyond that came a minibus with a light fixed to the roof. 'Four policemen,' I said. 'Perhaps more.'

She came over to the window, but had the good sense to stand well back from it. 'What kind of policemen?' she asked.

'The kind who get Volvos,' I said. With the scarcity of any sort of hard currency, only senior ranks or special squads could get an imported car.

'What do we do?' She gave no sign of fear. Married to a spy for a couple of decades, I suppose she'd lived through this nightmare times without number.

'Get two boxes of those seedlings from the greenhouse,' I said. 'I'll just look round in here before we leave.'

'Where are we going?'

'Back to my car.'

'We'll have to go past them.'

'They'll see us whichever way we go. Better to brazen it out.'

She put on an absurd fez-like felt hat and fastened it into her hair with ferocious-looking hatpins. She looked round the room. There were obviously many things she'd planned to take with her, but she grabbed only a fur coat from a box under the bed and put it on. She went out to the greenhouse, came back, and handed me a box of seedlings and kept one for herself. As we went out, I smiled to the neighbour stretched out on a blanket in front of his castle. He shut his eyes and pretended to be asleep. Closing the little garden gate carefully after Mrs Munte, I followed her down the lane towards the policemen.

They were working systematically, a two-man team on each side of the lane. One man to go into the garden and knock at the door, the other to watch the back. The driver of the car would be ready to take a potshot at anyone trying to run for it. In the back of the Volvo there was another man. It was Lenin, the senior officer of the team that had arrested Rolf Mauser. He was sprawled across the back seat ticking off names and addresses from papers on a clipboard.

'Who are you, where are you going?' said one of the policemen as we got near. It was the young Saxon conscript again. He'd been given the job of plodding along the lane to hold back the bushes that might scratch the paintwork of the car.

'None of your business, young man,' said Mrs Munte. She made an incongruous figure, standing there in the sunshine holding the plants and wearing her fur coat and Kaffeeklatsch hat.

'Do you live here?' He moved out to block the path. I noticed that the flap of his pistol holster was undone. His arms were folded across his body, a gesture that policemen like to think looks friendly.

'Live here?' said Mrs Munte. 'What do you think we are, squatters?'

Even the policemen smiled. Whatever Mrs Munte looked like, she could not be mistaken for one of the dirty long-haired squatters seen so frequently on TV news from the West Sector. 'Do you know anyone here named Munte?'

'I don't know any of these people,' she said disdainfully. 'I come to this dreadful place only to buy things I can't get elsewhere. My son is helping me with these carnations. It's his day off and he's brought his car here. Ten marks for these few seedlings. It's disgraceful. You should be concerning yourself with the profiteers that are flourishing here.'

'We are,' said the policeman. He still smiled but didn't move.

She leaned close to him. 'What are you doing?' she whispered loudly. 'Is it wife swoppers you are after? Or have the whores moved in here again?'

He grinned and stood aside. 'You're too young to know about that kind of thing, Mutti ,' he said. He turned round and watched us as we staggered along with the boxes of plants. 'Make way for the busy gardeners,' he called to the policemen behind him. And they stood aside too. The man in the back of the Volvo stared at his papers and said nothing. He probably thought our papers had been checked.