Len Deighton - Berlin Game

'I'd like to think I was just a little smarter than the man you made a fool of then.'

'You've got nothing to regret. You'll go back to London and get Dicky Cruyer's desk. By the end of the year you'll be running Bret Rensselaer out of his job.'

'Will I?'

'I've made you a hero,' she said bitterly. 'You made me run for cover, and at a time when no one else suspected the truth. Until you phoned about the handwritten report, I thought I could keep going for ever and ever.'

I didn't answer. I kicked myself for not acknowledging the truth years before – that I had been Fiona's greatest asset. Who would believe that Bernard Samson would be married to a foreign agent and not realize it? Her marriage to me had made her life more complicated, but it had kept her safe.

'And you rescued your precious agent. You got Brahms Four home safely enough to make all your other agents breathe easily once more.'

I still said nothing. She might be leading me on. Until I was sure that the Muntes were safe, I preferred to play dumb on the subject.

'Oh, yes. You're a professional success story, my darling. It's only your domestic life that is a disaster. No wife, no home, no children.'

She was gloating. I knew she wanted to provoke me into an outburst of bad temper. I recognized that tone of voice from other times, other places and other arguments. It was the tone of voice she sometimes used to criticize Werner, my grammar, my accent, my suits, my old girlfriends.

'Can I go now?'

'The arresting officer – Major Erich Stinnes – is taking you to Checkpoint Charlie at nine o'clock. The arrangements are all made. You'll be all right.' She smiled. She was enjoying the chance to show me how much authority she had. She was a KGB Colonel; they would treat her well. The KGB look after their own, they always have done. It's only the rest of the world they treat like dirt.

I turned to go, but women won't let anything end like that. They always have to sit you down at the table for a lecture, or write you a long letter, or make sure they have not just the last word but the last thought too.

'The children will go to the best school in Moscow. It was part of the arrangements I made. I might be able to arrange that you have a safe passage to see them now and again, but I can't promise.'

'Of course not,' I said.

'And I can't send them to England on visits, darling. I just couldn't trust you to send them back, could I?'

'No,' I said. 'You couldn't. Now can I go?'

'I paid off the overdraft and put six hundred into your account to pay off Nanny. And one hundred for some outstanding bills. I wrote it all down and left the letter with Mr Moore, the bank manager.'

'Okay.'

'The D-G will send for you, of course. You can tell him that the official policy at this end will be one of no publicity about my defection. I imagine that will suit him all right, after all the scandals the service has suffered in the past year.'

'I'll tell him,' I promised.

'Goodbye then, darling. Do I get one final kiss?'

'No,' I said. I opened the door; Lenin was waiting on the landing, leather cap in hand. He saw Fiona standing behind me. He didn't smile in the presence of a senior officer. I wondered if he knew she was my wife. She'd probably be working out of Berlin. Poor Erich Stinnes.

When we got to the ground floor, I walked past him and he hurried to catch up with me as I marched to the front door to get out of that foul building. 'Is there anything else?' Lenin asked as he signalled for the car.

'For instance?' I said.

I sat in the black Volvo and looked out at the sunny streets: Stalinallee that had become Karl-Marx-Allee one night when all the street signs were changed before daybreak. The Alex, left onto Unter den Linden, and then left again so that Checkpoint Charlie was to be seen at the bottom of Friedrichstrasse.

'I'll take you right through the checkpoint,' said Stinnes. The driver touched the horn. The frontier police recognized the car, put the booms up and we drove through without stopping.

The American soldier in the glass-sided hut on the Western side gave us no more than a glance. 'Far enough,' I said. 'I'll get one of these cabs.' But in fact I'd already caught sight of Werner. He was seated in the car over the road where we always parked when we waited at Checkpoint Charlie. The Volvo turned and stopped. I got out and took a deep breath of that famous Berliner Luft . I wanted to run down to the canal and follow it to Lutzowplatz and then to Dad's office on Tauentzienstrasse. I would open his desk and take the chocolate bar that was his ration. I'd climb up the mountain of rubble that filled half the street, and slide down the other side hi a cloud of dust. I'd run through the carefully swept ruins of the clinic, where cleaned bottles, dusted bricks and salvaged pieces of charred timber were arranged so proudly. At the shop on the corner I'd ask Mr Mauser if Axel could come out to play. And we'd go and find Werner and maybe go swimming. It was that sort of day…

'Did it go all right, Werner?'

'I phoned England an hour ago,' said Werner. 'I knew it would be the first thing you'd ask. There's an armed police guard around your mother's house. Anything the Russians try won't work. The children are safe.'

'Thanks Werner,' I said. Thinking about the children made it easier not to think about Fiona. Better still would be not having to think at all.

Len Deighton was born in London in 1929. He worked as a railway clerk before doing his National Service in the RAF as a photographer attached to the Special Investigation Branch.

After his discharge in 1949, he went to art school – first to the St Martin's School of Art, and then to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. It was while working as a waiter in the evenings that he developed an interest in cookery – a subject he was later to make his own in an animated strip for the Observer and in two cookery books. He worked for a while as an illustrator in New York and as art director of an advertising agency in London.

Deciding it was time to settle down, Deighton moved to the Dordogne where he started work on his first book, The Ipcress File. Published in 1962 , the book was an immediate and spectacular success. Since then he has published twenty books of fiction and non-fiction – including spy stories, and highly-researched war novels and histories – all of which have appeared to international acclaim.