Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

"I'm sorry for the interruption, Chairman," she said bleakly.

"You can also say," Husband added, "that the surveillance has been discontinued – hasn't it, Dieter?"

"Oh yes."

Sladen said: "Now we've got that settled, perhaps Mr Husband, you'd like to…"

"It's Dieter's section that's been handling this, so I'll let him fill in the background. "

Sims ground out his cigarette and began. "You will all be aware of the changes in the Politbureau in the GDR since the railway strike. Especially one of the new members of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, Gustav Eismark."

Sir Bruce wasn't sure he'd read that issue of The Economist.

"He is widely regarded in the West as the token liberal," Sims explained. "Just as there must be a token Jew and a woman. We believe he could be more than this. His background is with shipping, first in the yards at Rostock, then with the national shipping line. He stopped the seamen and dock workers joining the strike, but he did not take too hard a line. We prefer to see him as we think he sees himself: a pragmatist."

"The great thing to be in East Germany right now," Scott-Scobie announced. "It marks you as one of the technocrats – what a ghastly word – and they're the class that counts. The politicians may say Blah but the computers go on saying onoioo or whatever it is, and it's the people who can make senseof that who'll be in the top bunk when the dam breaks. Also Eismark's only sixty-odd and that's a mere youth in the GDR. Ulbricht died in office when he was gone eighty, didn't he?"

"That is so," Sims said, smiling – apparently grateful for S-S's help. 'Filling in the background', Agnes saw, didn't include delivering the punch lines. "We believe he may be, in the long term, a very important man. And we also know of his early life something more than the official biography, since, thirty years ago, his sister defected to here. She was a pianist, and used her mother's name, Linnarz. Wilhelmina Linnarz."

"I remember her, " Sladen pounced, thankful for something he recognised at last. "She used to play a lot of Schumann. I didn't always agree with her Chopin, and her Liszt was a disaster area, but I'd listen to her for a long time if it's Schumann. What happened to her? – is she dead?"

"We do not know. She left this country twenty years ago, and we have no trace. "

There was a moment while everybody thought about that, 84 probably for no good reason except that they didn't like to see twenty years go by without offering up a few seconds' respectful silence, then Sir Bruce asked: "So she didn't go back to the GDR?"

Husband said: "We're very inclined to doubt it. They'd have put her in the freak show, confessing how misled she was by capitalist gold. One defector that repenteth is better propaganda than nine-and-ninety loyal party workers, isn't that so, Dieter?"

But ofcourse, Agnes realised, Sims – or whoever he'd been born – must once have been on the far side of The Wall, too. She'd been slow to see that, and tried to make up for it by saying quickly: "Her jumping over can't have helped Eis-mark's career."

Sims nodded, thanking her. "That is so. But he was only young then, about thirty, and he did not have so far to fall. And also his background was very good. His father had been killed in the Rostock riots of 1931, and it seems that Gustavhimself had for certain been a Worker Youth. "

"In 1945," Husband said, "they were trading cigarettes -which were better than gold in those days – for Party cards and affidavits that they'd always been true Worker Youths -once they found themselves in the Russian Zone. There were – are still, I'm sure – plenty of overnight heroes of the Resistance with Hitler Youth uniforms buried in their cellars. "

"Yes, yes, yes," Scott-Scobie said with cheery impatience. "But we can accept that our Gustavwasn't one of those. Apart from anything else, he wasn't even in the Russian Zone to begin with. He actually went East soon after the war ended, if Guy's files mean anything. So his wicked sister's vanished and now he's big man on campus. Let's read on. "

"In the war," Sims said,"Gustavhad married. He had a son, that is now Manfred, who is a colonel in the SSD. But Gustav's wife was killed at the end of the war. His sister then helped to bring up the child while Gustav wasin Moscow for two years, at the university and taking the political indoctrination. He did not marry again until much later, when he was coming back to political life after the economic changes of 1962, which made the shipping more important. Politically, itis important to be married. It is normal, and the Democratic Republic is very modest."

"An absolute hotbed of puritanism, " Scott-Scobie cut in. "Rife with morality. When Frau Ulbricht was den mother she ran the Politbureau like a convent school. "

"So when Gustav Eismarkcame to the Secretariat," Sims went on, "naturally we looked in the files about him. There was not much; we do not have the money to research every politician in the Republic. But now, we said to our people, if anybody has something about Eismark that they had not the money to explore, now we can unlock the money."

"Standard operating procedure," Husband said, quickly smoothing over Sim's full-frontal use of the word 'money', even though there was nobody there from the Treasury to hear it.

"And one person said yes, she thought she had something. "

"Something interesting or something dirty?" Sir Bruce asked.

Scott-Scobie grinned at him. "Both, we hoped. It's the dirty bits that make the world go round, don't you find, General?"

"Please… " from Sladen.

"So we said to go on, to investigate. She reported that she was sure she would be able to prove something, but it needed just one operation, with more money. It was to be in a small town called Bad Schwärzendem."

"Do you know the place, George?" Scott-Scobie called.

"A spa witha Gradierwerkdown near Paderborn. I toddled through it when I was with Rhine Army. What happened then?"

Husband said: "It went wrong, badly wrong," then lit a match and Sims found he was holding the ball again.

"There was a shooting. Our agent was killed, so was the town registrar. If you read the German papers, it was in there. We lost the money, we did not get the proof. "

"Ohdear," Agnes said brightly.

Sim's smile stayed as bright and unchipped as his teeth. "But the identity of our agent was not discovered and the police seem to think it was a crime of passion without any third person involved. We do not expect any blowback."

"Ah, thatis lucky," Agnes helped. Husband glared at her.

Scott-Scobie also gave her a look, then past her at George. "I have to say that we in The Office put the highest, thevery highest priority on acquiring this proof- if it still exists."

George asked: "Knowledge of what? And in what form?"

"That," Husband said, "is what we would like your Major Maxim to toddle round and tell us. "

The cricket ground was wide and shapeless, surrounded mostly by the back gardens of houses, but one stretch gave onto the main road, where the taxi from Littlehampton station dropped Agnes off. She walked up a gravel drive crowded with large cars, past an old-fashioned wooden pavilion and two clay tennis courts, ignored the adult game going on in front of her and started around the boundary to the second and much smaller game in the far corner.

Maxim was sitting on a wooden bench in the uncertain shade of a row of poplars and chatting to two small schoolboys in fresh whites. He stood up as she got near, taking off his sunglasses politely, and they shook hands. He wore a loose cottonblousonbuttoned at the waist over a blue tee-shirt and faded khaki slacks.

The bench was cluttered with cricket gear; Maxim asked the boys: "Could you find us a couple of chairs, do you think?" They rushed away with competitive enthusiasm.