Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

And for a few years it hadjust about done so. Looking back, nobody could now say how much of her success was due to her defection and how much to her playing. She had made only one recording for posterity to judge her by, and that was of Chopin, never her strongest point. She toured Britain and West Europe, she broadcast constantly – but she preferred recitals to the teamwork of symphonies, so never got taken up by one conductor, and in the long run that can be very important. Her agent – perhaps he wasn't the best in the world – never got her an American tour which, again, might have made all the difference. But probably the biggest shock, Leni thought, was the unexpected competitiveness of the top musicians in the West. In the East you worked, you were paid, there was no need to compete and no reward for it. In London, some of the stories about what pianists would do to secure a tour, a recording contract, a broadcast, had left Mina shattered. The Dream was real, but so were some of the things the Berlin loudspeakers had said about it.

Her career dwindled gently. She took to spending more time at Bush House, playing for very little except the chance to gossip in her native language. Oddly, she had never shown much interest in touring in West Germany – perhaps she was scared to go that close to the border – and had not even taken out a West German passport, to which she was automatically entitled. She lived day to day, as dear Mina always had – or rather, year to year, on a British Certificate of Identity renewed annually.

Agnes knew that already. "She never married?" She knew that, too, but preferred to imply that she hadn't seen the files.

"She went out with some men, yes, when she was here. She was not… not abnormal. But she talked about a boy she had loved in the war and who had been killed. That happened often enough, God knows. And then looking after Gustav's boy, I think after that she wanted a life for herself. Then she went to South Africa. No, she went on a Commonwealth tour, but it was in South Africa that she had her new success, and shestayed on there. She wrote to us about it, it was like the first days in Britain except the weather was much better. She sent us some notices of her recitals…"Leni smiled wistfully; "… and then we heard nothing. I thought… perhaps I thought she was dead."

"Did she marry out there?"

Leni didn't answer, didn't look at Agnes, just sat with her hands held primly in her lap. The big cat climbed stiffly down off the desk and squatted on a box of cat-sand under a corner table, staring straight ahead with a sublime conviction that it was invisible.

Agnes said: "She must have got some new identity. Her British certificate hasn't been renewed for twenty years."

Leni got up briskly and sprayed around the cat-box with an air-freshener. "Oh yes, she did get married."

That was all it took. Given a new name, she got a new nationality, new passport – a new life that was far more fundamental a change than she had managedjust by defecting. It is much easier to vanish than most people realise, particularly if you're a woman and ready to cut yourself off from family and friends – most of which Mina had already done by coming West.

"She told you this last week?"

"Yes…"Leni hesitated; "… yes, she told me then."

"Was he British?"

"I… I suppose he must have been, to bring her back here. "

That 'suppose' seemed a bit odd. "Can you tell me his "1" name?

The delicate face was lined with anguish. "But why do you want to know?"

"Because others want to know. I suppose that's the best answer. And merely because you didn't tell them her new name and address doesn't mean to say they'll stop looking."

"She didn't tell me."

There was one last hope of invisibility, as dignified as the cat's, although this time for her friend. And maybe a little shame that Agnes had to dispel.

"I know that," she said gently. "But somebody who cares as much as you do, you'd want to know." She waited, but Leni stayed obstinately silent. "She, played the piano for you, one last time. The men who came to see you, they wouldn't think of somebody having to empty their pockets before they play the piano – but that's really what a woman does, isn't it? She puts her bag down, somewhere aside, not on top of a grand piano, with her new name and address inside…"

Until they had got out of the car to phone, Maxim had never seen Sims standing up. He turned out to be a couple of inches shorter than Maxim himself, but slightly heavier in build, the figure of a boxer rather than a sprinter – except for those tiny hands.

Now it seemed as if his arms tapered all the way down to his fingertips where they lay lightly on the wheel of the Audi. The cuffs of his cream silk shirt were still linked, the discreet but expensive tie still knotted at his neck; his only concession to the sun was that his light blue blazer was carefully laid out along the back seat. Maxim wondered if he dressed that way only because he worked for The Firm, and decided probably not. As a nation, the Germans were far more formal dressers than the British: the only people around the centre of Osnabrücknot wearing ties were obviously foreigners by the rest of their dress. Maxim had a tie with him, but at the moment it was in his pocket.

"Will you be able to get those photographs blown up?" he asked casually. Now that he was going to be with Sims for most of the day, knowing what was on the photographs was an uncomfortable burden.

"I will arrange it in Paderborn." It was just about a hundred kilometres to Bad Schwarzendorn, with Paderborn – another town with a British garrison – shortly before it.

"What are we going to do at Bad Schwarzendorn?"

"You will look. Go to the place, Dornhausen. On the map it is a very small place. Somebody will remember. "

"Do the Germans – I mean in the West – know Gustav Eismark was Rainer Schickert?"

"No. It is what Guy told you: a politician in the GDR has no public past. The official history is that he was in the Communistresistance. That is all, the whole war, for him. And of course everybody was in the Communist resistance – now."

"Wouldn't somebody in West Germany recognise him?"

"He was Rainer Schickert for only a year and a few months – and mostly in hiding. How many saw him then? And then he was, I think, twenty-three. By the time he is becoming a politician, his picture in the paper, he is fifty. It is a long time, a lot of change. "

"How didyou know?"

Sims took a long time to think about answering that. He was driving well, perhaps too well, as if there was one perfect speed for every individual metre of road and he had to slow down or speed up to reach it. It wasn't jerky, just a little unsettling, and Maxim might not have been asking so many questions if he'd been able to sit back and watch the countryside flow past.

At last Sims said: "It was Mrs Howard who came to know that. It was the first thing we had… Do you know the island of Hiddensee, near to Rügen? Ah – of course you must know Rügen."

And 'of course' Maxim did, because it was the island – little more than a peninsula really – in the Baltic where the East German version of the Special Air Service did its training. He had studied the snatched photos of their Jeeps and Land-Rovers, their NATO uniforms, that proved their wartime mission was just the same as the SAS's. It could have been Sims's unit who supplied those photos.

"I don't know Hiddensee. "

"It is a place for Freikultur, not what you call nudism but… a liberation of the body, a going back to natural things… It was very strong with the old Weimar Republic. People go there to holiday, to lose all their problems, and also their ranks. The Democratic Republic is very bureaucratic, very much full of class distinctions. But at Hiddensee, you become anybody… or nobody. Somebody will sit down beside you on the sandhills and just talk. They will tell you anything, things they would never say to anybody anywhere else. Things they would get arrested for. "