Len Deighton - Funeral in Berlin

From two thousand feet the Soviet Army War Memorial in Treptower Park is the first thing you notice. It’s in the Russian sector. In a space like a dozen football pitches a cast of a Red Army soldier makes the Statue of Liberty look like it’s standing in a hole. Over Marx-Engels Platz the plane banked steeply south towards Tempelhof and the thin veins of water shone in the bright sunshine. The Spree flows through Berlin as a spilt pail of water flows through a building site. The river and its canals are lean and hungry and they slink furtively under roads that do not acknowledge them by even the smallest hump. Nowhere does a grand bridge and a wide flow of water divide the city into two halves. Instead it is bricked-up buildings and sections of breeze block that bisect the city, ending suddenly and unpredictably like the lava flow of a cold-water Pompeii.

Johnnie Vulkan brought a friend and a black Cadillac to meet me at Tempelhof.

‘Major Bailis, US Army,’ said Johnnie. I shook hands with a tall leathery American who was buttoned deep into a white Aquascutum trench coat. He offered me a cigar while the baggage was being checked.

‘It’s good to have you with us,’ said the major and Johnnie said the same.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘This is a town where one needs friends.’

‘We’ve put you into the Frühling,’ the major said. ‘It’s small, comfortable, unobtrusive and very, very Berlin.’

‘Fine,’ I said; it sounded OK.

Johnnie moved quickly through the traffic in the sleek Cadillac. Cutting across the city from west to east is a ten-lane highway that successive generations have named ‘Unter den Linden’ and ‘Strasse des 17. Juni’ and once was a gigantic path leading through the Brandenburger Tor to the royal palace.

‘We just call it Big Street,’ said the American as Johnnie moved into the fast lane. In the distance the statue on the Tor glinted gold in the afternoon sun, beyond it in the Soviet sector a flat concrete plain named Marx-Engels Platz stood where communist demolition teams had razed the Schloss Hohenzollern.

We turned towards the Hilton.

Just a little way down the street beyond the shell of the Gedächtniskirche with its slick modern tower – like a tricky sort of hi-fi speaker cabinet – apeing the old broken one is Kranzlers, a café that spreads itself across the Kurfürstendamm pavement. We ordered coffee and the US army major sat on the far side of the table and spent ten minutes tying the laces of his shoes. Across in the ‘Quick Café’ two girls with silver hair were eating Bockwurst.

I looked at Johnnie Vulkan. Growing older seemed to agree with him. He didn’t look a day over forty, his hair was like a tailored Brillo pad and his face tanned. He wore a well-cut Berlin suit of English pinhead worsted. He leaned back in his chair and pointed a finger lazily towards me. His hand was so sunburned that his nails seemed pale pink. He said, ‘Before we start, let’s get one thing clear. No one here needs help; you are superfluous to requirements as far as I am concerned. Just remember that; stay out of the way and everything will be OK. Get in the way and …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘This is a dangerous town.’ He kept his hand pointing into my face and gave a flash of a smile.

I looked at him for a moment. I looked at his smile and at his hand.

‘Next time you point a finger at someone, Johnnie,’ I said, ‘remember that three of your fingers are pointing back at you.’ He lowered his hand as though it had become heavy.

‘Stok is our contact,’ he said quietly.

I was surprised. Stok was a Red Army colonel in State Security. 1

‘It’s official then?’ I asked. ‘An official exchange.’

Vulkan chuckled and glanced at the major.

‘It’s more what you might call extra-curricular. Official but extra-curricular,’ he said again, loud enough for the American to hear. The American laughed and went back to his shoelace.

‘The way we hear it, there is a lot of extra-curricular activity here in Berlin.’

‘Dawlish been complaining?’ Vulkan asked, captiously.

‘Hinting.’

‘Well, you tell him I’ll have to have more than my present lousy two thousand a month if it’s exclusive service he’s after.’

‘You tell him,’ I said. ‘He’s on the phone.’

‘Look,’ said Vulkan, his solid gold wristwatch peeping out from the pristine cuff. ‘Dawlish has no idea of the situation here. My contact with Stok is …’ Vulkan made a movement with his cupped hand to indicate a superlative.

‘Stok is one thousand times brighter than Dawlish and he runs his show from on the spot, not from an office desk hundreds of miles away. If I can bring Semitsa over the wire it will be because I personally know some important people in this town. People I can rely on and who can rely on me. All Dawlish has to do is collect the kudos and leave me alone.’

‘What I think Dawlish needs to know,’ I said, ‘is what Colonel Stok will require in return if he delivers Semitsa – what you call – over the wire.’

‘Almost certainly cash.’

‘I had a premonition it would be.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ said Vulkan, loud enough to bring the American out of his reverie. ‘Major Bailis is the official US Army observer for this transaction. I don’t have to put up with dirty talk like that.’

The American took off his sun-glasses and said, ‘Yes, siree. That’s the size of it.’ Then he put his glasses back on again.

I said, ‘Just to make quite sure that you don’t promise anything we wouldn’t like: make sure I’m there at your next meeting with comrade Colonel Stok, eh?’

‘Difficult,’ said Johnnie.

‘But you’ll manage it,’ I said, ‘because that’s what we pay you for.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Vulkan.

1 KGB ( see Appendix 4).

When a player offers a piece for exchange or sacrifice then surely he has in mind a subsequent manœuvre which will end to his advantage.

Monday, October 7th

Brassieres and beer; whiskies and worsteds; great words carved out of coloured electricity and plastered along the walls of the Ku-damm. This was the theatre-in-the-round of western prosperity: a great, gobbling, yelling, laughing stage crowded with fat ladies and dwarfs, marionettes on strings, fire-eaters, strong men and lots of escapologists. ‘Today I joined the cast,’ I thought. ‘Now they’ve got an illusionist.’ Beneath me the city lay in huge patches of light and vast pools of darkness where rubble and grass fought gently for control of the universe.

Inside my room the phone rang. Vulkan’s voice was calm and unhurried.

‘Do you know the Warschau restaurant?’

‘Stalin Allee,’ I said; it was a well-known bourse for information pedlars.

‘They call it Karl Marx Allee now,’ said Vulkan sardonically. ‘Have your car facing west in the car park across the Allee. Don’t get out of your car, flash your lights. I’ll be ready to go at 9.20. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said.

I followed the line of the canal from the Berlin Hilton to Hallesches Tor U-Bahnstation, then turned north on to Friedrichstrasse. The control point is a few blocks north. I flipped a passport to the American soldier and an insurance card to the West German policeman, then in bottom gear I moved across the tram tracks of Zimmerstrasse that bump you into a world where ‘communist’ is not a dirty word.

It was a warm evening and a couple of dozen transients sat under the blue neon light in the checkpoint hut; stacked neatly on tables were piles of booklets and leaflets with titles like ‘Science of the GDR in the service of Peace’, ‘Art for the People’ and ‘Historic Task of the GDR and the future of Germany’.