Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (25 page)

Here is how I managed to sum up the entire Iraq conflict in my school diary.

I hope Saddam sees sense and pulls out. I do not want war.

On a lighter note, it is not raining much at the moment.

I was now rifling through the Box and finding more and more evidence of my time in Berlin. Tarek’s entry in the Book listed
him as living in the former West Germany, and even had a phone number. I’d tried it, but to no avail. But there were clues
elsewhere. A copy of the JFK Student Directory. An address of a mutual friend. And dozens of photos of the old gang in Berlin…
photos of us on lunch breaks, when we’d walk down to Zehlendorf and buy curry-wursts and chips. Photos of us on a school trip
to Brussels. A class photo, signed by everyone, on the last day of school—a sad day for me, because it indicated a return
to Britain and an end to JFK. A sad day for my friends, too, because, with America pulling out of Germany, whole military
families would now be saying goodbye to Berlin too. My friend Amy, whose dad was a diplomat, was heading back to Washington,
DC. My friend Josh, whose dad had flown for Pan Am, was heading back to Boulder, Colorado, and had made me memorize his address
as a sort of bizarre rhyme. Brian, whose dad was in the army, had his ticket for Buffalo, New York, and was packing up already.
We’d all shared that time in Berlin… but for all of us, it had come to an end. But how about Tarek? Had he stayed on at JFK
and graduated in the class of ’94? Would he still be in Berlin?

The doorbell rang. I answered it.

“So… been busy?” asked Paul the builder. He was halfway up his own ladder inspecting the location of the new canopy. I stood
at the bottom with a mug of coffee. This made me look more like a boss.

“Oh, you know…” I said. “Yes. Sort of. I’ve ordered some shopping online and varnished a table.”

Paul looked over to the end of the garden and spotted my handiwork.

“Christ—
you
did that?”

I was mildly offended.

“Yes,” I said. “With varnish and a brush.”

I was
sure
that’s how you did it.

“Bloody hell.”

I looked over at the table, proudly. And then the pride sort of disappeared. It suddenly didn’t really look all that varnished.
It just looked like a table someone had liberally dripped varnish over. I’d been in quite a rush to get it done—to prove to
Lizzie that I would live up to the Desperados Pact—but really, I’d just wanted to get on and track down more of the names
in the Book, and this streaky, patchy mess of a table was the result.

“Well. It’s not quite finished,” I said, defensively. “I’ve been a bit distracted. With important work.”

“You must’ve been,” said Paul. “You’ve not even done her legs.”

I checked. He was right.

“It’s an ongoing project,” I said. “I am taking my time with it. With her. With it.”

“Well, I’d start again, if I were you… I could do that for you, if you like, for a bit extra…”

Paul was undermining my confidence in the job. Plus, it was apparent that I still didn’t know when to correctly identify something
as a lady. I resolved to do the legs myself before Lizzie got home, and left Paul to get on with building the canopy. But
twenty minutes later, after receiving a phone call asking for a quote, he told me he’d brought the wrong screws and would
have to return in a few days, when he’d ordered the right ones. I told him there was a DIY shop just down the road, but he
frowned and shook his head and assured me they would not have the right screws, so I said okay, and told him to keep me updated.
I was secretly pleased he was off. Being in charge of Paul was tiring. And besides, I had
real
work to do, and a can of varnish remover to buy a little later on…

I sat down at my desk just as a text arrived. It was from Hanne.

I think I should reiterate that I only use Facebook as a business utility and not as some kind of social networking site and
the pointless Take That obsession is Guro’s, not mine. Understood?

I suggested she go and cook an egg.

I hit the Internet and tried to find the website of the John F. Kennedy International School… and it got me thinking…

One of the strangest things about our move to Berlin was the day I’d had to fight off a renegade KGB agent who’d broken into
our flat.

Now, you might wonder why I’ve never mentioned this before. It is, after all, quite a nice sentence to say. It’s the kind
of thing I have to stop myself from telling complete strangers at bus stops or in post office queues, as it has the effect
of making me seem a little bit mental, like saying “My friend Simon has solved time travel” or “I know the German Chunk” would.
It is, however, fact: I once fought off a renegade KGB agent who’d broken into our flat.

Actually, “fought off” is probably a little strong. And I’ve no proof that he was “renegade”—he might’ve been a real stickler
for the rules. But he
was
KGB. And he
did
break into our flat.

I’ll explain.

My dad is a very good friend of Britain. He pays his taxes, he picks up after himself, he never litters and he always observes
the countryside code. The East Germans, on the other hand, thought of him slightly differently. According to official secret
police files released as the Wall took its tumble, they’d decided my dad was an Enemy of the State. His official file brands
him as
feindlich negativ
and a menace to East Germany, thanks to his work studying various exiled writers and vocal critics of the socialist government.

It is something I had never realized about my dad, but it suddenly made him something just short of James Bond. And from the
evening I stared the KGB in the eye, small events in my childhood slowly started to make sense. The fact that sometimes, in
Dundee, when you picked up the phone and hadn’t even dialed a number yet, there’d be someone on the other end already waiting
for you. I’d assumed that was just how phones worked. But no. It turned out this was MI5, possibly trying to see if my dad
was a double agent. Which would have been weird, seeing as how he wasn’t even a single one. But sometimes, Dad would finish
a conversation, put the phone down, then remember with a tut and a click of his fingers that he’d forgotten to mention the
one vital thing he’d phoned up about. So he’d pick up the phone again, only to hear his own conversation being played back
in a room with a couple of men commenting on it.

“Hello!” he’d shout. “Can I use my phone again?”

Whereupon you’d hear two men shouting “Shit!” and spilling their coffee while pressing various buttons.

I remembered the day Special Branch turned up at our house in Loughborough. And the day we found out that a woman I’d always
thought of as a mere busybody who was always turning up to our house and asking what we were up to was in fact a part-time
spy for the East Germans. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she’d come up with a decent codename, like Hawkwind or Raven-tits.
But the letters she sent the East German secret police were just signed “Anne”… which lent a potentially exciting situation
a sort of beige tinge.

But then there was Frederick. Frederick was
brilliant.
Frederick was the world’s most rubbish spy, sent over to Loughborough to infiltrate our small family and keep tabs on my
dad. His brief was apparently simple: pretend to be a student, win my dad’s confidence and report back.

Sadly for Frederick, his cover story involved pretending to be twenty-two, when he was a man quite clearly in his early forties.
This was also in the days before Google, so when Frederick came to the business of his clever disguise, he couldn’t actually
look up what students in the late 1980s in England were wearing. He had to
guess.
Which is why he turned up in the student bar looking like Doctor Who, with a huge Oxbridge scarf, hat, tweed jacket and leather
briefcase, in a futile attempt to blend in with people holding lagers, wearing stonewashed jeans and talking about whether
the Smiths would ever get back together.

His plan, however, was
genius.
He would use
my
middle name in order to strike up a rapport with my dad, and then claim to be Swiss, not East German, in order to fox us.
The flaw in the plan was that he didn’t seem to have read the family file all the way through. He seemed to have stopped at
my middle name. I believe the initial conversation with my dad went something like this.

FREDERICK: Hello Professor Wallace! I am twenty-two but perhaps look older! Look at my clothes—I am undoubtedly a student!
My name is Frederick!

DAD: Frederick? Goodness! That’s my son’s middle name! You must join us for dinner and we can talk about this further!

FREDERICK: Well, that would be wonderful! I am not from East Germany, by the way, so do not be suspicious of me. I am from
Switzerland instead of that.

DAD: Really? My
wife
is from Switzerland!

[pause]

FREDERICK: Oh.

DAD: You must talk to her about being from Switzerland!

FREDERICK: Yes.

DAD: Where are you from in Switzerland?

FREDERICK: I am not 100 percent sure…

DAD: You’re a spy, aren’t you?

FREDERICK:… Yes.

And Frederick disappeared the next day.

Dad kept much of this quiet from me. Not on purpose; it just didn’t really seem to bother him very much. It was just a part
of everyday life, becoming normal very quickly, in the way that filling up your car for the first time is exciting but soon
becomes a trivial annoyance. But it was the night of the KGB invasion that made me think of it further.

It happened like this. A month or so after we’d moved to Berlin, we had a new neighbor. His name was Bogomolov and he’d been
a former adviser to Gorbachev, but had been sent away, as advisers sometimes are. He’d got talking to my dad in the hallway
one day, and soon enough they agreed to play ping-pong together. The fact that my dad was playing ping-pong with the former
adviser to Gorbachev (and that’s another sentence I can never say in queues) was enough to raise suspicions, and within a
week a new set of Russians were living down the hall. But these were
different
Russians. They were brooding, and odd, and they wore all black, and despite their cover story of being experts in German,
they didn’t really seem to speak it very well. I couldn’t help but wonder whether somewhere in the world Frederick had been
promoted. We’d been tipped off by two or three people that the new Russians were KGB, but simply shrugged it off… until the
night they’d waited for my parents to leave the house and get on a train. Thinking I wasn’t in the flat, they’d laid their
hands on the skeleton key to the flats, and I’d heard a rattle of the door as a burly man tried to make it fit. Finally it
clicked into place, he turned it and in he stormed… and there I was. Standing, like Macaulay Culkin in
Home Alone,
holding the Louisville Slugger baseball bat I’d started taking to school every day, and probably wearing the most frightened
face in Germany.

The man looked at me. I looked at the man. My grip on the bat tightened. An hour seemed to pass, but just a moment later he
growled something in Russian that sounded faintly terrifying, turned and ran out of the door. I slammed it shut and looked
through the peephole, but he’d gone. A second later I heard the main door of the flats slam shut too. He’d legged it. I had
successfully repelled the KGB.

Dad thought the man had been there to plant a bug, which I remember thinking was vastly unimaginative of the spy. Frederick
would have probably pretended to be a Chinese ping-pong pro in order to glean
his
information. Now
that’s
a spy.

I still have the Louisville Slugger, by the way. Because it was a present. A present from Tarek…

*   *   *

The JFK website was packed with more blasts from the past. Names I hadn’t seen or thought of in years, like its own private
Friends Reunited. An alumni page gave me brief snapshots into people’s lives, through email addresses or small photos. But
nothing seemed to have been updated since about 2002. It seemed Rob Busch was now a dentist in Miami. JC had joined something
called the Ministries of God Theological Church in Atlanta. Jan Zimmerman now seemed to be some kind of professional hacky
sack player in Zurich. And Tarek? Just the words…
left JFK in 1992
…

Where would he have gone?

A brief Google search under his name showed various possibilities. Was he the Tarek Helmy who was now Associate Professor
of Clinical Medicine Division of Cardiovascular Diseases in Cincinnati? No.

Was he the Tarek Helmy who was teaching at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran? Not likely.

But there… at the bottom of one particularly long entry, was the name Tarek Helmy and four letters which seemed to strike
a chord… BAHS.

What was BAHS?

I clicked the link.

Berlin American High School.

Of course! Our rival school! The one we’d always been pitted against in unsuccessful basketball games! The kids who used to
wear the burgundy
Happy Days
jackets to our blue ones! Had Tarek defected? Gone to the other side?

Yes!

I found a sentence, entered onto a messageboard, almost exactly a year before…

If you went to BAHS class of 94 we should have a reunion. Would be cool to see you again. Tarek.

I couldn’t believe it.

Tarek was doing what
I
was doing! Exactly the same kind of thing! Just one year earlier! Maybe
he
had an address book to update! Plus—there was an email address! Had I found him?

I quickly started up my email. I would write to him straight away.

But, as it opened up before me, something stopped me.

The bing-bong of a new email.

Dear Danny,

Peter Gibson has sent you a message through Friends Reunited. Click here to read it.

Peter
Gibson!
The day just got better and better.