Spy Hook (7 page)

'Prettyman? No,' said Frank with conviction. Then Frank asked if everything was all right between me and Gloria. I said it was, because the ever-growing fear that I had, about becoming too dependent upon her, seemed too trivial and childish to discuss.

'Not thinking of marrying again?' Frank asked.

I'm not free to marry,' I reminded him. 'I'm still legally married to Fiona, aren't I?'

'Of course.'

'I have a nasty feeling she'll try for custody of the children again,' I said. I hadn't intended to tell him but I'd got to the point where I had to tell someone.

'I hope not, Bernard.'

'I had a formal letter from my father-in-law. He wants regular access to the children.'

He took his pipe from his mouth. 'And you think he's in touch with Fiona?'

'I'm not going to rule it out; he's a two-faced old bastard.'

'Don't meet trouble halfway, Bernard. What does Gloria think?'

'I haven't told her yet.'

'Bernard you are an ass. You must stop treating her as if she's halfwitted. A woman's point of view, Bernard.'

'You're right,' I said.

'Yes, I am. Stop brooding. Talk to her. She must know the children by now.'

I'd better get going, Frank,' I said. 'It's been like old times.'

I'm glad you stayed to dinner. I wish I'd known you were coming, I could have laid on some decent grub for you.'

'It was just like home,' I said.

'Have you got a car?' he asked.

'Yes, thanks.'

'I wish you wouldn't rent cars at the airport. It's not good security.'

'I suppose you're right,' I admitted.

His pipe was burning fiercely now, its smoke so dense that Frank's eyes were half-closed against it. 'Staying with Frau Hennig?' He always called her Frau Hennig. I don't think he liked her very much but he hid his emotions about her as he did about a lot of other things.

'Yes,' I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tarrant glide in, scowling. Frank's longtime valet always materialized like the ghost of Hamlet's father. I swear he listened at the door. How else could he appear at the exact right – or sometimes no less exact wrong – moment?

When Frank turned to him, Tarrant said, 'Colonel Hampshire phoned to say Headquarters won the tournament.'

I looked at Frank, who took the pipe from his mouth, smiled at me and said, 'Bridge.'

So I'd dragged Frank from some damned Officers' Mess bridge final. No doubt the meal we'd eaten was Tarrant's supper. But appearances could be deceptive; Tarrant's big eyebrows were always lowered menacingly, like a bull about to charge. Perhaps he wasn't hungry and resentful: maybe he was drunk.

'Thank you, Tarrant. You can go to bed. I'll see Mr Samson out.'

'Very good, sir.'

'Don't go,' said Frank to me. 'Let's open a bottle of tawny and make a night of it.'

Frank's choice in vintage port was always a temptation but I declined. 'I must put my head round the door before Lisl goes to sleep,' I said, looking at my watch.

'And what time is that?'

'Pretty damned late,' I admitted.

'You heard she's closing down?'

'The hotel? No more than that. Werner wrote me one of his cryptic notes but that's all he said.'

'It's too much for her,' said Frank, 'and those bloody people who work for her turn up only when they feel like it.'

'You don't mean Klara?' Klara was Lisl Hennig's maid and had been for countless ages.

'No, not Klara, of course not. But Klara is very old now. They're a couple of very old ladies. They should both be in a nursing home, not trying to cope with all the problems of a broken-down hotel.'

'What will Lisl do?'

'If she takes the advice everyone is giving her, she'll sell the place.'

'She's borrowed on it,' I said.

He prodded the pipe. 'If I know anything about the mentality of bank managers, the bank won't have loaned her more than half of what it will fetch on the market.'

'I suppose you're right.'

'She'd have enough cash to live her last few years in comfort.'

'But the house means such a lot to her.'

'She can't have it both ways,' said Frank.

'I can't imagine coming to Berlin and not being able to go to Lisl's,' I said selfishly. My father had been billeted in that house, and eventually my mother took me there to join him. We lived there all through my schooldays and my youth. Every room, every stick of furniture, every bit of frayed carpet held memories for me. I suppose that was why I was pleased that so little was done to bring it up to date. It was my private museum of nostalgia, and the thought of being deprived of it filled me with dread. It was tantamount to someone wrenching from me memories of my father.

'Just one?' said Frank. He laid his pipe on the ashtray with reverential care, and went to the drinks trolley. 'I'm opening the bottle anyway.'

'Yes, thanks,' I said changing my mind and sitting down again while Frank poured a glass of his tawny port for me. I said, 'The last time I was at Lisl's, only three rooms were occupied.'

'That's only half of the trouble,' said Frank. The doctor said running that place is too much for her. He told Werner that he wouldn't give her more than six months if she doesn't rest completely.'

'Poor Lisl.'

'Yes, poor Lisl,' said Frank handing me a brimming glass of port wine. There was a sardonic note in his voice: he usually called her Frau Hennig.

'I know you never liked her,' I said.

'Come, Bernard. That's not true.' He picked up his pipe and got it going again.

'Isn't it?'

'I said she was a Nazi,' he said in a measured way and smiled to acknowledge his dissembling.

'That's nonsense.' She was like a second mother to me. Even if Frank was like a second father I wasn't going to let him get away with such damaging generalizations about her.

'The Hennigs were social climbers in Hitler's time,' said Frank. 'Her husband was a member of the Party, and a lot of the people she mixed with were damned shady.'

'For instance?'

'Don't get so defensive, Bernard. Lisl and her friends were enthusiastic Hitler supporters right up to the time when the Red Army started waving a flag from the Brandenburger Tor.' He sipped. 'And even after that she only learned to keep her political opinions to herself.'

'Maybe,' I said grudgingly. It was true that Lisl had always had a quick eye for any failings of socialism.

'And that Lothar Koch… Well, we've been through all that before.'

Frank was convinced that Lothar Koch, an old friend of Lisl's, had some sort of Nazi past. One of Frank's German pals said Koch was a Gestapo man but there were always stories about people being Gestapo men, and Frank had said the same thing about many other people. Sometimes I thought Frank spent more time worrying about the Nazis than he did about the Russians. But that was something common to a lot of the old-timers.

'Lothar Koch was just a clerk,' I said. I emptied my glass and got to my feet. 'And you're just a romantic, Frank, that's your problem. You're still hoping that Martin Bormann will be discovered helping Hitler to type his memoirs in a tin hut in the rain forest.'

Still puffing his pipe Frank got to his feet and gave me one of his 'we'll-see-one-day' smiles. When we got to the door he said, 'I'll acknowledge Dicky's memo on the teleprinter, and we'll get together late tomorrow so you can take a verbal back to him. Will that suit you?'

'Just right! I wanted to have a day sightseeing,' I said.

He nodded knowingly and without enthusiasm. Frank didn't approve of some of my Berlin acquaintances. 'I thought you might,' he said.

It was about one-thirty when I got back to Lisl Hennig's little hotel. I'd arranged that Klara should leave the door unlatched for me. I crept up the grand front staircase under crippled cherubs that were yellowing and cobwebbed. A tiny shaded table lamp in the bar spilled its meagre light across the parquet floor of the salon, where the enormous baroque mirrors – stained and speckled – dimly reflected the tables set ready for breakfast.

The pantry near the back stairs had been converted to a bedroom for Lisl Hennig when her arthritis made the stairs a torment to her. There was a wedge of yellow light under her door and a curious intermittent buzzing noise. I tapped lightly.

'Come in, Bernd,' she called, with no hint in her voice of the frailty I'd been led to expect. She was sitting up in bed, looking as perky as ever: cushions and pillows behind her and newspapers all over the red and green quilt. Reading newspapers was Lisl's obsession.

Parchment lampshades made the light rich and golden and made a halo of her disarranged hair. She had a small plastic box in her hands and she was pushing and pulling at it. 'Look at this, Bernd! Just look at it!'

She fiddled with the little box again. A loud buzz with a metallic rattle came from behind me. I was visibly startled and Lisl laughed.

'Look at it, Bernd. Careful now! Isn't that wonderful!' She chuckled with delight. I jumped aside as a small olive-coloured jeep came rattling across the carpet, but it swerved aside and rushed headlong at the fireplace, hitting the brass fender with a loud clang before reversing and swinging round – antenna wobbling – to race across the room again.

Lisl, who was wrestling with the controls of this little radio-controlled toy, was almost hysterical with joy. 'Have you ever seen anything like it, Bernd?'

'No,' I said. Not wanting to tell her that every toy shop in the Western world was awash with such amusements.

'It's for Klara's nephew's son,' she said, although why Lisl should be playing with it in the small hours was left unexplained. She put the control box alongside a glass of wine on the bedside table where the wind-up gramophone, and a pile of old 78 records, were at her elbow. 'Give me a kiss, Bernd!' she ordered.

I rescued the little toy jeep from where it had come to a halt on the rumpled carpet and gave her an affectionate hug and kiss. She smelled of snuff, a heavy spicy mixture that she'd spilled down the front of her bed jacket. The idea of losing this crazy old woman was a terrible prospect. She was no less dear to me than my mother.

'How did you get in?' she said and glared at me. I moved back from her, trying to think of a suitable answer. She put on her glasses so that she could see better. 'How did you get in?'

'I…'

'Did that wretched girl leave the door on the latch?' she said angrily. 'The times I've told her. We could all be murdered in our beds.' She hit the newspaper with her loose fingers so that it made a loud smack. 'Doesn't she read the papers? People are murdered for ten marks in this town nowadays… muggers! heroin addicts! perverts! violent criminals of all kinds. You only have to go a hundred metres to the Ku-Damm to see them parading up and down! How can she leave the door wide open? I told her to wait up until you arrived. Stupid girl!'

The 'stupid girl' was almost List's age and would be up at the crack of dawn collecting the breakfast rolls, making coffee, slicing the sausage and the cheese, and boiling the eggs that are the essential constituents of a German breakfast. Klara deserved her sleep but I didn't point this out to Lisl. It was better to let her simmer down.

'Where have you been?'

'I had dinner with Frank.'

'Frank Harrington: that snake in the grass!'

'What has Frank done?'

'Oh, yes, he's an Englishman. You'd have to defend him.'

'I'm not defending him. I don't know what he's done to upset you,' I said.

'He's all schmaltz when he wants something but he thinks only of himself. He's a pig.'

'What did Frank do?' I asked.

'Do you want a drink?'

'No thanks, Lisl.'

Thus reassured she drank some of her sherry, or whatever it was, and said, 'My double suite on the first floor had a new bathroom only a year or two ago. It's beautiful. It's as good as anywhere in any hotel in Berlin.'

'But Frank's got this big house, Lisl.'

She waved her hand to tell me I'd got it wrong. 'For Sir Clevemore. He stayed here long ago when your father was here. That's before he became a "sir" and he'd be happy to stay here now. I know he would.'

'Sir Henry?'

'Clevemore.'

'Yes, I know.'

'Frank got him a suite at the Kempi. Think of the expense. He would have been happier here. I know he would.'

'When are we talking about?'

'A month… two months ago. Not more.'

'You must have made a mistake. Sir Henry has been sick for nearly six months. And he hasn't been in Berlin for about five years.'

'Klara saw him in the lobby of the Kempi. She has a friend who works there.'

'It wasn't Sir Henry. I told you: he's sick.'

'Don't be so obstinate, Bernd. Klara spoke with him. He recognized her. I was so angry. I was going to ring Frank Harrington but Klara persuaded me not to.'

'Klara got it wrong,' I said. I didn't like to say that it was the sort of story that Klara had been known to invent just to needle her autocratic and exasperating employer.

'It's a beautiful suite,' said Lisl. 'You haven't seen that bathroom since it was done. Bidet, thermostatic control for the taps, mirrored walls. Beautiful!'

'Well, it wasn't Sir Henry,' I said. 'So you can sleep easy on that one. I would know if Sir Henry came to Berlin.'

'Why would you know?' she said. She grinned from ear to ear, delighted to catch me out in a self-contradiction, for I'd always kept up the pretence that I worked for a pharmaceutical company.

'I get to hear these things,' I said unconvincingly.

'Good night, Bernd,' she said still smiling. I kissed her again and went upstairs to bed.

As my foot touched the first stair there came a sudden blast of sound. A Dixieland band, with too much brass, giving I'm for ever blowing bubbles' a cruel battering. The volume was ear-splitting. No wonder Lisl's hotel wasn't overcrowded.

I had my usual garret room at the top of the house. It was a room I'd had as a child, a cramped room, overlooking the back of the house and the courtyard. It was chilly at this time of year. The effects of the hot-water pump didn't seem to reach up to the top of the house nowadays, so the massive radiator was no more than tepid. But the indomitable Klara had put a hot-water bottle between the crisp linen of my bed and I climbed into it content.