Spy Line (25 page)

‘What is it, Tessa?’

‘Your friend Jeremy is looking for you.’ She twirled around to enjoy again the fleeting shadows she made.

‘Who is Jeremy?’

‘You mean, Jeremy who, darling.’ She laughed shrilly at her joke. ‘Jeremy thing!’ She clicked her fingers. ‘Jeremy the cultivated ape. Know you not the couplet:
He doth like the ape, that the higher he climbs the more he shows his ars
. Francis Bacon. You think I’m an untutored wanton, but I went to school and I can quote Francis Bacon with the best of you.’

‘Of course you can, Tessa. But you seem a little high yourself.’

‘And the more I show my arse? Is that what you mean, Bernard, you rude sod?’

‘No, Tessa, of course not. But I think it might be a good idea to get you back to your hotel. Where’s Dicky?’

‘Are you listening to me, Bernard? Jeremy the ape is
desperate to find you. He is going mad. He is in fact going ape!’ More laughter; soft but shriller, and a suggestion that hysteria was not far away. ‘The signal has come and you must go.’

‘Is that what Jeremy the ape said?’

‘The signal has come and you must away.’

‘Tessa!’ I shook her. ‘Listen to me, Tessa. Get a hold of yourself. Where is the ape now?’

‘He was trying to get into one of Werner’s three-piece lounge suits – blue with a pin stripe – but Werner got angry and wouldn’t let him borrow any clothes. They were both shouting. Werner doesn’t like him.’ She smiled. ‘And Werner’s suits are too big.’

I said it slowly. ‘Where is Jeremy the ape now?’

‘You’re not going without me. The car’s here. Van. Ford van, a lovely shade of blue. Diplomatic plates. Outside in the rain. Jeremy the ape is driving. They make good drivers, apes. My father employed one for years. Then he started wanting extra bananas all the time. They can be awfully tiresome, apes. Did I tell you that?’

Outside, the rain was falling in great steel sheets, hammering the road and pounding upon the roof of the Ford van. Jeremy Teacher, still in gorilla costume, was in the driver’s seat. He was soaking wet. I asked him what was happening and had to shout to make myself heard above the sound of the rain and thunder. ‘Get in,’ he said.

‘What’s happening?’ I said for maybe the fourth time.

‘What the hell do you think is happening?’ he said furiously. ‘The bloody signal came through three and a half hours ago!’

‘You said a VW van.’ He shot me a poisonous look. ‘I haven’t got my passport,’ I said, my mind racing as I thought of all the other things I didn’t have.

‘Get in! I’ve got the passports here.’ The prospect of going through the checkpoints dressed as a gorilla had obviously put him in a foul temper.

It was then that I noticed that Tessa was dancing about in the rain. She was drenched but she seemed oblivious of the arresting sight she offered as the thin material clung tightly to her body.

It was Tessa dancing round the Ford Transit – added to the sight of a gorilla gunning it while arguing volubly with a civilian who might have been his keeper – that brought other revellers out into the street. They made an astonishing sight in their costumes, and although some of them had umbrellas, many were as indifferent to the downpour as Tessa was.

Werner came too, struggling under the weight of my father’s suitcase. He opened the rear door to put it inside and as he was doing so Tessa pushed him aside and climbed into the van, slamming the door with a crash that made the metal body-work sing.

‘Let’s go!’ shouted Teacher.

‘Tessa’s in the back,’ I said.

He looked round and shouted, ‘Get out of there, Tessa.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ she cooed.

‘Don’t be silly. You haven’t got a passport,’ said Teacher with a calm politeness that was commendable under the circumstances.

‘Oh yes I have,’ she said triumphantly. She had produced it from somewhere and was holding it up in front of her to show him. ‘Dicky said I was to carry it everywhere while I was here.’

‘Get out, you stupid bitch!’ He revved the engine as if hoping that would persuade her but it didn’t. It simply confirmed that the engine was not firing properly. I had doubts that it would ever complete the journey.

‘I won’t. I won’t.’

‘For Christ’s sake get her out of there,’ shouted Teacher to me.

‘Who the hell do you think you are,’ I said. ‘You get her out.’ I recognized one of Tessa’s bloody-minded moods and decided to let the intrepid Mr Teacher earn his pay.

He looked at his watch. ‘We must go.’ With a string of curses he opened his door and got out, but as the rain hit him and soaked his hairy gorilla outfit he changed his mind and climbed back into the driver’s seat again.

‘Come on, Tessa. We’re leaving.’

‘I’m coming too,’ she said.

‘No, you’re bloody not!’ said Teacher. He switched the heater on to full. His damp costume was obviously chilly.

Then Dicky arrived on the scene. He was dressed as Harlequin, the carefully decorated face, chequered costume and imposing hat a favourite for Germany’s Fasching celebrations. He spotted Tessa and dutifully told us that she was in the back of the van. Teacher gave a loud and angry sigh. ‘Then get her out of it,’ he said, abandoning his usual respectful attitude to those set in authority over him.

By now there seemed to be dozens of people in bizarre costumes milling around the van, although in the darkness and the relentless rain it was difficult to be sure who they really were. But they formed such a crush that getting through them, getting the door open and getting Tessa out would be physically difficult even if no one objected to Tessa being manhandled. And if I knew anything about the effects of alcohol on the male psyche, any sort of struggle with Tessa would be enough to start a riot.

There was a flash of lightning. Hordes – in ever more amazing garb – spilled into the street. The commotion round the van had become the party’s new attraction. A rain-soaked Frederick the Great was waving both hands in glee, while Barbarossa, his false beard bedraggled, offered his hat to a Roman maiden to protect her coiffure.

I saw the Duchess. She was dressed as a witch, in a pointed hat and a long black gown with occult symbols on the skirt of it. That damned cat was with her despite the heavy rain, its eyes glowing angrily in the darkness. The Duchess was standing in front of the van and began making solemn gestures with her wand. A roll of thunder came in on cue.

‘What’s that old cow doing?’ Teacher asked.

‘I think she’s casting a spell,’ I replied.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Teacher, aggravated beyond control. ‘Has everyone gone insane?’

Before the Duchess had finished her incantation Harlequin stuck his painted face through the window of the van and said, ‘Teacher is in charge. Remember that, Bernard.’ I ignored him. He grabbed my shoulder and in the voice of an exasperated parent talking to a naughty child, he said, ‘Look here, Bernard! Do you hear what I said?’

I looked at Dicky’s elaborately made up face and his cold little eyes. Years and years of repressed resentment welled up in me. The way in which he’d been promoted over my head, the pompous things he said, his pretentious lifestyle, his readiness to cuckold poor old George and make jokes about it. Now emotion took precedence over common sense. Whatever the consequences, now was the time to react. I pulled my fist back and gave him a solid punch on the rouged nose. Not hard, but it was enough to send him reeling back into the roadway just as another car came past. With incredibly quick response the driver swerved with a sharp squeal of brakes and avoided him. I turned to see him through the window. Dicky still staggered back, hat askew, feet splayed wide apart. His arms were flailing to keep balance, but he fell backwards into the road and his big cocked hat came off.

‘Go! Go! We’ll sort it out at the checkpoint,’ I yelled.

Teacher let in the clutch and there was a squeak of rubber and a sickening bump followed by a woman’s scream. I knew immediately what had happened. That bloody cat ‘Jackdaw’ had gone under the van to shelter from the downpour. Now it was flattened under the rear wheels. We might have hit the Duchess too, but Teacher spun the wheel and narrowly missed her and we sped out into the traffic of the Ku-Damm.

The wet streets shone with the coloured light of the neon
signs that summoned tourists to meet the junkies, winos and dropouts who had made the Europa Centre their home. ‘Is she still in the back?’ said Teacher as we passed the Gedächtniskirche, preserved to remind the nostalgia-prone that old Berlin had its fair share of ugly buildings. Even at this time of night there was plenty of traffic. Teacher gunned the motor a couple of times and after that the engine began firing more efficiently. I suppose the rain must have been afflicting it.

‘I’m here, darling,’ said a voice from the back. ‘I can guess who you are going to meet. If you dare to try throwing me out at the checkpoint I’ll scream it aloud to the whole world. You wouldn’t like that, would you?’

‘No we wouldn’t like that,’ I said.

‘This bloody heater’s not working,’ said Teacher and slapped it with his hairy hand.

‘That’s a damned convincing costume, Jeremy,’ I said admiringly. Tessa giggled softly but Teacher didn’t answer.

Traffic leaving West Berlin for the Autobahn to West Germany goes through the Border Control point at Drewitz in the south-west corner of the city.

The procedures are efficient and, for a car with Diplomatic plates, minimal. On the DDR side of the controls it is customary for the drivers and passengers of vehicles so marked to flatten their identity papers against the glass of the window, where they are examined by the flashlights of the communist officials who work with that studied slowness that in the West is usually the modus operandi of trade unionists in dispute.

Eventually the guards grudgingly waved us through. They gave no sign of noticing that one of us was a gorilla. Teacher tossed the diplomatic passports into the glove compartment and we began the long and monotonous journey to the West. In keeping with the DDR’s siege mentality, there are no cafés or restaurants on this road. There’s nowhere to savour those sixty-eight different flavours of ice-cream that punctuate long wide American freeways, none of the bifteck aux pommes frites avec Château Vinaigre that mark the expensive kilometres of France’s autoroutes, not even the toxic waste and strong tea so readily available on Britain’s motorways.

At first there was a great deal of traffic on the road. Lovers and husbands returning from blissful weekends passed each other on the way home. Trucks starting out at the stroke of midnight after the weekend embargo on heavy vehicles slowly
and laboriously overtook other heavyweights. In the fast lane Germans roared past us at top speed, flashing their lights lest they be inconvenienced in their public demonstration of German mechanical superiority. ‘
Deutschland über alles
,’ said Teacher as one such Mercedes driver, who’d come tailgating close behind us, pointed his finger to his head as he overtook, and sprayed us with dirty water.

‘Tessa’s gone to sleep,’ I said.

‘Something good had to happen,’ said Teacher. ‘It’s the law of averages.’

‘Don’t bet on it,’ I said. The wipers squeaked and squealed at the rain. Teacher reached for the radio switch but seemed to have second thoughts about it.

We came up behind a line of heavy trucks, the wind whipping the covers of the rearmost vehicle, and stayed there for a bit. ‘Keep awake. We’ll check
all
the exits,’ said Teacher. ‘The message may have got it wrong.’

‘No comment,’ I said.

These East German Autobahnen were in poor condition. Little had been done on this stretch since it was first built in Hitler’s time. Subsidence here and there had caused wide cracks, and hasty patches of shoddy maintenance had failed to cure the underlying fractures. All over Europe the motorways were poxed with signs, and littered with the equipment of construction gangs, as the Continent’s roads succumbed to an arterio-sclerosis that had every sign of proving fatal.

There had been roadworks at several places along the route, but after the turn-off for Brandenburg – a town that forms the centre of a complex of lakes to the west of Berlin – the westbound side of the Autobahn was reduced to single-lane working. Teacher slowed as our headlights picked out the double row of plastic cones, some of them overturned by the gusts of wind that accompanied ceaseless heavy rain.

The road curved gently to the left and began a downward gradient. From here I saw ahead of us the ribbon of highway marked by pinpoints of light that climbed like a
file of insects and disappeared suddenly over the distant hill only just visible against the purple horizon.

This section of the Autobahn was being widened. Lining the road were colossal machines: bulldozers and towering power shovels, spreaders, graders and rollers, the bizarre toys of a Gargantuan world.

‘Look there!’ I said as I spotted a car parked amongst the machines, its parking lights just visible through the downpour.

‘That’s them,’ said Teacher, the relief audible in his voice. He swung the wheel. We bumped off the edge of the roadway and down on to the mud, picking the way carefully past metal drums, steel reinforcements, abandoned materials, broken wooden fencing and other undefinable debris. We were about fifty yards from the other car when Teacher judged us close enough. He stopped and turned off the engine: the lights died. The noise of the rainstorm was suddenly very loud. It was dark except when passing cars, coming round the curve, swept the site with their headlight beams. The light came swinging across it like the revolving rays of a lighthouse. There was no movement anywhere.

‘Careful,’ I said. ‘When you open the door we’ll be lit up by the interior light. We’ll be sitting targets.’ I slid into the back of the van, opened the suitcase and rummaged to find the ammunition and the pistol. I loaded it carefully. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could tuck into the waistband of a pair of cheap trousers so I kept it in my hand.

‘I’m getting out,’ said Teacher. ‘You two stay here.’

‘Whatever you say.’

It was no time to start a row, but as he opened the door and got out of the driver’s seat I slid out the back and into the darkness and pouring rain. Outside there was the sort of stink that roadworks always exude, the smell of disturbed earth, faeces and fuel oil. But the road here runs through a tall forest and the felling of the trees had added sap to the medley of odours. The rain soaked me to the skin before I’d taken more than two steps through the sticky mud. I kept
the gun under my coat and out of sight, and watched the dim figure of Teacher walking cautiously towards the car. Some traffic swung past, driving carefully along the prescribed lane, their beams dulled by the steady rain.

While Teacher moved forward, someone got out of the car which I could now recognize as a Wartburg. The other side had taken the precaution of taping up the interior light switch. The Wartburg’s interior remained dark, and the glare of the parking lights was enough to make it impossible to see whether it was a man or a woman standing there. Nearer to me – and directly behind the nearest of the big yellow machines – there was a barrier. It fenced off the deep ex cavations where the foundations were being extended.

‘Please walk forward, one at the time,’ I heard Teacher call, his uncertain German evident from only those few words.

Suddenly the full beams of the Wartburg came on. This light was hard and brilliant. It came cutting through rain that shone like glass beads, and exposed Teacher as an absurd and soaking wet gorilla. Teacher was alarmed and jumped aside into the darkness but I could still see his outline.

From the bulldozer closest to me I heard a movement, a soft metallic click that might have been the safety catch of a gun. A figure had shifted position from behind the bulldozer’s tracks in order to see where Teacher had gone. I moved closer to the line of earth-moving machinery which would provide me with the sort of cover that the other side had taken advantage of. Now I could see more clearly in the darkness. There seemed to be a woman standing by the Wartburg and possibly others still inside it. The metallic sound I’d heard had come from someone standing near the barrier. It was a man holding a gun with a long silencer attached. All their attention was on Teacher.

It was like watching a performance on a fully lighted stage, its backdrop the tall trees of the immense forest while to one side there were the twin lines of traffic – one red one white – flickering away into the far distance. Now
I could see Teacher, but he couldn’t see the figure with the gun who was silhouetted against the mud and puddles which shone like silver in the beams of the Wartburg’s headlights.

I heard a shout – almost a scream – a woman’s voice, and there was someone running through the squelching mud behind me. I turned to see but our Transit van was in my field of view. Then came the first shot: the sort of soft plop you only get the first time from a gun with a brand-new silencer. It wasn’t Teacher. The woman called again. She was shouting, ‘Do as you were told!’ In German, Berlin German.

Then came another shot, a loud report from an un silenced gun and the smashing of glass. It was a single shot from somewhere to the left of me. Now came a confusion of darkness, pierced by pistol shots and the sudden beams of passing headlights. Traffic rumbling past gave light enough to show that the Wartburg had suffered a broken windscreen, its shattered glass scattered around like hail. In that brief flicker of light I saw Teacher standing crouched with a pistol held at arm’s length, the way actors stand in TV movies about cops. I couldn’t be sure whether he’d fired the shot. Had he I wondered tried to hit someone inside the car, and if so had he succeeded?

Then something came fluttering out to make a glowing pattern between me and the light of the Wartburg headlights. Until that moment I thought Tessa was still in the back of the Transit van, but there could be only one person who would go whirling through the mud, twisting and turning, oblivious to the rain and the gunfire.

Whoever shot her was standing near the front nearside wheel of the Wartburg. She was very close to the gunman when she was hit and lifted in the air. Bang. Bang. Two rounds from a shotgun floated her through the headlight beams with her skirt and draped sleeve shining and trans lucent yellow. As she fell back to earth she metamorphosed to crimson and the cloth wrapped round her like some beautiful flying insect that in fast playback becomes a
twitching chrysalis. Illuminated by the headlights she lay full-length in the mud. The rain beat down. She moved again and then was still.

‘You bastard!’ said someone in English. It must have been Teacher. And then he fired, I recognized the pump-pump sound of the 9mm Browning I’d seen him carrying. Two shots very loud and very close together. One of them hit the steel frame of a big earth-moving machine, and was deflected into the sky with the piteous little cry that spent rounds give. But the other shot hit the Wartburg’s near-side headlight and it went out with a secondary explosion and much hissing as the rain found the hot metal of the light.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. There were men with guns in the darkness over beyond Teacher. No silencers. They returned the fire immediately. Several shots, so close together in time that they sounded almost like one. Teacher ran, stumbled and then went down with a loud scream. I could just see him in the gloom beyond the light provided by the Wartburg’s solitary beam. He writhed and shouted, hugging himself with both arms like a man trying to escape from a straitjacket of pain.

But under cover of the attention he was getting I was able to slide round the back of the bulldozer and scramble up on to the wide track. The blade was elevated and I used it for cover as I climbed as high as I could.

I was rewarded with a view of the whole site. More traffic moving slowly past in single file provided light to see the wide trench of the excavations, the line of earth-moving machines and at the end of it the Wartburg. In the centre of the stage there was the Transit van parked askew and to the left of it Teacher’s body. Two men came from the direction of the shots and stood over Teacher. One of them prodded the body with the toe of a shoe. There was no sign of life. ‘It’s all safe now,’ he said. I recognized the voice of Erich Stinnes.

From behind the Wartburg there came the woman. She
walked carefully so as not to put her shoes into the worst of the muddy pools. It was Fiona, my wife.

‘How many did they send?’ said one of the men.

‘A man and a woman,’ said Stinnes. ‘They are both dead.’ Fiona walked past Tessa’s body and looked down at Teacher without giving any sign of recognizing him. I realized then that she’d not recognized her sister either. Stinnes turned to look at the Transit van. He was probably considering the smashed windscreen of the Wartburg and what it would be like to be behind it driving through the rain that was still falling.

At that moment I had many alternatives. I suppose the textbook would have wanted me to negotiate with them, but I wasn’t a dedicated reader of textbooks and training manuals, which is the principal reason that I was still alive. So I raised my big revolver and resting the barrel on the dozer’s heavy steel blade – the sort of position considered unsporting by the instructors supervising the Department’s outdoor firing range – I fired at the one who was farthest away, aiming for the centre of the body. The heavy Webley round hit him like a sledgehammer slamming him into the darkness where he remained still and silent. The second man – the one called Stinnes – stepped back in alarm but his training overcame his fear and, without seeing me, he raised his gun and fired three times, aiming in my general direction. The bullets buzzed past my head and one plucked at my coat. It was the right thing to do: the prevailing theory being that your adversary stops shooting and seeks cover. But my reactions were far too slow for such theories and by that time I’d hit him with my second round. It struck him in the neck.

It was a sight that was to interrupt my sleep, a finale to nightmares that awoke me sweating in the middle of so many dark nights. For Erich Stinnes spurted blood like a fountain, high in the air. And with blood spurting – hands to his throat – he stumbled backwards with a gasping noise
and went slipping and sliding along in the mud until he hit the barrier around the excavation. There he stayed for a moment and then slowly he toppled and went head-first down into the waterlogged trench with a loud splash.

Fiona, frozen in fear, and spattered with fresh blood stayed where she was. I waited. There was no sound from anywhere. There was a pause in the passing traffic and the forest absorbed the sounds of the wind and rain.

Then Fiona ran back to the Wartburg. As she did so the heel of her shoe broke and she twisted her ankle, stumbling so that as she reached the car she was down on one knee and sobbing with the pain of it. From the assumed security that the darkness gave her – and unaware of how close I was – she called, ‘Who is it? Who is there?’

I didn’t reply, make a sound or even move. There was someone with a silenced gun somewhere out there, and until I settled with him it wasn’t safe to climb down to the mud.

I waited a long time. Then Fiona hobbled to the Wartburg, leaned in and doused the headlight beam. Now the site was entirely in darkness except for the occasional lights from passing traffic as it swept round the bend and started down the hill.