Spy Sinker (22 page)

The D-G finished the sentence for him. 'The way we have reacted will make those chaps in Moscow feel very good, eh Bret?'

'I try to disregard any personal feelings of triumph or disaster when making decisions of that sort, Sir Henry.'

'And quite right too.'

'If Stinnes is doing this on Moscow's orders, he'd be more likely to bring us some secret document that we'd be tempted to transmit verbatim, or at least in sequence.'

'So that they could compare it and break our code? Yes, I suppose so. So you think he's genuine?'

'Silas thinks it doesn't matter; Silas thinks we should work on him, and send him back believing what we want them to believe over there.' Bret waited for the reaction and was still ready to jump either way. But he could tell that the D-G was attracted by this idea.

After a moment's pause for thought, the D-G said, 'I don't want you to discuss this with Silas for the time being.'

'Very well, Sir Henry.'

'And in course of time, separate Stinnes from Cruyer and Samson and everyone else. This is for you to do alone, Bret. One to one, you and Stinnes. We have to have one person who understands the whole game and all its minutiae and ramifications. One person is enough, and that person must be you.'

Bret put the photos and the printout back into his case. The D-G made agitated movements that indicated he was about to terminate the meeting. 'Before I go, Bret, one aspect of this…'

'Yes?'

'Would you say that Bernard Samson has ever killed a man?'

Bret was surprised, and for a moment he allowed it to show. 'I imagine he has, sir. In fact… well, I know… Yes, many times.'

'Exactly, Bret. And now we are subjecting nun to a considerable burden of anxiety, aren't we?'

Bret nodded.

'A man like Samson might not have the resilience that you would be able to show in such circumstances. He might take things into his own hands.'

'I suppose he might.' Bret was doubtful.

'I saw Samson the other day. He's taking it badly.'

'Do you want me to give him sick leave, or a vacation?'

'Certainly not: that would be the worst thing you could do for the poor fellow. It would give him time to sit and think. I don't want him to sit and think, Bret.'

'Would you give me some idea of what…?'

'Suppose he came to the conclusion that his wife had betrayed him, and betrayed his country. That she'd abandoned his children and made a fool of him? Might he not then decide to do to her what he's done to so many others?'

'Kill her? But wait a minute, Sir Henry. In fact she hasn't done that, has she?'

'And that leads us on to another aspect of the horrible position that Samson now finds himself in.' The D-G heaved himself up out of the low seat. Bret got to his feet and watched but decided against offering him assistance. The D-G said, 'Samson is asking a lot of questions. Suppose he discovers the truth? Might it not seem to him that we have played a cruel prank on him? And done it with callous indifference? He discovers that we have not confided in him: he feels rejected and humiliated. He is a man trained to respond violently to his opponents. Might he not decide to wreak vengeance upon us?'

'I don't think so, Sir Henry. Samson is a civilized man.' Bret went across the office and held the door open for him.

'Is he?' said the D-G in that cheery way he could summon so readily. 'Then he hasn't been properly trained.'

East Berlin. November 1983.

To the façade of the building in Karl Liebknecht Strasse a dozen workmen were affixing a huge red banner, 'Long Live Our Socialist Fatherland'. The previous one that had promised both prosperity and peace was faded to light pink by the sun.

From the window of Fiona Samson's office there were only the tassels to be glimpsed, but part of the framework for the new banner cut across the window and reduced the daylight. 'I've always wanted to go to America,' admitted Hubert Renn as he picked up the papers from her desk.

'Have you, Herr Renn? Why?' She drank her tea. She must not leave it for it was real Indian tea, not the tasteless USSR stuff from the Georgian crop. She wondered where Renn had found it but she didn't ask.

'Curiosity, Frau Direktor. It is a land of contradictions.'

'It is a repressive society,' said Fiona, dutiful to the line she always took. 'A land where workers are enslaved.'

'But they are such an enigmatic people,' said Renn. He replaced the cap on his fountain-pen and put it in his pocket. 'Do you know, Frau Direktor, when, during the war against Hitler, the Americans began to drop secret agents into Germany, the very first of those parachutists were members of the ISK?'

'
Der Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund?
' She had never heard of that organization until Renn had mentioned that his mother had been a member, and then she'd looked it up in the reference library.

'Yes, ISK, the most radical of all the parties. Why would the Americans select such people? It was as if our friends in Moscow had sent to us, as Stalin's emissaries, White Russian nobility.'

She laughed. Renn gave a skimpy selfconscious grin. There had been a time when such remarks by Renn would have suggested to her that he might be sympathetic to the USA, but now she knew better. If there was anything of his attitude to be deduced from his remarks it was a criticism of Russia rather than praise for the US. Renn was a dedicated disciple of Marx and his theories. As Renn saw it, Karl Marx the incomparable prophet and source of all true enlightenment was a German sage. Any small inconsistencies and imperfections that might be encountered in the practice of socialism – and Renn had never admitted to there being any – were due to the essentially Russian failures of Lenin and Stalin.

But Fiona had learned to live with Hubert Renn's blind devotion to Marxist socialism, and there was no doubt that daily contact with him had opened up to her a world that she had never truly perceived.

There were for instance the regular letters that arrived from Renn's twenty-two-year-old daughter Lisa, her father's great pride. Lisa had taken the learning of the Russian language in her stride and gone on to postgraduate work in marine biology – one of the postgraduate courses the regime permitted to female students – in the University at Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. The deepest lake in the world, it contains more fresh water than all the North American lakes put together. This region supported flora and fauna not found anywhere else. And yet until Renn had showed her the letter from his daughter she'd not even known where Lake Baikal was! How much more was there to know?

'I will confide a secret,' Renn announced when she gave him back the chatty letter he'd just received from his daughter.

'What is it, Herr Renn?'

'You are to get an award, Frau Direktor.'

'An award? I've heard nothing of it.'

'The nature of the award has still to be decided but your heroic years in England working for the revolution will be marked by an award. Moscow has said yes and now there might also be a medal from the DDR too.'

'I am overwhelmed, Herr Renn.'

'It is overdue, Frau Direktor Samson.'

Renn had been surprised at the way in which Fiona had settled in to her Berlin job. He didn't realize to what extent Fiona's English background had prepared her for the communist regime. Her boarding school had very quickly taught her to hide every human feeling: triumph, disappointment, glee, love or shame. Her authoritarian father had demonstrated the art of temporizing and the value of the soft reply. Her English middle-class background – with its cruel double-meanings, oblique questions and humiliating indifference – had provided the final graduation that amply fitted her for East Berlin's dangers. And of course Renn had no inkling of Fiona's bouts of depression, her ache for her children and the hours of suicidal despair and loneliness.

Hair drawn back in a style that was severe and yet not unbecoming, her face scrubbed and with very little make-up, Fiona, with the slight Berlin accent that she now applied to her everyday speech, had become accepted as a regular member of the KGB/Stasi team. Her office was not in the main building in Normannenstrasse, Berlin-Lichtenberg. As Renn had pointed out, to be one of the horde coming out of that big Stasi building at the end of the day's work, to fight your way down into the Magdalenenstrasse U-Bahn and wait for a train, was not something to yearn for.

There were many advantages to being in Karl Liebknecht Strasse. It was in the Mitte, only a stone's throw from the shops, bars and theatres, and Unter den Linden ran right into it. What the cunning old Hubert Renn really meant of course was that it was near the other government offices to which he had to go on foot, and convenient to the Alexanderplatz S-Bahn which took him home.

'I ordered a car for fourteen-thirty,' said Renn. He stopped to admire the fur-lined coat that Fiona had just bought. Not wanting to attract too much speculation about her finances, Fiona had debated about what sort of winter coat she should wear. Hubert Renn had solved the problem by getting permission for her to buy, with DDR currency, one of the fancy coats normally only on sale to foreign visitors. 'You have a meeting at the clinic for nervous diseases at fifteen hundred,' said Renn. 'I'll make sure the driver knows where to go. Pankow: near where the Autobahn ends. It's a maze of little streets: easy to get lost.'

'Thank you, Herr Renn. Do we have an agenda?'

Renn looked at her with an expression she didn't recognize. 'No agenda, Frau Direktor. Familiarization visit. You are meeting with Doktor Wieczorek.'

'Can't the doctor come here?'

Renn busied himself with some papers that were on the filing cabinet. 'It is usual to go there,' he said stiffly and without turning to look at her.

She was about to say that it all sounded very mysterious and make a joke of it, but she had learned that jokes of that sort did not go down well in the East. So she said, 'Do I need to take papers or files with me?'

'Only a notebook, Frau Direktor.'

'Will you not be there to take notes?' She was surprised by this development.

'I am not permitted to attend the meetings with Doktor Wieczorek.

She looked at him but he didn't turn round to meet her eyes. 'In that case,' she said, 'perhaps I'll take an early lunch. By the way, Herr Renn…'

'Yes, Frau Direktor?'

'There is a doctor, Henry Kennedy… Here, I'll write that down for you.' She passed him the slip of paper and he read it carefully as if he might discover some hidden meaning in the name. 'He is from London; working at the Charité on a year's contract…'

'Yes, Frau Direktor?'

'For a year's residence he would have been screened, wouldn't he?'

'Yes, Frau Direktor.'

She wanted the next bit to sound as casual as possible. 'Could you let me see the file?'

'It wouldn't be kept in this building, Frau Direktor.' She looked at him. 'But I could look it up.'

'I don't really need the file or even a copy.'

'You just need to know that there are no complications,' offered Renn.

'Exactly, Herr Renn. He is someone I know socially; I will have to see him from time to time.'

'All is clear, Frau Direktor.'

Pankow has long been one of the most desirable residential districts of the central part of Berlin. This was where smartly dressed East Germans arrived to dinner parties in imported cars! And here, Fiona had discovered to her great surprise, there were households that boasted live-in domestic help.

But the clinic was not in the most salubrious part of Berlin-Pankow. It was a three-storey building in imitation marble. Its bleak neo-Renaissance style, monumental proportion and the pockmarks of wartime artillery damage suggested that it was a surviving example of Berlin's Third Reich architecture.

She was glad of her beautiful fur-lined coat. It was snowing: large flakes that came spinning down like discs and made loud crunching noises underfoot. The temperature had dropped with a suddenness that caught even the residents off guard, and the streets were quiet.

The driver found the clinic without any trouble. There was a wall around the building and a tall gate that opened for her car. The ornamental entrance doors surmounted a wide flight of stone steps with a relief, suggesting columns, on each side of it.

The lobby was lit by soft grey light that came from clerestory windows, set deep into the wall above the entrance. Its floor was an intricate mosaic, depicting Roman maidens broadcasting flowers, and the doors on every side were closed. Doktor Wieczorek's name was painted on a wooden plaque and inserted, together with those of other senior medical staff on duty that day, into a large board on the wall behind the reception desk.

'Yes?' The receptionist was a young man with black hair upon which he'd used a generous amount of hair cream. He wore a washable grey linen jacket, a white shirt and black tie. It was a kind of uniform. He was writing something in a ledger and didn't look up.

'Doktor Samson,' said Fiona. The profound trust that Germans showed for doctorates of any sort had persuaded her to start using her academic qualification.

'Your business?' The young man still didn't look up.

'Stand up when you talk to me!' said Fiona. She didn't raise her voice but the tone was enough to remind the young man that a visitor from the Stasi was expected this afternoon.

He leapt to his feet as if scalded and clicked his heels. 'Ja, Frau Doktor.'

'Take me to Doktor Wieczorek.'

'Doktor Wieczorek… Herr Dok Dok Dok…' said the young man, stuttering and red-faced.

'Immediately. I am on State business,' said Fiona.

'Immediately, Frau Doktor. Yes, immediately.'

Doktor Wieczorek was an elegant forty-year-old specialist who had spent time in the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow and at the well-known mental hospital which was a part of the Chernyakhovsk prison. He had wavy hair that was beginning to grey at the temples, and a manner that suggested consummate medical expertise. Under his white jacket he wore a smart shirt and silk tie. His firm voice and avuncular manner relaxed her immediately, and so did his readiness to make little jokes about the bureaucracy that he constantly faced and so seldom defeated. 'Coffee?'

'No thank you,' said Fiona. There had been an attempt to make the austere little office look homely with the addition of an oriental carpet and an antique clock that chimed the hours.

'Tea? Tea with milk?' He smiled. That was the only thing I could remember about the British when I was a child: the way they poured cold milk into their tea and ruined it. No? Well we'll get on with this "familiarization visit". There is not a great deal to see in the building. At present we have twenty-three patients, one of whom I expect to be able to send home in a month or two. Some, I'm afraid, will never go home, but in the matter of clinical psychiatry I am always reluctant to say there is no hope.' He smiled at her. 'Do you know what we do here?'

'No,' she said.

He turned far enough to get from the shelf a large glass jar inside which a brain was to be seen in murky formalin, 'Look at that,' he said, putting it on the desk. 'That's the brain of "Der Grosse Gustaf", who was a music hall performer of the nineteen thirties. Anyone in the audience could ask him such questions as who fought Max Schmeling in 1933. He'd immediately tell them it was Max Baer who won on a technical knockout in the tenth round in New York City.'

'That's impressive,' said Fiona.

'I'm interested in boxing,' explained Wieczorek. He tapped the jar. 'But "The Great Gustaf" could answer any sort of question: he had a brain like an encyclopedia.'

'Why is it here?'

'There remains in the Soviet Union a small but influential group of medical men who think that slicing up the human brain will reveal some of nature's secrets. Lenin's brain was sliced up and studied under the microscope. So was Stalin's. So were a lot of lesser brains before and since.'

'What did they find?'

'That seems to be a State secret.'

'They discovered nothing, you mean?'

'I didn't say that, did I?' He tapped the jar again. 'But I saved Gustaf from such indignity. Gustaf has his brain intact.'

'Where did you get such a thing?'

'It came from the Charité Hospital at the end of the war. All hospitals have a roomful of such stuff. When the Red Army infantry got into the Charité during the fighting in 1945 they found the generals, and other high-ups who'd been hanged for trying to assassinate Hitler. Their bodies were still preserved in the post-mortem room refrigerators there. The cadavers had been sent from the Plötzensee prison and no one had been told what to do with them. And there was the medical museum, with all sorts of other stuff, over there too but the Red Army high command disapproved and the exhibits were sent to other institutions. We got Gustaf's brain.' He shook the jar so that the brain moved. 'The distribution of the exhibits started a lot of silly rumours. They said that-Ernst Rohm's heart had been sent to the University Hospital in Leipzig and it had been contained in a test tube.' He put the jar back on the shelf. 'You must forgive me: physicians are inclined to develop a macabre sense of humour.'

'What sort of success rate do you have. Doctor?'

'They are all failures when they come here,' said Wieczorek. 'We only get patients for whom some other institution can do no more. For most of them we can merely keep the fires under control. It is like the job of your security service, isn't it? Are we drawn to such work, do you think?'