The Innocent (10 page)

And security in the canteen was not tight. As the numbers eating there rose, so did the din of conversation. Glass would have been outraged. Small groups from all over the building talked shop in closed huddles. Leonard, eating alone, enfolded with his thoughts of Maria, still amazed at the changes that had come over his life, was sometimes drawn against his will into a story at a nearby table. His world had contracted to a windowless room and the bed he shared with Maria. Elsewhere in her
apartment it was simply too cold. He had made himself an outsider here, and now he was becoming a reluctant eavesdropper, a spy.

He heard two vertical diggers at the next table reminisce with suppressed hilarity in front of their American colleagues. It appeared that the tunnel had a predecessor in Vienna. It had been dug in 1949 by MI6 and ran from a private house in the Schwechat suburb seventy feet out under a road, where it picked up the cables linking the headquarters of the Soviet occupation forces in the Imperial Hotel with the Soviet command in Moscow. “They needed a cover, see,” one of the diggers said. A companion laid a hand on his arm, and the first man continued quietly, so that Leonard had to concentrate. “They needed a cover for all the coming and going while they installed the tap. So they opened up a Harris tweed import shop. They reckoned no one in Vienna would be too interested in that kind of thing. And what happened? The locals couldn’t get enough Harris tweed. They were queuing up for it, and the first shipment was sold out in days. So there were these poor buggers filling out order forms all day and answering the phone instead of getting on with their business. They had to turn customers away and close the place down.”

“And then,” the American said when the laughter had died away, “our guy walked right into your act.”

“That’s right,” the Englishman said. “That was Nelson, Nelson …” And it was this name, which Leonard was to hear again, that brought the group to the full awareness of its transgression. The conversation turned to sport.

Another time, a different group of tunnelers, vertical as well as horizontal, were comparing notes. The purpose of nearly all the stories Leonard heard was to entertain. The Americans recounted how they had had to shovel their way through the runoff of their own cesspit. Again there was loud laughter, and an English voice said to more laughter, “Digging through your own shit, that just about sums this business up.” Then one of the American sergeants told how the sixteen of them, all hand-picked for the job, had been made to dig a practice tunnel in
New Mexico before they started in Berlin. “Same kind of soil, was the idea. They wanted to figure out the optimum depth and check out if there was going to be any kind of slump on the surface, so we dug—” “And dug, and dug …,” his friends joined in. “After fifty feet they had all they needed for the best depth, and there was no slump. But would they let us stop? You want a picture of futility? It’s a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long. Four hundred and fifty feet!”

One conversation the diners had frequently concerned how long it would take the Russians or the East Germans to smash through into the tap chamber, and what would happen when they did. Would the operators have time to get clear, would the Vopos shoot, would there be time to close the steel doors? There had once been a plan to install incendiary devices to destroy classified equipment, but the fire risks were thought too great. On one matter everybody was agreed, and Glass confirmed this too. There had even been a CIA study. If the Russians ever did break in, they would have to keep quiet about it. The embarrassment of having their top military lines tapped would be too great. “There are silences and silences,” Glass had told Leonard. “But there’s nothing like the great Russian silence.”

There was another story Leonard heard several times. Its form changed only slightly with the retelling, and it worked best on newcomers, on people who were not yet acquainted with George. So in mid-February it was often heard in the canteen. Leonard first heard it while he was waiting in the queue. Bill Harvey, the head of the Berlin CIA base, a remote and powerful figure whom Leonard had never even glimpsed, occasionally visited the tunnel to check on progress. Because Harvey was conspicuous around Berlin, he came only at night. On one occasion he sat in the backseat of his car and overheard his driver and the GI beside him complain about their social life.

“I’m getting nowhere, and boy, am I ready for it,” said one.

“Me too,” said his friend. “But George is out there every afternoon, screwing by the fence.”

“Lucky George.”

The men at the warehouse were supposed to be kept in relative isolation. There was no telling what they might divulge to a fräulein in a moment of weakness. The extent of Harvey’s anger when he arrived that night depended on the storyteller. In some versions he simply asked to see the duty officer; in others he stormed into the building in an alcohol-driven rage and the duty officer quivered before him. “Find this asshole George and get him out of here!” Inquiries were made. George was in fact a dog, a local mongrel adopted as the warehouse mascot. In further elaborations, Harvey was supposed to have responded with face-saving calmness. “I don’t care what he thinks he is. He’s making my men unhappy. Get rid of him.”

At the end of four weeks Leonard’s great task was over. The last four tape recorders to be fitted with signal activation were packed into two specially constructed cases with snap locks and canvas straps for extra security. The machines were to be used for monitoring purposes at the head of the tunnel. The cases were loaded onto the cart and taken down into the basement. Leonard locked his room and wandered down the corridor to the recording room. It was lit by hooded fluorescent lamps and was large, but not quite large enough to accommodate comfortably the 150 machines and all the men who were working around them. The recorders were stacked three high on metal shelves and arranged in five rows. Down the aisles there were people on their hands and knees tracing power cables and other circuits, and stepping over and around them were others with spools of tape, in and out trays, numbered signs and gummed paper. Two fitters were drilling into the wall with power tools, preparing to secure a twenty-foot-long set of pigeonholes to the wall. Someone else was already gluing pieces of card with code numbers under each compartment. By the door was a head-high pile of stationery and spare recording tape in plain white boxes. On the other side of the
door, right in the corner, was a hole in the floor through which cables dropped down into the basement, down the shaft and along the tunnel to where the amplifiers were about to be installed.

Leonard was at the warehouse for almost a year before he understood the operating system in the recording room. The vertical diggers were scraping their way upward to a ditch on the far side of the Schönefelder Chaussee in which three cables lay buried. Each one contained 172 circuits carrying at least 18 channels. The twenty-four-hour babble of the Soviet command network consisted of telephone conversations and encoded telegraph messages. In the recording room only two or three circuits were monitored. The movements of the Vopos and the East German telephone repair crews were matters of immediate interest. If ever the tunnel was about to be discovered—if the beast, as Glass sometimes called the other side, was ready to break in and threaten the lives of our people—the earliest warnings would come over these lines. As for the rest, the taped telephone conversations were flown to London and the telegraph messages to Washington for decoding, all in military planes, under armed guard. Scores of workers, many of them Russian émigrés, toiled in small rooms in Whitehall and in the temporary huts that littered the way between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

Standing by the entrance to the recording room on the day he finished, Leonard was concerned only to find himself a new job. He teamed up with an older German, one of Gehlen’s men, whom he had seen on his first day driving a forklift. Germans were no longer ex-Nazis, they were Maria’s compatriots. So he and Fritz, who had once trained as an electrician and whose real name was Rudi, stripped wires and made connections at junction boxes, and fitted protective covers over power lines and secured them to the floor so that no one would trip on them. After an initial exchange of first names, they worked in comradely silence, passing the wire-strippers between them and making encouraging grunts whenever one small job was complete. Leonard took it as a sign of his new
maturity that he could work contentedly alongside the man Glass had described as a real horror. Rudi’s big fingers with splayed ends were swift and precise. The afternoon lights came on, coffee was brought. While the Englishman sat on the floor with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette, Rudi kept at it and refused refreshment.

In the late afternoon people began drifting away. By six Leonard and Rudi had the room to themselves, and they worked faster to complete a final set of connections. At last Leonard stood up and stretched. Now he could allow himself to think again of Kreuzberg and Maria. He could be there in less than an hour.

He was fetching his jacket from the back of a chair when he heard his name being spoken from the door. A man too thin for his double-breasted suit was coming toward him with his hand extended. Rudi, who was on his way out, stepped aside and called
“Gute Nacht”
to Leonard over the stranger’s shoulder. Leonard had his jacket half on and was returning the goodnight as he shook the man’s hand. During this little flurry, Leonard was making the automatic, barely conscious appraisal of manner, appearance and voice by means of which one Englishman decodes another’s status.

“John MacNamee. We’ve got someone fallen sick and I’ll be needing another pair of hands at the tunnel head next week. It’s all clear with Glass. I’ve got half an hour now if you want me to show you around.” MacNamee had buck teeth, and very few of them—little pegs set far apart, and rather brown. Hence the slight lisp in a delivery from which the Cockney had not been fully expunged. The voice was almost chummy. A refusal was not expected. MacNamee was already leading the way out of the recording room, but his authority was lightly worn.

Leonard guessed that this was a senior government scientist. A couple of them had been his teachers at Birmingham, and there were one or two in and around the G.P.O. research laboratory at Dollis Hill. Theirs was a special generation of unpretentious, gifted men, brought into prominent government service in the forties by the necessities of modern scientific
warfare. Leonard respected the ones he had met. They did not make him feel clumsy and short of the right word the way the public-school boys did—the ones who would not speak to him in the canteen and who were all set to rise through the hierarchies of command by dint of a reasonable grasp of Latin and ancient Greek.

Down in the basement they had to stand and wait by the shaft. Someone in front of them was having difficulty finding his pass for the guard. Near where they stood, the earth piled to the ceiling exuded its cold stench. MacNamee stamped his feet on the muddy concrete and clasped his bony white hands. On the way Leonard had taken from his room a greatcoat Glass had found for him, but MacNamee had only his gray suit.

“It’ll be warm enough down there when we get those amplifiers running. It could even be a problem,” he said. “Enjoying the work?”

“It’s a very interesting project.”

“You fitted out all the recorders. That must have got boring.”

Leonard knew it was unwise to complain to a superior, even when prompted. MacNamee was showing his pass and signing for his guest. “It wasn’t so bad, really.”

He followed the older man down the ladder, into the pit. By the mouth of the tunnel MacNamee supported his foot against a railway line and bent to retie his lace. His voice was muffled, and Leonard had to stoop to hear. “What’s your clearance, Marnham?” The guard at the edge of the shaft was looking down at them. Could he possibly believe, like the sentries on the gate, that he was guarding a warehouse, or even a radar station?

Leonard waited until MacNamee had straightened and they had stepped into the tunnel. The fluorescent striplights barely dispersed the blackness. The acoustic was dead. Leonard’s voice sounded flat in his ears. “Actually, it’s level three.”

MacNamee was walking ahead of him, his hands deep in his trouser pockets for warmth. “Well, I suppose we might have to bring you into four. I’ll see about that tomorrow.”

They were making a shallow descent as they walked between
the rails. There were puddles underfoot, and on the walls, where the steel plates had been bolted together to make a continuous tube, condensation glistened. There was a constant hum of a groundwater pump. On both sides of the tunnel sandbags were piled to shoulder height to support cables and pipes. A number of bags had split and were spilling their contents. Earth and water were pressing in on all sides, waiting to reclaim the space.

They arrived at a place where tight coils of barbed wire were stacked by a pile of sandbags. MacNamee waited for Leonard to draw level. “We’re stepping into the Russian sector now. When they break in on us, which is bound to happen one of these days, we’re meant to spread the wire across as we retreat. Make them respect the border.” He smiled at his little irony, revealing his pitiful teeth. They teetered at all angles, like old gravestones. He caught Leonard’s gaze. He tapped his mouth with his forefinger and spoke right into the younger man’s embarrassment. “Milk teeth. The other lot never came through. I think perhaps I never wanted to grow up.”

They continued along level ground. A hundred yards ahead a group of men stepped through a steel door and came toward them. They appeared deep in conversation, but as they came closer, Leonard realized they were making no sound. They jostled in and out of single file. When they were thirty feet away Leonard caught the sibilants of their whispers. Those ceased too as the two groups squeezed by each other with wary nods.

“The general rule is no noise, especially once you’ve crossed the border.” MacNamee was speaking in a voice fractionally above a whisper. “As you know, low frequencies, men’s voices, penetrate very easily.”