The Innocent (28 page)

“Hey! Leonard. Godammit, Leonard!”

Glass was climbing out of his Beetle and was striding across Platanenallee toward him. His beard shone glossy black with early morning energy.

“Where the hell have you been? I was trying to reach you all day yesterday. I need to talk about—” Then he saw the cases. “Wait a minute. Those are ours. Leonard, what in God’s name have you got in there?”

“Equipment,” Leonard said.

Glass already had his hand around one of the straps. “What the hell are you doing with it here?”

“I’ve been working on it. All night, in fact.”

Glass grappled the case to his chest. He was preparing to cross the road with it. A car was coming and he had to wait. He shouted over his shoulder, “We’ve been through all this, Marnham. You know the rules. This is madness. What do you think you’re doing?”

He did not wait for an answer. He bounded across the road, put the case down and opened the Beetle’s hood. There was just room inside. Leonard had no choice but to follow with the other case. Glass helped him heave it into the back. They climbed into their seats, and Glass slammed his door hard. The unsilenced engine started with a roar.

As they juddered forward Glass shouted again, “Godammit, Leonard! How can you do this to me? I won’t feel safe until this stuff is back where it belongs!”

A
ll the way to the warehouse Leonard wanted to think about the sentries, who would be obliged to search the cases, while Glass, having exhausted his indignation, wanted to talk about the anniversary celebration. There was very little time. Glass had found a clever route, and they were through Schöneberg within ten minutes and round the edge of the Tempelhof airfield.

“I left a note on your door yesterday,” Glass said. “You weren’t answering your phone, and then it was busy all night.”

Leonard was staring into the hole in the floor at his feet. The
asphalt blur was mesmeric. His cases were about to be opened. He was so tired he could welcome that. A process would begin—arrest, interviews and the rest—and he would abandon himself to it. He would offer no explanations until he had had a decent sleep. That would be his one condition.

He said, “I took it off the hook. I was working.”

They were in fourth gear and traveling well under twenty miles an hour. The speedometer needle was shaking.

Glass said, “I need to speak to you. I’ll be straight with you, Leonard. I’m not happy.”

Leonard saw a clean white cell, a single bed with cotton sheets, and silence, and a man outside the door to guard him.

He said, “Oh?”

“On several counts,” Glass said. “One, you had more than a hundred and twenty dollars to spend on entertainment for our evening. I gather you’ve blown it all on one act. One hour.”

Perhaps it would be one of the friendly ones on the gate, Jake, or Lee or Howie. They would lift one of the pieces out.
Sir, this isn’t electronic equipment, this is a human arm
. Someone might be sick. Glass, perhaps, who was moving to his second point.

“Two. This one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar hour is going to be one lonely dude playing the bagpipes. Leonard, bagpipes is not everyone’s idea of a good time. It’s not
anyone’s
, for Chrissakes. Do you mean we’re going to have to sit there for one hour and listen to this howling shit?”

Sometimes a white line flashed across the hole. Leonard mumbled into it, “We could dance.”

In a theatrical gesture, Glass clamped his hand over his eyes. Leonard did not look up from his hole. The Beetle held its course.

“Third. There are going to be some intelligence brass there, Leonard, including some of your own guys. D’you know what they’re going to say?”

“When everyone’s had a few drinks,” Leonard said, “there’s nothing quite like a lament.”

“Lament is right. They’re gonna say, Hmm, American food,
German wines and
Scottish
entertainment. Is it Scotland in Gold? Do we have a special relationship with Scotland? Did Scotland join NATO?”

“There was a singing dog,” Leonard muttered without lifting his head. “But there again, it was English.”

Glass had not heard. “Leonard, you’ve screwed up, and I want you to fix it this morning, while there’s still time. We’ll drop this equipment off, then I’m going to drive you up to the Scots Greys barracks in Spandau. You’re going to talk to the sergeant, cancel the piper and get our money back. Okay?”

They were being overtaken by a convoy of trucks, so Glass did not, notice that his passenger was giggling.

The antenna cluster on the warehouse roof was visible. Glass was slowing down further. “These guys are going to need to see what we’ve got here. They can look, but they don’t need to know what it is, okay?”

The giggling fit had passed. “Oh God,” Leonard said.

They stopped. Glass was winding down his window as the sentry came toward them. It was not a face they recognized.

“This one’s new,” Glass said. “And his friend. That means it’s going to take longer.”

The face that filled the window was pink and large; the eyes were eager. “Good morning, sir.”

“Morning, soldier.” Glass handed both passes to him.

The sentry straightened and spent a minute examining them. Glass said without lowering his voice, “These guys are trained to be keen. They have to do six months’ duty before they ease off some.”

It was true. Howie might have recognized them and waved them through.

The eighteen-year-old face was in the window again. The passes were handed back. “Sir, I need to look in the trunk, and I have to see inside that bag.”

Glass got out of the car and opened the front. He heaved the case onto the road and knelt by it. From where he sat, Leonard watched Glass unbuckling the straps. He had ten seconds or so left. He could, after all, just run off down the road. It could
hardly make matters worse. He got out of the ear. The second sentry, who looked even younger than the first, had come up behind Glass and was touching him on the shoulder.

“Sir, we’d like to see it in the guard room.”

Glass was making a great show of arguing with no one. In security matters, his enthusiastic compliance was intended to set an example. One of the straps was already undone. Ignoring it, he hugged the whole case to his chest and staggered with it to the hut by the side of the road. The first soldier had opened Glass’s door, and now he stood back politely to allow Leonard to drag the other case out. The two sentries followed him as he carried the case with two hands to the hut.

There was a small wooden table with a telephone on it. Glass put the telephone on the floor and with a squeezed-out grunt lifted his case onto the table. There was barely room for four of them in the hut. Leonard knew Glass well enough to recognize that all the straining and heaving had made him bad-tempered. He stood back, breathing noisily through his nose and stroking his beard. He had carried the case over; now it was up to the sentries to open it. And if they failed in their procedures, they could be sure of being reported.

Leonard set his case by the table. He had it in mind to wait outside while the examination took place. After his dream, he did not want to see any more, and there was a good chance one of the young sentries was going to throw up in the confined space. Perhaps all three of them would. He stood in the doorway, however. It was hard not to watch. His life was about to change, and he felt no particular emotion. He had done his best, and he knew he was not an especially bad person. The first soldier had set his rifle down and was unbuckling the other strap. Leonard watched on, as though from a great distance. The world that had never much cared for Otto Eckdorf was about to explode with concern at his death. The soldier raised the lid and they all looked in at the covered pieces. Everything was packed in tight, but it did not much look like electronics. Even Glass could not conceal his curiosity. The smell of glue and rubber was rich, like pipe smoke. From nowhere, Leonard
had an idea, and he acted without premeditation. He pushed his way to the table just as the sentry was reaching out to take hold of one of the pieces.

Leonard held the young man’s wrist while he spoke. “If this search is going to proceed, then there’s something I have to say to Mr. Glass in private. There are serious security implications, and I won’t need more than a minute.”

The soldier withdrew his hand and turned to Glass. Leonard closed the case.

Glass said, “Is that okay, boys? One minute?”

“That’s fine,” one of them said.

Glass followed Leonard out of the hut. They stood by the red-and-white-striped barrier.

“I’m sorry, Bob,” Leonard said. “I didn’t know they were going to go right into the packing.”

“They’re new, that’s all. And you shouldn’t have taken the stuff out of here.”

Leonard relaxed against the barrier. He had nothing to lose. “There were reasons for that. But listen. I’m going to have to break with procedure to protect a more important matter. I have to tell you now that I have level four clearance here.”

Glass seemed to come to attention. “Level
four?”

“It’s largely technical,” Leonard said, and reached for his wallet. “I’m level four, and those chaps are messing about with highly sensitive material. I want you to phone MacNamee at the Olympic Stadium. This is his card. Get him to call the duty officer here. I want this search called off. What’s in those cases is beyond classification. Tell MacNamee that—he’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Glass asked no questions. He turned and walked quickly back to the hut. Leonard heard him tell the sentries to close and secure the case. One of them must have queried the order, for Glass shouted, “Jump to it, soldier! This is a lot bigger than you!”

While Glass was on the phone, Leonard wandered off along the roadside. It was turning into a fine spring morning. There were yellow and white flowers growing in the ditch. There
were no plants he could identify. Five minutes later Glass came out of the hut, followed by the soldiers carrying the cases. Leonard and Glass stood back while the soldiers loaded the luggage into the car. Then they raised the barrier and stood at attention as the car went through.

Glass said, “The duty officer gave those poor guys hell. And MacNamee gave the duty officer hell. That’s quite a secret you’re carrying around.”

“It really is,” Leonard said.

Glass parked the car and switched the engine off. The duty officer and two soldiers were waiting for them by the double doors. Before they got out Glass put his hand on Leonard’s shoulder and said, “You’ve come quite a way since your cardboard-burning days.”

They got out. Leonard said over the Beetle’s roof, “It’s an honor to be involved.”

The soldiers took the cases. The duty officer wanted to know where they were to be taken, and Leonard suggested the tunnel. He wanted to go down there and be soothed. But it was not quite the same, making the descent with Glass and the duty officer at his side, and the two soldiers coming up behind. Once they were down the main shaft, the bags were loaded onto a little wooden truck, which the soldiers pushed. They passed the barbed-wire coils that marked the beginning of the Russian sector. A few minutes later they all squeezed past the amplifiers, and Leonard showed the place under the desk where the cases were to be stowed.

Glass said, “I’ll be damned. I’ve passed those bags a hundred times and never thought of looking inside.”

“Don’t start now,” Leonard said.

The duty officer put a wire seal on both cases. “To be opened,” he said, “on your authority alone.”

They went up to the canteen for coffee. Leonard’s level four revelation had conferred a kind of promotion. When Glass mentioned going out to Spandau to find the Scots Greys sergeant, it was the easiest thing in the world for Leonard to put his hand to his forehead.

“I can’t face it. I’ve been up two nights in a row. Tomorrow, perhaps.”

And Glass said, “Don’t worry. I’ll do it myself.”

He offered Leonard a ride home. But Leonard was not certain where he wanted to be. He had new problems now. He wanted to be where he could think about them. So Glass dropped him off on the way into town, at the Grenzallee station at the end of the U-Bahn line.

For several minutes after Glass had left, Leonard strolled around the ticket hall, exulting in his freedom. He had been carrying those cases for months, for years. He sat down on a bench. They weren’t here now, but he had not disposed of them yet. He sat and stared at the welts on his hands. The temperature in the tunnel was eighty degrees, perhaps more under the desk by the amplifiers. In two days or less the cases would be stinking. It might be possible to get them out with some kind of elaborate level four story, but even now MacNamee would be on his way to the warehouse from the stadium, bursting to know just what equipment Leonard had managed to get his hands on. It was a mess. He had set out to leave the cases in the public anonymity of a railway station with international connections, and he had ended up leaving them in a confined and private space where they were entirely identified with him. It was a terrible mess. He sat trying to think his way through the problem, but all that came was what a mess it was.

The bench he was on faced the ticket office. He let his head drop. He was wearing a good suit and a tie and his shoes were shiny. No one could take him for a tramp. He drew his feet up and slept for two hours. Though his sleep was deep, he was aware of the footsteps of passengers echoing in the hall, and it was comforting somehow to be safely asleep among these strangers.

He woke in a panic. It was ten past noon. MacNamee would be at the warehouse looking for him. If the government scientist was impatient or careless, he might even try to use his authority to have the seals broken on the cases. Leonard stood
up. He had only an hour or two in which to act. He needed to talk to someone. It pained him to think of Maria. He could not bear to go near her flat. The bench slats had cut into his buttocks, and his suit was creased. He wandered toward the ticket office. It was a characteristic of his tiredness that he did not make plans. Instead he found himself beginning to follow them through, as though under orders. He bought a ticket to Alexanderplatz, in the Russian sector. There was a train waiting to leave, and one came in immediately at Hermannplatz, where he had to change. This ease confirmed him in his intention. He was being drawn to it—to a huge, an appalling solution. He had a ten-minute walk from Alexanderplatz along Königstrasse. At one point he had to stop and ask the way.