Spy Line. Len Deighton
‘You looking for me?’ I asked the man in the hat.
‘Samson?’ He got to his feet and looked me up and down. He kept it formal, ‘How do you do. My name is Teacher. I have a message for you.’ His precise English public school accent, his pursed lips and hunched shoulders displayed his distaste for this seedy dwelling, and perhaps for me too. God knows how long he’d been waiting for me; top marks for tenacity.
‘What is it?’
‘I …’
‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘Spengler’s brain was softened by alcohol years ago.’ A dazed smile crossed Spengler’s white face as he heard and understood my words.
The visitor, still doubtful, looked round again before picking his words carefully. ‘Someone is coming over tomorrow morning. Frank Harrington is inviting you to sit in. He guarantees your personal freedom.’
‘Tomorrow is Sunday,’ I reminded him.
‘That’s right, Sunday.’
‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Where?’
‘I’ll collect you,’ said the man. ‘Nine o’clock?’
‘Fine,’ I told him.
He nodded goodbye without smiling and eased his way past me, keeping the skirt of his overcoat from touching anything that might carry infection. It was not easy. I suppose he’d been expecting me to shout with joy. Anyone from the Field Unit – even a messenger – must have sniffed out something of my present predicament: disgraced ex-field agent with a warrant extant. Being invited to the official interrogation of a newly arrived defector from the East brought an amazing change of status.
‘You’re going?’ Werner asked after the front door banged. He was watching over the balcony to be sure the visitor actually departed.
‘Yes, I’m going.’
‘It might be a trap,’ he warned.
‘They know where to find me, Werner,’ I said, making him the butt of my anger. I knew that Frank had sent his stooge along as a way of demonstrating how easy it was to pick me up if he felt inclined.
‘Have a drink,’ said Spengler, from where he was still sprawled on the floor. He pushed his bent glasses up on his nose and prodded the buttons on the machine he was holding so that the little lights flashed. He’d finally found new batteries for his pocket chess computer and despite his alcoholic daze he was engaging it in combat. Sometimes I wondered what sort of genius he would be if he ever sobered up.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’
Take me to a safe house blindfolded and I’d know it for what it was. Werner once said they smelled of electricity, by which he meant that smell of ancient dust that the static electricity holds captive in the shutters, curtains and carpets of such dreary unlived-in places. My father said it was not a smell but rather the absence of smells that distinguishes them. They don’t smell of cooking or of children, fresh flowers or love. Safe houses, said my father, smelled of nothing. But reflexes conditioned to such environmental stimuli found hanging in the air the subtle perfume of fear, a fragrance instantly recognized by those prone to visceral terror. Somewhere beyond the faint and fleeting bouquet of stale urine, sweat, vomit and faeces there is an astringent and deceptive musky sweetness. I smelled fear now in this lovely old house in Charlottenburg.
Perhaps this young fellow Teacher smelled something of it too, for his chatter dried up after we entered the elegant mirrored lobby and walked past the silent concierge who’d come out of the wooden cubicle from where every visitor was inspected. The concierge was plump, an elderly man with grey hair, a big moustache and heavy features. He wore a Sunday church-going black three-piece suit of heavy serge that had gone shiny on the sleeves. There was something anachronistic about his appearance; he was the sort of Berliner better suited to cheering Kaiser Wilhelm in faded sepia photos. A fully grown German shepherd dog came out of the door too. It growled at us. Teacher ignored dog and master and started up the carpeted staircase. His footfalls were silent. He spoke over his shoulder. ‘Are you married?’ he said suddenly as if he’d been thinking of it all along.
‘Separated,’ I said.
‘I’m married,’ he said in that definitive way that suggested fatalism. He gripped the keys so tight that his knuckles whitened.
The wrought-iron baluster was a delicate tracery of leaves and flowers that spiralled up to a great glass skylight at the top of the building. Through its glass came the colourless glare of a snow-laden sky, filling the oval-shaped stairwell all the way down to the patterns of the marble hall but leaving the staircase in shadow.
I had never been here before or even learned of its existence. As I followed Teacher into an apartment on the second floor I heard the steady tapping of a manual typewriter. Not the heavy thud of a big office machine, this was the light patter of a small portable, the sort of machine that interrogators carry with them.
At first I thought the interrogation – or debriefing as they were delicately termed – had ended, that our visitor was waiting to initial his statement. But I was wrong. Teacher took me along the corridor to a sitting room with long windows one of which gave on to a small cast-iron balcony. There was a view of the bare-limbed trees in the park and, over the rooftops, a glimpse of the figure surmounting the dome of the eighteenth-century palace from which the district gets its name.
Most safe houses were shabby, their tidiness arising out of neglect and austerity, but this ante-room was in superb condition, the wall-coverings, carpets and paintwork cared for with a pride and devotion that only Germans gave to their houses.
A slim horsy woman, about thirty-five years old, came into the room from another door. She gave Teacher a somewhat lacklustre greeting and, head held high, she peered myopically at me and sniffed loudly. ‘Hello, Pinky,’ I said. Her name was Penelope but everyone had always called her Pinky. At one time in London she’d worked as an assistant to my wife but my wife had got rid of her. Fiona said Pinky couldn’t spell.
Pinky gave a sudden smile of recognition and a loud ‘Hello, Bernard. Long time no see.’ She was wearing a cocktail dress and pearls. It would have been easy to think she was one of the German staff, all of whom always looked as if they were dressed for a smart Berlin-style cocktail party. At this time of the year most of the British female staff wore frayed cardigans and baggy tweed jackets. Perhaps it was her Sunday outfit. Pinky swung her electric smile to beam upon Teacher and in her clipped accent said, ‘Oh well, chaps. Must get on. Must get on.’ She rubbed her hands together briskly, getting the circulation going, as she went through the other door and out into the corridor. That was something else about safe houses: they were always freezing cold.
‘He’s inside now,’ said Teacher, his head inclining to indicate the room from which Pinky had emerged. ‘The shorthand clerk is still there. They’ll tell us when.’ So far he’d confided nothing, except that the debriefing was of a man called Valeri – obviously a cover name – and that permission for me to sit in on the debriefing was conditional upon my not speaking to Valeri directly, nor joining in any general discussion.
I sank down on to the couch and closed my eyes for a moment. These things could take a long time. Teacher seemed to have survived his sleepless night unscathed but I was weary. I was reluctant to admit it but I was too old to enjoy life in a slum. I needed regular hot baths with expensive soap and thick towels and a bed with clean sheets and a room with a lock on the door. To some extent I was perhaps identifying with the mysterious escaper next door, who was no doubt desirous of all those same luxuries.
I sat there for nearly half an hour, dozing off to sleep once or twice. I was woken by the sound of an argument coming, not from the room in which the debriefing was taking place but from the room with the typewriter. The typewriting had stopped. The arguing