'They shot him.'
Closer, now, the Wall.
'They shot him in the back.'
Looming against the south sky, the Wall.
'What made him do it?'
It was all you could see through the window here: the Wall, floodlit, towering, though it's not all that high, fourteen feet, but towering because of what it is, what it means. And because of the barbed wire, the watchtowers, the machine gun posts.
'I suppose he wanted freedom,' I said.
He took another gulp of schnapps, puckering his mouth over it, squeezing his eyes shut, a drop of clear mucus gleaming at the end of his nose under the bleak white light. You could even see the reflection, in the glass of the china cabinet opposite the window, the reflection of the Wall. It shut us in, squeezing us into the small overheated room between its floodlit expanse against the window and its reflection on the cabinet. It was all they talked about in these rooms, these buildings, along these streets: the Wall. Twenty-seven years ago it had leapt like a tidal wave and frozen solid, cutting a city in half.
Gunter Blum, sixty, cab-driver: 'It's not so bad here.'
'No
'We're better off here than what they are in Poland or Czechoslovakia. 'There's industry here, goods, stuff in the shops. You can earn a decent living.' He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. 'So why did he do it?'
'Those things aren't freedom,' I said. 'Perhaps that was what he wanted. How old was he?'
'Thirty-two. Still a young man.'
This place was near Spittelmarkt, and we were on the second floor. The other apartment was next to this one, next to his. He just had the two.
'When did it happen?'
'Three years ago. Three years and seventeen days.' He rubbed at a blister on his hand. 'She tried to kill herself.'
'Your wife?'
'His mother. More his mother than my wife, you know? He was everything to her.' Small jerk of his head. 'It's the way it is, sometimes, mothers and sons.'
This was the fourth place I'd seen. I hadn't looked at the small ads in the local papers because I wanted somewhere close to the hotel, close to the embassies. I'd spent two hours getting rid of a tag, not one of Cone's people because his face didn't match any of the photographs, possibly one of Yasolev's if he'd decided to break faith, possibly one of Horst Volper's. Then I'd gone on foot, looking for the Zimmer zu Vermieten cards in the windows.
'Where is she now?'
There was no sign of a woman here.
'She's living with her sister in Strausberg. She — we couldn't get on, after that.' Jerk of his head. 'She shouldn't have tried to do such a terrible thing. I didn't, and he was my son too, wasn't he? She still had me, didn't she?'
The cheap schoolroom chair creaked as he tossed back the last of his drink; he was a big man, his arms tattooed, his fists resting on the table, bunched, angry, his eyes glancing up at the window every so often as if he were keeping watch on an enemy.
'I read about it,' I told him.
'A lot of people did. It caught attention.' He reached for the bottle of schnapps and then changed his mind, looking at the tin-framed clock on the shelf over the sink.
The story had caught attention because of its irony. Paul Blum had almost made it to the West: he'd been poised on the top of the Wall when they'd shot him, and it was only his body that had dropped to freedom on the other side.
'Why did he do it?' Couldn't get it off his mind.
'He was making a statement,' I said.
'They don't shoot to kill, these days. If only he'd waited.'
'His statement still stands. There are plenty of others crying out for freedom. He spoke for them too.'
'Hero, then. He's a hero? They didn't think so when I went to the checkpoint. I didn't know he'd been going to try it. I saw the papers, next day, and I went to the checkpoint, out of my mind, hit some of the guards, went crazy.' Eyes on the window again. 'They beat me up and shoved me inside for twenty-four hours. Common criminal they said he was, a criminal, betraying the cause, all that Party bullshit.' His glance was on me, now, wary. 'I don't know you, don't know who you are.
'They're no friends of mine. I'm in the market.'
He looked away. 'Do a bit myself.'
They all do. 'So you never see your wife?' I needed to know.
'Once in a while.' Jerking his head — 'I still love her, but I'm not sorry she keeps away. Breaking her heart, you see, and I can't stand for women to cry. Wants to visit his grave. I think if she could ever do that, she'd start mending.'
'They buried him over there?'
'I've got a cousin. I sent him the money. He sent us some pictures — Paul's in a cemetery in Grunewald. Pictures aren't the same as seeing, though, being there. I'd do anything, but they won't even look at our applications. He was a criminal, is how they think of him. God in heaven — ' he hit the top of the table with the flat of his hands and got to his feet and kicked the chair aside '- he was born there, you know that? They killed him trying to get into his own country!'
He moved in the room like a creature tethered, going in lumbering circles, trapped, his big hands hanging with their fists still bunched, his Bath heavy, his mouth puckered.
'Do you think she'd come back to you,' I asked him, 'once she'd seen the grave?'
Or stay over there. Either way, she'd feel better, start mending.
'Why haven't you moved away?'
He stopped dead. 'Where to?'
'Just away from the, Wall.'
He faced the window again, his square head going forward. 'No. I'm not turning my back.'
I got out of the worn leatherette armchair. 'He wouldn't want that for you.'
'I want it for myself. I want to go on hating them.'
I let him talk some more, enough to do him a bit of good; then I got out my wallet. 'I'll take the flat,' I told him, 'for a month.'
'The flat?' He'd forgotten why I'd come here.
It'd be as good as I'd find and I'd run out of time; it was three days since Yasolev had told us Gorbachev was coming to East Berlin and we'd only got four left. From this floor there was an easy drop into the small littered yard behind the building and the window at the front wasn't overlooked — there was just the Wall. There was a staircase instead of a lift and good enough cover in the street outside: vans standing opposite the paper mill, loading and unloading; five doorways within plain sight and a long shop window diagonally opposite with a wide angle of reflection; a high fence alongside a demolition site where they were knocking a three-storey building down.
I got out some money. 'I'll want privacy,' I said, 'just as you want yours. I'm not into anything risky, I just want to keep myself to myself. Is that understood?'
'I'm not interested in other people's business.' He picked up the money.
'I'm going to rely on that. Give me your wife's name and her sister's address, and by the end of the month I'll see she gets a permit to visit the cemetery on the other side.'
He swung his head up. 'You can do that?'
'I guarantee it. If you look after me well.'
'Got my word.'
Safe-house.
'Didn't you see me?'
She was in Airforce uniform, the greatcoat buttoned to the chin against the freezing wind, her hands gloved. First Lieutenant's insignia.
'It was the brakes,' I said. 'They've been giving trouble.'
'What did you say?' She stood closer, pitching her voice above the din of a truck going past, its wheels churning through the slush. There'd been snow last night.
'Brakes,' I said. 'They don't work.'
'You admit responsibility?'
'Yes. You'd better shut your door.' She'd left it open when she got out of the car to look at the damage. It wasn't much more than I'd done to the other two cars the night before: creased rear wing, smashed tail-light.
She went back to the pagoda-top Mercedes and got a black briefcase and slammed the door. 'Show me your driver's licence and your insurance, please.' A bus came past, throwing out a wave of slush, but she didn't move when it hit her jackboots, knew how to concentrate.
'Let's go in there,' I said, 'or we'll freeze.'
She glanced at the steamed-up window of the restaurant, then at her watch, then back to me.
'Let me see your identity card.'
I showed it to her, the official one with the HUA insignia, and she gave me a closer look, dark eyes, pale skin, a hard straight mouth. 'Very well, captain.'
The place was almost dark inside, either trying to look like a night-club or keep down the electricity bill. She put her briefcase onto a bench inside the door and zipped it open, her hands ungloved now, her movements deft. The other two women had been slower, less controlled. 'Here is my licence. May I please see yours?'
We exchanged notes; one of her gloves dropped and I picked it up; she didn't thank me. The window shook as something big went past, and a man in a moth-eaten fur hat came in and slammed the door and banged his feet up and down to get the slush off; but I was more interested in the woman — First Lieutenant Lena Pabst, Werneuchen Airforce Base, thirty-two, status unmarried — and the way she wrote, quickly, vertically, the way she stood, straight, balanced, totally confident.
'Thank you, comrade captain.'
'I haven't eaten since this morning,' I told her. 'Will you join me for a meal?'
I think I got the tone right: it wasn't an invitation, only a suggestion. We weren't so much a man and a woman as a secret police captain-and an Airforce lieutenant in a communist state; she'd pay her own bill when we left, if she decided to stay.
'Very well. I have time.'
The other two had been more feminine, more relaxed, and neither of them had known anything about Moscow, hadn't particularly cared, and that was why I hadn't gone any further with them. This one was into a fairly sophisticated summary, halfway through the meal, of her thoughts on the future of Europe.
'It's impossible for Greater Germany to remain bifurcated for much longer, given the climate of world-political thinking inside the Kremlin — given the undoubted genius of Gorbachev. And it's impossible to conceive of the new Germany following the corrupt and bourgeois system of the decadent West. The direction we shall be taking is obvious.'
We hadn't ordered wine. I'm driving. But when I get to my apartment I shall drink Underberg. She hadn't said when I get home.
'Have you been in the West?'
'Only for a few days,' she said, 'to the other side.'
'You were allowed to cross?'
She moved her head quickly to look at me. 'A group of us made a request to go there, for educational purposes. It was granted. There was no question of "being allowed" to go.'
I'd made a slip and she'd picked it up at once; I was thinking like a Westerner and I'd have to watch it.
'And how did it strike you?'
'Have you been there, comrade captain?'
'My name's Kurt, as you know. May I call you Lena?'
It stopped everything dead and she glanced down, and when she looked up again her eyes had changed. I'd thrown a personal note into the relationship, and her reaction was the same as when I'd suggested we have a meal together, but stronger, and she held my eyes for a moment, watchful, engaged.
'Very well, you may call me Lena.'
'"Thank you. Yes, I've been into West Berlin.'
In a moment, looking down again, her strong fingers toying with a crust, 'I found it pathetic. I don't think it's important that people can drive up to a bank and do business without having to get out of their car. I don't need the choice of a dozen different brands of breakfast cereal, all of which contain fifty per cent refined sugar. I need bread. Bread, food, work to do for the world. But the difference between the East and West isn't really significant. The people wear much the same clothes, have children, go to the movies, drive cars. War springs from fear, not from the slight difference in ways of life, and while there are these two all-powerful nations pitched together on the same planet there's bound to be fear. We need one world, not of nations but of people, earthlings, living in harmony, working for the future, poised on the threshold of space, the ultimate adventure. To achieve that, a last war is necessary. My air base, Werneuchen — ' she twisted in her chair to face me '- is in the front line of that war, and the thought excites me beyond all words. I am in the front line of the last war on earth, and when it's over I shall still be here to see the dawn of the new world. When I think of it in the night it's like an orgasm.'
The dark eyes were liquid suddenly, shimmering, the mouth parted and the tips of the sharp teeth touching together, the small face drawn into a rictus, fierce, vulpine, carnal.
'I can imagine,' I said.
Third time lucky: I'd creased the rear ends of a Fiat and a VW last night and toyed with schweinfleisch and sauerkraut in two shifts and hadn't got anywhere, but this was the one I wanted, manic, obsessed and pro-Gorbachev.
''That surprised me.' She was still twisted in her chair, watching me.
'What did?'
'My reference to orgasm.'
'When feelings get intense enough, there's nowhere else they can finish up.'
'You don't seem,' she said, 'the kind of man who lets his brakes fail.'
Still watching me, her eyes dipping to my mouth, lifting to my eyes again.
'It didn't have to look like a pickup.'
'But that isn't all it is.'
'No.'
The man in the moth-eaten fur hat had been sitting opposite, under the portraits of Lenin and Honecker; now he was leaving, shrugging to his coat. I'd been checking him, because he'd come in here soon after I had; but I was satisfied; he'd sat too close, and was known here, a regular. And Werneuchen Air Force Base was eighteen kilometres from Berlin and I'd driven here with enough feints and detours to arrive totally clean. That was essential. Back in Berlin I would have to leave myself open again, but I was here to get information and I didn't want to be disturbed.
'I'm not the type,' she said, 'that men want to pick up.'
'Most men are conservative.'
In a moment, her eyes still on me, 'I think we have a lot in common. You're very disciplined. So am I.'
'I don't take it. But I could give it.'
'I'm more complicated,' she said, 'than that.'
I looked for the boy in the apron. 'Would you like some more coffee?'
'No. I'm going now. Will you come with me?'
'Of course.'
Underberg, black, bitter, gold-rimmed on the surface, the German version of Fernet Branca, lighter but not much, in a shot-glass, scented, viscid.
Light came from slits in a shutter, blue light falling across black leather, black silk, turning the smoke milky, the tendril of smoke curling from the incense in the black lacquer bowl. A single gold eye, fixed in the brow of a mask on the wall, watched.
'There are these,' she said, the blue light dwelling on pale skin and the darkness of coarse hair, the shadows sculpting the long lines of muscle.
Metal glinted, chased, knurled, cloisonne; the smell of leather came into the air, underlying the sandalwood and the emanations from her body.
'Where did you get them?'
'I collect them.'
It wasn't an answer. Heat came in waves from a floor unit, the thermostat cutting on and off.
'How did you get them through the customs?'
'Are you serious? They were smuggled in from Poland.'
Faintly, from inside the building, the voice of the guardian. Someone coming in late.
'Feel this,' she said. 'Feel it now.'
The thermostat cut on, cut off. Try this one, look how they made it. Have you ever seen such imagination? There was no fierceness in her now, in this different aspect of her obsessiveness; she became loosened, languid, pliant. I wasn't uninterested; the libido is linked with the urgent needs of the psyche, not the body, and there were the same dark reaches in her that were in me, the same urge to go beyond the knowable. Here was the demesne not of Eros but Thanatos, and this had nothing to do with the creation of life, but with the expression of the fear of death.
She masked herself and unmasked, during the night hours, revealing herself in a way that left her with a nakedness that seared the nerves.
I'm taking so much risk, she said again and again, and this was the nucleus of her innermost identity, the dark heart of the vortex: she talked of risk as she talked of love, and I had the thought, at some time before dawn, that in this brief exposition of her psyche she was expressing the same pathological drives that had goaded me into mission after mission, each time seeking the ultimate experience — a kiss from death.
She made coffee and we drank it in the first pooling of daylight that came through the shutters. She looked sated, drained, liberated.
'This brave new world of yours,' I said, 'isn't some kind of facade?'
'I know it seems contradictory, but no, it's all I live for. It's an intellectual concept, nothing to do with — what goes on underneath.'
So I told her there was a major threat to General-Secretary Gorbachev and that she could help to defuse it by tunnelling immediately into the substructure of Werneuchen Airforce Base and looking for any changes of plan in its routine training operations during the next four days. I gave her the number of my room at the hotel and told her to use the code-name Renata.