Читать книгу Faith - Len Deighton - Страница 8

Magdeburg, where we were headed, is one of the most ancient German cities, a provincial capital tucked into the most westerly bend of the River Elbe at a place where the river divides into three waterways. Its commanding site at the edge of the North German plain has always made it a target for plundering armies. Devastated by the Thirty Years War, it was razed again by the Second World War and even more thoroughly by the Soviet-style city-planners and architects who came after it.

Magdeburg has been a home to men as choosy as Otto the Great and Archbishop Burchard HI and the more refined members of the house of Brandenburg. So great was the power vested here that when they came to build the railway joining Paris to Moscow they diverted the line through Magdeburg. More than a century later, in the postwar race for growth, the city was hastily transformed into one of the world’s most polluted industrial regions, where the proletariat choked on untreated chemical waste and more than half the children were suffering from bronchitis and eczema. Now, as the Marxist empire shrank and its privileged ruling class felt threatened from all sides, the Stasi, the Party’s Moscow-styled secret police and security service, had chosen Magdeburg to make a fortified compound where its most secret and highly treasured documents and artifacts could be guarded and hidden. Even the mortal remains of Hitler and Goebbels had been secreted away in the compound.

‘Do you know where the Smersh compound begins?’ I asked him as we drove through the centre of town.

I’d almost forgotten how dark and bleak East German towns became after dark. There was little traffic, fewer pedestrians and no advertising signs. Two cops standing under a street light watched us pass with interest.

The kid glanced at me and smiled. ‘So they really call it the Smersh compound? I thought that was just something invented by the newspapers.’

We passed slowly along a wall of billboards around a building site. At least two dozen huge posters affirmed with typographic bombast the DDR’s loyalty, obligation and friendship to the mighty USSR and the even mightier socialist brotherhood. We passed the cathedral for a second time. ‘One side is the Westring, I remember that,’ I said, as we came to the billboards again. ‘It’s a long time since I was here.’ Traffic signals brought us to a halt, and then he made a turn and said he knew where he was.

The kid had the car window down and was staring out into the shadowy moonlit streets. ‘Our man lives off to the left.’ He slowed and having spotted Klausenerstrasse – onetime Westendstrasse – signalled a turn and we were in a quiet street, paved with neatly arranged cobblestones and darkened by mature trees. These large comfortable houses had miraculously survived the RAF night bombers, the American day bombers and all the artillery fire that came afterwards.

It is a curious paradox that Hitler’s Third Reich and subsequent communist governments had preserved East Germany as the last remaining European country with domestic servants. Only in the DDR were such grand old households functioning in the old-fashioned way. Senior officials of the Stasi, and lucky detachments of KGB liaison officers like VERDI, had readily settled into this sort of bourgeois comfort, and now this unassailable elite occupied choice tree-lined streets of German towns complete with gardens, garages and quarters at the rear for attentive maid-servants, chauffeurs, cooks and gardeners. Only recently had chipped paintwork, untrimmed hedges and cracks in the glass signalled some tightening of the economy.

‘This is the house where VERDI lives,’ said the kid, reducing his voice almost to a whisper. ‘He shares it with two other officials and their families.’ The wrought-iron gates were closed. He parked at the kerbside and we got out. It was a big house: two storeys, with some of the upper rooms granted access to a long decorative balcony by means of french windows. There were no lights to be seen anywhere, but that might have been a tribute to the heavy curtains.

The front garden of the old house was protected by a more recently installed six-feet-high chain-link fence. It was anchored to stone gateposts and a pair of ancient and elaborate gates. The kid shone his flashlight on the brass plate which bore the house number. Above it a more recent white plastic sign indicated which of two bellpushes should be used by visitors and which by delivery men. It was that kind of house.

He unlatched the gate and we went inside without pressing either bell. In the air there was the smell of burned garden rubbish. ‘We’re only half an hour late,’ said the kid. ‘He’ll wait.’ It was very quiet in Magdeburg. There was not even the sound of traffic, just the hum of a distant plane droning steadily like a trapped wasp. In the silence every movement seemed to cause unnaturally loud noises, our footsteps crunching in the gravel like a company of soldiers marching through a bowl of cornflakes.

Three stone steps led up to a wide entry porch where a panelled front door with a fanlight was flanked by two small wired-glass windows that provided the residents with a chance to make sure that the delivery man was not using the wrong entrance.

‘Are you all right?’ said the kid, looking at me strangely.

‘You’ve been here before?’

‘They always leave the front door unlocked. It’s all right.’ As if to demonstrate this familiarity he pushed the heavy door open and stepped inside. I followed him. The house was in darkness, and only silky moonlight through the fanlight enabled us to see. A wide staircase with a carved wooden rail descended to a grand hall tiled with large black and white squares. Against one wall a longcase clock stood still and silent, its lifeless hands clasping the number twelve. Occupying the greater part of the opposite wall hung a towering oil-painting: a life-size depiction of a Prussian general stared serenely at the artist, while smoking cannon roared and a bloody mayhem of men and mounts provided a colourful background. The overall effect – of the family home of some nineteenth-century nobleman – was marred only slightly by a pungent smell of carbolic and scented polish that intruded an institutional dimension.

I heard the sound of the kid clicking the light switches, but no light came. ‘Power failure,’ he pronounced after several tries. ‘Or maybe it’s switched off at the main supply.’

For a moment I thought he was just going to stand there until something else happened, but he gathered himself together and went to the door of one of the front rooms and opened it slowly, as if half-expecting a shouted objection from inside.

I followed him. The moonlight coming through the tall windows revealed a big room with over-stuffed armchairs and sofas, and some antique furniture that had seen better days. There was an ornate stove and a large mirror that made the room seem double its size.

‘Look!’ said the kid.

But I’d already seen him: a man sitting on the sofa and toppled slightly to one side, canted at an impossible angle like some discarded doll. The kid directed his torch at the figure.

‘Douse the light. It might be seen through the windows.’ I went to the sofa. The man was dead. It was obvious just from the awkward posture. The moonlight made everything colourless, but the big dark patch on his chest was blood and there was more of it on the sofa and on the carpet too. His head was thrown back and his face was a horrific mess: his skull cracked open like the shell of an egg. ‘Keep still a minute,’ I said.

‘Where did you get the Makarov?’

‘Keep still. It’s just a toy,’ I explained, but the long silencer made the damn thing as conspicuous as a frontier Colt.

I quickly went through the dead man’s pockets. The body was still warm. The blood was wet and becoming tacky. I sniffed the air but there were none of the smells of oil and burned powder that gunfire leaves. Still it was obvious that the shooting had taken place just before we arrived. I was no expert, but it would be foolhardy to think the killer must have left the vicinity.

‘From the guy at the bar,’ said the kid, as the explanation of where I got the gun occurred to him. ‘I should have guessed you didn’t want cigarettes … He gave it …’

‘Shut up,’ I said. It was the sort of stupid carelessness that got good men into trouble. ‘Pull yourself together. Check the windows and the hallway.’

He must have realized what he’d blurted out, for he looked around as if he might spot a microphone or wires. It was his nervousness about being overheard that caused him to spot the broken window. ‘The shot came from outside,’ he said. He was holding the window curtain aside and pointing at a large round hole in the glass pane. It was at about the right level for a prowler to shoot a man sitting on the sofa.

‘Get away from the window – pull the curtain closed. Can the power be switched off from outside?’

‘Yes. The fuses are on the cellar steps.’

‘Close the curtain.’ The kid was still at the window looking at the garden. Then without warning I heard him retch deeply, and then came long and splashy vomiting. Oh boy, that’s all I needed. ‘Let’s go, Kinkypoo,’ I said bitterly as he coughed, spat, and wiped his face with a handkerchief. I could hear him follow me as I went to the hallway and opened the front door. I looked around the garden. There was no sign of movement, but enough big dark shadows for a battalion to be concealed.

‘Run for the car. I’ll cover you as best I can. Get into the back seat: I’ll drive.’ I suppose it was my way of ensuring he didn’t depart without me, but by now I had the nasty feeling that a reception party would be waiting by the car.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. I didn’t reply.

‘Go,’ I said.

He ran across the grass, dragged open the wrought-iron gate and dashed out into the dark street. I followed him, flattening myself against the wall as I got outside. The trees were being shaken by the wind and making shadows on the cobbles. There was no one to be seen in any direction: just silent parked cars. Reassured, I climbed into the driver’s seat, closed my door and started the engine. The kid slammed his door with all the force he could muster, making a noise that could be heard for two or three blocks.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked anxiously.

I was covering my face with both hands, seeking a moment of darkness to gather my wits. I understood the anxiety I heard in his voice. When I was young I’d seen some of the old wartime field agents resorting to that sort of gesture, and I’d written them off as burned out and useless. ‘I’m okay,’ I said.

Gently I revved up and pulled away. I swung my head to get a look at him in the back. The kid had stains and marks down the front of his coat. He looked at me and wiped his mouth self-consciously. He smelled strongly of sour vomit.

‘What a foul-up. Poor VERDI. Are we going to be all right?’ he asked.

‘You stay there in the back seat and watch the road behind us. They’ll probably tail us and arrest us at the Checkpoint. It’s the way they like to work. They’ll want to see what we do.’

‘What’s the score?’ he said. ‘Who killed him?’

‘How do you know VERDI lives there?’

‘As opposed to meeting me there? I don’t know. I just assumed it.’

‘Always in that same room?’

‘Yes, always in that room. I guess they were on to him. They let him go to the rendezvous and then killed him.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe they spotted me last time,’ said the kid. Then in a sharper voice: ‘There is a car …’

‘I can see it.’

‘A big dark Mercedes. He turned when we did at the signal.’

‘Keep an eye on him.’

I didn’t want to make a mistake. It’s easy to think you’re being followed. What percentage of the cars driving through the middle of the city were heading towards the Autobahn ramp? A lot of them I would say.

‘Go around the block,’ suggested the kid.

‘That will tip them off that we’ve spotted them, and it makes it look as if we are running away.’

‘Slow down and stop.’

‘I don’t think so. Let’s see what they do.’

‘Slow down to walking pace.’

‘So that they can overtake us and block the road in front?’

‘You’re right,’ said the kid. ‘What are you going to do then?’

‘I want them to think they have the wrong car. I want to be very innocent … very law-abiding.’ Even as I said it I realized that it sounded like a plan based upon despair; and it was.

‘They’re still behind us. Still at about the same distance.’

We were out of town now, driving through moonlit countryside. It was a lousy situation. It was after midnight. Out here among the turnips was not the place to be. You could lay down an artillery barrage and bring in a couple of bulldozers to bury the bodies without the danger of attracting any witnesses.

‘I’m going to choose a suitable stretch of road and have a showdown,’ I told the kid. ‘When I stop the car and get out, I want you to scramble over the seat and get behind the wheel in the driver’s seat. Keep the engine ticking over but don’t rev it. Keep your head well down. When I shout go: burn rubber … Would you be able to do that for me?’

‘You bet I would.’

‘I’ll stop. Then I’m going to walk back towards them, shining a flashlight into their eyes and behaving like a lost tourist. Slightly drunk. If they are the kind of people I think they might be, they will get out of their car.’

‘Why?’

‘You can’t shoot accurately through windscreen glass. And leaning out of a car window and shooting a gun is something that only Humphrey Bogart learned how to do.’

‘You’re going to stop and go back and talk your way out of it?’

‘Watch me and don’t wait too long.’

‘Okay.’

‘And don’t take the Autobahn route. See that hill on the skyline in front? I’ll come to a stop near the bridge at the bottom. When I shout go, you be in a low gear … and swing and swerve as you pull away – got it?’

‘I’ll be all right,’ he said.

The road was narrow. When we reached a stone bridge over a stream, I slowed down and stopped there, positioning the car so that there was no room to pass it. They stopped too. I hid the pistol in my raincoat pocket and then with as much noise and fuss as I could manage I swung open the car door and stood up and squinted into their headlights, and waved an arm like an innocent traveller who had strayed off the Autobahn and wanted to ask the way to Helmstedt, the crossing point to the West. There was ice underfoot, but the water in the stream was still trickling: I could hear it even over the sound of the car engines.

The driver of the other car jumped out of his seat immediately. I could see that there was someone in the back seat but the rear doors remained closed.

Walking back towards them, illuminated in the full headlight beam, I called out: ‘How many kilometres to Helmstedt?’ in a shrill Austrian accent that would not have fooled many people sitting under the trees in the Wiener Wald but here amongst the ‘Prussians’ would probably be convincing enough.

My question was framed to cause momentary confusion, and it obviously did, for the driver bent down to say something to the passenger in the back seat.

Close enough now to see what I was doing, I dropped flat on my belly and fired at the nearest front tyre, aiming so that the round’s entrance and exit would rip out a big enough chunk of tread to deflate even the most fancy of puncture-resistant tyres. Like all Russian pistols, what the East Germans call the Pistole M is a crudely designed piece of machinery with a simple blowback system and a butt angle like a letter L, but its Soviet designers gave it a legendary reliability which in tight corners makes up for all other shortcomings. Bang! The noise was deafening, the ancient silencer providing no sound reduction at all. Too late to remove it now. I squeezed the trigger and there was that stiffening that precedes a jam. I cursed and pulled harder on the trigger – it must have just been lack of oil, for the gun fired, and I saw a piece chopped from the second tyre.

The sound of escaping air seemed to go on for ever. I jumped up and ran back to my car. The kid revved the motor. The shots had brought the back-seat passenger out of the car, and now he was bending down, trying to see the tyres. The driver was still in the same position: standing, feet apart, watching me as if petrified by the sudden events. I stood up and, to make them keep their heads down, I aimed a final shot to go over the driver’s head. But my hand was not steady and what was intended to be a frightener dropped him. The poor sod spun round and fell, clutching at his chest, then he rolled around on the ground groaning and kicking and rocking face-down, pressing himself to the icy road as if that might ease the pain.

‘Shit!’ I said. ‘Go, go, go.’ I threw myself into the front passenger seat. The car leaped away before I’d closed the door and as I slammed it my head banged against the window glass with a sharp crack. The kid heard the sound and glanced round to see if I was still conscious. But I had a thick skull; it is one of the few qualifications needed for the work I do. ‘Floor it!’ I told him. The engine screamed in pain as he jammed his foot on the pedal and we went roaring up the hill in low gear.

‘The passenger is climbing into the driving seat. He’s following us,’ called the kid.

‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ I told him.

The second man was making a plucky attempt at chasing us, despite the sparks that came off the road surface as the tyres flapped around the wheel rims.

As the Volvo breasted the hill the kid changed gear. I looked back to see the Mercedes slewing across the road out of control with black snakes of rubber following it as the tyres were ripped to pieces. Despite the driver’s desperate efforts the Merc slowed, hesitated and then slowly rolled backwards until it hit a ditch. The car tilted up so that the main beams shone into the sky. Beyond it, at the bottom of the hill, I could see the other man still writhing on the ground clutching his chest. But even as I watched his movements slowed. Then the hilltop closed off my view of the horrible little cameo.

‘You were fantastic!’ said the kid in high excitement. ‘Un-bloody-believable! You got him.’

‘Yes, clever me. It was exactly what I was trying to avoid.’

‘Trying to avoid? What?’

‘They’ll not forgive us for that one,’ I said grimly. ‘And there’s a witness still alive. These are sure to be Moscow men, not Germans. You don’t know the lengths they’ll go to get even with us.’

‘You want to go back and kill him?’

I wet my lips. For a moment I was going to say yes. It was the logical, sensible thing to do, even if it was the kind of solution they glossed over at the training school. But at that moment I wasn’t sure I was up to killing him in cold blood. I was drained, and experience told me the kid wouldn’t be able to do it. ‘Keep going,’ I said.

We sped through the night like drunken bank-robbers, the kid taking the bends in narrow country roads at dangerous speeds. He was flushed and excited and driving beyond his abilities. Suddenly he said: ‘What say we give the Autobahn a try?’

It was tempting of course. We were close to the major route that ran from Berlin to the bright lights of freedom. On the Autobahn there would be lots of ‘Westies’, commercials and trucks trundling through what we used to call ‘the Soviet Zone’ on their normal route between the West Sector of Berlin and West Germany. But such a short cut was too tempting, too logical, too convenient to be safe. ‘No. That’s the first place they’ll block off.’

‘I have extra papers,’ said the kid. ‘In a little box welded to the underside of the car.’ He was Mr Ultra-efficient.

‘No,’ I said. ‘And slow down. That flea-bitten moggie of yours will be all right for a day without food. Forget the Autobahn. It’s not worth taking a chance. Even the traffic computer on the western end picks up drivers for five-year-old unpaid parking tickets in their home town.’

‘You’re right.’ He sobered a little.

‘Stick to the plan,’ I told him.

‘The plan is shot. VERDI is dead: one of the opposition is dead … maybe two of them. We don’t have any escaper needing false papers and transportation.’

‘Stick to the plan,’ I said. ‘Assume the dead man wasn’t VERDI; assume VERDI is on the run.’

‘You’re crazy. We’re sticking our necks out for nothing.’

‘Maybe I am crazy. You’ve never been out there where we all go crazy, or maybe you’d be crazy too.’ I remembered so many times when things had gone wrong for me. The field agent always desperately hopes that the operation can be salvaged. You hope like hell that the men assigned to meet you won’t just cut their losses and run. ‘We’ll go to the safe house and wait for an hour until the Stasi alert teams have done their preliminary checks. Driving in these rural parts in the small hours of the morning makes me feel very conspicuous. Any time now they’ll have a chopper overhead.’

‘It’s a village church about eight miles from here. The pastor is one of our people; an experienced man.’

‘Let’s do it,’ I said. ‘Let’s get off the road and come back on it when the commuter traffic starts. We’re too bloody visible out here in the sticks in the night.’

Before the war this village had been neat and prosperous, a dazzling prospect of whitewashed walls, flowers and well-kept farms with the church its cherished heart. Now it was a miserable little huddle of houses. Its ancient church had been destroyed, along with half the village, by a jettisoned RAF bomb-load in 1944. After the war ended the Red Army garrison commander had permitted the villagers to build a hut on the same site and continue to hold services. The postwar German communist politicians were more actively hostile to the Church than the Russian troops had been, and now that temporary structure – patched and propped – was still the villagers’ only place of worship.

We parked the Volvo alongside a rusty tractor in the barn and the kid found some keys hidden in the bowels of the tractor’s engine. Under the temporary hut the crypt of the old church had been restored to use. He took me down a flight of stone steps and when he switched on the lights the whole crypt, an extensive vaulted subterranean area, was revealed. One section had been divided off and made into a chapel with a permanent altar and a strange assortment of chairs that had probably been collected over the years, donated by the congregation. A large austere altar and a candelabra looked as if they had been salvaged from the wreckage of the razed church, repaired and restored to become the centre-piece of this improvised sanctuary.

The pastor arrived five minutes after we got there. Jumping out of bed fully alert in the middle of the night is a part of the job for a good pastor just as it is for a field agent, fireman or cop.

The old pastor seemed strangely familiar: weathered face with wrinkles and old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses. I remembered having seen him a couple of times in Berlin, at the houses of mutual acquaintances. Now he displayed unlimited energy as he strode about switching on lights and tidying up misplaced coffee cups and pamphlets, prayer books and dried flowers with that dedication that neurotics display when they need time to think. A woman in a sleeveless floral-pattern house-coat arrived and without a word brewed a jug of foul-smelling coffee for us, while the pastor kept up small-talk about his village and masterfully restrained any temptation to ask us questions.

‘We lost contact,’ the kid told him as we drank our coffee. ‘Our man is unlikely to have revealed – or even been told – that this was our first stop, but I wanted to go through the motions.’ He turned to include me in his speech, as if I might otherwise contradict him and tell the pastor that our man was dead on a blood-soaked sofa in Magdeburg. And that we were fugitives who’d murdered a government official, probably bringing retribution hard on our heels.

‘Poor devil,’ said the pastor with convincing concern. He turned around fully now, as if the time had come to give us his full attention. ‘If he’s out there with a general alarm ringing in his ears, I hope God is watching over him.’ I wondered how much the pastor had been told. Draped upon a chair I noticed a dark suit and outer clothes, smelling strongly of moth-repellent. If these were intended to disguise our missing escapee the pastor might have been told quite a lot, right down to VERDI’s shoe size.

The kid said: ‘Someone was killed – it might have been our contact who was killed … And we had trouble on the road. You should be prepared for house-to-house searches.’

‘It’s not often that things go according to plan,’ the pastor said, remaining almost unnaturally calm in the circumstances. The only sign of anxiety came in the way he took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one with that steady determination that is the mark of the addict. He blew smoke. ‘It’s in the nature of undercover work that the unexpected so often happens. You plan for three different eventualities but the fourth occurs.’ He grinned and reached for the coffee jug. ‘Moltke said it: he said it about war.’

‘No more coffee for me.’ I put my hand across the top of the china mug.

‘This is a war that is going on here,’ he said. ‘It’s no use denying it. Men are always at war. We are always at war because every man is at war with himself.’

‘Is that another of Moltke’s sayings?’ I asked him.

He’d been looking at me quizzically and now – jug in hand – he ventured: ‘We met. Remember? Some sort of celebration in a private house in Köpenick … No; wait: a hotel off the Ku-Damm and a fancy-dress party. I know your wife?’

It was framed as a question. ‘It’s possible,’ I said warily.

‘Yes, I worked with her. She is a great woman.’ He said it with a depth of reverence and awe that startled me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Perhaps my subdued response prompted him to tell me more: ‘She started us on our first steps to freedom. We have a long way to go of course, but it was your wife who taught us that we must fight. We had never fought. It was a hard lesson to learn.’

I must have looked puzzled. It was no longer a secret that my wife had defected to the East in an elaborate and successful scheme that had encouraged widespread grassroots opposition to the communist rulers. I’d heard other people speak of my wife’s profound achievements and I’d always nodded it through. This time I didn’t. ‘What did she do?’ I asked him.

He smiled. He had one of those rubber-mask faces that relax naturally into a grin. It was an old-fashioned face: the sort Hollywood used to cast as a priest who plays the harmonica and says wise things to Bing Crosby.

‘You’ve got to understand how it has always been for the Church in Germany,’ he said. ‘Countless small principalities, the religion of each of them decided by its ruling prince or bishop. That ensured that the Church and State were indivisible. Even in Nazi times, the State’s tax-gathering officers collected Church dues from every citizen and paid them to the Church. Little wonder that we churchmen found it so difficult to confront the Nazis, and then after the war even more difficult to resist the institutionalized anti-Christ of communism. We became dependants of the State. But your wife told the Churches of all denominations that if this monstrous regime under which we suffer is ever to be resisted and overthrown, the rallying places must be sanctuaries offered by the Church: the German churches.’ He sipped his coffee. The kid and I were silenced by this display of emotion. The pastor added: ‘Lenin said “Whoever controls Germany, possesses Europe.” This will be the last place the communists yield.’

His passionate speech had made me uneasy, but such deeply held feelings were needed by anyone confronting the communists in their police-State. For lately the politicians here had seen what was happening to their fellows – the communist crooks who were running the neighbouring countries – and were beginning to identify the Churches as their most dangerous enemy.

‘I say a prayer for her,’ said the pastor. ‘All my flock say a prayer for her. Cherish her.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It will be getting light,’ said the kid. He’d been shuffling about as if made uncomfortable by this high-flown talk.

‘You are too young to understand,’ said the pastor gently. ‘Only old men know enough to cry.’

Suddenly I remembered where I’d last seen the pastor. He’d been at a big fancy-dress party at Lisl Hennig’s hotel in West Berlin. It was the night when everything seemed to go wrong. My wife was brought out of the East that night. We were involved in a stupid gun battle on the Autobahn and I saw Tessa my sister-in-law murdered. That night I left Germany and solemnly vowed I would never come back here. Never. ‘Yes, I remember you now,’ I told the pastor. ‘That party in the hotel near the Ku-Damm.’ Amid that frantic collection of revellers, in his dark clerical suit and dog-collar, I had taken the pastor for just another guest in fancy dress. Perhaps his presence there that night supplied one of the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was still far from complete.

‘Yes, I was there that night,’ he admitted. He’d been about to add something else but now he stopped suddenly as we heard the sound of vehicles coming along the road. Several of them. They slowed and turned into the cobbled churchyard where we had left the Volvo in the barn. I hoped they wouldn’t search the premises, for the Volvo with its West licence plates would make them start tearing everything apart.

‘Pray!’ said the pastor and dropped to his knees. I heard them more clearly now. Two vehicles: one heavy diesel and one petrol. There were loud squeaks and the hiss of hydraulic brakes. A car door opened and slammed. That meant one person. It was a bad sign. I had no doubt that the heavy truck contained an armed assault team of barrack-police who were now sitting silent and alert and waiting for orders. ‘Pray!’ said the pastor again, and I sank down on my knees before him, as did the kid and the woman who’d made the coffee.

The pastor began a droning litany of prayers as metal boot studs sounded on the stone steps. With a stifled groan of pain the woman got to her feet, rubbed her arthritic knee, and went to receive the visitor with a soft and deferential greeting on her lips and a cup of hot coffee in her hand. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked him.

‘Yes,’ said the cop without explaining further. He sipped the coffee.

‘A night of continuous prayer,’ she said, and explained our presence as bereaved parishioners from a neighbouring town. She had a strong local accent and as the explanation continued I could follow it only with difficulty.

Out of my half-closed eyes I could see the policeman standing feet apart staring at us. His uniform revealed him as a local cop, sent no doubt to lead a team of outsiders from Magdeburg – draftees perhaps – who didn’t know the country districts. Impatient toots of a car horn made the cop look at his watch. Then there was the sound of another car door and the hurried clatter of boots. ‘You haven’t got time for cups of coffee,’ came a shout from the top of the stone steps. The unseen commander – disconcertingly accurate in his guess about the coffee – had a voice that was hard and Berlinerisch, the accent that educated urbane men use to command those they regard as country bumpkins.

Jolted by the accusation the cop pushed the coffee cup back into the woman’s hand. ‘All is in order here, Captain,’ the policeman shouted, and started back up to join his commander. The German Democratic Republic – more realistically an undemocratic dictatorship run by the Soviets – was changing. Out here in the country districts some of the more cautious officials had begun hedging their bets against the day when the unthinkable happened, and their beat became part of a truly democratic republic with all the dangerous consequences such a turn-round could bring to those in rural isolation.

‘You need not pretend to pray any more,’ said the pastor when the sound of the two vehicles had dwindled to nothing.

‘I wasn’t pretending,’ I said. The old man looked at me and rose to his feet.

There was just a thin line of purple along the skyline as we got back on the road. The kid was driving: I wanted to look around.

‘The pastor is a decent old man. His family had a big estate here. They were landowners since goodness knows when. He volunteered for the U-boats,’ said the kid. ‘After the war, when he was released from the POW camp in England he came back and found that the family estate had been confiscated without compensation. It was rotten luck. The Russians only seized farms larger than 250 acres and theirs was only a few acres larger than that.’

‘Then he found God,’ I said.

‘No, that’s the funny thing. He became a fervent communist at first. It was only afterwards that he went back to the Church and then started working against the regime.’

‘It happens.’

‘He said he used to think that Karl Marx was an economist. It was when he realized that Marx was a moralist that he began to see how deeply the theories were flawed.’ When I made no response to this he said: ‘Have you read Marx?’

‘Karl Marx was a nut,’ I said. ‘He should have kept his mouth shut like Harpo.’

‘We’ll be in Berlin early. Do you want to return the gun to your friend?’

‘Didn’t I tell you to forget about the gun?’

I’d let my anger show. ‘Sorry, boss.’

‘I must get rid of it. I’m glad you reminded me.’

‘Is it the shooting you’re worried about?’

‘Who said I was worried?’

‘You did everything exactly right,’ he said, with an exuberance calculated to cheer me up. ‘It was terrific.’

‘But it smells all wrong,’ I said. ‘Who were those bruisers?’

‘In a shiny new 500 SEL Merc? They were Stasis or left-behind KGB or something. They weren’t innocent peasants on their way to church, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

‘They did nothing except drive along a public road. I shot holes in them.’

‘You can’t be serious?’

‘They didn’t shoot back, that’s what’s worrying me. This is their territory. In a car like that they always stow all manner of weapons … and heavies like that get their shots in first.’

‘But …?’

‘I have a feeling we were set up. I have a nasty feeling that – apart from my shooting that driver – we did everything the other side wanted us to do, right from the moment we were stopped at that militia checkpoint.’

‘Well if you are right, we sure put a spanner in the works.’ He was not to be deprived of his gleeful satisfaction.

‘And don’t mention Krohn’s bar or that damned handgun in your report.’

‘You can rely on me, old-timer.’

‘And you can leave out the old-timer, Kinkypoo.’